Botany picture #160: Serapias lingua

More orchids from south-western France: Serapis lingua. It differs from its larger congener S. vomeracea in not having the conspicuous hairs on the tongue, among other things. This photo was taken at a spot where six orchid species were standing side by side.

Very miscellaneous: Frozen and ill-advised sequels

When I only caught snippets while my daughter was watching it for the first time, I found Disney's latest movie Frozen somewhat annoying, especially the snowman character. But now that I have seen it in its entirety it has grown on me. That is, while I understand the people who have decided to hate it - if something is hyped too much, I also tend to have an averse reaction - I actually think that it is a damn good movie. However, I am getting a very bad feeling when I read that a sequel is pretty much "inevitable".

Missionary zeal

I have mentioned before that I have some issues with the most vocal proponents of Bayesian analysis. Nothing against the approach as such - I have used it myself often enough. Indeed Bayesian phylogenetics and Bayesian analysis of population structure are fairly standard in my line of work.

But the problem is that every so often you run into people who think that it is the alpha and omega of scientific methodology, that it is hugely superior to every other approach, and/or that every other approach just sucks, or who simply try to apply it to everything, even where it is very difficult to apply.

That last one is often a problem because there is a tendency to conflate an intuitive use of Bayesian logic - something that we all daily do even if unconsciously, and that is consequently so trivial that it does not need to be hyped - and an explicit use of the Bayes formula to calculate actual, numeric probabilities - which is much harder to do because the probabilities and especially the priors are often pulled out of some dark place. Chris Hallquist just did a good post mentioning that distinction.

Really I get the feeling that many dedicated Bayesians, especially phylogeneticists just a bit younger than myself, exhibit a kind of missionary zeal. They may have the feeling that they are kind of a new wave, transforming their area of science for the better, throwing out what needs to be thrown out.

And this is where it hit me: That is exactly the impression that cladists must have given colleagues using old-established approaches when they swept biological systematics in the 1980ies and 1990ies. And I can understand; there must be something really insufferable about somebody telling you that what you have done the last thirty years is bad, and that you have to adopt their shiny new technique or you aren't a good scientist.

Still, and that may only be my bias, but to me there is significant difference: The cladists were right. It really does make more sense to classify by relatedness, and it does not make sense to classify inconsistently. You need to apply the same criterion everywhere because otherwise your classification will be uninformative and non-predictive, in other words useless.

On the other hand, while Bayesians have a shiny new approach they do not have the one principle that has to be applied everywhere. Indeed their approach cannot possibly apply to every question a scientist may ask (just as cladism does not apply to, say, geology). It is a powerful tool but it is only one of several powerful tools we have. When use it for cases where it is the best tool, and we use parsimony, for example, for cases where parsimony is the best tool.

Let's just say that the claim of Bayesian analysis being superior to all other tools, or demands we apply it to everything, seem a bit extreme.

Botany picture #159: Carduncellus mitissimus

The other plant group that I obviously - for professional reasons - took a lot of picture of while in Europe are the daisies, and in particular members of the thistle tribe Cardueae. This is Carduncellus mitissimus (Asteraceae), a nearly stemless plant I found growing copiously between pasture grasses in the Corbieres. Nice colour, and it would probably look good in a rock garden.

This is one of a few small groups where I seriously wonder who ever thought it was a good idea to segregate them from the knapweed genus Centaurea. I mean, if you only know a bit about daisies, as a botanically interested layperson would, you look at this thing, see the scarious tips of the inner involucral bracts, and you immediately start at the Centaurea key where of course you will only find frustration but not this species. What is more, if even half of these silly satellite genera don't fall squarely inside of Centaurea on a phylogeny I will eat my hat.

Euphemistic threats

I am kind of wondering whether I merely increasingly notice something over the past few years or whether it is actually on the rise.

David Futrelle of We Hunted The Mammoth (nee Manboobz) dissects the 'logic' of an obnoxious commenter on his blog. Basically the guy argued that if attractive girls do not sleep with unattractive, frustrated young men then the latter will naturally go on a killing spree, so girls should sleep with men even if they don't find them attractive.

For some reason that made me think of the cases where religious fundamentalists and their supporters argue that one should not say or write or draw certain things such as, say, cartoons of Mohammed, because it is just unavoidable and natural that such blasphemy will lead to violent riots.

Speaking of religions, the logic behind Muslim or Orthodox Jewish demands for the veiling of women, or even just Western conservatives' demands that girls and women dress more modestly, and the general removal of women from public spaces often appears to be that if women show themselves then men will unavoidably and quite naturally lust after them, leading to harassment and worse.

The underlying idea is always the same. People don't come right out and say, hey, the crazies are threatening violence if you don't do what they want; that's blackmail! Instead, it is, hey, you should do what they want or you will cause bad things to happen. Things that just logically happen, as opposed to things that the prospective killers, rioters and rapists could decide not to do if they were nicer.

So, did I simply not notice that ten, fifteen years ago or is it on the rise?

Botany picture #158: Serapias vomeracea

Still a bit jetlagged and having immediately jumped back into work I find it hard to write something longer at the moment. But of course I have taken dozens of plant photographs on our trip to Europe, and so here is the next botany picture. Serapias vomeracea (Orchidaceae), France, 2014. Not much I can tell you about this plant as such, but we saw many, many orchids in south-western France and I will surely post more of them. This one I like very much because of its rather unusual shape and colour scheme; not everything has to be pink and fragile-looking!

Botany picture #157: Graphis

Today we are flying back to Australia, meaning I will be out of action for two days. Time for the first botany picture in weeks, a member of the lichen genus Graphis from the bark of a walnut tree in southern France. I don't know how to distinguish any species but the genus is easy to recognise here, and the best known species is Graphis scripta. Its name captures what the black fruiting bodies on the white thallus are reminiscent of: some kind of strange script. Because the connection between lichens and writing was too good to pass on, there is of course a lichenological scientific journal with that very name.