Category Archives: Politics

Welcome to the Plutocracy: Senate Edition

So, you know how it’s supposed to be harder for a rich man to get into heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of the needle.* Well, two things:

     1) That’s not as hard as it seems, since a sufficiently rich man can pay to have people build him a huge-ass needle.

     2) In fact, it is not as hard as a poor man being elected to the United States Senate.




If you go to the original, you can scroll around and zoom in and stuff. If not, all you need to know is that Alaska and Hawaii fall in the puke-green colored,  greater than 1 million, but less than 3.16 million category.

This map was constructed on TargetMap using data from the Center for Responsive Politics. These are estimates of net worth, and the numbers I have used are the average of the minimum and maximum estimates. It should be noted that the difference between the minimum and maximum estimates is typically quite large.

What I find interesting here is not so much the relative numbers, but the absolute scale. Note that it is only the green states where the Senators are (on average) NOT millionaires. The red states are where the average net worth is greater than 31 million (10^7.5, actually).

Next up: The House of Representatives.

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* Or, for the Lolcatarians out there, it is to fit a Great Dane into a tiny cat carrier than for a Fancy Feast kitty to go to the Ceiling (Matthew 19:23-24):

23 Den Jeezus sai to hiz desiplz, “Im teh srs, it teh sux 4 a rich kittn to go 2 teh Ceiling.24 Aiz tel yu geiz agin, it srsly moar easier 4 graet daen to fit in teh tiny cat cariur dan for fancey feast kitteh two go to teh Howse uf teh Ceiling Cat.”

Prince Caspian on Wall Street’s arcane financial instruments

So, over the past two and a half years, a lot of opinions have been aired on the arcane financial instruments that were created, packaged, repackaged, sold, and leveraged by Wall Street Czars and Moguls. Some people view this activity as a natural extension of free-market capitalism, just as some people undoubtedly view eating children as a good source of protein. Other people view this self-referential and self-reinforcing “fake economy” as a financial cancer that nearly collapsed the world economy, just as some people view cancer as a cancer that kills people.

I’m still making up my mind.

While we have heard a lot on the topic from economists and politicians, one person we have not heard from is the fictional ruler of the fictional country of Narnia. Unfortunately, there are no surviving records from which we can reconstruct what Caspian X (the ruler formerly known as Prince Caspian) on these matters. However, we can infer a little something from Caspian’s questioning Governor Gumpas of the Lone Islands about islands’ slave trade.

Just to set the scene, we’re in Book 3 here, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. The Lone Islands are a part of the Kingdom of Narnia, but it has been about a hundred and fifty years since the last contact. So, the islands have been more or less self governing for a while. Caspian and the gang arrive to find a thriving slave trade, and Caspian insists that Gumpas abolish the practice.

The arguments that Gumpas puts forth to defend the slave trade could have come out of mouths of any one of the very serious people who have cautioned us against the chilling effect of imposing regulations, or curbing executive pay, or insisting upon transparency in how tax-supported funds are distributed among the elite.

“Necessary, unavoidable, a necessary part of the economic development of the islands, I assure you. Our present burst of prosperity depends on it.”

“Your Majesty’s tender years hardly make it possible that you should understand the economic problem involved. I have statistics, I have graphs, I have . . .”

“But that would be putting the clock back. Have you no idea of progress, or development?”

Caspian’s response could have come out of the mouths of any of the millions of people who lack the connections and – let’s say moral flexibility – to thrive in government:

In other words, you don’t need [slaves]. Tell me what purpose they serve except to put money into the pockets of such as [the slave trader] Pug? . . . . I do not see that it brings into the islands meat or bread or beer or wine or timber or cabbages or books or instruments of music or armour or anything else worth having. But whether or not it does, it must be stopped. 

So, two action items here. First, for anyone in congress who was holding off on enacting meaningful financial reform until you were clear on Narnia’s position on the matter, you may now proceed.

Second, speaking now to the British Royal Family from the self-governing former colony of America, if you can tear yourself away from hanging out with pedophiles and dressing up like Nazis, maybe you could come over and visit Wall Street and kick a little Gumpass, if you know what I mean.

Now, I’m certain that some readers are going to feel that I’ve played a bit fast and loose with the analogy here. After all, is it really fair to compare contemporary American capitalism to the slave trade?

You make a good point, imaginary critic.

Here in America, we live in one of the richest nations in the history of the world. The top one percent of the population receive only 25% of the income and control only 40% of the wealth. Government policies meet needs of corporations and the extremely wealthy with increasing efficiency. We send the children of the least wealthy members of our society off to fight against oppressive regimes that do not cater to our geopolitical dominance, while we send the children of the wealthiest members of our society off to curry favor with equally oppressive regimes that provide us with energy resources and places to dock our warships. Corporations have been granted rights of unlimited expression and privacy, while individual whistleblowers are confined and tortured. Rules of equal treatment in the court system have been abandoned for those subsets of humanity deemed too dangerous to be given a fair trial.

You’re right. It is absolutely nothing at all like slavery.

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Update: I’ve changed the title, and modified the text a bit to clarify that King Caspian X is the same person as Prince Caspian, which is probably obvious only if you are a huge C. S. Lewis fan.

Bonus Darwin Eats Cake: Expertise

So, here’s a little something for all you Dancing with the Stars fans out there.

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The good news is that for every seven dollars Candie’s Foundation gave to Bristol Palin in 2009, they spent one dollar on “actual teen pregnancy prevention programs.”(Raw Story)

I’m certain that’s EXACTLY what the donors were hoping for.

Sonic commercial exposes flawed American education system

So, unless you live somewhere within spitting distance of the Southwestern* part of the United States, you probably don’t have Sonic. The drive-in restaurant, not the hedgehog. Let me start by saying that I feel sorry for all of you people, as you don’t have regular access to their chili-cheese tots, or their SuperSONIC green chile bacon cheeseburger. [1]

If you are one of these people, you probably have not heard their latest radio commercial. It is introducing their new hot-dog menu, including the New York Dog and the Chicago Dog. The commercial goes on to explain the absence of Dogs from other cities. There is no Dallas Dog because they could not find one big enough. There is no Los Angeles Dog because it wanted a reality show.

There is no D. C. Dog because, among other reasons, it was filibustered by the House.

Sonic, the filibuster was eliminated in the House of Representatives in 1842. Today, in the United States, filibusters happen in the Senate.

If we can not rely on our fast-food restaurants to accurately portray federal parliamentary procedures, what hope is there for America?

[1] Full disclosure. I no longer have access to these things either, since going pretty much vegetarian, but I can still vouch for their awesomeness.

*Update: Following a comment on twitter, I have discovered that it would have been better to say, “South-Central.” See the follow-up post for a map.

Transocean Safety Bonus

So, you can file this one under Adventures in Corporate Asshattery:

Yes, that’s correct, the CEO and other executives of Transocean were each rewarded with a 2010 safety bonus for “significantly improving the company’s safety record,” which raises the question: How many people does an exploding Transocean oil rig kill most years?

The article where I got the numbers from is here.

This comic (along with others) is also posted at Darwin Eats Cake.

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Important Harvard Scientists Attack Kin Selection: Context

So, a couple of days ago, I made a video dramatizing the scientific kerfuffle surrounding a paper published in Nature by Martin Nowak, Carina Tarnita, and E. O. Wilson of Harvard. My original goal had been to create something that would be entertaining to the people involved in the argument.

The original post, which contains the video, is here.

Over the past day or so, it has become clear that a lot of people are seeing the video who are maybe not familiar with the context in which the kerfuffle arose. If you’re one of those people, here’s an attempt to provide a little background.

Nowak and Wilson, two of the authors of the article, are two of the most prolific and high-profile evolutionary biologists working today. If you’re in the field, you probably own at least one of Wilson’s books. Tarnita is a postdoc working with Nowak who already has an impressive set of credentials. Last August, the three of them published a paper in the scientific journal Nature, which, for biologists, is one of the the two super-high-profile places where your papers can be published. It is incredibly difficult to get a paper into Nature, and, if you are a young scientist, a publication in Nature will go a long way towards getting you an academic job.

Modeling and eusociality

Their paper was about the evolution of eusociality, which is the thing that you sometimes find in species like bees and ants, where one individual – the queen – makes all the babies, while everyone else builds the nest or the hive, and does not reproduce themselves. These are interesting evolutionary systems, because, if you think about it naively, why should the worker ants or worker bees give up their own reproduction so that the queen can have babies? If natural selection is all about who passes on the greatest number of copies of their genes, how can you possibly get this worker behavior, where a huge number of individuals don’t reproduce, and are, in fact, willing to sacrifice their lives so that someone else (the queen) can reproduce?

[Note: this is a cartoon description. The real biology is, as always, enormously more complicated, and there is a huge amount of variation in the way in which eusociality works, in insects and elsewhere.]

Here’s the way that I like to think about it. Think about a cell in your brain. There is absolutely no chance for that cell to pass on copies of its genes to the next generation. That brain cell is an evolutionary dead end. In fact, no genes in any cell in anyone’s brain have ever been passed on.

Nevertheless, natural selection has created genes that lead to enormously complex functions in the brain. The reason is that for every gene that is present in your brain, there is an identical (probably) copy of that gene in your germ line (in your testes or ovaries) that can be passed on. So, genes that lead to brain functions that help you to survive and reproduce can be favored by selection, even if the gene copies that are physically present in the brain are not passed on themselves.

That is the basic idea behind the evolution of eusociality. Workers that don’t reproduce have evolved because they help the queen to reproduce, and, in particular, they help her to make more queens, who go off and start their own colonies. So, in a sense, the colony as a whole reproduces, and genes that facilitate that non-reproductive worker behavior are passed on, even though they are not passed on by the workers themselves.

At this verbal, qualitative level of description, everyone agrees about what is going on. But, in evolutionary biology, we are interested in developing mathematical, formal, quantitative descriptions of the process. This is where the divisions start.

There are different ways that these ideas can be formalized. Traditionally, the two major formalisms have been “kin selection” or “inclusive fitness” models on the one hand, and “group selection” models on the other. I won’t go into detail here about the differences, because I don’t personally find them interesting. The fact is, if you do your math correctly, you can accurately describe any system using either of these frameworks, as well as others. They’re not totally identical, in the sense that certain systems can be described more simply using one framework than another, or in that some questions can be more natural to ask in one framework than another, or in that the framing entailed by your choice of model can influence how you tend to interpret the results of the model. That being said, there is a deep way in which all of the different modeling frameworks are mathematically interchangeable, and this interchangeability has been demonstrated repeatedly over the past few decades.

The problem with the paper

The thing about this particular paper that roused the ire of so many evolutionary biologists was that much of the text was devoted to discrediting the kin selection approach.  The problem with the paper is that it does not actually go after any of the core ideas that underlie the kin selection approach. Nor does it criticize models of kin selection in the way that people actually use them.

Instead, the paper sets up a straw man, and then tears it down. The “kin-selection approach,” as it is described by them, would certainly be a limited, flawed modeling framework. But the limitations that they describe in the paper fall into three categories:

  1. Limitations that are not a part of kin-selection models as they are actually used by anyone.
  2. Limitations that may apply to particular models applied to particular systems, but are not limitations that are inherent in the approach.
  3. Limitations that apply to all evolutionary models, including the alternative that they are championing.

I won’t go on more here. If you’re interested, I recommend reading the original criticisms, which I have cited and linked to in my original post.

Now, one interesting thing about this paper is that many of the papers that have extended kin-selection models beyond the limitations that the paper accuses them of are actually cited in the supplementary materials. And yet, the main text of the paper (which is the only thing that most people will read) seems to be written as if none of those papers exist.

The personalities

Back in the 1970s and 1980s, E. O. Wilson was a polarizing figure in evolutionary biology, due to his role in championing the application of evolutionary reasoning to the study of behavior, particularly human behavior. (In a previous post, I recommended this article, which provides an entertaining overview of the sociobiology wars, in which Wilson was a central figure.) However, over the past couple of decades, Wilson has become one of the Grand Old Men of evolution, and is nearly universally respected.

Martin Nowak, by contrast, is a controversial and polarizing figure in evolutionary biology today. However, whereas Wilson became controversial for his ideas, Nowak is controversial for the way that he presents his ideas. In particular, many people within the evolutionary biology community feel that Nowak has a tendency to oversell the importance and originality of his own work. More specifically, many people feel that he systematically fails to give enough credit to previous work by other scientists.

So, while I believe that the criticisms leveled against this particular paper – specifically those in the published responses in Nature – are all legitimate, I can see how it might seem like a lot of controversy over a little problem. I would like to suggest what I think might be an explanation for the volume (both number of words and loudness of those words) of the response that the paper seems to have elicited. Although I know some of the letter writers personally, and know many of them professionally, I claim no privileged insight as to their motivations. So, what I am presenting here is pure speculation, and should be taken with large quantities of salt, but here it is:

My suspicion is that the response was as broad and strident as it was specifically because it was a response to Nowak. The shortcomings that they have pointed out the current paper are certainly all there. But, I think that those shortcomings perhaps seem all the more galling because they represent an extreme case of a style of argument and presentation that Nowak has used repeatedly over the years, and which has long been infuriating to many evolutionary biologists, including, I suspect, many of the authors of the letters.

The politics

I mentioned at the beginning of this post that the paper was published in Nature, and publications in Nature are worth their weight in gold in terms of a biologist’s career. But the reputation of Nature within evolutionary biology is a complicated one. Many people will routinely dismiss Nature as a “science tabloid” that is very interested in publishing flashy results, but interested enough in whether or not those results are true. At the same time, most of these same biologists would gladly trade their right gonad for a Nature publication themselves, as Nature publications open the door to future success, like getting academic jobs, getting grant money from funding agencies, and getting, well, more Nature publications. As one colleague of mine put it, it’s like how everyone wants to have their picture taken with the dictator.

So, one thing that is going on here is that there are a lot of people who have published a lot of very good work in a lot of very good journals. Then, along comes this paper, which basically dismisses that whole body of work. You could say (as a different colleague of mine did), “Well, if the arguments in the paper are wrong, why not just let it go. No one will believe it in the long run anyway.” The problem is that the impact of this one article in Nature may outweigh the impact of all of those very good articles in all of those very good (non-Nature) journals, at least in the eyes of anyone who is not, themselves, an evolutionary biologist. So, while this paper will have little to no effect on the way that evolutionary biology is done, it may have a big impact on the way that evolutionary biology is perceived by people outside the field.

So, some of this is probably a combination of righteous indignation and sour grapes, similar to what you might feel upon seeing some celebrity interviewed on CNN as an “expert” on some topic that you feel they don’t really understand, and that you feel that you, in fact, understand much better.

Then, there is the funding issue. There are two funding sources that Nowak has that are viewed with some suspicion by many evolutionary biologists (and probably most academics, more generally): the Templeton Foundation and Jeffrey Epstein, both of which/whom are thanked in the acknowledgements of the original paper.

The Templeton Foundation funds a lot of science, but has a particular interest in science that relates to issues of religion and spirituality. This interest is, in itself, enough to make many evolutionary biologists feel that any research supported by Templeton is inherently suspect. I have no horse in that race, and my view is that as long as they are not dictating the outcome of your research, there is no problem. Then, of course, there is the fact that Nowak himself is a devout Catholic, which, I suspect, makes his relationship with Templeton seem even more problematic to your average evolutionary biologist.

Jeffrey Epstein is, of course, the hedge-fund mogul who pled guilty a couple of years ago to a charge of soliciting an under-age girl for prostitution. There is an argument to be made that his extreme wealth allowed him escape much more severe charges, such as sex trafficking. More recently he has been in the news following accusations that he “trained up” a girl who lived with him from age 14 to 18, and loaned her out to his rich friends.

Now, one can take a range of positions on this issue. One viewpoint, probably espoused by many academics (including me), is that any money from someone like Epstein is inherently dirty, and that the choice to take money from him casts doubt on one’s ability to make valid moral – and, by extension, scientific – judgments.

An alternative viewpoint would be that money is money, there’s not enough of it out there to support all the interesting research that could be done, and you’ve got to take money where you can get it. An even more extreme viewpoint would be that every dollar that you take from Epstein for science is one dollar that he won’t be spending to pay some underage girl to give him a “massage.”

As I say, I side with the first viewpoint, that Epstein’s moral violations are severe enough that there is no excuse for interacting with or taking money from him. However, I suspect that some people may feel differently without necessarily being bad people.

The point is that Nowak’s associations probably color how he is perceived by the academic community. That does not mean that those associations have affected his science. And, in fact, I believe that the scientific points of the argument can be completely understood without any reference to these other issues.

However, I think the intensity of the response to this paper was enhanced by things that form a part of the sociology of science, rather than a part of the science itself. It is in this vein that I mention Nowak’s associations, which are fairly well known to most evolutionary biologists (who, like all academics, are a gossipy bunch).

Wrap-up

So, what you have in Martin Nowak is a guy who has been enormously well funded and enormously prolific, publishing a huge number of papers in high profile journals. As a result, Nowak has become one of the best known evolutionary biologists, particularly outside the field. However, many other evolutionary biologists are suspicious (and probably resentful) of his high profile. This suspicion comes in part from a feeling that he has not really earned his reputation, that his reputation exceeds his actual accomplishments, and that he associates with unsavory characters. It is not surprising, then, that he is something of a lightning rod in the field.

I doubt that I have written anything here that will be surprising or new to anyone who actually works in evolutionary theory, or follows it closely. But, I wanted to lay this out because I know that this sort of academic dust-up always looks really bizarre and petty when viewed from the outside. And, it is clear in this case that the debate is emotionally charged. So, if you’ve stumbled upon this, and were confused, but interested enough to slog through this whole post, I hope that maybe this provided some degree of context.

Nowak, M., Tarnita, C., & Wilson, E. (2010). The evolution of eusociality Nature, 466 (7310), 1057-1062 DOI: 10.1038/nature09205

Update: PS If you came here through finding the video posted on Richard Dawkins’s site, it is shoebucket productions, not shoebox productions.

General Electric versus the NSF

So, you may have seen the recent New York Times article about General Electric. Here are the key numbers: 14.2 billion dollars in profits globally in 2010, 5.1 billion of which came from the US; negative 3.2 billion in US taxes. That’s right, not only did they pay no taxes, they claimed at 3.2 billion dollar tax benefit. That’s billion, with a b.

Here’s something to put that in perspective:

And, of course, there’s the fact that Jeffrey Immelt, head of GE since Jack Welch stepped down, was appointed as the chair of the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. What could possibly go wrong?

If you would like to embed this comic in your own blog, here’s the URL: http://www.darwineatscake.com/img/comic/13.jpg

The best URL for sharing is: http://www.darwineatscake.com/?id=13

Or, to view the comic in its natural habitat, go here.

If you want to feel more outraged and depressed by this, I recommend Tom Scocca’s post on the matter.

Sources:
G.E.’s Strategies Let It Avoid Taxes Altogether, David Kocieniewski, New York Times, March 24, 2011.
NSF budget numbers from LiveScience.

Darwin Eats Cake: Red Queen

So, have you spend all day looking for a comic that integrates Red Queen evolutionary dynamics, commentary on the application of parsimony arguments in biology, and Newt Gingrich’s recent flip-flopping on Libya? No? Well, hopefully you’ll enjoy this anyway. For a more viewable image, see the original at Darwin Eats Cake.

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For more on the flip-flop check out Think Progress or Weigel.

Van Valen, L (1973). A New Evolutionary Law Evolutionary Theory, 1, 1-30

Bill Zedler, champion of "academic" freedom

So, Texas is apparently worried about losing its status as most backward state. Enter state representative Bill Zedler, who is introducing a bill that will prevent students and professors from being “discriminated against” for questioning evolution. Because apparently he believes that this is NOT the exact opposite of the problem with science education.

Texas Republican Bill Zedler has a mind that was intelligently designed with an extraordinary capacity for deliberately misinterpreting facts, and with an ability to use disingenuous arguments about academic freedom to push a religious agenda. Fortunately, millions of years of evolution have also left him with a mind that is incapable of adequately disguising his transparent attempt to violate the first amendment of the United States Constitution.

I humbly submit to Mr. Zedler that he should modify his bill, expanding it to include the following:

  1. No student shall be expected to depart any university with any knowledge that supplants or contradicts any beliefs or preconceived notions they may have had upon first enrolling.
  2. No one shall be denied employment as a doctor at any university health center as a result of their disbelief in the germ theory of disease, nor as a result of a lack of medical training.
  3. Any student accused of plagiarism or any other form of academic misconduct shall be examined by panel consisting of three members of the faculty and the university ombudsman. The student shall be held underwater for no less than twelve consecutive minutes. Should the student drown, he or she shall be deemed innocent of said misconduct.
  4. Each university shall establish a quota system for tenured faculty in each department as follows. Each Chemistry Department must have no less than four (4) practicing alchemists. No less than seven (7) members of each English Department must be functionally illiterate. Women’s Studies Departments must include at least six (6) self-identifying misogynists, including at least one (1) violent sex offender.

I look forward to seeing the revised version of the bill.

Update: New post presenting my webcomic on this subject.