Deborah Owens Fink Defeated in Ohio School Board Race

SOURCE: Evolution in Ohio Board of Education Races

COMMENTARY: Allen MacNeill

First, the news story, compliments of the National Center for Science Education (commentary follows):

In a closely watched race, Tom Sawyer handily defeated incumbent Deborah Owens-Fink for the District 7 seat on the Ohio state board of education. Evolution education was a key issue in the race; on the board, Owens-Fink consistently supported antievolution measures, including the "Critical Analysis of Evolution" model lesson plan, which was rescinded by the board in February 2006, and dismissed the National Academy of Sciences as "a group of so-called scientists." Defending her stance to The New York Times (October 26, 2006), she described the idea that there is a scientific consensus on evolution as "laughable."

Sawyer, in contrast, told the Akron Beacon-Journal (October 23, 2006) that evolution is "grounded in numerous basic sciences and is itself a foundational life science. By contrast, creationism in its many forms is not science but theology." But the campaign was not solely about evolution, he subsequently explained to the Beacon-Journal (November 8, 2006): the evolution debate "was a metaphor for the failure of some members of the state board of education to understand the larger issues facing education in Ohio. I mean funding, quality and governance."

Owens-Fink and Sawyer aired their views during a radio discussion entitled "Evolution's Effect on Voters," broadcast on October 26, 2006, by WCPN, and available on-line in MP3 format; also on the show were "intelligent design" sympathizer Chris Williams and Brown University cell biologist Kenneth Miller, then stumping for Sawyer and other pro-evolution-education state board of education candidates in Ohio. (A high point occurred when Williams claimed that evolution delayed the discovery of small interfering RNA, and Miller replied by remarking that Craig Mello, who won a Nobel Prize in 2006 for his work on RNA interference, was a student in the first biology class he taught.)

In the four-way race, Sawyer received 54% of the vote to Owens-Fink's 29%, David Kovacs's 12%, and John Jones's 9%, according to the Associated Press. The Beacon-Journal reports that Owens-Fink's campaign spent over $100,000, while Sawyer's spent about $50,000 -- both "unusually large sums for a state school board race." Sawyer also enjoyed the support of the pro-science-education coalition Help Ohio Public Education, organized by Lawrence M. Krauss and Patricia Princehouse at Case Western Reserve University and Steve Rissing at the Ohio State University.

Pro-science candidates prevailed elsewhere in Ohio. In District 4, incumbent G. R. "Sam" Schloemer handily defeated challenger John Hritz, described by the Cleveland Plain Dealer (October 22, 2006) as "a conservative millionaire who wants to include alternatives to Darwinism in science class." In District 2, John Bender narrowly triumphed in a four-way race with 37% of the vote; his closest rival, Kathleen McGarvey, who won 35% of the vote, was described by the Plain Dealer as "sympathetic to teaching alternatives to evolution." And in District 8, Deborah L. Cain defeated incumbent Jim Craig, who was criticized for ambivalence about the "critical analysis" effort.

The result of Ohio's gubernatorial election is also relevant, since eight seats on the state board of education are filled by gubernatorial appointment. Responding to a question from the Columbus Dispatch (July 23, 2006), Democrat Ted Strickland said, "Science ought to be taught in our classrooms. Intelligent design should not be taught as science," while Republican Ken Blackwell said, "I believe in intelligent design, and I believe that it should be taught in schools as an elective," adding, "And I don't see it as having met the generally accepted criteria as a science." Strickland won in the November 7, 2006, election, with 60% of the vote.

COMMENTARY:

About a week ago, I posted a commentary on the election race for the Ohio state board of education, highlighting the opinions and positions of ID supporter and anti-evolutionist, Deborah Owens Fink (see Scientists Endorse Candidate Over Teaching of Evolution. As the foregoing news story indicates, Owens Fink was overwhelmingly defeated yesterday by her pro-science rival, Tom Sawyer, in a closely watched election in a state that has repeatedly been a battleground over the teaching of evolution in the public schools.

In addition to Owens Fink, three other anti-evolution candidates for the Ohio school board were also defeated, in what appears to be a landslide in favor of the teaching of the science of evolution in the public schools (see "Honest Science Wins in Ohio" for the details). Following on the heels of the Kitzmiller v. Dover decision last December and similar court cases nationwide, it looks like ID is in full retreat in states that were once touted by the Discovery Institute as key to the success of ID in the public schools.

Even more interesting in the context of yesterday's elections is the fact that public support for the teaching of evolution (and against ID) cut across party lines in Ohio. The pro-evolution winners in the Ohio school board elections included both Democrats and Republicans, indicating decisively that support for good science (and opposition to pseudoscience) is a non-partisan issue. Even in states in which the voting public is generally conservative, such as Ohio, there is a landslide going on, a landslide in favor of science as it is practiced and taught by working scientists.

The "politics and public relations" tactics of the Discovery Institute have been consistently losing nationwide for almost a year, and public opposition to their deliberate distortions of science and scientific research has been growing exponentially. Even more encouraging to scientists and their supporters is the fact, demonstrated most clearly in Ohio yesterday, that even with massive amounts of money for political advertisements and public relations, the Discovery Institute is losing, and losing overwhelmingly in states once considered their best and brightest hope for ID in the public schools.

So, the future looks bright for real science – as I have said before, it's a wonderful time to be an evolutionary biologist, and an even more wonderful time to teach evolutionary biology!

--Allen

New Definitions of a "Gene"

AUTHOR: RPM

SOURCE: Evolgen

COMMENTARY: Allen MacNeill

RPM at Evolgen has a new post about evolving definitions of a "gene". Here are my thoughts on the subject:

For years I have been teaching my students that a gene is a segment of DNA that codes for a single RNA molecule with a complementary sequence, regardless of whether that RNA molecule is translated or not. This definition takes into account the genes for the various rRNAs and tRNAs, which are not translated, and also other forms of non-translated RNA that have recently been discovered. By this definition, genes that code for mRNAs that are actually translated are distinguished as "structural genes," using terminology that was first developed to describe the Jacob-Monod model of the lactose operon. Using this same terminology, the gene that codes for the lactose repressor protein is a "regulatory gene," insofar as the repressor does not function in an "extrinsic" biochemical pathway, but rather participates in the regulation of other structural genes.

However, the distinction between "structural" and "regulatory" genes outlined above is insufficient to describe the various kinds of genetically significant DNA sequences now known. For example, it does not include regions of the DNA to which protein regulators bind, but which are not themselves transcribed. It also does not distinguish between RNAs that are translated into proteins (either enzymes or repressor/regulator proteins) and those that are transcribed into RNA but never translated (such as rRNA, tRNA, and the newer non-translated RNAs).

Given the foregoing, it appears to me that there are four (possibly five) functionally different kinds of DNA coding sequences:

(1) translatable sequences: those DNA sequences that are both transcribed into mRNA and later translated into proteins, regardless of function (these can be further subdivided into proteins that participate in non-DNA related biochemical pathways and those that directly regulate DNA, but those seem to me to be classifications of the proteins, not the DNA sequences that code for them);

(2) transcribable sequences: those DNA sequences that are transcribed into RNA (i.e. rRNA, tRNA, etc.), but are not later translated into proteins/polypeptide chains. Again, what the RNAs do after being transcribed is not a function of the DNA, but rather of the RNAs, and therefore should not really be used to classify DNA coding sequences;

(3) binding sequences: those DNA sequences that are not transcribed into RNA nor translated into protein, but which function as binding sites for regulatory molecules such as repressor proteins, homeotic gene products, etc. While such sequences do not code for the production of a transcribed or translated gene product, they still participate in the regulation of other genes by serving as regulatory binding sites; and

(4) non-binding sequences: those DNA sequences that are not transcribed into RNA, not translated into protein, nor function as binding sites for regulatory moelcules. Such sequences would include highly repetitive sequences, tandom repeats, "spacer DNA", pseudogenes, retroviral and transposon inserts (both "dead" and potentially "alive"), etc. This latter category could be further subdivided into "functional" non-coding/non-binding DNA sequences versus "non-functional/parastitic" non-coding/non-binding DNA sequences, depending on whether they arise as part of the functional architecture of the DNA (primarily of eukaryotes), or whether they arise as side-effects of the action of parasitic genetic elements, such as retroviruses or transposons.

There may be other categories of DNA sequences that have other functions, but right now I can't think of any. Therefore, this is how I intend to teach the concept of a "gene" to my students at Cornell from now on.

So much for the Beadle/Tatum "one gene, one enzyme" model, eh? And the classical Mendelian definition of "one gene, one phenotypic trait" is no longer viable as well...

--Allen

On the Detection of Agency and Intentionality in Nature

AUTHOR: Elena Broaddus

SOURCE: Evolution and Design

COMMENTARY: Allen MacNeill

First, many thanks to the faithful readers who have also continued to pay attention to the Evolution and Design website (the weblog of the "notorious Cornell evolution and design seminar" and the contents contained therein. I am particularly pleased that the hard work and careful thought of the students whose papers have been posted has been recognized, and even moreso that they have been given the highest praise possible: that is, critical analysis.

I would like to draw some more attention to E. Broaddus paper on the “innate” tendency to infer purpose in nature. I have long suspected that humans (and perhaps many vertebrates, especially mammals) have this tendency. As an evolutionary psychologist, I at least partially subscribe to the idea that the human mind is composed primarily of “modules” whose functions are to process particular kinds of sensory information in such a way as to yield adaptive responses to complex environmental information. This is precisely what Broaddus argues for in her paper: that the human mind (and, by extension, the vertebrate “mind” in general) has a module that is adapted specifically for the precise and rapid inference of intentionality in nature. That such an “agency detector” (to use the commonly accepted term for such a module) would have immense adaptive value is obvious. In an environment in which other entities do indeed have “intentions” (i.e. predators, competitors, potential mates, etc.), the ability to detect and infer the possible consequences of acting upon such intentions would confer immense adaptive value on any organism with such an ability.

Furthermore, as Broaddus points out (and as we discussed briefly in the seminar), to be most effective such a detector should be tuned in such a way as to detect virtually all such “intention-indicating” behaviors. This would have the effect of producing a significant number of “false positives,” as any detector that is tuned high enough to detect all actual cases would have such a side-effect.

As Broaddus points out, one of the side-effects of such an “agency detector” would be the detection of intentionality in entities that clearly had no such intentions. If, for example, one of the most important functions of such a detector in humans is to quickly “read” and assess the intentions betrayed in human facial expressions, then it would almost certainly detect human facial expressions in objects in the environment that clearly do not have such expressions, such as rocks, foliage, water stains, etc. This would explain the ability of many humans to “see” human facial expressions in such things as water stains, cinnamon buns, rocks, etc.

Clearly, there are some “natural objects” that do, indeed, have human facial expressions impressed upon them: the faces of the presidents at Mount Rushmore are an example cited ad nauseam by ID theorists. However, I am much more interested in “faces” that humans detect in rocks and other environmental objects that are clearly not produced by human agency. Indeed, the faces at Mount Rushmore constitute a kind of “control” for this ability, as they are clearly the result of intentionality, and therefore can be used to anchor that end of the “agency detection” spectrum (at the other end of which are things like “faces” in clouds, tree foliage, etc.). Somewhere in this spectrum is a cross-over point at which actual intentionality/agency disappears and facticious intentionality/agency takes over. It is the location of that cross-over point that constitutes the hinge of the argument between evolutionary biologists and ID theorists.

Broaddus’s analysis of autism as a possible example of malfunctioning “agency detection” is, IMO, brilliant, and presents an immediately testable hypothesis: that autistic children lack well-tuned “agency detectors,” and that this at least partially explains their well-known indifference to intentional agents, such as other people (including their parents), animals, etc. In people with both full-blown autism and the milder Asperger’s syndrome (sometimes called Aspies”), a common attribute is an impaired ability to infer intentionality (or, in many cases, the mere existence of other minds) on the part of autistics and Aspies. As Broaddus points out, there are clear anatomical and functional differences between autistics, Aspies, and non-impaired people, and that these differences may be correlated with the etiology of these conditions. For example, it is very interesting that there appears to be more (rather than less) neurons in the brains of autistics than in non-impaired people.

This lends credence to the generally accepted hypothesis that the information processing “modules” proposed by evolutionary psychologists are the result of “pared down” neural networks that are speciallized for particular cognitive tasks. Clearly, the agency/intentionality detector in humans functions extremely well and, as the parlance goes, “in the background.” We are rarely conscious of its operation, despite the fact that it is virtually always “on.” This explains, for example, something I first noticed as a young child: that no matter how much I tried, I couldn’t NOT see faces in the patterns in the linoleum on the floor of my grandmother’s kitchen, in the foliage of trees, in rocks, and in photographs of billowing smoke, splashing water, etc. The agency/intentionality detector works extremely efficiently in people of all ages, but especially in children. Indeed, as Broaddus points out, part of becoming an adult consists in learning (usually by trial-and-error) which of the seemingly intentional entities which we perceive all the time actually are intentional agents and actually have intentions vis-a vis ourselves. We must learn, in other words, to critically analyze the constant stream of “positive” agency/intentionality detection events, and discriminate between those that affect us and those that do not. It may be that this discrimination process actually involves the neurological “re-wiring” of the parts of the sensory/nervous system that produces such detection events, and this might explain, at least in part, the decreased ability of adults to believe in the existence of intentional agents in the natural environment.

Broaddus not only presents a cogent hypothesis concerning the existence of such an agency/intentionality detector/module in humans, she proposes several possible ways of testing whether or not such a detector actually exists, and to “map” its dimensions, capabilities, biases, and limitations. I believe that this opens up a very fruitful area of empirical research into such detectors, and can ultimately lead to much more clarity about an issue that so far has generated much more heat than light. I hope that her ideas and suggestions will be followed up by others (I certainly intend to do so), and that further empirical research into this fascinating and little-known capability will add to our understanding of what makes us the peculiar creatures we are.