Botany picture #45: Helichrysum arenarium

The paper daisies (Gnaphalieae) comprise about half of the ca 1,000 native species of daisies (Asteraceae) in Australia. Until about 30 years ago, many of the species were placed in the then massive genus Helichrysum but then it turned out that they were only distantly related to the real Helichrysum species from Africa and Eurasia. Since then, they have been segregated into numerous mostly small genera. Because I am currently conducting research on some of those Australian plants formerly erroneously placed in Helichrysum and have just produced the first results, my thoughts are also drawn to the "real thing". Unfortunately, I have a picture of only one of the species, H. arenarium, Germany, 2007. Gnaphalieae are mostly southern hemispheric so you find very few of them in Europe.

Jason Rosenhouse's Among The Creationists

Recently I finished reading through Among The Creationists by Jason Rosenhouse, a mathematician blogging at ScienceBlogs. The book was not quite what I expected, it was certainly unusual, and it thus seems best if those interested in reading it approach it with the right expectations. Despite the idea one could get from the title, it is not a collection of amusing anecdotes presented to the reader as an invitation to point and laugh, nor is it a point by point refutation of creationist arguments.

It is instead a rather unusual mixture of (nonetheless amusing) anecdotes from Rosenhouse's visits to creationist conferences and institutions that show the creationists with all their human dimensions, a quasi-ethnological examination of the creationist subculture in the USA, and carefully formulated thoughts on the compatibility of science and religion as well as evolution and religion, plus a very personal chapter in which the reader can learn, among other things, that the author dislikes mayonnaise, a sentiment that I personally can understand quite well.

The book has two related major take-home messages:

• Creationists are not idiots, they are people like you and me, and their motivation for rejecting evolution is understandable given the things they hold dear.
• The workarounds generally suggested by well-meaning liberal Christians and science communicators, such as "why don't you just believe that god created life through evolution" are not as simple as they look because evolution, while not decisively disproving a creator god, does have extremely unfortunate implications for such a god's character.

The first one shows that Rosenhouse is a much better person than I am. He is clearly able to develop real empathy for fundamentalist believers, and that allows him to explain their motivation and to examine the controversy in a deeply insightful and very useful manner.

Myself, I find it unfortunately very hard to feel such empathy and virtually impossible to really understand such a worldview. My instinct is to consider somebody who starts from the assumption that a certain superstition is true and who then rejects all contrary empirical evidence to be, yes, and sorry, an idiot. And I know that that is a character flaw. They did not chose to be born into a religious subculture. They did not chose to be told throughout their childhood and youth by the people they trust most, by everybody they trust, that a certain belief system must be protected at all cost or all that is good and holy will collapse. If I had been born into such a life, what would I believe today, how would I reason?

And that is ultimately why I would also recommend this book to others. There are intriguing insights into the workings of creationist conferences, it is amusingly written in some parts, I find much to agree with on the parts dealing with philosophy of science, but what I found really most valuable was the empathy it conveyed. The real strengths of Among The Creationists are that it shows the human side of the people the author nonetheless strongly disagrees with, and that it shows how and why they are so fiercely dedicated to creationism despite it being so much at odds with demonstrable fact. And it may just help me to develop a kinder and more tolerant attitude towards them and other fundamentalist believers.

Botany picture #44: Taxodium

Further to our trip to Lake Ginninderra last Sunday, this is a nice picture of cypress knees, parts of the root system of swamp trees that stick out above the ground. It is frequently assumed that they help supply the roots in the waterlogged soil inhabited by these trees with oxygen, but apparently there is still some doubt about their true function.

And this is the tree to which the roots belong, a Taxodium or swamp cypress from North America, here grown as an ornamental tree in an Australian park otherwise well stocked with native Casuarina and Eucalyptus. Taxodium and a few related genera of conifers once formed their own small family but have recently been sunk into the large Cupressaceae family (cypresses, junipers, Thuja and relatives).

What is science, continued

In the previous post with the same title, I wrote that I consider science to be best defined as the use of empirical data to critically test ideas, regardless of what specifically the ideas are about or how exactly the test looks like. The important thing is to work with observations from the world around us (as opposed to abstract concepts, for example) and to ask yourself how you would know if your idea could be disproved. If you don't do the former but the latter, you are doing non-science but you may still be dealing with a legitimate academic endeavor such as philosophy. If you do the former but not the latter, you are a pseudo-scientist.

It could be asked whether my definition is not a bit too lax - after all, aren't we all using observations to test our ideas? And indeed that has been part of the controversy between people who favor a wide circumscription of science (like myself) and those who favor a narrow one. For example, developmental biologist PZ Myers made the point that we are all daily surrounded by trivial mysteries that are best solved using basically the same approach as a scientist, stressing that "science is simply a process for examining the world, and anyone can do it, even if you don’t have a lab coat." In a similar vein, evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne once compared science to plumbing because plumbers also use empirical observations and hypotheses in their work, prompting ridicule from philosopher/biologist Massimo Pigliucci. However, I do not consider the equivalence of scientific practice and everyday commonsense problem solving to be an absurd conclusion, as Pigliucci seems to think, but instead an interesting observation.

Botany picture #43: Azolla pinnata

Today we went to the parks around Lake Ginninderra in Belconnen. Very nice playground, lakes with many water-birds, a creek with impressive rocks along it, so all in all we made good use of the fine weather. The plants floating on the small lake in the park seen above are the topic of today's botany picture post.

Several lineages of land plants have independently evolved representatives that are adapted to floating on the surface of lakes or slow-moving rivers. The best known are duckweeds which are flowering plants in the Araceae family even if one would not know it from looking at them; their morphology is drastically reduced to a small flat or bulbous thallus, and in two of the five genera even the roots have been lost. Another lineage that has produced a similar floating representative are the complex thalloid liverworts, with Ricciocarpus natans. The photo above now shows a member of a third lineage to independently evolve this habit, the ferns. There are two small genera of free-floating ferns, Azolla and Salvinia, and this is Azolla pinnata (Salviniaceae).

These water-ferns are exceptional among ferns in that they are heterosporous. While most other ferns have only one kind of unicellular spores, the water-ferns produce many small male and fewer large female spores, and the development of the prothallium (gametophyte) takes place inside the spore. That is the first step towards the evolution of true seeds, and the seed plants must have gone through the same stage in their evolution hundreds of millions of years ago. Another interesting thing about Azolla specifically is that it forms a symbiosis with a cyanobacterium that fixes atmospheric nitrogen for its host so that Azolla can grow in more nutrient-poor water than most other floating plants.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Azolla is the "Azolla event": congeners of the plants pictured above are hypothesized to have played a crucial role in carbon sequestration 49 million years ago.

Puzzled about online first and print publication in different years

Recently I noticed a slightly confusing aspect of the move towards online first or early view publishing of scientific papers. It is about how to cite a paper. It was all easier when journals were simply a batch of print issues collecting dust on a library shelf; you had the time between acceptance and print, when you would cite the paper as

Blinckhorn N, in press. Molecular phylogeny of the genus Planta (Plantaceae). Some Botanical Journal.

and then you had the time after print, when it would change to

Blinckhorn N, 2002. Molecular phylogeny of the genus Planta (Plantaceae). Some Botanical Journal 19: 34-41.

(That or very similar is how we write reference lists in my area. It might be different in yours but the principle is the same everywhere.)

Now, however, papers actually have two dates of publication, once as online first or early view when they appear as PDFs on the journal's website and then again when they are finally printed, and the problem is really what to do when the two publication dates are in different years. In the above case, the researcher might want to update their staff website or publication list, or a colleague could decide to cite their paper, once it is available online. They would then write something like this:

Blinckhorn N, 2012. Molecular phylogeny of the genus Planta (Plantaceae). Some Botanical Journal. DOI: 00.0000/sbj.0000

It was published in 2012, you can cite it, and the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) allows you to find it online. But then a few months later, the paper comes out in print. It now occupies page numbers in a certain issue of the journal and if somebody wants to cite it in it is suddenly

Blinckhorn N, 2013. Molecular phylogeny of the genus Planta (Plantaceae). Some Botanical Journal 30: 107-114.

So, what is it, 2012 or 2013? Will that cause confusion? Speaking for myself, I think it already has caused me some in a few cases. And consider the not infrequent cases where a funding agency or employer wants a scientist to submit a list of their publications "in the last five years". How about counting the same paper as published (online first) in 2012 when asked for such a list in 2012 and as published (in print) in 2013 when asked for such a list in 2018, whatever serves you best at any given moment?

As more journals move to online only, this will become less of an issue because they will only have one publication date again.

Botany picture #42: unidentified fungus

And another picture from Australia, from the same holiday trip in 2011 as the orchid. Never having been trained in mycology, I have no idea even what genus this fungus belongs to and thus cannot tell you anything about it. I simply found it cute.