Minorities in the Sciences: Fully Welcome?

As I wrote previously, us whites (or, in my case, almost-white) have a burden of responsibility to make the world better for all races—we have to work for good, not merely not be evil.

Academia, and in particular science, prides itself for being progressive in all ways. In particular, we proclaim ourselves (I am a botany professor) to not be racist. And, compared to many other areas of society (government, business, religion) we are correct. But it is not quite so simple. Here are three examples that show that work remains to include all races in the scientific enterprise.

First example. I heard an interview on the radio. A black ornithology student (he studies birds) said that he had been confronted by white groups because he was looking in the trees with binoculars. Of course, that’s what ornithologists do. (Embarrassingly but not surprisingly, this example came from my state of Oklahoma.) Right away, you see the problem. White people seeing blacks looking through binoculars might assume they are up to some criminal activity. Do ornithologists need to carry ID cards saying that they are ornithologists, and be prepared to show those cards to whoever comes along and confronts them? Or is it that black, not white, ornithologists need to do this? See the fascinating article in Orion magazine.

Second example. A couple of decades ago, I was one of the faculty judges of student presentations at the national meeting of the Botanical Society of America. I watched several undergraduate student presentations, and kept numerical scores on each. By keeping numerical scores, the other judges and I did the best we could to avoid bias. When our judging committee met, it was clear from our scores and our overall impressions that the best paper was one that had been presented by a black female. She got the prize and we were all happy. I hope she went on to a great career. However, one prominent botanist, at a major university, was quite upset. He told the chair of our judging committee how upset he was. The chair did not tell us about it until just before the awards banquet, by which time it could not influence our decision. The racist was a prominent enough botanist that, had he known who I was and that I was still a junior professor, he might have talked trash about me and held my career back, had he chosen to.

Third example. This same prominent botanist mentioned above had a brilliant mixed-race undergraduate student who later entered the same graduate program that I was in, with the same advisor, and who went on to a distinguished career. This unnamed senior botanist told my advisor that this student was just fine, the only problem was that he was black.

Incidentally, the Botanical Society link above includes Black Botanist Week.

Racial prejudice persists against scientists of color, both from the general public and among scientists. The main difference is that us scientists (at least, botanists, about whom I know) are doing our best to solve the problem.

Natural Selection in the Meadow of Science

Imagine a meadow full of flowers. Imagine yourself as a bee, looking for flowers that have the nectar that you want to eat. Which ones will you go to? There are only so many hours in the day, and you have to make the best use of your time in the sun. You may choose the biggest and brightest flowers, if for no other reason than that they grabbed your attention.

Natural selection results. The bees choose the biggest and brightest flowers, and these are the ones that get pollinated and produce a lot of seeds. In addition to natural selection, there is also sexual selection. The big, colorful flowers attract pollinators to bring, and to take away, pollen, which is the male function of the flower. I am unclear on the concept of how a pollinator can enhance a flower’s male success without also enhancing its female success, but the scholarly articles about pollination customarily make this distinction.

Now imagine that the meadow is full of graduate students looking for jobs in academia. They want their scholarly articles not to just get published but to get noticed. How can a graduate student do this?

Of course, the article has to be well written and technically accurate. An inaccurate article is as counter-productive as a flower that, due to a genetic or developmental defect, cannot produce seeds.

And this used to be all that mattered. Scientific articles had to be correct, not necessarily interesting. As a matter of fact, old scientific articles seemed to me to compete with one another to see how boring they could be.

But now, scholarly articles have to catch the reader’s attention.

I think this is a positive development. Like many other professors, I am overwhelmed with work. I do not have time to read a bunch of scientific articles. All I can do is to visit the websites of the professional organizations to which I belong (for example, the Botanical Society of America), click on each monthly issue of the journal (American Journal of Botany, AJB), and scroll through the titles. If one catches my attention, I click on it. Right at the top, under the title and names of authors, is a summary, called an abstract. It might be one or two hundred words long. And that is usually all I have time to read. If I want to look at it again, I highlight and copy the title and put it in a digital file to which I can refer later. Even this I mostly do on vacation.

You can see how important it is to have a clear and interesting title. The title might be all that most members of the Society read. Sometimes, the titles sound more like something from National Geographic than from AJB. (I repeat, this is a good thing.) Here are some examples, from 2017 and 2018:

• There was an article about the beautiful red-spotted golden flowers of Mimulus guttatus. I have long admired this flower, and was surprised to learn that in addition to being beautiful it had a nifty trick. The stigma (the surface on which pollinators deposit the pollen) closes itself up when it is touched. This is valuable for flowers that require pollen from a different flower. The ones that pollinate themselves, however, have lost the ability to close up their stigmas. The title began, “Losing one’s touch.”
• Plant species related to Amsinckia, which produces flowers on a stalk that unfurls like the neck of a violin, are found in both North and South America. Genetic analysis has revealed that seeds of these plants journeyed from one hemisphere to the other 18 times. Interesting, but I might have missed it were it not for the first part of the title: “Memoirs of a frequent flier.”
• There was an article about parasites seeking host vines. But these vines might be hard to find, interspersed with many other plants on which the parasites cannot live. The title began, “Reading between the vines.”
• There was a series of articles about the computer-based analyses of plant evolutionary history. One was about the plant family Campanulaceae (bellflowers). The title began, “Can we build it? Yes, we can, but should we use it?” The title of another article, about the plant family Apocynaceae (milkweeds), began, “Evolution on the backbone.” The author was referring to the backbone of the phylogenetic tree, not animal backbones.
• The August, 2018 AJB issue focused on how the “tree of life,” which shows the evolutionary relationships of all living species of plants, can be improved by adding in extinct, fossilized species, thus making it “The Tree of Death.” One of the article titles began, “Wanted dead or alive (probably dead).”

Interesting titles are good not just for us scientists, but also for science journalists, who write popular articles for everyday people to read. In case science journalists look over the titles, they will only notice the interesting ones. With a boring title, your research will never get mentioned in popular magazines or websites. One of the world’s leading journals, Science, has popular summaries of its technical articles near the front of each issue. The titles sometimes stretch themselves to the limit to get your attention.

For example, in the August 2, 2019 issue of Science, there is a technical article titled, “Laboratory mice born to wild mice have natural microbiota and model human immune responses.” If you read this title carefully, you can see that it is a pretty exciting article, bringing together two important aspects of modern medicine: microbiota (e.g. in your gut) and immunity. The summary at the front of the journal is titled “Walk on the wildling side,” and the news summary title is “Born to be a wildling.” The news summary titles tell you almost nothing about what the research is about; they exist solely to grab your attention. “Wildling” comes from the title of a 2018 movie.

In the immediately previous issue, there was a technical article about neutral mutations; that is, they are DNA mutations that have no measurable effect on the organism. Geneticists call these mutations cryptic. The title of the technical article is “Cryptic genetic variation accelerates evolution by opening access to diverse adaptive peaks.” The news summary article was entitled “Tales from the crypt(ic).”

Even the technical articles sometimes make a big stretch to gain attention. Several years ago there was a Science article about a Mediterranean volcano. The title began, “Bang!”

This has been going on for a long time, though less than at present. A 2002 article in the journal Oecologia is entitled, “It takes two to tango but three is a tangle: Mutualists and cheaters on the carnivorous plant Roridula.”

But sometimes the titles promise more than they can deliver. One 2017 article in AJB was entitled “Ecological and evolutionary consequences of tri-trophic interactions: Spatial variation and effects of plant density.” The title made me excited. It would make you excited, too, if you are a plant ecologist. It sounded like ecology at its best: biological processes having ripple effects up and down the food chain, that is, three trophic levels. I can almost hear John Muir saying that everything in the universe is hitched to everything else and that he would love to read the article.

But then I looked at the summary of the article. The seeds themselves are the first trophic level; the insects that eat the seeds, the second; and the parasites that eat the insects, the third. But the article simply showed that insects will be more abundant in places where there are more seeds, and that the parasites that afflict the insects are not affected by seed or insect density. The first conclusion was something we have already known for decades; the second conclusion was that the parasites didn’t affect the system. I thought that I was going to learn something new about ecology, in general, and was disappointed. If the authors had entitled the article “Seed predators eat more seeds when there are more seeds, and parasites have no effect on them,” the article would not have been noticed, perhaps not even published. All this, in spite of the fact that there was nothing technically wrong with the article.

If you want a job in the academic world, you have to publish articles with interesting titles (good) and that maybe promise more than they can deliver (not so good). Overall, I am glad that scientific titles are more interesting than they used to be. I certainly made some stretches for the chapter titles in my most recent book. But sometimes, just sometimes, a clever title makes me wonder if the author is hiding something.

My Fun Evolution Trip Part Eleven: The Botany Conference and Cookbook Teaching

First, an announcement: the YouTube link in the previous announcement now works. It is here.

I just finished teaching a cookbook lab in our general biology course at Southeastern Oklahoma State University. The lab was an experiment in which students measured the effects of enzyme concentration, temperature, and pH on the activity of amylase. We measured amylase activity by roughly quantifying glucose production: glucose turns Benedict’s solution (which is blue because of copper) into an orange or red color. This can actually be exciting, because you have to boil the solution to make the color appear, and it is always fun to watch students using clamps to manipulate little test tubes in beakers of boiling water. The broken glass container got some use today.

Like the other instructors, I told the students to follow the cookbook instructions. The instructions told them exactly what to put in each of their eight test tubes, and which pipettes to use, and to put the amylase in last (since that starts the reaction); where to put the tubes for incubation; how to use the Benedict’s solution; how to score the results. Cookbook all the way so far.

I participated in the Botany 2014 conference of the Botanical Society of America in Boise, Idaho, is always the high point of my year in those years that I attend—and that’s saying something. If you read this blog regularly, you know I have lots of interesting activities. But the people at the Botany conferences are so enthusiastic, knowledgeable, and professional, that the conference reinvigorates me. The conference is so welcoming to students; even undergraduates present their results, and as often as not their papers are as good as those that us older people present. I especially admire my fellow participants in the Teaching Section, where we meet to exchange ideas about how to teach botany and related subjects (like general biology).

It is popular for educators to disparage “cookbook labs” in biology education. Even the term used for it is a put-down. While I admire the professional creativity of the anti-cookbookers, I have to stick up just a little for the cookbook lab in which we tell the students exactly what to do at each step.

The main reason for having cookbook labs is that our students, at least, have little or no experience with basic scientific manipulation, such as how to use a pipette, or why they should not mix pipettes up (amylase with starch, acid with base, etc.). Even our best students are worried they might do something wrong, and they often do, by simply not reading the instructions. There are always a few who put amylase in the control tube. If we just gave them the materials and background information and let them work it out themselves, many of them would get very confused. We have extra materials so that if they screw up, they can start over. A fifteen minute incubation in a two-hour lab is not too difficult to redo if necessary. But without cookbook instructions, the groups of students would have to start over so many times that we could not, with our limited staff, make up and clean up enough materials, especially since our labs are scheduled back-to-back-to-back. And with every seat in the lab occupied, there may be twelve groups of students. And if each group screws up in a different way, how is one instructor (or two, if we are lucky) help each of them out of their confusion? I had so much work on my hands anyway that I did not notice that the boiling water beakers dried out and started smelling like melted glass. I got to them just in time.

Therefore in my experience, cookbook labs aren’t so bad. Cookbooks aren’t so bad. Some things you can throw together while cooking—I never consult a cookbook—but other things you have to be careful about doing just the right way, and published advice from good cooks becomes very valuable in those cases. Cookbooks even have their own style of grammar that is universally accepted, with its reliance on the imperative mood and omission of articles (“bring water to rolling boil”), a grammar also used in lab manuals. To me, the alternative is chaos.

But here is where we depart from a cookbook mentality. Once the students have their row of test tubes lined up, from blue (the control in which the Benedict’s solution had nothing to react with) to orange or red, they had to think about the results for themselves. They had to test hypotheses about the effects of amylase concentration, temperature, and pH (independent variables) on enzyme activity (dependent variable) and then graph it. Here, there were no explicit instructions, and nearly everybody got it wrong at first. But they got it creatively wrong, made the corrections, and understood (in most cases) what had happened. Here is where the real education occurred. I will agree with my anti-cookbook colleagues that we should not tell the students what to think about their results. If their results were “wrong,” we had them make note of it but not to change their results to make them fit the expectations, and they lose no points for getting wrong results, so long as they understand them.

In a future week we will have another cookbook lab: look at the slide, draw it, and label it, without really thinking about what the parts do. Now, that is the kind of cookbook lab I really don’t like. But I didn't write the lab book for the course.

The BSA Evolution Session: We Made the Papers!

On July 30, I reported from the Botany 2013 meeting in New Orleans. I mentioned the symposium, organized by Joe Armstrong and Marsh Sundberg, called “Yes, Bobby, Evolution is Real.” I wish to announce that this symposium generated some notice (or, depending on your viewpoint, notoriety), though not as a result of my presentation. The New Orleans Times-Picayune took notice of the presentations by Barbara Forrest and the activist student Zack Kopplin, and were not entirely pleased; the Huffington Post reported it more positively.

A meeting of botanists does not usually draw very much attention from even the local media, not even negative attention (I can imagine a headline, “Representative Lamar Smith (R-TX) Decries Botanists Using Federal Funds to Meet and Talk about Wildflowers at Snowbird Resort” or “Senator Jim Inhofe (R-OK) Denounces Botanists for Talking about Global Climate Change at Hot Summer Meeting in New Orleans”).  We need to get attention more often. But we won’t unless the rest of us botanists, as Joe and Marsh have done, actually plan something to that end. So, what should we do for the 2014 meetings in Boise, Idaho? Maybe some of us could walk around the city park Sunday afternoon dressed as flowers and bees to publicize the economic importance of crop pollination?

Evolution at the Botany 2013 Meetings

I am writing this entry at the Botany 2013 meetings in New Orleans. These meetings are a celebration of all aspects of plant biology, and nearly all of these aspects tie in with evolution.

One symposium focused directly on teaching evolution. It was a symposium entitled, “Yes, Bobby, Evolution is Real,” organized by Marsh Sundberg of Emporia State University in Kansas and Joe Armstrong at Illinois State University. The Bobby referred to in the title is Bobby Jindal, the governor of Louisiana, who signed into law a creationist education bill several years ago. One of the presenters was Barbara Forrest, a professor in Louisiana who talked about the creationist law and its consequences in Louisiana. She is one of the leading experts on creationism in America. Another presenter was Zack Kopplin, who was a high school student in Louisiana when the law was enacted, and who is now an undergraduate college student who is leading a campaign to get the law overturned. He has spoken to, and been the recipient of some incredibly illogical comments from, state legislators, which he has posted on YouTube.

I was also a speaker in this session. For my presentation “Confessions of an Oklahoma Evolutionist: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” I told of some of my experiences in Oklahoma, and how religion can suppress scientific thinking but how, in some cases, religion can promote a desire to pursue an understanding of the natural world. My conclusion was that, since religion will always be with us, we should try to guide religious feelings that we have, or that we encounter in others, into a constructive direction, of desiring to learn about and to protect the natural world, rather than to continually engage in conflict. Not surprisingly, I wore my Darwin outfit for this presentation.

But nearly all the sessions incorporated evolution in some way. The most common presentations at the botany conference each year are about plant systematics, in which researchers present their phylogenetic analyses, often of DNA, by which they can reconstruct the evolutionary histories of and relationships among plant genera and families. Nearly every plant ecology paper has an evolutionary context also, for example about the coevolution of plants and the fungi that live in their roots. One of the economic botany sessions will have a presentation by Norm Ellstrand about how crops can sometimes evolve into weeds. Even the educational papers had an evolutionary context. Even though none of the papers directly concerned teaching evolution or the creationist controversies, the Teaching Section is planning a field trip for next year’s meeting (which will be in Boise, Idaho) to one of the most famous fossil sites in the world—Fossil Bowl, where visitors can dig up preserved 15-million-year-old leaves that look almost as fresh as if they had been buried yesterday.

I realize that some creationists think that scientists at meetings are plotting to suppress the truth in order to inflict evil upon the world. But the exact opposite is true: we let the facts speak for themselves, and they reveal a natural world in which evolution ties all the different fields of research together, from DNA to the whole history and ecology of the Earth; and we truly form a camaraderie of women and men who strongly desire to make the world a better place for everyone. We find creationism frustrating not only because it is wrong but because it creates such unnecessary conflict. We even find it to be, in some cases, hypocritical: in Louisiana, one of the biggest supporters of creationism and “family values” is none other than the famous client of prostitutes, Sen. David Vitter.

Not that we always agree on how to make the world better. The Botanical Society of America has accepted funding from Monsanto Corporation, and has been hesitant to bring any criticism against Monsanto for the way it aggressively markets its genetically altered plants. Nobody said much about this, and BSA seems to have slipped into a comfortable symbiosis with Monsanto. But one woman from West Africa, who is currently a professor in the United States, has directly observed the negative effects that some of Monsanto’s practices have had on African farmers. She plans to try to get the issue discussed in future meetings, perhaps by organizing a discussion session at next year’s meeting. I doubt that the Botanical Society can reach any consensus, but it may be the ideal place to discuss these issues. As the leading society devoted to the study and use of plants, we are neither an arm of agribusiness nor an anti-GMO activist organization. We are free to have such discussions and I hope we do so.

The collegiality with which evolutionary scientists work together stands in striking contrast with the paralyzing bitterness in Congress.