Science and Religion: The Case of George Washington Carver

I have written in my evolution blog about my immense admiration for George Washington Carver as the model scientist. He is also a very interesting example of the meeting of science and religion.

Throughout his life, but less subtly in his later years, George Washington Carver considered his work to be God’s little laboratory, and that God was revealing the secrets of nature to him.

Carver apparently meant this literally, as when, in 1924, he gave a speech in New York City. The New York Times editorial was highly critical of his religious approach to science.

At first the editorial just seems racist, even though the writer might have meant well (saying that a hocus pocus approach to science makes blacks, who are quite intelligent, look like they are not). But this brings up an interesting point: at what point does religion interfere with a scientist’s quality of work?

I am not talking just about creationism. I have written extensively about how creationists use their pseudoscience as a tool to advance a political agenda. It is really bad science and used to promote a really bad goal. Instead, I am talking about deep religious convictions of scientists that motivate them to pursue scientific research as a holy calling—scientific research that might be just as good as that of any other scientist.

This remains a current issue among scientists. The religious convictions held by Francis Collins were the basis for Sam Harris to claim that he should not be the director of NIH. And the religious faith of Kenneth Miller caused some controversy in the Society for the Study of Evolution when Miller received the Stephen Jay Gould Award in 2011. While, in this link, Jerry Coyne is undoubtedly right that a person who publishes books about science and faith open themselves up for public criticism, I have to wonder if Coyne’s opposition to Miller’s professions of faith is entirely fair.

Is it true, then, that real scientists don’t, or shouldn’t, talk the way George Washington Carver did? To me, this is not a very important question to answer. The real anti-scientists are causing so much trouble that we shouldn’t pick fights with real scientists who happen to be religious. A fair percentage (though of course we keep no records of it) of members of the Oklahoma Academy of Science will describe themselves as people of faith. And if they keep doing good work (such as getting students to look closely at the natural world, which may or may not be God’s creation), I am their enthusiastic colleague. I admit I have problem with some religious institutions, such as Oral Roberts University, whose administration uses every opportunity to promote the belief that God directly told Oral Roberts what the truth was, and that settles it for all time. This resulted in a really disquieting moment at the AAAS Southwest and Rocky Mountain Section meeting in Tulsa in 2012 (which I described in my blog). My first reaction is always to distrust religious scientists, based on my Oklahoma experiences, which have been mostly negative. But in many individual instances, I have found my religious scientific colleagues to be really fine people.

Some of you might, however, have different views. I encourage comments. I will be posting this essay on the Oklahoma Academy of Sciences blog and, later, on my evolution blog.

Stan Rice, OAS President

Science Ethics and Tobacco Corporations

I heard a report on All Things Considered yesterday. Nearly everyone has heard that stress causes numerous health problems, including heart attacks. The scientific research behind the stress-heart disease connection is excellent. But the earliest major researcher who studied the physiology of stress—Hans Selye—got most of his funding from tobacco corporations. The reason is actually quite simple. Numerous things cause heart attacks. Stress is one of them. Smoking is another. Others include poor nutrition and genetic factors. All of these factors interact with one another. And what the tobacco companies wanted to claim, although Selye never actually said this himself (as far as I can tell), was that stress, not smoking, caused heart attacks. What Selye did not say, the tobacco companies were eager to say. Their advertisements openly proclaimed that you should smoke to relieve stress. Tobacco corporations wanted to blame stress and avert criticism of smoking.

And Selye went right along with this. Mark Petticrew, Director of Public Health for the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and his colleagues examined thousands of documents that were made public as a result of the “tobacco settlement” of the late 1990s. They found that tobacco corporations vetted the content and wording of Selye’s papers (see hyperlink above). Says Petticrew, “tobacco industry lawyers actually influenced the content of his writings, they suggested to him things that he should comment on.”

Hanse Selye was certainly a famous scientist, author of thousands of papers and 39 books. Was Selye a liar? It does not appear so. But tobacco companies paid for his research and used his results to lie to the American public. Blood is on their hands, and Selye was their, apparently willing, tool.

You see, some scientists will say whatever you pay them to say. I am happy to know my Oklahoma scientific colleagues, for whom such unethical practices are practically unthinkable.

Stan Rice, President

Fake Scientific Journals for Fun and Profit

I have always been idealistic about science and scientists. Whenever I go to a scientific meeting, I get inspired all over again by the enthusiastic and excellent work done by scientists, whether old professors, young professors, grad students, or undergrads. (The best contributed-paper presentation I ever saw was by an undergrad.) Sometimes you find BS in science, but not often. When I took an ecology course from Joe Connell at Santa Barbara, in 1978, he had us read papers that he claimed were really terrible but got published anyway. Our job as students was to rip them to shreds. Now that I look back on it, I see that the papers were flawed but at least represented a good faith effort by the authors. I remember one of the flaws in a paper by Martin Cody was that he relied on a local fisherman to give him some information about shore birds. We science majors looked down on fishermen. But, I now realize, fishermen may know a lot about nature. The whole citizen-science movement has exploded since those old days of scientific snobbery. Cody may have accepted the fisherman’s testimony a little too readily, but there was nothing unscientific in getting observations from him.

A paper that appeared in Ecological Monographs in the 1980s described the problem of “pseudoreplication,” which is a real pitfall to avoid in research. The author said that too many papers have been published with this kind of error. He described scientific papers as “the coin of the realm” and this coinage needs to have value. He was right and still is. In many universities, the number of peer-reviewed publications is used as one measure of scholarly productivity for hiring, tenure, and promotion purposes.

Since the rise of online publishing—something that was inevitable and can be really good—a whole new kind of problem has arisen that makes pseudoreplication and other statistical errors look totally innocent. I refer to the large number of fake scientific papers. In the old days (I did not say good old days) a fake publisher could be quickly identified and driven out of business, since paper and ink and graphic design and postage are costly. But today it costs hardly anything to set up a “scientific journal” and start issuing online papers. There must be dozens of such journals now on the web. If the author pays them, they will publish anything. Joe Connell’s jaw would have dropped at these.

A contributor to the Ottawa Citizen whipped up a fake paper and sent it off to some of these “peer-reviewed” journals. He took half of the title, and half of the material, from geology, and the other half from hematology: the article “Acidity and aridity: Soil inorganic carbon storage exhibits complex relationship with low-pH soils and myeloablation followed by autologous PBSC infusion.” Gotta admit it was creative, especially with the author’s invention of “seismic platelets.” He got several acceptances. A few noticed his plagiarism, but told him to do a little rewording and it could be published.

What’s there to get upset about here? Anyone who hires an applicant or awards a grant to someone whose publications have titles like this has only him or herself to blame. These “peer-reviewed” papers apparently have no peer review, depending on your interpretation of peer. One could interpret “peer” in such a way as to make all of us peers. Anyone who is hiring a scientist should give credence only to journals which are known to be reliable, even if not widely read (such as our own Proceedings of the Oklahoma Academy of Science and Oklahoma Native Plant Record). You cannot distinguish between real and bogus publishers by asking whether they charge a fee to the author; nearly all journals have “page charges.” Occasionally even the most prestigious journals publish articles that turn out to be hoaxes (such as the work of Woo-suk Hwang) or the work of scientists who jumped to conclusions a little too fast (such as the work of Felisa Wolfe-Simon).

Peer review (in the opinion of any of us who have had papers rejected) is frequently a capricious affair. But at least it is pretty good at catching fakes. I reviewed a paper for American Biology Teacher once that was plagiarized. Lazy plagiarists are often lazy in more than one way. In this case, the author cited articles that were not listed in the references. Fifteen seconds of work on a search engine showed me that the paper was plagiarized. I told the editor to contact the supervisor of the author. Now that I look back on it, I wonder if the paper was generated just to test the internal quality control of the journal review process.

So, go ahead and have a laugh at the articles published by bogus journals; and if you believe them, joke’s on you.

On a related note, I’m thinking about starting a journal called Zeitschrift für Recherches en las Ciencias Naturalistas. I only charge $10,000 per article. If you are interested in publishing there, let me know, and remember I’m a peer.

Thanks to my wife Lee who found this article link through the American Library Association.

Stan Rice, president

Additional photo from Field Meeting

Here is a photo taken by Gary Wellborn during the Aqautic Invertebrate trip at the recent Spring Field Meeting. David Bass is working with UCO senior Kinsey Tedford.

Scientists Learning from Nature: Oklahoma Academy of Sciences Field Meeting Spring 2014, part two.

In the previous blog entry I wrote about the two evening presentations at this meeting.

Since there was such a small number of people at this field meeting, most of the field trip activity involved the whole group at once instead of numerous separate field trips. We took morning and afternoon trips on April 5 at Lake Murray State Park. It was a lot of fun to have everyone together, because wherever we went we could learn about everything all at once (mostly about plants and insects). There is a lot of fascinating conglomerate rock around Lake Murray, and I wished there was a geologist along to tell us about them.

Lake Murray is surrounded by a perfect example of a cross-timbers forest consisting mostly of post oak (Quercus stellata). This species of oak grows slowly on poor dry soil. The cross-timbers forest, found mostly in Oklahoma, is the only kind of forest that post oaks dominate. We also saw blackjack oaks, white ashes, black hickories, and chittamwoods, all of which had leaves that were just beginning to expand. It was beautiful to see how leaves and flowers are neatly packaged into buds. This was a late spring; back in 2012 the leaves of these trees were already fully expanded by this time. Because these forests are open and dry, cactus plants grow in the understory. Among these are Coryptantha missouriensis, a tiny cactus down in the leaf litter, the bright red fruits of which were mature and falling from the stem.

The sporophytes were emerging from the mosses.

Mosses and cacti growing together? The mosses are dormant during the dry summer when the cactuses are fully active. We also visited a transition zone between forest and prairie, where we saw forest edge trees such as chittamwood and persimmon, as well as grasses from tallgrass, midgrass, and shortgrass prairies.

We pretty much knew which plants we would find, but when it comes to animals, you have to wait until you stumble across them. We saw a leaf-footed bug that smelled like almonds, because it produces cyanide as a defense against predators. We saw a large moth almost perfectly camouflaged in the leaf litter, except for the big predator-scaring eyespots.

We saw cottony fluff on a beavertail cactus, produced by cochineal insects as a defense against predators. These insects were the original source of carmine dye, and the skillful use of a knife can reveal the bright crimson color under the fluff. One group of explorers even surprised a nest of shrews.

We benefited immensely from the expertise of botanists Gloria Caddell of University of Central Oklahoma (see photo below) and Suneeti Jog (behind the mosses in the photo above) of Northeastern Oklahoma State University and entomologist Ken Hobson of the University of Oklahoma. Mycologist Steve Marek of Oklahoma State University helped us find mushrooms and understand the lichens, which were astonishingly crowded all over the oak branches and bark. David Bass of the University of Central Oklahoma looked for aquatic invertebrates, and Michael Shaughnessy of Northeastern Oklahoma State University showed us how to interpret animal tracks. Gregory Plumb of East Central University brought his computer and screen to demonstrate how geographers integrate many kinds of digital information and also brought his telescope for viewing Jupiter. We pretty much searched all of heaven and earth we could find at Lake Murray.

One of the most rewarding aspects of the field trips for me was that six of my students took these trips, and were able to learn from scientists other than me (they already hear plenty of stuff from me). The three morning students were Maryam and Nasim Akhter and Brian Ridgway; the three afternoon students were Bobby Long, Ben Singleton, and Kristin Brooks.

One of the students told me that she had never been out in the woods before. Clearly, for her, the most important part of this trip was just getting out in the forest and noticing how much is in it. And I wanted them to experience nature as fully as possible without compromising safety. I induced them to eat greenbriar shoots, wild mustard, and cactus fruits (which is what the students are doing in the second photo). Some of these students plan to study medicine. Therefore I and Connie Murray, a botanist at Tulsa Community College, talked with them about wild medicinal plants. There were also a few students from other Oklahoma universities.

Also, despite all evidence to the contrary, there is life after being OAS President. We found past president Craig Clifford, of Northeastern Oklahoma State University, lying in a gutter. But he was not there for the usual reasons a man might be in the gutter; like many of us, no posture is too embarrassing to get that perfect photograph.

I believe it was also important that I got to demonstrate what a good ecologically-minded citizen does. A lot of people who come to the lake deliberately leave behind huge numbers of beer cans and bottles, some of them smashed. With help from others, I collected as many of these as I could (not, of course, broken glass) to take back and recycle. The attitude of responsible stewardship, which we all felt, could not contrast more greatly with the deliberate offense that litterers show to nature and to the other humans with whom they live. One of my favorite experiences at Academy meetings is to be among people who care about the Earth and the other humans who share it with us.

Stan Rice, OAS president

Scientists Learning from Nature: Oklahoma Academy of Sciences Field Meeting Spring 2014, part one.

When you get these three elements together, something good is bound to happen: First, the minds of people who know a lot about nature and want to know more; second, the minds of people who care about nature and want to talk about how to protect it; third, a beautiful natural ecological community. Such a convergence occurred this past weekend at the field meeting of the Oklahoma Academy of Science at Lake Murray State Park in southern Oklahoma. I will post two blog entries about this meeting. The first essay is about the two evening presentations.

On Friday, April 4, Jona Tucker from the Nature Conservancy gave a beautifully-prepared presentation about the Arbuckle-Simpson Aquifer, the Blue River, and TNC’s restoration of what had once been a beautiful riverside forest in Oklahoma.

The Oka’ Yanahli Preserve on the Blue River is not what you would think of when you hear The Nature Conservancy’s slogan of “the last great places.” It was until recently a cow pasture where even the very streams had been mashed out of existence, and where a thin layer of trees lined the river. But historical evidence and old maps clearly indicate that it used to be one of those great places. TNC wants to make it back into such a place.

The main impression I got as I listened to Jona’s presentation is that you cannot understand, protect, or manage anything by simply reducing it to its component parts. The Blue River is a perfect example of this. Almost all of its water comes from springs that emerge from the Arbuckle Simpson Aquifer, but you cannot understand either the river or the aquifer merely by knowing how much water flows from one to the other. (Alas, governing bodies often do not even correctly consider the amount of water flow when making decisions about how much aquifer water can be pumped and used.) It is a system that changes over time, as when the river itself changes course. Water flow and quality are affected by the riparian forest along the river. If this forest has been damaged or destroyed, it must be restored before you can have a healthy river. But restoring the river is also a complex system. You cannot just go out and ceremonially plant a tree or two; the beavers will chew them down. So what do you do? You could put up a fence to keep the beavers out. But even this does not work; when the river floods, a fence can be knocked over and crammed with debris. The Conservancy, and two graduate students from the University of Oklahoma, are using fences that can be quickly dismantled if a flood is coming then reassembled after the waters have gone down; and you can only hope the beavers aren’t bright enough to recognize their narrow window of opportunity before and after a flood.

But because the river and aquifer and forests are a system, it is not necessary to replant the entire thing. It is important to get a few trees started, but after that, just keep the cows away and most of the plant and animal species will return. This can be seen at the nearby Blue River Public Hunting and Fishing Area, also on the Blue River, which was pretty much just a pasture until a few decades ago. Now it is lined with, among other things, a healthy population of rare seaside alder trees.

And you have to think of the way the entire natural system of the Blue River interacts with the human system. It doesn’t work for a government (e.g. a court or the Fish and Wildlife Service) to impose rules on land owners, rules with which the land owners may minimally comply (or not). Instead it is important to get the land owners to want to protect and improve their land. Humans can be a positive part of the system. Once when I was studying alder trees along this river, a fisherman asked me about the trees. Then he said that maybe fishermen were causing damage by walking around among the trees. I told him that the fishermen were causing no damage at all, and in fact their license fees maintained the state land, which is where most of these rare alder trees survive. We need for people to feel welcome to do harmless things in the natural world, thereby becoming aware of its beauty and being more likely to support its preservation. I believe the fisherman was delighted to hear that rural Oklahoma has a rare subspecies of tree found nowhere else in the world.

I am definitely proud to have served as Jona’s undergraduate advisor when she majored in botany at Southeastern Oklahoma State University. At the same time, it is clear that nearly everything Jona knows she has taught herself, and most of what she does she has figured out for herself. She is one of our best examples of a student whom we got started on a professional path but who has made most of that path herself. Her work is not necessarily what she was trained to do; a lot of it involves talking with and arranging agreements with land owners. This requires the kind of positive spirit that Jona has, and is something you cannot simply learn by taking a public relations course. For example, it was necessary to consider the public impact of choosing a name for the preserve: they chose a Chickasaw name, Oka’ Yanahli, that recognizes the efforts to bring the river back to what it was like in the nineteenth century when the Chickasaws first arrived, and recognizes rural Oklahoma’s increasing pride in its Native American heritage. Now the only problem is that we might get complacent and expect Jona to do the whole job by herself, which nobody can.

On Saturday, April 5, Matt Bolek of Oklahoma State University described his research into all aspects of the life cycle and ecology of hairworms. We did not have a show of hands to see how many of us scientists even knew what hairworms were, especially since they do not live in humans. They live primarily in insects. They are one of those phyla of animals that people seldom see. But they can be quite surprising. A single large tropical roach can be the host of a 4.3-meter-long hairworm tangled up into what looks like a Gordian knot (after which one of the genera is named). They have amazing adaptations for surviving and dispersing from one host to another. Matt is an active member of a very small worldwide group of hairworm experts.

Small and (to us) obscure organisms are also hard to study. One example of this is the swallow bug. Usually, Valerie O’Brien is at our field meetings, but this weekend she and Charles Brown were marking individual swallow bugs to track their dispersal patterns. That is, each bug has to have its own individual mark distinguishable from the others. Now, how do you mark a swallow bug? I assume it cannot be a radio collar or a GPS transponder. I’ll be interested in finding out how to mark a bug.

Stan Rice, OAS president

In the next entry, I want to tell you about the OAS field trips.

In Memoriam, Dr. Paul Nighswonger

Dear OAS Members and Friends,

It is with sadness that I notify you of the death of Dr. Paul Nighswonger on March 23, 2014.  At the time of his death Paul was nearly 91 years old and was the longest serving member of the Oklahoma Academy of Science, having joined in 1942.  He was a botanist and served on the faculty at Northwestern Oklahoma State University from 1969 until his retirement in 1994. 

Dr. Nighswonger was a native of Woods County, Oklahoma, and grew up on land homesteaded by his grandfather.  He lived on the family land throughout most of his life, including his final years.  During WWII he enlisted in the U.S Army and rose to the rank of 1^st Lieutenant, serving as a B-17 co-pilot in the European Campaign.  After the war he returned to the Alva area and earned his undergraduate degree in 1949 at Northwestern State.  In 1951 he married Elaine Moore, with whom he had six children.

In 1964 he entered graduate school at the University of Oklahoma, where he earned a Ph.D. in Plant Ecology.  His plant specimens in the Bebb Herbarium at OU are still known for their natural and artistic presentation.  After graduating from OU he began his teaching career at Northwestern State.  He was a member of the faculty along with such other well-known faculty as Dr. Louis Bouchard, Dr. Anna Fisher, and Dr. Dan Shorter.  Many graduates from the biology program of those days went on to distinguished careers in science, medicine, and education.

Dr. Nighswonger was a strong supporter of OAS and was a frequent participant in field meetings and technical meetings.  He encouraged his students to become OAS members and to take part in OAS activities. I first met Paul in 1976 when I was a student at Northwestern State.  I fondly remember taking his classes, including general botany, genetics, plant kingdom, and plant taxonomy, and participating in his field trips.  In those days the faculty and students would gather next to the coffee pot between classes and many vigorous debates occurred during those breaks.  I still recall Paul’s mischievous grin when he confided to me that he had clipped out a discount coupon for coffee and left it in the coffee donation can instead of the usual ten cents, much to the chagrin of Dr. Shorter, the keeper of the coffee fund.  While Paul was a significant influence in my life as a teacher, he was also a mentor to me.  He taught me the importance of accepting people for who they are and keeping my mind open to ideas and change.  He had a profound and positive influence on my life when I was a young college student struggling to find my path, and his lessons on life guide me today. 

Paul is survived by his wife Elaine and by his children. A fuller account of his life is available online at: http://www.whartonfuneralchapel.com/sitemaker/sites/wharto0/obit.cgi?user=1274506Nighswonger. Memorial donations may be made to the Paul Nighswonger Scholarship fund at Northwestern State.

Reported by Terry R. Conley on March 27, 2014