Category: Misc.

Should evolutionary biologists "debate" creationists/ID advocates?

Last week I received an email also sent to a group of other local evolutionary biologists asking if one of us would be willing to participate in a “debate” with a creationist who was coming in to town to give some sort of talk.  The email said, among other things:

… we have a creationist (who holds to the 6-literal day creation and young earth 6,000 year position), (name deleted), coming on our campus challenging someone to debate him. 

And, well, I ignored the email as did the others apparently.  Then we all got a second email a few days later:

Dear Professors, 

The Creationist side is offering $300 for accepting the challenge! And another $250,000 to anyone presenting any empirical evidence for macro evolution! 

Why has this offer been out there for years? Where are the experts??? Where is the evidence?? How is  this possible?

If you are convinced that Darwin was right, if you accept it, if you teach it to students, as a career, then WHY DO YOU REFUSE TO DEBATE?!

You betray the students that look up to you!! Come on, Creationist don’t bite!

Sorry for this sarcastic tone, but it doesn’t make sense. If you teach it in class you must be the first ones defending it.

We have a philosophy graduate wanting to debate, no science professors yet, especially Biology and Anthropology.

Please respond to this email asap!

Clearly, they people organizing this were trying to get someone to do the debate.  But this strategy just convinced me that debating creationists was an absurdly silly thing.  So I wrote back:

The issue is pretty simple to me.  There is nothing really to debate.  Creationism is not science.  It is a religion driven position that pretends (and does so poorly) to be about science.  I for one have perfectly pleasant interactions with many creationists and I understand their beliefs at least at some level.  But just as I would not encourage physicists to debate with those who deny gravity, and just as I would not encourage chemists to debate with those who claim the periodic table is invented, I think it is inappropriate to evolutionary biologists to “debate” with creationists in this type of setting.  Discussing creationism – fine.  Discussing criticism of evolutionary hypotheses – fine.  Having a reasonable panel discussion of science and religion – fine.  Meeting with creationists to discuss their ideas about evolution – ok too.  But engaging in a “debate” and thus even for a second implying that creationism stands on the same ground as evolution – completely ludicrous.  
Sincerely
Jonathan Eisen

Alas, the people doing the inviting were not particularly impressed with my answer:

You Sir, are a COWARD.
If it is so easy in your mind to refute Creationist’s arguments, why don’t you do it publically? FOR MONEY?! 
Your words do nothing to change the standing offer of $250,000 for evidence of Macro-Evolution. How about Actions, not Words only?

By denying there is a challenge, and at the same time refusing to accept the challenge you tell us that you’re unable to defend your position.
We know why you are fine with a panel discussion: because there is no Looser or Winner, you are afraid to loose, that is the real reason behind your rhetoric.

your answer is a nonanswer

Try again.

I guess they did not get my point.  But anyway – I am asking readers out there – what do you think one should do?  Should one debate creationists/ID supporters?  

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This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

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More on Swine Flu in Davis from the Davis Enterprise.

There is a mini update on the swine flu incidence(s) in Davis at the Davis Enterprise.

Basically it appears the city of Davis is backing off some of the extreme quarantine type measures that were reported yesterday.

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This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

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GIS mapping of bike accidents in Davis

A PhD student in my lab has generated a nice GIS mapping of auto and bike accidents in Davis, CA.  Worth browsing …

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This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

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Open Flu: Up to date Open analysis of Human/Swine A/H1N1 Influenza

Just got a pointer to a fantastic site with detailed up to date analyses of flu (e.g., swine flu) data. The site is http://tree.bio.ed.ac.uk/groups/influenza/. The site says

These pages are to allow the rapid dissemination of results and analysis of genetic data from the ongoing Influenza A/H1N1 outbreak attributed to swine flu.

And there is some great stuff there posted by among others, Andrew Rambaut, Oliver Pybus, Nicholas Grassly, Mike Worobey and Gavin Smith. Definitely worth checking out. Hat tip to Eddy Holmes for pointing this out.

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This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

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Marketplace piece on open access

Marketplace on NPR had a mini story on Open Access publishing. See Marketplace: Publicly funded research for a price. Hat tip to Aaron Gussman and Keith Bradnam for pointing this out. I did not listen to the piece but the text is online here. Here are some bits (does not seem to be a particularly well researched piece but it is still something)

KAI RYSSDAL: A lot of the scientific research that goes on in this country is really expensive. And, as it happens, a lot of it is publicly funded. But when taxpayers want to read a particular study that has been paid for with their money, they have to pay again to read about it in, say, The New England Journal of Medicine.
…

JANET BABIN: People who grew up with the Internet expect information to be free. That’s what 21-year-old Josh Sommer thought. In 2006 he was a typical college freshman. Studying environmental engineering, hanging out, making new friends. Suddenly, he started to get severe headaches. He had a series of routine tests.

JOSH SOMMER: End up having an MRI and being told that I have a mass right in the very center of my head, entwined with critical arteries, in one of the most difficult locations to operate on. The cancer Josh has is called Chordoma. It’s a rare disease with a low survival rate. Even doctors don’t know much about it. So Josh threw himself into Chordoma research. He Googled the disease to find out all he could about it, but kept hitting roadblocks.

SOMMER: I’d find an abstract, and I’d click on it. And oh, you have to pay $60 to read this article. Oh, you have to pay $40 to read this article. I mean, I have this disease, I want to know about it. Journal subscriptions — like the Journal of the American Medical Association — can cost thousands of dollars each year. With universities and libraries trimming budgets, they can’t afford all of them either. What Josh needed was free access to the research online. Last year, the National Institutes of Health unlocked the gates on a lot of research. Through its Web portal called PubMed Central, you can now search research papers for any disease scientists are studying with public funds. It’s an estimated 80,000 articles a year. Duke University law professor James Boyle says open access is only fair.

JAMES BOYLE: Why would you possibly say that when the taxpayers funded something, then the public can’t get to read it afterwards without paying again?

…
Then they quote Martin Frank from the American Physiological Society. saying something defending restricted access. They also quote rebuttal from Professor Boyle, at Duke:

BOYLE: The Web works great for porn or for shoes, or for flirting on social networks. But it doesn’t work really well for science. We haven’t done for science what we did on the rest of the Web, which is basically to have this open Web with everything linked together.

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This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

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Assembling the Marine Metagenome, One Cell at a Time

As I have already divulged on twitter and friendfeed, a paper on which I am an author just came out in PLoS One. The paper is Assembling the Marine Metagenome, One Cell at a Time

It represents a collaboration between a bunch of different institutes including the Joint Genome Institute, UC Davis, and the Bigelow Lab in Maine. The main thing in the paper is the use of whole genome amplification to aid in the sequencing of the genome from a single cell.

The first author on the paper Tonja Woyke at the Joint Genome Institute has been adopting and developing methods for this type of single cell work (extending for example the MDA “multiple displacement amplification” protocol. Woyke is one of those rare types who can do both complex lab work and genome analysis and a variety of other things and is also great to be around.

The other main player in the project was Ramunas Stepanauskas from the Bigelow Lab in Maine who is the “biologists” with an interest in the specific samples which were being worked on. These samples were flavobacteria (a type of bacteria) that live in surface ocean waters but have never been grown in isolation in the laboratory. And in such cases, single cell genomics is very useful and powerful. In the paper we show that having this genome is quite useful for interpreting metagenomic data (not surprising, but good to show).

Anyway – check out the paper if you are interested in microbial ecology and/or metagenomics. Or look at the press release here.


Figure 2. Biogeography of microorganisms closely related to MS024-2A and MS024-3C.
A. Geographic distribution of the Global Ocean Sampling (GOS) metagenome fragments with >95% identity to MS024-2A and MS024-3C DNA. Numerals on the map indicate GOS station numbers. B. Sea surface temperature in December 2003, which demonstrates hydrological separation of GOS aquatic samples collected north and south of Cape Hatteras (near GOS station 13). Provided is a composite Aqua-MODIS image for December 2003 (http://oceancolor.gsfc.nasa.gov). The GOS stations were numbered in the order of their sampling, and stations 12, 13 and 14 were sampled on December 18, 19 and 20, 2003.
doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0005299.g002

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This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

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Open Access Flu – Updated

In regard to the swine flu infections going on, here are some Open Access PLoS papers articles about flu.  In total they provide some useful background reading on flu that anyone can get access to.  I have updated the list after prodding from @bpb on Twitter …

More from PLoS Pathogens (click here for a link to a title search for “influenza”)
More from PLoS Medicine
More from PLoS Computational Biology
More from PLoS One (see even more here)
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This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

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A blog posting of my email signature to reduce clutter.

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Jonathan A. Eisen, Ph.D
With appointments in:      UC Davis Genome Center
Academic Editor in Chief, PLoS Biology

Mailing address:
UC Davis Genome Center
451 East Health Sciences Drive
Davis, CA 95616-8816

Blog: http://phylogenomics.blogspot.com/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/phylogenomics/
FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/treeoflife/
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathaneisen
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Support open access to scientific literature:http://www.publiclibraryofscience.org

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In order to reduce the length of my signature in my email, I am posting my signature here and then am tinyurling the link in order to make it as short as possible and not clutter up my email (so now my signature reads http://tinyurl.com/jonathaneisen). I do not know if anyone else does this or if there is a better way to do it I would love to know. I have deleted the phone # and email address portions of this but it does have most else.

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This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

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Genome sequences are not enough

For those interested in either ciliates like Tetrahymena species or how to make sure that a genome sequence is broadly useful to a community of researchers, this email I just got might be of interest.  Basically, in a nutshell, a consortium (of which I led in the past – see our main genome paper in PLoS Biology here and a follow up paper in BMC Genomics here) has been sequencing the genome of Tetrahymena thermophila a really cool ciliate (one clade of eukaryotes) that has been a model organism for much molecular and cellular work.  As part of the NIH portion of funding for sequencing the genome we subcontracted Mike Cherry at Stanford to create the Tetrahymena Genome Database (TGD) based upon his highly successful Saccharomyces Genome Database (SGD).  Now that the grant is over, there is no support for TGD anymore and it is going to at some point become obsolete.  Fortunately, there is support (see email) for a Tetrahymena Stock Center to provide resources to the community like strains and now it looks like this stock center will also take on the task of helping maintain the TGD (with Nick Stover, who used to work at TGD).  Great news and might give some people something to think about in terms of building and maintaining resources for other genome sequencing projects. 

Dear Tetrahymena Community members,

We are delighted to announce that the Tetrahymena Stock Center has been awarded funding by NIH and the National Center for Research Resources (NCRR).

We are very grateful to NIH for continued funding, and to all the members of the Tetrahymena community who have supported our efforts to establish a functional stock center at Cornell University. We are excited that this new funding will allow us to expand the purview of the Stock Center and pursue several goals that will benefit the Tetrahymena community as a whole.

First, we will continue to maintain a large variety of genetic stocks in our secure facilities at Cornell University and make them available to the scientific and educational community. We are constantly seeking to expand the diversity of the strains in the Stock Center as a resource for the community at-large. We are currently are working to complete the acquisition and documentation of several large strain collections, including the critical collections developed by Dr. Eduardo Orias, Dr. Martin Gorovsky, and Dr. Joseph Frankel. In addition, we are now accepting strains from other laboratories to provide a secure site for strains they wish to share with the community. We are also actively providing strains to researchers and educators around the world. We encourage everyone to visit our updated website at http://tetrahymena.vet.cornell.edu/ . We have new expediated online ordering and have streamlined the process for depositing cells. We welcome any comments, suggestions, ideas for other things that you would like to see on this site.

Second, as part of our continuing efforts to make the Tetrahymena Stock Center as useful as possible to the entire Tetrahymena community, we have expanded the purview of the Stock Center to include support for the Tetrahymena Genome Database (TGD). TGD is no longer actively maintained at Stanford and is fast becoming outdated. We believe that making TGD operational under the auspices of the Stock Center and linking support efforts to community annotation strongly complements the overall mission of the Stock Center to facilitate the use of Tetrahymena as a research and teaching organism. We look forward to working with Dr. Nick Stover at Bradley University, who will supervise the development of a genome Wiki and further annotation of the database. Revising the TGD format will be an exciting and challenging task that we hope will involve many members of the Tetrahymena community. We will send out a more detailed explanation of the new TGD format soon. For now, we thank Dr. Mike Cherry for his continued support and help in working with Dr. Stover to make the transition to the Wiki format as easy as possible.

Finally, please continue to use the Stock Center for all of your strain needs, and don’t forget to include the costs for strain ordering in your respective grant applications. Contact us with any questions, suggestions, ideas at tetrahymenastockcenter-mailbox@cornell.edu . We look forward to working with the community to enhance the scope and function of the Tetrahymena Stock Center over the next 5 years.

Sincerely,

Ted Clark

Donna Cassidy-Hanley 

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This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

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Michael Eisen gives the bird to the Redsox and A’s

Yup, that is my brother, Michael Eisen, on his birthday yesterday, giving the bird to the As and Redsox. RIP Mark Fidrych.

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This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

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