DarkSyde (DS):
So let's just settle this upfront, your credentials and credits in general science and evolutionary biology are what?
DR Paul Z. Myers (PZ): I am an associate professor of biology at the University of Minnesota, Morris. I have a Ph.D. in biology from the University of Oregon.
DS: How did you get interested in science originally?
PZ: I'm not sure. I've been a science geek since early childhood, as long as I can remember. In grade school I had the idea that I was going to be a doctor someday, but as I realized that doctors had to work with people and couldn't just do experiments on them, I decided I was going to become some kind of zoologist. I had my dinosaur phase, like all kids, but got more and more fascinated with marine biology, since we lived in the Pacific Northwest and were often at the coast, poking into tidepools and digging up interesting invertebrates to eat. When I got to college, I got increasingly involved in the lives of cells, and found that all organisms were fascinating, not just salmon and squid and marine worms. That's how I could end up in Minnesota, about as far from any ocean as you can get, and still find a world of interest in my microscope.
DS: Did it limit your social life that you were a, well I hesitate to use the word, "nerd", from the get go?
PZ: Being a nerd didn't exactly limit my social life--I wasn't aware that there was such a thing as a social life, and once I found out what it was, I wasn't much interested in it. I'm still not. It means I'm actually a very boring person in real life, and that's OK with me.
DS: You work in one of the newer fields called Evolutionary Development. What is this exactly and can you give some examples of the value of this new paradigm? [For an outstanding article on the intricacies of evo-devo, and one hell of an expert creationist smack down to boot, see PZ's dinosaur/bird article Digit Numbering and Limb Development. This is one of the best science articles I've ever read on the web]
PZ: My lab work is actually drifting closer to something called eco-devo -- how do developing systems respond to changes in their environment? What are the variations that can occur when translating the genotype into the phenotype? How flexible and plastic are embryos? It's necessarily much more tightly focused on smaller problems than what I write about on the weblog--if I started babbling about tiny changes in feeding behavior in different strains of zebrafish, or error rates in cell migration in the presence of teratogens, there'd be maybe two or three people in the world who'd care, and they'd just check in once every six months to see what was new!
The work fits into the much grander scheme of evo-devo, though. This is a relatively new synthetic discipline that arose in the last twenty or thirty years from the interactions of work in genetics and molecular biology (molecular genetics), which was applied to problems in developmental biology. This was a major shift; where we were once working on this set of very interesting problems in embryology, suddenly we had this new set of tools and new ways of thinking, new results were pouring in rapidly, all because we were looking at genes and how they interact and are regulated, rather than focusing on the effects of gene activity. This was powerful stuff. People were starting to see this as a new discipline, and where once we considered "embryologist" a reasonable name for what we were doing, we started thinking of ourselves as developmental biologists, using the term more exclusively to refer to a deeper focus on cells and genes. One indicator of the new outlook was that one of our major journals, The Journal of Embryology and Experimental Morphology (nice mouthful, huh?) relaunched itself as Development...just Development. There was much more emphasis on molecular processes and this is now the premier journal in the field.
But wait! We're not done! Molecular genetics and developmental biology were a happy merger in the early 80s, and started answering lots of interesting questions about model systems. How does an embryo decide which end is the front? How does a fly make a pattern of segmental stripes? How does it assemble an abdomen? How does it know to make wings on a thorax, but not on an abdomen? Researchers collected and identified the genes involved in these various developmental programs, and were making amazing progress in individual organisms. Flies, for instance, provided a lot of information about early pattern formation, how the basic layout of the body plan was set up. Nematodes were studied to address problems in cell fate, cell migration, and cell death. Research programs on mouse molecular genetics were trying to tackle these same problems in vertebrates (but at a slower rate -- mice are much harder to work with than fruit flies). Developmental biologists started pulling all of the answers together and noticed that the stories were all related. Developmental processes have been conserved to varying degrees, we can see the structure of these interactions with molecular genetics, and now evolution has become a big part of our thinking.
For example, one early set of genes that are responsible for patterning the fruit fly body plan are the Hox genes [See PZ's article A Brief Overview of Hox Genes and Hox Genesis]. This is an array of genes that are turned on in an orderly fashion to specify spatial positions in the body -- one is active in the anteriormost part of the head, another in the posterior tip of the abdomen, and others in tidy stripes in between. We have the same genes, and they do the same thing. In fact, the Hox genes now seem to be one of the hallmarks of the animal body plan. They evolved early in animal evolution and have expanded and been elaborated upon in our history, but they're all there.
DS: I think it's fair to note you're also pretty liberal, and that academics such as yourself are often criticized for being 'too liberal'. How do you respond to that charge? What would you say to your more conservative scientific colleagues regarding the current political dynamic?
PZ: What conservative scientific colleagues? I don't know of any. Sure, there are some more conservative than I am on social and economic issues, but one thing the Republican administration has done is draw us all together--this administration is so anti-science that it has united us all, as far as I know.
As far as the charge of being too liberal -- no one can be too liberal. We can only be not liberal enough. Being liberal means one is for civil liberties, equality, social justice, fairness. We work to improve the world, not maintain the status quo, and especially not to enrich those who already have too much. How can someone be too liberal?
DS: You're also unabashedly skeptical of super natural claims or the value of such ideas, be it Wahhibism or the more homegrown Neo-Christian right-wing variety. Is there room for compromise between religion and science in your view?
PZ: Sure. When religious superstition dissipates and wafts away before reason like a fog in the noonday sun, then we will have achieved an appropriate balance.
DS: Holy smokes, I can already see the angry e-mails coming in on this one ... You serious?
PZ: Seriously, that's the compromise. Religion is a clumsy farrago of myths and wishful thinking and old traditions which is irrelevant to our understanding of reality, and in fact often impedes our understanding. We lose nothing if it goes away. As people recognize its lack of utility, something that often (but not necessarily) happens as we learn more about science, it fades away. It's like Santa Claus -- as we learned more about how the real world works and how our parents fulfill all the roles of the fat old myth, we don't mind seeing it go away.
Creationists know this, and that is why they're afraid of science. I don't need to preach atheism -- all I need to do is point out the palpable structure of reality in the growing detail science provides for us, and those who are awake and aware will notice the disparity between the world around them and the clumsy, sterile, ludicrous fantasies of religion, and they'll eventually abandon faith. Or, at least, they'll throw away dogma and retire faith to a smaller, private part of their lives.
The Universe: it's the Anti-Religion.
DS: You have a Ph.D. in a life science, many creationists such as Jonathan Wells or Michael Behe have a Ph.D. in the same thing. What makes your point of view any more credible than theirs?
PZ: Nothing. I hope no one believes me because of some work I finished in 1985 that earned me a piece of paper. This is not about dueling credentials; it's about our relative accuracy in describing how the world works. My ideas are representative of those of the majority of scientists, which provide an excellent working framework for understanding a vast body of information, observation, and experiment, and are also productive in guiding new research. Wells' and Behe's ideas are just the latest excrescence of a 200+ year old primitive theology, are compatible with one old book of mythology, are a dead end for research. By their fruits ye shall know them, and their fruits are scabby, withered, and nasty. It really doesn't matter how many degrees we each have on our side.
DS: One of the criticism you and others level at Intelligent Design Creationism is that it's not science, or that there is no published work in peer professional journal. Why is it not science? Didn't Stephen Meyer get a piece in a peer reviewed journal though? What was that all about?
PZ: Well, first of all, sometimes real crap gets published in peer- reviewed journals, and sometimes really great stuff has to struggle to get the approval of other scientists. It's not an absolute sine qua non of good research -- it's more of a stochastic thing, where what counts more is what kind of work snowballs into a lot of research. As a lesser example, my grad work was as one of the first few people doing research on this new model system, the zebrafish I would go to meetings and people would complain that no one needs new models, fish are weird, we don't know everything about fruit flies so why are you going off in this other direction, yadda yadda yadda. What won them over was not one paper, but a growing body of work that caught the interests of many others, revealed some novelties in vertebrate development that weren't present in flies, and promised some useful and simple techniques to address specific problems of interest. Now there are thousands of people working on this one little animal, and it's become an important model system in the field.
That's what it takes for an idea to take off. The IDists have no research program and no data, so they're trying to cheat. Meyer got a piss-poor review paper (no original research in it at all) published in a small journal with the collusion of a cooperative editor; it would have had no impact on science at all. What made it something of a cause celebre, though, was that the DI wanted to use this for propaganda purposes. Normally, we'd let this kind of debris slide and sink without a trace, but the fact that there was a PR machine that was going to exploit it to push bad science on schoolkids and politicians meant we had to push back hard.
It really was a poor paper, too. I took apart one paragraph here--the scholarship was appalling, and it typically misrepresented the work that it cited. I think a lot of the people who objected to it were horrified that such a wretched piece of work could be used to damage the reputation of a respectable journal like the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington.
The whole shoddy affair illustrates why Intelligent Design creationism isn't science. They are scrabbling to put up a facade, but science isn't about words in a journal or a collection of degrees: it is a process. It's science if it is being continually tested, if there is research being done to critically evaluate the components of the theory. There is no research being done on intelligent design, nor can there be--there aren't any testable hypotheses in their proposal.
DS: One of the big claims made by IDCists involves a concept called Irreducible Complexity which means, as I understand it, that there are structures at many levels in living organisms in which each component is critical. Remove any component and the entire system fails catastrophically. And so, the claim goes that such a system could not develop in a step by step fashion required by natural selection because the transitory stages would have either have no adaptive value or result in the death of the owner. What's wrong with that?
PZ: This is the same logic that would say it is impossible to build an arch, because removing one piece would cause the whole thing to tumble down. Yet arches are built every day -- bridges must be miracles!
The answer, of course, is that arches are supported by a scaffold during their assembly, and similarly, "irreducibly complex" pathways were supported by duplications and redundancy during their evolution. I've explained this in a little detail here. Simply put, there are two broad explanations for how IC systems could evolve. One is that intermediate steps can be added by gene duplication that do not interfere and can even enhance the effectiveness of the pathway, and subsequent loss of redundancy makes them essential and unremovable. The other explanation is that it is a mistake to assume loss of a piece would cause failure; it may not function for the role you think it should, but it may function in some other capacity. Biological systems tend to be highly multifunctional and rich with redundancies, so none of this is surprising.
You asked earlier why people should think me more credible than Behe. One reason is that he has rested his career on this untenable nonsense of "irreducible complexity", which is so trivially false that it implies a deep misunderstanding of basic concepts of molecular evolution.
DS: Why did you start your weblog and what the hell is a pharyngula?
PZ: Why not? It started as an experiment in writing instruction for a class I was teaching -- I had students submit reviews and mini-essays to a web page. When the class was over, there was this interesting piece of software sitting on my server, and I just cleared the old data out and started writing on my own. It became my space. I've got a couple of subdomains still where I have students do their writing.
Blastula, gastrula, neurula, pharyngula...they're all stages in embryonic development. I named the site after my favorite stage, which is the one where all kinds of interesting things are starting to happen in the neural circuitry, and where it is beginning to build the pharyngeal structures -- gill arches and jaws -- for which the stage is named. Brains and jaws, it seemed appropriate at the time...
DS: That blog has grown from a cozy corner in cyberspace frequented by a few die-hards, to as best I can tell, the largest science blog in the blogosphere traffic wise. And you've become something of a quasi-celebrity in the process appearing on RealTV and the radio, linked by uber bloggers like Atrios. Do your peers or the faculty admin at your school have any idea about all of this? What do they think about it?
PZ: First of all, I'm kinda hoping I'll stop being the "largest science blog". It's not that I want people to stop reading me, but I'd like to see more science sites spring up. I won't complain in the slightest when other's traffic overtakes mine. The rather extreme disparity in traffic levels that we see on the political side of the blogosphere is not a good thing (uh-oh, that's a dig at dKos, isn't it?), and I'd prefer to see greater diversity and less inequity on the science side. We're all more specialized here - I shouldn't be regarded as "the" science site, since I'm not at all representative of chemistry, physics, geology, math, all those other disciplines, and I'm also only a narrow slice of the breadth of ideas in biology.
Yes, my colleagues and administrators know about it. It would be hard not to -- I'm not anonymous, we're a small school, and as traffic climbed I was representing a significant fraction of the total net traffic out to our little town on the prairie. They're supportive. They don't agree with everything I say -- in particular, I suspect my anti-religious stance might give a few of our administrators' ulcers -- but they're also committed to the principles of academic freedom. The last time one of our faculty websites got significant attention, it was one by one of our coaches that discusses sports and Christian evangelism, and was mentioned in the NY Times. I think that tells you something about the kind of diversity this university supports.
DS: When Pharyngula begin hitting the 'big time' and the flame wars lit up between Power Whine and a few other blogs, you mentioned that you started getting scary phone calls, hack attempts into the blog, and so forth. Do you take it real seriously? And if so, what can you do about it?
PZ: The phone calls were a temporary aberration. That hasn't been a problem since. I get lots of hate email, but that just gets trashed.
There have been attempts to slam the site with denial-of-service attacks. Some are just those pernicious spammers, but I've noticed that they go up in intensity after criticisms of conservatives and religion get some play in the blogosphere. I take it seriously because it interferes with access to the site, but otherwise, I'm unworried. I've got ideas that are contrary to a lot of people's -- I would be more concerned if they didn't hate me.
DS: Where do you see evolutionary biology going from here? What are some of the really interesting mysteries we may be on the verge of shedding some light on?
PZ: Once upon a time, the big question was where the genetic information was stored. The answer was the nucleus and the DNA Then the question was how a molecule could encode that information. The answers involve deciphering the genetic code. The next big question was how genes were controlled, and how different cells could express different genes. We've got the general outlines of the answer to that, with many more details to be worked out, and in particular we want to figure out how to switch patterns of gene activity in a cell to whatever we want. The really big question in development that awaits us next is how a pattern of gene activity can produce organized tissues and morphology -- that huge step from a sequence of nucleotides in DNA to the complicated shape of an ear, for instance. We don't have a clue how that happens. It's like the basic problem of how a sequence of amino acids is reliably translated into a pattern of protein folding, only many orders of magnitude more complex.
If you want to grow a replacement organ in a vat, if you want to know how to switch off those rogue cells that make up a cancer, if you want to reconstruct an extinct animal, if you want to switch on the process of neural regeneration after spinal cord injury...all of these are technologies that will emerge from the field of developmental biology. And what we're seeing now is that the best way to explore the potential of development, genetics, and molecular biology is to study how evolution has successfully exploited those same processes to sculpt the variety of organic forms now extant.
DR Paul Myers is an associate professor of biology at the University of Minnesota. He is a founding member of the popular blog The Panda's Thumb and a regular contributor to the American Street. To see more of his work or contact him, visit his personal weblog Pharyngula.
Or check out PZ Myers, the mad scientist, gracing the the City Pages and profiled within here.
