Tag Archives: media

Seriously, People, It's Selection, Not Mutation!

I just read an excellent piece at Slate.com this morning by Benjamin Hale. He notes that the scariest, most insidious thing about Ebola Virus Disease is that the disease capitalizes on intimate contact for transmission. While diseases such as influenza or cholera are transmitted by casual contact, frequently to strangers, via aerosolized droplets (influenza) or fecally contaminated water (cholera). Caretakers, and especially women, are hit hard by EVD. Hale writes,

...the mechanism Ebola exploits is far more insidious. This virus preys on care and love, piggybacking on the deepest, most distinctively human virtues. Affected parties are almost all medical professionals and family members, snared by Ebola while in the business of caring for their fellow humans. More strikingly, 75 percent of Ebola victims are women, people who do much of the care work throughout Africa and the rest of the world. In short, Ebola parasitizes our humanity.

True, and tragic, enough. But this article falls prey to one of my biggest frustrations with the reporting of science, one that I have written about recently in the context of the current EVD epidemic ravaging West Africa.

In the list Hale presents of the major concerns about EVD, he notes: "The threat of mutation," citing concern that Ebola virus might become airborne in a news report in Nature and the New York Times article that got me so worked up 10 days ago. Earlier this week, there was yet another longish piece in Nature/Scientific American that mentions "mutation" seven times but never once mentions selection. Or in another Nature piece,  UCSF infectious disease physician Charles Chiu is quoted: "The longer we allow the outbreak to continue, the greater the opportunity the virus has to mutate, and it’s possible that it will mutate into a form that would be an even greater threat than it is right now.” True, mutations accumulate over time. Not true, mutation alone will make Ebola virus a greater threat than it is now. That would require selection.

While the idea of airborne transmission of Ebola virus is terrifying, the development of the ability to be transmitted via droplet or aerosol would be an adaptation on the part of the virus. Adaptations arise from the action of selection on the phenotypic variation. Phenotypes with higher fitness come to dominate the population of entities of which they are a part. In the case of a virus such as Ebola virus, this means that the virus must make sufficient copies of itself to ensure transmission to new susceptible hosts before killing the current host or being cleared by the host's immune system. While efficient transmission of EVD by aerosol or droplet would be horrible, equally horrible would be an adaptation that allowed it to transmit more efficiently from a dead host. It's not entirely clear how long Ebola virus can persist in its infectious state in the environment. In a study designed to maximize its persistence (indoors, in the dark, under laboratory conditions), Sagripanti and colleagues found that Ebola virus can persist for six days. Under field conditions, it's probably much shorter, but CDC suggests that 24 hours in a reasonably conservative estimate.

The lack of a strong relationship between host survival and pathogen transmission is why cholera can be so devastatingly pathogenic. The cholera patient can produce 10-20 liters of diarrhea (known as "rice water stools") per day. These stools contain billions of Vibrio cholerae bacteria, which enter the water supply and can infect other people at a distance well after the original host has died. The breaking of the trade-off between host mortality and the transmissibility of the pathogen means that the natural break on virulence is removed and the case fatality ratio can exceed 50%. That's high, kind of like the current round of EVD. Imagine if the trade-off between mortality and transmission in EVD were completely broken...

Changes in pathogen life histories like increased (or decreased) virulence or mode of transmission arise because of selection, not mutation, and this selection results from interactions with an environment that we are actively shaping. Sure, mutation matters because it provides raw material upon which selection can act, but the fact remains that we are talking primarily about selection here. Is this pervasive misunderstanding of the mechanisms of life the result of the war of misinformation being waged on science education in the US? I can't help but think it must at least be a contributor, but if it's true, it's pretty depressing because this misunderstanding is finding its way to some of the world's top news and opinion outlets.

The Least Stressful Profession of Them All?

In the spirit of critics misunderstanding the life of university researchers that I started in my last post, I felt the need to chime in a bit on a story that has really made the social-media rounds in the last couple days. This kerfuffle stems from a Forbes piece by Susan Adams enumerating the 10 least stressful jobs for 2013. Reporting on a study from the job-site careercast.com, and to the surprise of nearly every academic I know, she listed university professor as the least stressful of all jobs. Adams writes: "For tenure-track professors, there is some pressure to publish books and articles, but deadlines are few." This is quite possibly the most nonsensical statement I think I have ever read about the academy and it reveals a profound ignorance about its inner workings. This careercast.com list was also picked up by CNBC and Huffington Post, both of which were completely credulous of the rankings.

Before going on though, I have to give Ms. Adams some props for amending her piece following an avalanche of irate comments from actual professors. She writes:

Since writing the above piece I have received more than 150 comments, many of them outraged, from professors who say their jobs are terribly stressful. While I characterize their lives as full of unrestricted time, few deadlines and frequent, extended breaks, the commenters insist that most professors work upwards of 60 hours a week preparing lectures, correcting papers and doing research for required publications in journals and books. Most everyone says they never take the summer off, barely get a single day’s break for Christmas or New Year’s and work almost every night into the wee hours.

All true.

In the CNBC piece, the careercast.com publisher, Tony Lee, lays down some of the most uninformed nonsense that I've ever read:

"If you look at the criteria for stressful jobs, things like working under deadlines, physical demands of the job, environmental conditions hazards, is your life at risk, are you responsible for the life of someone else, they rank like 'zero' on pretty much all of them!" Lee said.

Plus, they're in total control. They teach as many classes as they want and what they want to teach. They tell the students what to do and reign over the classroom. They are the managers of their own stress level.

Careercast.com measured job-related stress using an 11-dimensional scale. These dimensions and the point ranges assigned to each include:

  • Travel, amount of (0-10)<
  • Growth Potential (income divided by 100)
  • Deadlines (0-9)
  • Working in the public eye (0-5)
  • Competitiveness (0-15)
  • Physical demands (stoop, climb, etc.) (0-14)
  • Environmental conditions (0-13)
  • Hazards encountered (0-5)
  • Own life at risk (0-8)
  • Life of another at risk (0-10)
  • Meeting the public (0-8)

These seem reasonable enough, but the extent to which they were accurately assessed for at least this first item in the list is another point altogether.

It is important to note that there is enormous heterogeneity contained in the job title "professor." There are professors of art history and professors of business and professors of law and professors of vascular surgery, and professors of chemistry, and professors of seismic engineering professors of volcanology and ... you get the point. No doubt some of these are more or less stressful than others. Many of these involve substantial work in the public eye and meeting the public. Some involve hazardous environmental conditions and physical demands.

However, I will focus mainly on what I see as the most ludicrous statements made by both Lee and Adams: that professors have no deadlines. My life is all about deadlines: article/book submission deadlines, institutional review board deadlines, peer review deadlines, editorial deadlines, and the all-important grant deadlines. There are the deadlines imposed by my students when they apply for grants or fellowships or jobs and need highly detailed letters of recommendation, often on very short notice. Oh, and guess what: grades are due on a particular date at the end of the term. You know, a deadline? And those classes we teach: better have a lecture ready before the class meets. Again, kinda like a deadline. I think that it is worth noting that one is expected to meet these teaching deadlines even when most professional incentives (at least at a research university) are focused around everything in your job description but teaching. There is a trite phrase describing the life of a professor -- particularly a junior professor -- that seems to have found its way into the general consciousness, "publish or perish." Notice that it is not "give coherent, interesting lectures and grade fairly and expediently or perish"!

So, yes, there are deadlines and there are very difficult trade-offs relating to the finiteness of time. Honestly, it's hard for me to imagine how even a casual observer of the university could not see the ubiquity of deadlines for the professor's life.

In an excellent rebuttal of this list, blogger Audra Diers writes about both the time demands and the economic realities of obtaining a tenure-track job. I will finish up with a few thoughts on competitiveness and "growth potential." My experience on a variety of job search committees since coming to Stanford is that there are typically hundreds of highly qualified candidates for any given job search. These are all people who have Ph.D.'s and, frequently, already have jobs at other universities. In the anthropology department at Stanford, the majority of faculty joined Stanford from faculty positions at other universities. It is very difficult to get a job at a university like Stanford directly out of graduate school. Inevitably, you are competing against people who have already been assistant professors (or at least post-docs) at other universities and already have a substantial publication and grant-writing record. The differences in salary, teaching loads, and institutional prestige can be substantial. Browsing the Chronicle of Higher Education's Almanac of Higher Education can provide some numbers. Many people bust it in lower-prestige universities with the hope of eventually getting an opportunity for a job at a place like Stanford or Berkeley or Harvard. This means publishing important work, often while teaching outrageously high teaching loads at universities with primarily teaching missions and that means long hours, juggling many conflicting demands, and enormous individual drive.

If you are a scientist, you are often competing with other scientists for results. Getting yourself in a position to secure such results means successful grant-writing and attracting top students and post-docs to your lab. Now, this competition is often enjoyable and almost certainly drives innovation, but it can be stressful (and deadline filled!). There is nothing quite like the feeling of looking at some journal's table of contents that's shown up in your inbox and realizing you've been scooped on a problem you've spent years working on. There is always that little bit of fear in the back of your head pushing you to publish your results before someone else does.

Where Lee gets the idea that professors "teach as many classes as they want and what they want to teach" is a mystery to me. Universities (and colleges within universities) have rules for the number of courses their faculty are expected to teach. Sometimes, a professor can buy out of some teaching by securing more research funding that specifically budgets for such buy-outs. Within departments, there is the dreaded curriculum committee. My department's CC decided this year that I should teach all my courses in the Spring quarter. While it's been nice to have large chunks of research time this Fall, Spring is going to be horrible. This is hardly teaching as much or what I want to teach. Departments have instructional needs (i.e., "service courses") and someone needs to teach these. Junior faculty are often dumped upon to teach the service courses (e.g., history of the field, methodological courses) that very few students want to attend.

Writes Adams at Forbes, "The other thing most of the least stressful jobs have in common: At the end of the day, people in these professions can leave their work behind, and their hours tend to be the traditional nine to five." This is just crazy talk. I work every night, some nights are more effective than others, for sure, but, like many professions, I take this as a given for my job.

So being a university professor is hardly a stress-free life. This doesn't in any way mean that we don't like our jobs. Being a tenured professor at a major research university is good work if you can get it. The job carries with it a great deal of autonomy, flexibility, and the ability to pursue one's passion. As a professor, one interacts with interesting, curious people on a daily basis and helps shape future leaders. The job-related stress felt by a university professor is almost certainly not on par with, say, an infantry soldier or police officer, but the job is not stress-free. It never ceases to surprise me of how ignorant about the workings of universities critics often are. This is an instance where there is no obvious political agenda -- the study just got some facts badly wrong -- but studies like this contribute to disturbing anti-intellectualism (and concomitant disdain for empirical evidence) that has become a part of American public consciousness.

On Global State Shifts

This is a edited version of a post I sent out to the E-ANTH listserv in response to a debate over a recent paper in Nature and the response to it on the website "Clear Science," written by Todd Meyers. In this debate, it was suggested that the Barnosky paper is the latest iteration of alarmist environmental narratives in the tradition of the master of that genre, Paul Ehrlich. Piqued by this conversation, I read the Barnosky paper and passed along my reading of it.

The Myers's piece on the "Clear Science" web site is quite rhetorically clever. Climate-change deniers have a difficult task if they want to convincingly buck the overwhelming majority of reputable scientists on this issue. Myers uses ideas about the progress of science developed by the philosopher Thomas Kuhn in his classic book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. By framing the Barnosky et al. as mindlessly toeing the Kuhnian normal-science line, he has come up with a shrewd strategy for dealing with the serious scientific consensus around global climate change. Myers suggests that "Like scientists blindly devoted to a failed paradigm, the Nature piece simply tries to force new data to fit a flawed concept."

I think that a pretty strong argument can be made that the perspective represented in the Barnosky et al. paper is actually paradigm-breaking. For 200 years the reigning paradigm in the historical sciences has been uniformitarianism. Hutton's notion -- that processes that we observe today have always been working -- greatly extended the age of the Earth and allowed Lyell and Darwin to make their remarkable contributions to human understanding. This same principle allows us to make sense of the archaeological record and of ethnographic experience. It is a very useful foil for all manner of exceptionalist explanatory logic and I use it frequently.

However, there are plenty of ways that uniformitarianism fails. If we wanted to follow the Kuhnian narrative, we might say that evidence has mounted that leads to increased contradictions arising from the uniformitarian explanatory paradigm. Rates of change show heterogeneities and when we trying to understand connected systems characterized by extensive feedback, our intuitions based on gradual change can fail, sometimes spectacularly. This is actually a pretty revolutionary idea, apocalyptic popular writings aside, in mainstream science.

Barnosky et al. draw heavily on contemporary work in complex systems. The theoretical paper (Scheffer et al. 2009) upon which the Barnosky paper relies heavily represents a real step forward in the theoretical sophistication of this corpus and does so by making unique and testable predictions about systems approaching critical transitions. I have written about it previously here.

The most difficult part of projecting the future state of complex systems is that human element. This leads too many physical and biological scientists to simply ignore social and behavioral inputs. This said, there are far too few social and behavioral scientists willing to step up and do the hard collaborative work necessary to make progress on this extremely difficult problem. The difficulty of projecting human behavior often leads to projections of the business-as-usual variety and, unfortunately, these are often mischaracterized by the media and other readers. Such projections simply assume no change in behavior and look at the consequences some time down the line. A business-as-usual projection actually provides a lot of information, albeit about a very hypothetical future. What if things stayed the way they are? Yes, behavior changes. People adapt. Agricultural production becomes more efficient. Prices increase, reducing demand and allowing sustainable substitutes. Of course, sometimes things get worse too. Despite tremendous global awareness and lots of calls to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, carbon emissions have continued to rise. So, there is nothing inherently flawed about a business-as-usual projection. We just need to be clear about what it means when we use one.

A criticism that emerged on the list is that Barnosky et al. is essentially "an opinion piece." However, the great majority of the Barnosky et al. paper is, in fact, simply a review. There are numerous facts to be reviewed: biodiversity has declined, fisheries have crashed, massive amounts of forest have been converted and degraded, the atmosphere has warmed. They are facts. And they are facts in which many vested interests would like to sow artificial uncertainty for political purposes. Positive things have happened too (e.g., malaria eradication in temperate climes, increased food security in some places that used to be highly insecure, increased agricultural productivity -- though this may be of dubious sustainability), though these are generally on more local scales and, in some cases, may simply reflect exporting the problems to rich countries to the Global South. The fact that they are not reviewed does not mean that the paper belongs in an hysterical chicken-little genre.

A common critique of the doomsday genre is the certainty with which the horrible outcomes are framed. The Barnosky paper is suffused with uncertainty. In fact, this is the main point I take away from it! The first conclusion of the paper is that "it is essential to improve biological forecasting by anticipating critical transitions that can emerge on a planetary scale and understanding how such global forcings cause local changes." This suggests to me that the authors are acknowledging massive uncertainty about the future, not saying that we are doomed with certainty. Or how about: "the plausibility of a future planetary state shift seems high, even though considerable uncertainty remains about whether it is inevitable and, if so, how far in the future it may be"?

Myers writes "they base their conclusions on the simplest linear mathematical estimate that assumes nothing will change except population over the next 40 years. They then draw a straight line, literally, from today to the environmental tipping point." This is a profoundly misleading statement. Barnosky et al. are using the fold catastrophe model discussed in Scheffer et al. (2009). The Scheffer et al. analysis of the fold catastrophe model uses some fairly sophisticated ideas from complex systems theory, but the ideas are relatively simple. The straight line that so offends Myers arises because this is the direction of the basin of attraction. In the figure below, I show the fold-catastrophe model. The abcissa represents the forcing conditions of the system (e.g., population size or greenhouse gas emissions). The ordinate represents the state of the system (e.g., land cover or one of many ecosystem services). The sideways N represents an attractor -- a more general notion of an equilibrium. The state of the system tends toward this curve whenever it is perturbed away.

The region in the interior of the fold (indicated by the dashed line) is unstable while the upper and lower tails (indicated by solid lines) are stable and tend to draw perturbations from the attractor toward them. The grey arrows indicate the basin of attraction. When the system is perturbed off of the attractor by some random shock, the state tends to move in the direction indicated by the arrow. When the state is forced all the way down the top arc of the fold, it enters a region where a relatively small shock can send the state into a qualitatively different regime of rapid degradation. This is illustrated by the black arrow (a shock) pushing the state away from point F2. The state will settle again on the attractor, but a second shock will send the state rapidly down toward the bottom arm of the fold (point F1). Note that this region of the attractor is stable so it would take a lot of work to get it back up again (e.g., reduce population or drastically reduced total greenhouse gasses). This is what people mean when they colloquially refer to a "global tipping point."

This is the model. It may not be right, but thanks to Scheffer et al. (2009), it makes testable predictions. By framing global change in terms of this model, Barnosky et al. are making a case for empirical investigation of the types of data that can falsify the model. Maybe because of the restrictions placed on them by Nature (and these are severe!), maybe because of some poor choices of their own, they include an insufficiently explained, fundamentally complex figure that a critic with clear interests in muddying the scientific consensus can sieze on to dismiss the whole paper as just more Ehrlich-style hysteria.

For me -- as I suspect for the authors of the Barnosky et al. paper -- massive, structural uncertainty about the state of our planet, coupled with a number of increasingly well-supported models of the behavior or nonlinear systems (i.e., not simply normal science) strongly suggests a precautionary principle. This is something that the economist Marty Weitzman suggested in his (highly technical and therefore not widely read) paper in 2009 and that I have written about before here and here. This is not inflammatory fear-mongering, nor is it grubbing for grant money (I wish it were that easy!). It is responsible scientists doing their best to communicate the state of the science within the constraints of society and the primary mode of scientific communication. Let's not be taken in by writers pretending to present "just the facts" in a cool, detached manner but who actually have every reason to try to foment unnecessary uncertainty about the state of our world and impugn the integrity of people doing their level best to understand a rapidly changing planet.

References

Kuhn, T. 1962. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Scheffer, M., J. Bascompte, W. A. Brock, V. Brovkin, S. R. Carpenter, V. Dakos, H. Held, E. H. van Nes, M. Rietkerk, and G. Sugihara. 2009. Early-Warning Signals for Critical Transitions. Nature. 461 (7260):53-59.

Weitzman, M. L. 2009. On Modeling and Interpreting the Economics of Catastrophic Climate Change. The Review of Economics and Statistics. XCI (1):1-19.

 

On Newspaper Front Pages

Expert wrangler of predicaments Phillip Mendonça-Vieira has put together a very cool time-lapse movie from about 12,000 screenshots of the front page of the nytimes.com.  The movie is interesting to watch in a Koyaanisqatsi kind of way, but what I find most poignant is his commentary that accompanies the movie. Mendonça-Vieira writes,

Having worked with and developed on a number of content management systems I can tell you that as a rule of thumb no one is storing their frontpage layout data. It's all gone, and once newspapers shutter their physical distribution operations I get this feeling that we're no longer going to have a comprehensive archive of how our news-sources of note looked on a daily basis. Archive.org comes close, but there are too many gaps to my liking.

This, in my humble opinion, is a tragedy because in many ways our frontpages are summaries of our perspectives and our preconceptions. They store what we thought was important, in a way that is easy and quick to parse and extremely valuable for any future generations wishing to study our time period.

This really resonated with me.  Some time back, we wrote a paper that garnered quite a lot of media coverage. Indeed, we even got the 'front page' of the nytimes.com, if only fleetingly. I am very glad that I had the presence of mind to save that screen shot as a pdf so I would be able to preserve this 15 minutes of fame for posterity. If they had been available, I would have bought lots of paper copies.  However, what I am left with is this:

NYTimes_Front_Page

This really is a shame and clearly represents a serious challenge for the historians of tomorrow and the archivists of today.

On Husserl, Hexis, and Hissy-Fits

There has been quite a brouhaha percolating through some Anthropology circles following the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Associate in New Orleans last month.  It seems that the AAA executive board, in all its wisdom, has seen fit to excise the term "science" from the Association's long-range planning document. You can sample some of the reaction to this re-write in blog posts from anthropologi.info, Neuroanthropology, Evolution on the Beach,  AAPA BANDITInside HigherEd, and Fetishes I Don't Get at Psychology Today. There is also a letter from AAA president, Virginia Dominguez here and you can find the full text of the planning document here. The primary concern has centered on the first paragraph of this document.  Here is that paragraph as it stood before the November meeting:

The purposes of the Association shall be to advance anthropology as the science that studies humankind in all its aspects, through archeological, biological, ethnological, and linguistic research; and to further the professional interests of American anthropologists; including the dissemination of anthropological knowledge and its use to solve human problems.

The new wording is as follows:

The purposes of the Association shall be to advance public understanding of humankind in all its aspects. This includes, but is not limited to, archaeological, biological, social, cultural, economic, political, historical, medical, visual, and linguistic anthropological research.  The Association also commits itself and to further the professional interests of anthropologists, including the dissemination of anthropological knowledge, expertise, and interpretation.

So, anthropology is no longer a science, though there are lots of rather particularistic approaches through which one can pursue anthropology that may or may not be scientific.  Apparently, the executive board has a newfound passion for public communication as well.  I guess we don't really need an organization that promotes scholarly understanding or the production of new knowledge.  Just look where that's gotten us!

The new wording has greatly concerned a number of parties, including the Society for Anthropological Sciences.  I am a member of this section and have never seen so much traffic on the society's listserv.

I will admit to being somewhat dismayed by the Society's response.  While I am not quite as tweaked by this as many, I nonetheless wrote a longish call for specific action -- one that involved good old-fashioned political organizing and attempting to forge alliances both with other sections within AAA and across other scholarly societies with an interest in anthropology (e.g., AAPA, HBA, SAA, HBES).  My call was greeted with a deafening (virtual) silence and I am left to guess why.  Perhaps the membership is suspicious of the imperialist ambitions of a biological anthropologist with the taint of evolution on him?  Perhaps they've heard and tried it all before and were simply convinced it would not work?  Perhaps they actually like being an embattled minority and don't really want to take action to jeopardize that status?

To what extent is the scandal a tempest in a teapot?  I honestly don't know.  The word "science" has been taken out of the first paragraph but there is nothing inherently anti-scientific about the statement.  After all, "advancing public understanding" can be done through "archaeological, biological, social, cultural, economic, political, historical, medical, visual, and linguistic anthropological research." Any number of these can be done through a scientific approach to understanding.

The thing that I find completely bizarre about the new wording is the exclusive focus on public understanding.  Public understanding? Really? Judging from my recent search committee and scientific review panel experience, I can only be left with the conclusion that the public must have an insatiable hunger for phenomenology.  This explains why I can never find any Husserl at Barnes and Noble -- he must just be flying off the shelves!  You'd think if the goal of our flagship professional organization is really promoting public understanding, that more anthropologists would write in a manner that was generally understandable to, you know, the public.  In his distinguished lecture, the eminent archaeologist Jeremy Sabloff chastised anthropologists for their unwillingness to engage with the general public.  I could not agree with this perspective more, especially if "engaging with the public" entails engaging with colleagues from cognate disciplines, another thing that I think we do a miserable job of, in general.

I was a bit disappointed to read Alex Golub's write-up of this issue on the Savage Minds blog.  I'm usually a big fan of both this blog and Alex's posts more generally. However, in this case I think that Alex engages in the kind of ahistorical, totalizing stereotyping of scientific anthropologists that normally gives anthropologists the willies.  Advocates of science are characterized as close-minded automata, utterly lacking any appreciation for ambiguity, historicity, politics, or contested meaning.  For example, he writes

The fact that the model used by 'scientific' anthropologists has as much complexity as an average episode of WWE Smackdown -- with a distinction between the evil 'fluff-head' cultural anthropologists and the good 'scientific' cultural anthropologists -- should be the first sign that something fishy is going on.

Très nuanced, eh?

The statements made by many scientific anthropologists, particularly those of the generation to enter the profession in the 1960s and 1970s, need to be understood in the historical and political context of the speakers.  I think that it is simply disingenuous to claim that scientific approaches to anthropological knowledge have not become increasingly marginalized within the mainstream of anthropology over the last several decades.  One need only look at what has become to the departments that were home to the vaunted physical anthropology programs of the past to find evidence of this trend. Consider, for example, the University of Chicago, the University of California Berkeley or Columbia University.  And this is just biological anthropology; it does not account for the loss of scientific social and cultural anthropologists (think Gene Hammel or Roy D'Andrade) in elite, Ph.D.-granting programs. The reasons for the marginalization of scientific approaches to anthropology are complex and do not fit neatly into the simplistic narrative of "objective, scientific anthropology ... under assault from interpretivists like Clifford Geertz who do not believe in truth." No doubt, part of the problem is simply the compartmentalization of knowledge.  As scholars become increasingly specialized, it becomes more and more difficult to be both scientist and humanist.  Increasingly, hiring decisions are zero-sum games. The gain of a scientist represents the loss of a humanist and vice-versa. Gone is Eric Wolf's conception of Anthropology as "both the most scientific of the humanities and the most humanist of the sciences."

The key is that the declining importance of science in the elite anthropology departments has led to a feeling of embattlement -- that is almost certainly counter-productive most of the time -- among the remaining scientific anthropologists. Another consequence is that the decline of the place of science within anthropological discourse selects for personalities who thrive on embattlement, so that the reproduction of the field is relatively enriched with young scholars who see no point to professional or intellectual engagement. And so it gets more and more difficult to integrate.  This is the lens through which I view much of the public complaining about the recent actions of the AAA executive board. However, as my colleague Rebecca Bird noted, those of us who still see a place for science in anthropology need to move beyond reactionary statements.  We need to be proactive and positive.

The academy is changing. This can be seen in the increasing number of cross-cutting requests-for-proposals from funding agencies such as NSF (e.g., HSD, EID, CHNS) or NIH and the wholesale re-organization of many research universities (ASU is only the most extreme case; the ascendency of interdisciplinary centers such as the Woods Institute for the Environment or the Freeman-Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford is a more common manifestation of this trend; the Columbia Earth Institute also comes to mind).  In an academy that increasingly values transdisciplinarity and integration of knowledge, I think that anthropologists have an enormous comparative advantage -- if we could just get over ourselves.  As I wrote in my 2009 Anthropology News piece:

Four-field anthropology is a biosocial discipline that integrates information from all levels of biological and social organization. To understand human behavior, the four-field anthropologist considers genetics and physiology; the history of the human lineage; historical, cultural and social processes; the dynamics of face-to-face interactions; and global political economy. Each of these individual areas is studied by other disciplines, but no other field provides the grounding in all, along with the specific mandate to understand the scope of human diversity. The anthropologist stands in a unique position to serve as the fulcrum upon which the quality of an interdisciplinary research team balances. Revitalizing the four-subfield approach to anthropological training could move anthropology from the margins of the interdisciplinary, research-based academy of the near future to the core.

I have no interest in disparaging forms of knowledge or excluding particular types of scholars from any social movement, but I think that scientific anthropologists have a particularly important role to play in such a revitalization, if for no other reason than they (presumably) care about more of these levels of organization.  Maybe such scholars could even communicate the subtlety and richness of ethnographic experience that our more humanistic colleagues so value if we could just get beyond the name-calling.

I may be dismissed as being naively optimistic by the old guard of scientific anthropologists (hypothesis 2, above), but I think that I have good reasons to be optimistic about the future of anthropology, despite the many challenges. This optimism stems from the work of individual anthropologists.  I'll do a quick shout-out to a number of people who I think are doing particularly good work, integrating different anthropological perspectives, and communicating with a broader audience.  This is a very personal and idiosyncratic list -- these scholars are people I've encountered recently or whose work has been brought to my attention of late. They tend to be focused on questions of health and human-environment interactions, naturally, since these are the issues that organize my research.

If you want to feel good about the future of a scientific anthropology that is simultaneously integrated into contemporary anthropology and communicates with a broader scientific and policy audience (and is generally great and transformative -- that key NSF buzz word), check out the work of:

  • Craig Hadley at Emory on food security and psychological well-being
  • Amber Wutich at ASU on vulnerability, water security, and common-pool resources
  • Lance Gravlee at UF on the embodiment of racial discrimination and its manifestations in health
  • Brooke Scelza at UCLA on parental investment and childhood outcomes
  • Dan Hrushka at ASU on how cultural beliefs, norms and values interact with economic constraints to produce health outcomes
  • Crickette Sanz at Washington University on multi-ape ecology of the Goualougo Triangle, Republic of Congo
  • Herman Pontzer at CUNY on measuring daily energy expenditures in hunter-gatherers
  • Rebecca and Douglas Bird on subsistence and signaling among Martu foragers

This list could go on. I won't even mention the amazing anthropology post-docs, Siobhan MattisonSean Downey, and Brian Wood, with whom I have been so lucky to interact this academic year.

I have plenty more to say on this -- particularly how the portrayal of politics and political agendas enters the discourse -- but I have final exams to grade!

Dan Salkeld on the Radio!

I was thrilled to hear Dan Salkeld's excellent (and long!) radio interview on Colorado Public Radio about our recent paper on understanding plague epizootics in prairie dogs.  There is a remarkable amount of information contained in this interview.  If you want to learn about plague ecology, then this is an excellent introduction.

Dan Salkeld with a prairie dog.
Dan Salkeld with a prairie dog.

Many Americans Believe That Global Warming is "Exaggerated"

Results from a recent Gallup poll are rather depressing. Based on telephone interviews with a sample of 1,012 Americans, more Americans think that the reporting on global warming is exaggerated than think its seriousness is under-estimated (41% vs. 28%).  This looks like a real change since it wasn't that long ago (2006) that the numbers were reversed. Political party affiliation helps predict how people feel about global warming. Nearly two-thirds of self-reported Republican respondents (66%) think that news reports on global warming are exaggerated.  This is up from 35% in 1998, when Gallop started surveys on global warming. 

It seems likely that the economic crisis has blunted people's concern over global warming.  Lydia Saad, the author of the Gallup press release writes,

Importantly, Gallup's annual March update on the environment shows a drop in public concern about global warming across several different measures, suggesting that the global warming message may have lost some footing with Americans over the past year. Gallup has documented declines in public concern about the environment at times when other issues, such as a major economic downturn or a national crisis like 9/11, absorbed Americans' attention. To some extent that may be true today, given the troubling state of the U.S. economy. However, the solitary drop in concern this year about global warming, among the eight specific environmental issues Gallup tested, suggests that something unique may be happening with the issue.

One wonders what exactly is going on to make Americans specifically less concerned about global warming...

Top Five Sports I Didn't See on the NBC Olympic Coverage

OK, this isn't really about population, infectious disease or human ecology, but I've been thinking about it this morning:

  1. Team handball
  2. Fencing
  3. Table Tennis
  4. Badminton
  5. Women's Pole Vault

I like beach volleyball as much as anyone, but the Olympics are really the only chance the average viewer has to watch any of these other cool sports.   May and Walsh were awesome, but there are other sports besides beach volleball, swimming, track & field, and gymnastics.  It's a shame that what we see on Olympic coverage comes down to the fact that Kerri Walsh's teeny-weeny bikini sells more Budweiser than watching May Mangkalakiri and Eva Lee thwack a shuttlecock.