An American politician with a seat in the House of Representatives has introduced a resolution “to acquire Greenland and to rename Greenland as “Red, White, and Blueland”.
This is real. Not a prank. Not a hoax. Not an imaginary story. Not an April Fools day joke.
Carter introduces bill renaming Greenland, February 11, 2025
I am glad to hear that Felisa Wolfe-Simon is doing well and still loves science.
But lots of other information in a new article in the New York Times about Wolfe-Simon is not as warming.
First, the timeline of events circa 2010 described in the article is very fuzzy at best. I’m not sure if it6s wrong or just cloudy.
By focusing on Wolfe-Simon, others involved in this story – notably Rosie Redfield – are reduced to namely “critics.” There are other elements of the story that are maybe over emphasized?
Critique soon became attack, and attack often became personal – focusing, for instance, on Dr. Wolfe-Simon’s appearance, including her dyed hair.
Several articles described her colourful hair positively. And Rosie Redfield dyed her hair, too. I cannot doubt some attacked her appearance, and that any of those comments can hurt bad.
And soon, Dr. Wolfe-Simon said, she couldn’t get grants or publish papers.
A lot of researchers struggle to get grants or publish papers. There’s no way of knowing what proposals or manuscripts she was submitting or what the comments were.
Second, there is news that the journal Science is considering retracting the original paper. Current editor, Holden Thorp, expands on the possible retraction of the arsenic life paper in a thread on Bluesky. i asked what point a retraction would serve, to which Thorp replied, “Partly because of AI and even before with search engines that only look at the title, papers like this continue to get cited uncritically. ‘Retraction’ is added to the title in these cases.”
This strikes me as reasonable, but I still have some reservations. By the same argument, anyone who only looks at the title and sees “Retraction” will also view that uncritically and not read the retraction notice. This could mean someone would not cite this paper appropriately for its discovery of a new strain of arsenic-tolerant bacteria (which is not contests).
Retraction is a blunt instrument.
Third, this article paints Wolfe-Simon as someone who was wronged, not as someone who was wrong.
Usually, professional consequences so severe are reserved for those who fabricate data or commit fraud, which no one has alleged with #arseniclife. Why, then, were the repercussions so resounding for Dr. Wolfe-Simon?
And from reading this article, it seems to me that Wolfe-Simon still thinks she found bacteria that use arsenic instead of phosphorus.
She also defended the discovery against scientific consensus. Some see that as an unwillingness to change a conclusion in the face of new information. Dr. Wolfe-Simon would say that information is wrong.
And...
To this day, Dr. Wolfe-Simon defends the work, noting that she wishes the team had saved less data for a second paper. The team published a response to critiques in Science, and Dr. Wolfe-Simon disputes failed replications of their findings. Other co-authors say they also stand by the integrity of the original work.
What I would like to know if whether the co-authors stand by the conclusions of their work. Do they think they discovered a bacterium that uses arsenic in place of phosphorus?
Wolfe-Simon throws Science magazine under the bus a bit:
She wouldn’t pursue a flashy journal that would impose a heavy hand in publication and press, she said.
We absolutely have to make space for making mistakes and being wrong in science. But researchers have to be willing to admit those mistakes.
Her discovery wasn’t alien life, but science has never been the same. (Paywalled.)
This has been lightly edited from the original thread.
Well, no surprise that (Jerry) Coyne used his blog (whyevolutionistrue) to argue with the SSE/SSB/ASN letter about definitions of sex. I’m not going to engage deeply with the letter here. Like any committee-drafted text it reflects compromises; I agree with some phrasing but some could have been clearer.
Instead, I want to respond specifically about his comments regarding my work on stickleback. He points out, quite correctly, that I have personally used the terms male and female, and sex, extensively in my own research on stickleback. True.
But it misses the point.
Yes, stickleback can generally be categorized as male and female. And they have a XX female / XY male sex determination system (in some species, not in others). And yes, when I run stats I often check for effects of sex, and often find them. I’ve had whole papers devoted to sexual dimorphism. But Jerry might want to talk to me (or another sticklebacker) before making claims about stickleback sex differences. Because its not as clear cut as he likes.
Yes, the large majority of stickleback I’ve caught are phenotypically male or female, in the sense that they have ovaries or testes. But I have caught quite a few stickleback (hundreds at least) with neither identifiable ovaries nor testes. I have twice seen stickleback with both (yeah, we dissect a lot of fish). These are rare, but they exist. In statistical analyses, these fish get coded as NA, and excluded.
So when I publish on sexual dimorphism, or use male/female as a factor in my stats (which I do a lot), I am simplifying, setting aside a small minority to focus on overall tendencies of the majority.
That’s okay for stickleback, but its not ethical when applied to humans.
I could readily have published my papers instead with three levels of “sex”: male, female, and “unknown,” with the third group being comparatively small and under-powered for statistical purposes given my sample sizes.
Then there’s the issue of trait differences between the sexes, which are clear-cut for most individuals in some environments, but less so in other environments. Stickleback are famous for males having bright red chins and blue eyes as a sexual signal... except when they don’t. There are plenty of lakes where I work in BC, in which males are dull brownish-green, and indistinguishable visually from females. Indeed, in some lakes we have a hard time generating in vitro crosses because we’ll grab a fish we think is male, only to find after we euthanize and dissect it to obtain sperm, that it had ovaries.
For many traits that we have measured (diet, isotopes, morphology, size, color, immune traits, gene expression, metabolomics), males and females are on average different. But for most of these traits the sexes distributions overlap extensively. The magnitude of that dimorphism varies. In some lakes it can be easy to distinguish the sexes (for most individuals), other lakes it can be very hard, even in multivariate trait space. We can measure this dimorphism using things like linear discriminant function analysis (LDA). This LDA can score individuals as to how distinctively male or female they are and it varies numerically in ways we can measure precisely. Some populations are more dimorphic, others less. These differences persist in the lab, meaning there is genetic variation in between-sex differences.
To conclude: yes, I use the terms male and female in my work, reflecting real features of the fish I study. But I also set aside individuals who don’t fit neatly into the categories; again, that's a fair simplification when working with fish, but not morally defensible with people.
I also emphasize that even after 25 years studying stickleback, I can mis-identify an individual’s sex, even when the gonads are unambiguous. In these cases the gametic sex is a real distinction, but its relation to other traits is complex.
I'm not personally a deep expert on the biology of sex, that's not my specialty. But, if Coyne wants to have a conversation about sex and sexual traits in stickleback, I'd be happy to point out the subtleties. Most of all, the subtlety that seems to elude him is we can recognize male/female differences that characterize many individuals, and use this distinction, yet still acknowledge that these differences do not apply completely to fully 100% of a population.
Anisogamy (Differences in size of gametes - ZF) will surely come up in comments. I don’t have a problem with this criterion as a broad rule, but again there exist exceptions that make it less than universal. Individuals exist that produce no gametes: genetic sterility, environmentally induced sterility, parasitic castration. For instance, the parasite I study, Schistocephalus, can completely sterilize its host in some cases: we find males with no functional testes, females with non-functional ovaries. Do they cease to be males/females because they don’t have any gametes (whether large or small)?
To wrap up at last: my impression as an empiricist specializing on a particular fish species: stickleback sex is clearly delineated most of the time (hence, I use the term a lot), but not in every single instance.
The latter is where Jerry misses the point: Once we pivot into the world of humans, the biology of sex in stickleback (and how I simplify it slightly in my work) is irrelevant to the ethical standards by which we treat each other.
Photo by Jason Ching/University of Washington on Flickr. Used under a Creative Commons license.
I called last week, “The worst week for science ever.” Of course, it was just the worst week so far.
This morning, I saw reports of two large scientific societies – The American Chemical Society (ACS) and the American Geophysical Union (AGU) – editing their websites to remove or reduce mentions of diversity.
“The ACS has deleted its website on Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Respect.” – David K. Smith
“The main DEI page from AGU has been modified to take diversity out of the title.” – Celeste Labedz
This is on top of the American Society for Microbiology removing a bunch of pages relating to diversity and replacing them with “Under review.”
Not all societies are taking this road. The Society for the Study of Evolution released an message today, for instance, said the society still supported “community building in an equitable and globally inclusive manner.” Near the end, it concludes, “we note that the attacks on historically excluded members of society are reprehensible. We encourage our membership to be unwavering in your support of the most vulnerable within the community.”
My hypothesis about these is that somewhere in these big societies, there is one or more federal grants supporting some program or another. They had lawyers review the executive orders, who suggested that they change the website to avoid getting sued. A lawsuit exposes the entire society to financial risk, or maybe even ruin.
I appreciate that scientific societies want to continue to exist and are sensitive to risk.
But I am deeply disappointed that there seems to be no communication about these changes. Words and phrases and entire pages are disappearing with no warning or notice. That’s not transparency and it sure as anything isn’t leadership.
Sunday: American Society for Microbiology scrubs mentions of diversity from their websites.
Tuesday: NASA stops everything to scrub mentioned of diversity from their websites; ICE arrests a student on campus; NSF announces plans to make deep cut to staff; USAID is halted.
Wednesday: HHMI kills one of its diversity program; NIH trashes applications for diversity F grants.
Friday: NIH cuts its indirect costs and sets them to 15%.
Yes, these are all American centric. But the United States was, until the start of 2025, the world’s undisputed science superpower. These effects will not be contained within the borders of the United States.
The United States has doused itself in gasoline and lit a match.
The only question is whether the fire can be put out with no more than scorched clothes, or whether it will burn until even the bones are ash.
For everyone whose grant or pay is in limbo, I’m so sorry. You don’t deserve this bullshit.
There’s a lot to unpack and I won’t try to do it all in this post. But the current crisis did make me think back a few years about science crowdfunding. In particular, I think I had a good point about the importance of diversifying your portfolio for research funding.
So I wrote a little thread on Bluesky suggesting that some scientists might consider what they could do with crowdfunding for research.
This blog post is also a good opportunity to point to this post on Southern Fried Science about Andrew Thaler’s experience with Patreon:
By just about any metric, the return on investment from Patreon exceeds, by an order of magnitude, just about an other funding I’ve received in the last decade. For most of us, we don’t need to move mountains, we just need the space to stop and breathe and create.
I’m under no illusions about what science crowdfunding can and cannot do. And it sucks that I have to bring it up because we are facing an all out attack on research funding. But times are what they are and we have to think in new ways to keep the gears turning.
My Bluesky thread on science crowdfunding
My blog posts about the #SciFund experience
Small drops make mighty oceans: 10 years as a scientist on Patreon
In 2021, I was in front of the US Consulate in Toronto. And there was a small plaque that was surprisingly moving to me.
As the United States marks the 10th anniversary of the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, in the name of all Americans, Consulate General Toronto thanks the people of Ontario for their support and generosity following the worst attack on American since WWII.
The nearly 3,000 innocent victims from ninety countries included twenty-four Canadians, our friends and family in Ontario, and all of Canada, were with us in our darkest hour, as you always are. Neither terrorism nor any adversity can conquer free peoples, and we are grateful to stand with the best neighbours any nation ever had.
As together we look back, together we go forward.
We are eternally grateful.
September 11, 2011
Reading the text of this now is just crushing to me. I’m sad that “eternal” gratitude seems to have lasted less than 15 years since the plaque was revealed.
The Bookseller is reporting that Springer Nature is testing AI checks in their production pipeline for journal articles.
According to the publisher, the AI systems are designed to alert editors to “quality issues.” I find this frustratingly unclear, much like Elsevier’s testing of production pipeline changes. What, exactly, are they looking for with these systems?
I can see some automatic checking being very valuable. For example, it blows my mind that many journals apparently do no basic checks for plagiarism. I can also see value in an AI system that scanned basic statistical information, like whether reported p values were possible given the sample size, test statistic, and so on. For example, there is a program called Statcheck that has been proposed for exactly such purposes (Nuijten & Wicherts 2023, 2024), although there are ongoing debates about its utility (Schmidt 2017, Böschen 2024).
If the publishers were confident that these systems were genuinely making the peer review process better and were catching things like:
All of which are real problems that need addressing. So why are academic publishers being so cagey about what processes they are implementing and what they are supposed to catch? Are they worried that this provides information that cheaters can use to bypass their “quality issues” detection systems? Something else?
Publishers always claim that they add value to academic publication. These new AI checks provide a real opportunity that they could show how they are adding value to academics who are increasingly mad at them and asking “What good are you?”
Elsevier turns generative AI loose on manuscripts for no discernable reason
Springer Nature reveals AI-driven tool to ‘automate some editorial quality checks’
Böschen I. 2024. statcheck is flawed by design and no valid spell checker for statistical results. arXiv: 2408.07948. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2408.07948
Nuijten MB, Wicherts J. 2023. The effectiveness of implementing statcheck in the peer review process to avoid statistical reporting errors. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/bxau9
Nuijten MB, Wicherts JM. 2024. Implementing Statcheck during peer review is related to a steep decline in statistical-reporting inconsistencies. Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science 7(2): 25152459241258945. https://doi.org/10.1177/25152459241258945
Schmidt T. 2017. Statcheck does not work: All the numbers. Reply to Nuijten et al. (2017). PsyArXiv. https://psyarxiv.com/hr6qy
