Arctic ground squirrel, Wikipedia Commons

What makes this study really interesting in my mind is not just the fact that we’ve pushed back the date of the oldest cultivated plant by some 30,000 years (the previous record-holder was a 2000-year-old date palm from Iraq). This experiment yeilded plants with phenotypic differences from modern versions of Silene stenophylla, including longer and more widely-spaced petals and slower-growing root systems than their modern counterparts. This indicates that the ice age population of these plants is genetically different than their interglacial descendants, which gives us the opportunity to study evolutionary change at the glacial-interglacial scale. The researchers hope that their methods may be used to bring back extinct plant species where seeds are available.

This study suggests that– in cold and arid environments, at least– some seeds may be able to survive long enough to withstand adverse conditions for thousands of years. I wonder what the implications are of these finding to what we know about the migration and establishment of plants after the ice age? Were small mammal burrows or permafrost effectively seed banks for the re-establishment of plants after the ice melted? Why migrate, when you can essentially hibernate?

The paleoecological record suggests much more rapid rates of plant dispersal than we see in modern trees– so much so that it’s been called a paradox (Clark et al. 1998). Very little is known about whether and to what extent animals may have facilitated the dispersal of trees as they migrated northwards after the last ice age. Mark Vellend and colleagues speculated in this 2003 paper that deer browsing would have facilitated long-distance dispersal of Trillium seeds; Trillium are generally thought to be ant-

Nodding trillium, Wikipedia Commons.

dispersed, but given that ants typically move seeds <10 m from the parent plant, Trillium wouldn’t have made it very far from its ice age refuge locations relying on ants alone. Johnson & Webb (1989) suggested that the nut-caching habits of blue jays may help explain the rapid expansion of oaks during the Holocene. Still, ideas of animal dispersal haven’t been widely integrated into models of the post-glacial spread of plants. Work on modern population genetics of American beech and sugar maple by McLachlan and colleagues suggests that small, “cryptic” (i.e., not easily detectable) populations of trees may have been growing quite close to the ice sheets in populations too small to show up in the pollen record. In that case, trees may not have needed to migrate very far, or very quickly, to track their suitable climates.

“How fast can species migrate?” is more than an academic question. Conservationists and ecologists often look to the paleoecological record for a sense of how well plants can migrate in response to climate change. Depending on the evidence you look at, you might decide “very fast indeed!” or “not very fast, unless they have help from animals.” Silene stenophylla may well be adding a new hypothesis– seed banking– to the study of how plants spread so quickly after the last ice age. What remains to be seen is how many more of those 600,000 seeds and fruits found in the permafrost are viable, and whether or not there are similar caches to be found in other regions. I’m hoping to pursue these questions more in the future, and I welcome your thoughts!

Historians have a word for Reading Old Things: historiography. Historians of science do it for a living. Why don’t scientists read (and cite) Old Things more often? I don’t mean just the classic 19th century examples, either– for some fields, anything older than 10 years is considered out-dated. A common answer I hear is that reading takes up precious time, and it can be difficult to keep up with the emerging ideas in new publications, let alone exploring the papers of the past. I think it goes beyond time management, though. I wonder if the ways in which we fund, do, write about, and report on science have influenced how much we value the research of the past?

Pollination depicted in Linneus' Praeludia Sponsaliorum Plantarum, 1729. They don't make 'em like they used to.

In the Geographical Distribution section of Darwin’s Origin, one finds hints of vicariance, land bridges, continental drift, species-area relationships, coevolution, sea level change, invasive species, and island biogeography, in many cases a century before such concepts became a part of the academic mainstream. Focusing on the recent leaves out an historical perspective on the intellectual development of one’s field, but it could also mean that some really cool ideas are left by the wayside. Conversely, some classic concepts that get distilled and replicated ad nauseum in biology textbooks (I’m thinking MacArthur’s warblers* here) could stand for a bit of primary scrutiny.

Reading Old Things has served me well; for my masters thesis, I took an observation from a paper in 1987 and used it to test an hypothesis about the influence of mammoths and other large herbivores on novel plant communities. When people ask me how I came up with such a clever idea (using spores from a dung fungus to reconstruct the timing of the extinction of ice-age herbivores), I tell them I didn’t: Owen Davis did. I just read about it in my perusals of paleoecological literature as an undergraduate. I wonder how many other gems are out there, buried in the back issues of medium-weight journals?

Here’s an idea for you professors out there: Assign your students to write two review papers or exam questions on the same subject. For the first, they are to use only research published before a particular year. For the second, they can only use papers published after that year. This should accomplish two things: First, students will have a better appreciation for how ideas change through time. Secondly, they should come away with a better understanding of  the value of both old and new. This could be a  fun exercise for science writers to try, too (blog ideas, anyone?).

The next time you do a search in Google Scholar and find yourself about to exclude the results to the most recent years, stop and think for a moment. Do you really need the most recent, or do you want the most useful? The two may not be the same. To close, I’ll leave you with one of my favorite Old Things to read, T. C. Chamberlain’s The Method of Multiple Working Hypotheses, originally published in the late 19th century. This paper should be required reading for any young scientist-in-training (or science writers, for that matter).

*As an undergraduate, the aforementioned advisor took us to see MacArthur’s spruce trees. Not only did I not see a single spruce tree that resembled anything like the textbook diagrams, but I have serious doubts as to the ability of anyone to tell anything about niche partitioning among warblers in those trees.

More than seventeen thousand years ago, central Ohio was just emerging from beneath the melting ice sheet that had covered half of North America during the last ice age. Imagine yourself in this newly deglaciated landscape: rivers of meltwater snake through sand and gravel, around boulders and stagnant blocks of ice left behind by the melting glacier. One such block, covered over by debris, slowly melts; when it finally collapses, it forms a kettle-shaped basin that fills with water. Thousands of years later, someone will call it Silver Lake.

Glacial meltwater and debris from Mount Edith Cavell Glacier. Photo by Wing-Chi Poon, Creative Commons.

The first trees appear; clumps of spruce trees dotting an open, parkland-like landscape of grass and sedges. Mammoths graze the open spaces, and mastodons pull the tender leaves off of small saplings. Things are changing rapidly; the climate swings from the cold, dry ice age conditions to warmer and wetter, only to swing back again one last time before finally transitioning to the warmer conditions of the Holocene (the inter-glacial we live in today). The landscape becomes more diverse as alder, tamarack and other trees arrive from their ice-age refuges, establishing when their offspring are lucky enough to disperse into a suitable habitat. Meanwhile, the first humans arrive, and witness much of this change; perhaps they add some changes of their own, as they hunt, gather, disperse seeds, and set fires.

Then, in the blink of a geologic eye, the mammoths are gone. So are the horses, camels, giant beavers, saber-toothed cats and short-faced bears; by twelve thousand years ago, more than half the animals larger than a German shepherd have disappeared from the landscape. The double threat of a changing climate and new hunting pressures packs a mighty punch; a continent that once held more large mammal diversity than the African savanna is left with just a few species of large herbivores.

Cue a young scientist, working on her PhD nearly twelve thousand years later. She’s interested not so much in why the mammoths went extinct, but in what came afterwards. What happens when you take an entire guild of animals out of a landscape in a geologic instant? The mammoths, mastodons, and other herbivores have been residents of North America for millennia; other megafauna, like horses and camels, actually originated here. Did the landscapes they left behind remember them?

Collecting the sediment core from Silver Lake, OH in 2007. The mud is the archive of past landscape change.

I address this question in a new paper*, which came out in Quaternary Science Reviews this week (Gill et al. 2012). This study is a chapter of my PhD research, which followed up on my masters thesis on the ecological impacts of the extinction of ice-age herbivores (Ed Yong has a nice summary of my previous paper here). We used the pollen, charcoal, and physical properties preserved in the mud at the bottom of Silver Lake to reconstruct changing ecosystems after the lake was formed. To determine the timing of the megafaunal extinction, I counted spores from a dung fungus, Sporormiella, that requires digestion by herbivores to complete its life cycle. (lots of spores = lots of dung = lots of herbivores). In this paper, we argue that the loss of ice-age herbivores contributed to long-term changes in plant communities, including the emergence of novel ecosystems. By “novel,” or “no-analog,” we mean that the plant communities following the extinction of the megaherbivores were unlike any we’d see on the landscape in North America today. They consisted of unusual combinations of trees like spruce and ash that you’d normally find in cold boreal and warmer deciduous forests, respectively– two totally different biomes that don’t have a lot of overlapping tree species.

If the mammoths and giant beaver were extinct, how could they have had anything to do with the formation of new ecosystems? In our paper, we argue that these communities arose as the result of both changing climates and the loss of herbivores. In other words, herbivores may have preferred the tastier, more easily-digestible and nutritious deciduous trees, which were then able to thrive after they were no longer on the menu. Large herbivores not only affect ecosystems through consuming plants, though. We also suggest that once the herbivores went extinct, the plant material that would have been a mammoth dinner was instead able to accumulate on the landscape. This may have also had consequences to ecosystems: we found evidence that increasing the amount of plant litter in the forest may have 1) increased fire, because there was more more fuel available to burn, and 2) changed the way that nutrients like calcium cycled through the ecosystem. Plants and animals are often limited by the availability of nutrients in the soil, and so the loss of herbivores may have indirectly influenced what kinds of plants could thrive in the new conditions.

Elephants are important keystones in African savanna habitats, helping to maintain the balance between trees and grass. Photo in public domain.

The growing message from my dissertation research is that large herbivores are important. As ecological “keystones” that help maintain certain kinds of landscapes, losing our largest animals may have long-term consequences. The novel ecosystems following the megafaunal population collapse around Silver Lake lasted more than a thousand years! We know that large herbivores are some of the most threatened species today, and so their extinction (or conversely, their rewilding) may have cascading effects on ecosystems that can be difficult to predict. Extinction isn’t the only threat to modern ecosystems, however. I’m increasingly interested in how landscapes will respond to multiple changes that may interact to produce unpredictable results. At Silver Lake, the changes we observed are likely due to interactions between climate change and extinction; sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

What’s next? I’m currently wrapping up a study of the dung fungus Sporormiella, to better understand how well it predicts herbivore densities on modern landscapes and to strengthen our inferences from the paleo-record. Next up is a paper exploring the novel ecosystems of the Great Lakes region in greater detail, to help understand how these new landscapes are formed and how they behave. I’m also working on a model  of the effects of ice-age herbivores on ecosystems like the one around Silver Lake, to model what I can’t observe in the wild. That should keep me busy until I complete my dissertation in May, right?

Gill, J. L., J. W. Williams, S. T. Jackson, J. P. Donnelly, & G. C. Schellinger. 2012. Climatic and megaherbivory controls on late-glacial vegetation dynamics: a new, high-resolution, multi-proxy record from Silver Lake, OH. Quaternary Science Reviews, doi: 10.1016/j.quascirev.2011.12.008

*Please email me at jacquelynlgill [at] gmail [dot] com if you would like a copy of any of my paper manuscripts.

As I hurtle towards #phd2012, I’m getting that question a lot these days; from family members, casual acquaintances, cab drivers and dental hygienists. Those who know me really well– colleagues, close friends, my spouse– know the answer, or at least some vague approximation. From everyone else, it’s a question that gives me more pause than “What do you research?” I’ve got a pretty good collection of answers to the research question, which vary depending on who’s asking and how much time I have. But the “what’s next?” answer is harder, because it involves discussing that netherword of academia that doesn’t have a particularly good analog outside the Ivory Tower:

I’m going to be a postdoctoral researcher.

My family (who are not academics) are especially confused as to why I’m not getting a “real job” after eleven years in college and three degrees. My current (and somewhat unsatisfactory) analogy is that a postdoc position is like a holding pattern for an aircraft, while you’re waiting for clearance to land from air traffic control. Taken literally, this analogy is perhaps apt but a little scary– the aircraft only has so much fuel (i.e., grant money), so at a certain point you either have to refuel, land, or crash. The thing is, you don’t know which runway you’ll get clearance for, or how long you’ll have to be in the air.

Jorge Cham, PhD Comics.com

The postdoc explanation inevitably sounds more bleak than I mean it to. I try to maintain a balance between being realistic and being positive, which means that I do everything I can to increase my odds, and then trust that I’ve done my best. I’m faced with the uncertainty of where I’ll be living and what I’ll be doing six months from now, and that’s sobering. I’m getting used to the idea that I’m going to be spending the next decade proving myself until tenure brings some semblance of security. At this stage, I’m still more excited than nervous about that.

I submitted my first postdoc application on January first– an auspicious start to the new year, one hopes. Today, Saturday, I’m in my windowless office working on a second application, instead of enjoying Madison’s unseasonably warm weather and sunshine. I force my brain to go through the acrobatics required to jump from one project idea to another, and back to my dissertation, several times in one day. I find a strange consolation in the fact that every postdoc application I work on becomes my favorite– that even now, in what should be the most stressful period of my academic career to date, I find myself excited by new questions.

Inofographic by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Click for larger size.

In fact, it’s the questions that keep me up at night; or, rather, the thought of how any particular postdoc will change my career trajectory. I’m an ecologist and biogeographer  with a dissertation on how plants responded to climate change and the extinction of the ice age megafauna. This means that there’s a rather broad list of possible positions I could apply for, though my ideal postdoc position would be a combination of modern and paleo-ecology, implementing fieldwork and modeling, and could involve plants, animals or both. A postdoc can be an opportunity to take your research in a new direction and pick up complementary skills (I’m interested in species distribution modeling and ancient DNA, for example, which are pretty different fields!), but I’m also aware that researchers are unlikely to want to train someone from the ground up (so the ability to pick up skills independently is a plus). The advice I’ve gotten is that 1) you have to strike a balance between skills you can bring to a lab and skills you can pick up, 2) interesting questions can ultimately be more important than study systems, and 3) know what you don’t want to do (I, for one, don’t want to count any more pollen grains for a postdoc!).

I’ve got a few more postdoctoral application deadlines coming up in the next few weeks, and they include a mix of funded and independent projects. I’m most interested in big-picture questions with relevance to global change concerns: How do communities respond to multiple threats, like climate change and extinction? Can we see legacies of past change in the ecosystems of the present? How and why do novel ecosystems emerge? How important are ecological keystones? How does our concept of what is “natural” influence ecosystem management?  How does knowing about past ecosystem change help us to understand how plants and animals respond to the future, and what might limit the ability of organisms to adapt to change?

In the most broad terms, most of the positions I’m applying for involve– at least at some level– understanding (and predicting) how organisms respond to climate change. When it comes to the details, they’re each quite different, and involve working in a wide range of geographic locations (and elevations!) and study organisms. Sometimes, I feel like a kid in a toy store with choice fatigue…and then I remember that the toy that will pick me, ultimately. I can only ask my spouse, “so, would you rather live in X or Y?” so many times when the question is still academic at this point. Which usually means it’s time to get back to work, because no one will take me as a postdoc if I haven’t finished my dissertation.

• Attended the 4th International Biogeography Society Meeting in Iraklion, Crete in January. If you can figure out how to be a biogeographer, do it – not only do they meet in really cool places, but biogeographers are asking important questions like, “How will species keep pace with climate change?” and “Why are there more species in the tropics?”
• Spent all my free time in February and March at the Wisconsin State Capitol. I got a crash course in the value of Twitter for social justice, too (I shot up to over 1,000 followers almost overnight, and two of my tweets were the “most re-tweeted” on Twitter!).
• Was awarded a University of Wisconsin Peer Mentor Award in March.
• Started The Contemplative Mammoth in July! My blog had around 29,000 hits in 2011, and was nominated for the CollegeScholarships.org Blogging Scholarship. My most popular posts were How to argue with a scientist: a guide,  my Womanspace round-up, the Anonymous Author’s How to get a faculty job in 20 not-so-easy steps, and my response to Mark Davis’ Nature commentary on invasive species.

One of my photos for #wherethesciencehappens, a 2011 tweet-fest I hosted for people to share their lab, office and field photos.

• Attended the International Quaternary Association’s XVII Congress in Bern, Switzerland! I gave a talk in the Extinction Events session, fell in love with milchekaffe and Swiss chocolate, and got to meet some awesome European researchers for the first time.
• Attended the Ecological Society of America annual meeting in Austin in August, where I got to meet some of my new-found Twitter friends for the first time, saw some wonderful talks, hosted a symposium on What is Natural?, and gave a talk on the ecological implications of the end-Pleistocene extinctions.
• Got married in Vermont over Labor Day weekend! Work-life-balance: I have it. Sadly, there hasn’t been time for a honeymoon yet, but I’m hoping 2012 has one in store.
• Participated in Donors Choose, where I helped raise $784 for classrooms in need.
• Finished a chapter of my dissertation, and had it accepted for publication! Coming soon to a Quaternary science journal near you…

2012 is going to be an even bigger year, I suspect. Currently, my to-do list includes completing and defending my dissertation, and landing a postdoctoral research position (at an as-yet unknown location; more on this in the near future). I do have a few academic resolutions, too:

1) Take more photographs in general, and especially when I travel and in the field. In fact, I’m posting a photo a day on Twitter to capture the transition from #phd2012 to whatever comes next. I’ll be posting weekly round-ups of these photos on my blog, too.

2) Read more papers! I’m trying to read an academic paper a day, to better keep up with new literature and to brush up on classics. This isn’t as difficult as it seems– lunchtime, bus rides, and long stints on the elliptical are great times to sneak a paper in.

Here’s the catch: as a graduate student, I typically have access to travel funds through my university, my department, or the grant that’s funded my dissertation research. Unfortunately, I’m ineligible for university funding because I’m not technically”presenting” (as an “un-conference,” #scio12′s structure is a little unusual), and the NSF grant that funds my work is winding down, so the travel funds are depleted. That means I have to make it to Raleigh on a graduate student budget, and I need a little help.

But first, you might be wondering why a scientist would attend a conference about science communication. As I’ve written previously, I’m committed to a career as a practicing scientist-who-communicates (as opposed to a career in science communication) . Here’s why it’s important to me to participate, particularly as I prepare to finish my PhD:

As a publicly-funded scientist, I strongly believe that I have a responsibility to communicate my research with the public (that’s one of the reasons I started tweeting and blogging). I’ve spent the last six and a half years of my graduate career learning many valuable skills, but communication skills aren’t typically included in a scientist’s toolkit. Also, we know that scientists engaging with the public is an important part of increasing public science literacy, as well as diversity within the STEM (science, technology, engineering & math) fields.

At ScienceOnline2012, I’ll not only be learning how to be a better communicator, but also be part of the community that is shaping what science communication looks like in the future– and I believe that scientists should be a part of that conversation. I’ll also be networking with professional science writers and other scientist-communicators, and learning about other forms of new media (I’m especially interested in podcasts!). My goal is to incorporate these skills into my own lab and in the classroom, as I include science communication and new media in student training, lab outreach, and teaching.

I’ve already registered for ScienceOnline2012, and my goal is to crowd-fund $600 for my travel expenses. In return, I will not only tweet and blog the heck out of #scio12, but I have decided to take a page out of Sarcozona‘s book (she successfully crowd-funded a trip to ESA last year): for every $100 I raise, I will interview an awesome science communicator for The Contemplative Mammoth! Feel free to suggest someone in the comments section.

If you would like to make a contribution, I’ve come up with three options:

1) Send a donation via Amazon Payments to jlgill [at] wisc [dot] edu

2) Send a donation via Paypal to jlgill [at] wisc [dot] edu (as I am not a non-profit, I can’t have a donation button).

3) You can send a donation via the postal service to my work address on my website.

Many, many thanks to those of you who help me get to ScienceOnline2012! And, speaking of gratitude, I want to express my most sincere thanks to those of you who have shown your support for The Contemplative Mammoth, and to an incredibly welcoming community of scientists and science writers on Twitter. I can’t wait to meet many of you next month!

Update: So far, I’ve raised $120 $170 $210 $250 $265 $365 $465 $505 towards Yay! I’ve reached my goal of $600! That means I’ll be interviewing six people at ScienceOnline2012! Many, many thanks to my donors, most of whom I’ve never met (but am looking forward to meeting in a few weeks!).

And then a scientist joins the discussion.

The conversation tends to devolve from here, turning into a debate and (often) ultimately a debacle. Scientists are notoriously difficult to argue with– for one, they’re so sure they’re right! This is true of most people, though– and it’s probably true of you. What makes it especially frustrating to argue with a scientist is the jargon they use; if you don’t speak their language, you’re probably not going to change their mind.

I have created this handy guide to arguing with a scientist precisely for people like you! I’ve collected the most commonly used phrases and translated them into everyday English, so that the next time you argue with a scientist, you’ll not only better understand their arguments, but you might learn how to make yours better, too.*

Sample size: Sample size, often referred to by scientists as “n” (as in, “number”) is how many observations went into a particular study. In other words, if you interviewed twenty of your co-workers on whether donuts should be provided at meetings, then your sample size would be 20 (or, “n = 20″). For scientists, sample size is huge (er, pun intended)– the bigger the n, the better. If you only asked two of your colleagues in your survey, you might randomly pick the two that hate donuts, and that would result in donut-less meetings! Scientists talk about sample size in arguments all the time, to convince you that they have more “data” (evidence) to support their claim than you do. For example, if you say that there is one study that proves that global warming is natural, but the scientist cites 10,038 studies, their n = 10,038 and yours  = 1. You’re definitely going to need a bigger sample size to win this argument! Sample size could refer to the number of subjects in a test (like the number of interviewees in the donut study) or even the number of studies themselves (maybe you conducted two sets of interviews at two businesses). So why is more, well, more? Bigger sample sizes give you a better sense of the natural range your data might have (aka opinions on donuts), and you’re less likely to draw the false conclusion that people hate donuts because you didn’t ask enough people.

Made with the Einstein Chalkboard Generator (click for link).

Anecdotal evidence: This is related to sample size. An anecdote is a story– like that one about the time that Aunt Millie’s poodle ate four loaves of fruitcake and, well, you get the idea. Scientists are not fond of anecdotes, as a general rule. They’re not very, well, scientific (more on this later). Basically, your anecdote about your chain-smoking uncle who lived to be 98 is like having a sample size of 1, and it doesn’t hold up to the hundreds of studies that show a link between cigarettes and cancer. In fact, your anecdote isn’t even as good as a sample size of 1 in this case, because the anecdote is a story, and not a scientific study (remember, each study tends to have a lot of subjects, so really your sample size is closer to 0.001). Anecdotes are messy– they aren’t set up like proper experiments, with regulations and control groups. Your anecdote may be a really powerful story, and it may help to illustrate a point, but it won’t win an argument with a scientist. When a scientist says, “the plural of ‘anecdote’ isn’t ‘data’” , this is what they’re referring to: a story isn’t sufficient evidence to draw a strong conclusion. Scientific studies may have problems, but they’re still better evidence than a story (I may have just made up that story about Aunt Millie’s poodle, and you’d have no way of knowing!). If you want to convince a scientist, you have to show them real evidence.

“That’s not scientific!” A common critique from scientists is that something isn’t “scientific.” By this, they don’t mean that you didn’t come to your conclusion using test tubes and wearing a lab coat. Really, for something to be scientific, it needs to be done according to the Scientific Method– that is, you formulate a hypothesis (an idea about how the world works) and you test that hypothesis by experimenting or collecting data, and you repeat this process as much as possible until you better understand whatever it is you’re trying to learn more about. Obviously, this is tricky for a non-scientist to do, but you can limit yourself to arguing about things that are scientific! For something to be scientific, you have to be able to take a measurement of something– that is, it has to be “quantifiable” (which has the same root as the word “quantity”). Things like how much you love your cat or whether the Flying Spaghetti Monster made the universe are not quantifiable, because they can’t be measured. Therefore, they are not scientific. That doesn’t mean you can’t have real feelings or meaningful discussions about them, it just means that those discussions are not in the realm of Science. You can make an emotional, moral, or philosophical argument when debating with a scientist, but just be really clear that you’re using a different kind of criteria. For example, we can talk about whether it’s possible to clone Neanderthals to see if they had speech, and we can talk about whether cloning Neanderthals is morally and ethically right.

Peer review: Scientists just love to use peer review in arguments! You can show them all the well-written blog posts, internet surveys, magazine articles, interviews, and anecdotes you want, but scientists put much more stock in peer reviewed studies. By “peers,” they mean fellow scientists. This may at first sound like something of a Good Old Boys’ Club, where scientists sit around and pat one another on the back for yet another brilliant deduction. This is actually not the case! Scientists conduct experiments and collect data, write up that data into an article, and try to get that article published in a scientific journal (basically, a magazine for scientists that mostly only publishes the results of experiments). Many, many of these papers get rejected every day! Scientists can be very hard on one another, and often disagree on major ideas and finer details of methods, interpretation of data, or theories. Sometimes, experiments are just plain badly designed, or the conclusions are too strong and not supported by enough evidence. When a paper comes out in a journal after peer review, it means it’s been refereed by at least a few scientists in the field. Peer review can have its problems (you sometimes get an inappropriate editor, or perhaps easy or harsh reviewers due to luck of the draw), but that’s where sample size comes in. If you have a lot of peer-reviewed papers (a large sample size!), chances are that this effect evens out and you can come to some real conclusions.

To win an argument with a scientist, you need to cite peer-reviewed research. A website with a poll linking vaccines to autism is useless; anyone could have made up the data, for example, and your results are skewed to only those people visiting that website already (so, a specific subset of the population). With peer review, you at least know that the publication has undergone scrutiny by other experts. What’s more, once the paper comes out in a journal, scientists see it and continue the discussion by doing their own studies. If a scientist disagrees with a paper, they may even submit a letter to the journal explaining why. But with blog posts, or magazine articles– even well-written and well-researched ones– the rules are different. One problem is that non-scientists (maybe you!) often don’t have access to peer-reviewed articles (many are subscription-only), and so you can be at a disadvantage. But if you can cite peer-reviewed studies, or ask the scientist to, then your arguments will be much stronger. When you read a blog post or an article, check to see if they’re citing good sources, too.

Bias: When arguing with a scientist, you want to avoid using lines of evidence that come from what could be called “biased” sources–that is, sources that may have a vested interest in holding a different conclusion than that drawn from the evidence. For example, if you were trying to argue (still) that cigarettes don’t cause cancer, you wouldn’t want to back up your argument with a website run by a tobacco company. The tobacco company has an agenda (to sell cigarettes) and are therefore unlikely to share information that detracts from this agenda. “But what about scientists?” you might argue. “Isn’t the pursuit of science a sort of agenda itself?” Sure, and scientists do have their own biases (which could be the subject of an entire blog). However, at the end of the day, whether (most) scientists make money doesn’t depend on their research results. Publicly funded scientists (those who fund their work from research grants that come from taxpayer dollars) get paid to do research, not to come up with particular conclusions. Ultimately, peer-reviewed climate research is just more trustworthy than research paid for by an oil company, for example. If you want to win an argument with a scientist, be very careful about the kinds of evidence you’re citing, where it came from, and who paid for it.

Consensus: Scientists often use “consensus” as the ultimate argument-winner, and for good reason. Scientific consensus is the collected opinions of all scientists, and not just the one you’re arguing with. There can be one or two scientists who disagree (just like there are a handful of people who don’t believe the Holocaust happened), but if the vast majority of scientists have reached consensus, it means that there is so much evidence in support of an idea that it’s basically a guaranteed thing, based on state-of-the-art knowledge. Remember that scientists often disagree, have debates, argue, and may spend entire careers fighting one another. The reason scientists generally reach consensus with other scientists (and not, say, your UFO abudction group) is because other scientists also use the Scientific Method, publish in peer-reviewed journals, and are informed by some of the basic principles I’ve explained above. Consensus is a powerful thing, and in some ways it’s amazing that scientists ever reach it at all! In other words, if a scientist says that the consensus is that you are wrong, there is probably nothing you can do. Unfortunately, saying, for example, “well, the consensus among my abduction support group is that UFO’s did build the Pyramids!” isn’t going to sway them, because you probably a) don’t have peer-reviewed studies, and b) rely on anecdotes (see above).

If you’ve struggled with arguing with scientists, it’s understandable! After reading this guide, you may realize that scientists can have very different worldview than many people, due to their training and the tools they use– In fact, there are entire branches of study that are involved with understanding scientists’ outlook and how it’s changed through time. Having a different worldview can make scientists especially tricky to argue with, but it can be done (which is proven by they very fact that they argue among themselves all the time!). Scientists may seem like robots, but they in fact make mistakes, have emotions, and are biased, just like everyone else (including you!). Just remember that 1) behind the jargon, scientists are human beings, and most of them can really be very nice people, and 2) you don’t have to be a scientist to successfully argue with one!

*Insert many caveats about generalizations and oversimplifications here. This is meant to be an introductory guide, not a thorough treatise. Historians and philosophers of science will likely cringe, but the goal here is the edification of the layperson.

In case you’ve been off the grid, all good people everywhere are in an uproar because Nature (yes, that Nature) published a stupefyingly sexist piece called “Womanspace” within its “Futures” section.  Although the iambic pentameter falters in places, the article effectively evokes a fictional Odyssey within which middle-aged male protagonists receive a vision from on high that simultaneously reveals and explains the mutually incompatible destinies of men and women arising from their inherently different shopping neurophysiology.  The reader is never really sure if Icarus ever successfully returns to Ithaca with Penelope’s underwear, but as we all learned in high school, it’s the journey that matters.  A few days later, Editor Henry Gee supplied this ringing endorsement: “I’m amazed we haven’t had any outraged comments about this story” and within a couple more days his readers began to comply.  Last I heard Nature doesn’t give a crap about what its readers think.

Because so many smart men and women have so effectively created a traffic jam on the moral High Road*, the only road less-travelled is the Low Road and the anonymous author is always up for a short-cut.  This is further justified because the self-declaredly “patient” exchange over said article has devolved into:

[Reader] I’m pissed off.

[Rybicki] I didn’t intend to piss anybody off.

[Reader] But I’m still pissed off.

[Rybicki] But I didn’t intend to piss anybody off.

[Reader] But I’m still really pissed off.

etc.

Since writing a letter directly to Nature is like throwing a rock at a tank, the anonymous author decided that she would try to pony up to the Mammoth’s bar with a different, more anonymous if you will, perspective regarding objections to “Womanspace”.

1.  It’s confusing that it was published in Nature. The anonymous author anonymously surveyed the entire anonymous population and revealed that >75% of respondents believe that “Womanspace” was actually published within “A Letter to the Right Honorable the Lord Chancellor, on the Nature and Interpretation of Unsoundness of Mind, and Imbecility of Intellect**” by John Haslam (late of Piggysquill Commons) in 1823.  Moreover, explicitly showing subjects both Nature’s website and print versions did nothing to convince them otherwise.  This is exactly the type of literary confusion that every author should go out of his way to avoid.

2. It doesn’t cite its sources***.  My casual research via the National Archives revealed that several passages of  “Womanspace” had been directly lifted from transcripts of “The Benny Hill Show” and “Hee Haw”.  Because the creators of those shows are far too ashamed of what they wrote when they were young-and-needed-the-money to file a law suit, we must stand on the side of intellectual property on their behalf.

3. It’s misleading.  We all know that Americans score in the negative numbers on World Geography tests.  Rybicki’s article exacerbates this dismal state-of-affairs in that readers, upon seeing the author’s affiliation, conclude that South Africa must be some unreal fictional place like the Republic of Gilead, the Slough of Despond, or the City of Dis****.

4. It isn’t funny to our generation.  This is the really unforgivable sin that’s been committed, in the anonymous author’s mind.  How hard it is to run one’s gibberish by just one man-on-the-street and use your smirk-o-meter to determine if there’s even one iota of humor somewhere on the page before creating the 7 separate PDFs required by Nature’s fast-track submission process?  If the anonymous author can figure this out (and her schooling was acquired while sitting on a haystack scratching out sums on a broken shingle while seething with envy over bigcity things like real chalk, heated classrooms and the use of baseballs instead of corncobs), then surely a seasoned intellectual veteran like Rybicki should have.

5. It isn’t funny to any generation.  The immediate reaction of several scientists whom I admire was that the article would have been a downright hootenany in 1950.  Based on her 87-year-old dad’s skepticism of this claim, the anonymous author performed public readings of “Womanspace” in 350 assisted-living facilities across the U.S.  In all but one instance, this performance was met with dour silence and/or the switching off of hearing aids.  Explosive laughter occurred exactly once, but upon questioning, the subject became adamant that she had “drifted off” and was reliving her sister’s 1945 bachelorette party at the time.

6. The author has retreated into a persecuted petulance, instead of manning up and addressing his readers’ criticisms.  Aside from assuring interested readers that his “crap” has been “blown out of the water”*****, the author has offered no new insight regarding the article since its publication.  Instead, he has repeatedly asserted that “Womanspace” is not true, not funny and not worth reading.  The anonymous author admits that he’s absolutely right, and exceptionally convincing, on each of these points.  However, the same cadre that created a generation of women who had to fight hard to play Science with the boys should not just cower in the dugout when we show up with our gloves.  And our bats.

Footnotes:

 *summarized here

**readily available via Project Gutenberg:

***First pointed out by the brilliant Paul Anderson here

****look it up.

*****see Rybicki’s comment on this page, where he no doubt alludes to the acceptance of his next contribution to Nature.

About the author:

The author lives anonymously in Hawaii and cranked out this drivel in about twenty minutes.  Although she hides behind an opaque cloak of anonymity, her initials are AHJ.  The anonymous author requests that comments along the lines of “Righty-ho!” and “Tru-dat” be kept brief, as Rybicki and his cronies usually require a significant amount of space to recycle their tired old rejoinders that basically amount to “Aww … now you girls are just being mean …”.

Today’s post is by an anonymous guest blogger, who submitted this in response to a Twitter conversation today that began with a discussion of the recent spate of “Don’t get a PhD!” essays by tenured faculty inspired by the poor job market. I lamented that the process of getting hired isn’t necessarily transparent, for a host of reasons (i.e., how many jobs a person applies for, gets interviewed for, and ultimately offered). Our guest blogger obligingly supplied this hilarious post for your reading pleasure and general edification. I’ll be following up soon with my thoughts on the “Don’t get a PhD!” essays, and in the meantime, feel free to share your application-to-interview-to-hire ratio in the comments. Some of us stubbornly working towards a PhD would love a better sense of what’s typical.

So they’ve called you and scheduled an interview. Congratulations! Get ready for a couple of days of fun with your prospective new faculty. This could be the start of a whole new chapter in your professional career.

1. The Golden Rule of Interviewing: The time to decide if you want the job, is after they offer you the job. The advice below is designed to help you get the job in the first place.

2. When you schedule the interview, tell them how delighted you are and how much you are looking forward to this. They are putting themselves out there by inviting you, and they don’t want to be rejected any more than you do.

3. What to pack? Advice: 1. Better to overdress than underdress; and 2. You want them to remember YOU, not your clothes. Wear something formal but forgettable.

4. Don’t forget to show interest in the local area. It’s effective to wax ebullient about how you view moving to rural Minnesota as a dream-come-true since your personal interests include not being anywhere near a theater, operahouse, symphony or having an escalator in town*.

5. Wear a catheter. Your interview will consist of 1-2 days of 20-minute meetings scheduled back-to-back with absolutely anybody they could cram onto your schedule. There will be no bathroom breaks, no water breaks, and no insulin injections. This is exacerbated by the fact that every single one of the people you meet will want to take the 20-minutes as their coffee break**. In the end, most of the interview will be a blur, except that you will be able to find the coffee cart from any point on campus blindfolded.

6. Point 5 above reminds the author to tell you Not To Wear Heels. Heels make everyone uncomfortable in a scientific setting and I don’t know why. It’s just part of that vast incomprehensible world of feminine frivolity from which we are excluded when we gaze through that first microscope. The author is not sure whether this is good or bad.

7. Never underestimate just how freaking weird these 20-minute meetings can be. Sometimes you will be compulsively talked at as you walk in the door, through the meeting, and you will shut the door on someone still talking as you leave. Sometimes you will share a stony silence with your host for 20 minutes. Many times you will be marched through laboratories, presumably to ogle shiny machines. Ogle them. Ogle them like it is the last glimpse of human civilization you will ever get. The sorry soul who is your tour guide traded her youth and health to become chained to that beeping machine, and is it so much to ask of someone to witness this reality***?

8. People will ask you personal questions. Including questions that are illegal to ask during interviews. Stuff like: “Are you married or are you a lesbian?”, “Do you plan on having children?” and “Would you move here if we offered you the job?” and stuff that’s a lot more crazy than that. The author is telling you now so you won’t be surprised.

9. When people ask you illegal questions, you are not obligated to answer truthfully. Well, that’s the anonymous author’s position anyway. Responses like: “I’m celibate and I’m sterile” and “All my crap is in a moving van on its way here right now” are no harm no foul as far as the author is concerned. I recommend that you don’t get miffy. Nurse your wound and complain about these illegal questions on a blog anonymously many years later after you’ve had the sweet sweet revenge of living well.

10. Play up the young, fresh and cheerful angle. Universities need infusions of optimism more than they need overhead, if you want to know the truth. Academics are such endlessly relentless complainers that you can often distinguish yourself conspicuously just by intimating something (anything) hopeful and positive. Sincerity optional.

11. Here’s the Secret Key to Everything: In every department there’s one dismal job that everyone has been avoiding for years. It could be anything. It could be offering a required course, it could be leading an alumni field trip, it could be writing the annual newsletter — anything. If you can figure out what this job is, and state forcefully that you want to do it, the position is pretty much yours right there. Not only do you not mind teaching “Science 101 for the Declaredly Uninterested”, all the events of your life have been catapulting you towards doing it. You will never feel fulfilled until you can put on your C.V. that you negotiated putting a vending machine in the department’s front office. You get the idea.

12. The Seminar. News flash: none of these people have read any of your papers and maybe two of them have read your application and recommendation letters. Everyone will make their decision based on your seminar. Honestly, at the end of 35 years, the success of your whole career comes down a few one-hour seminars. So make it good. No pressure, though.

13. After your seminar you will be taken to the Interview Dinner. This will take place at a fancy restaurant with a hybridized group of the faculty most interested in your subject area and the faculty most interested in a free meal. A high degree of overlap between the two groups bodes well for your chances of being hired.

14. Order something simple for dinner. The author always goes with scallops because they seem classy, taste good and come in bite-size pieces. It’s hard to pontificate about the future of science while gumming a fistful of baby-back ribs or while standing to gain leverage over a rack of lamb.

15. Don’t drink at the Interview Dinner. Your hosts will. They will drink like men who’ve been stuck in the Sahara Desert for ten years. This is because the fancy dinner will be at the university’s expense. Years of pent up anguish suffered at the cold sinewy hand of the administration can be soothed by about $30 of Sauvingnon with astonishing efficiency. It’s actually a good deal for the alumni.

16. Don’t get into a car with any of your hosts after the Interview Dinner. See point 15 above. Chirp happily about how there’s nothing like a good long walk in the forty-below to ruminate over all the fascinating science to which you’ve been exposed that day.

17. Bring bubble bath. After the dinner, you will get so damn depressed you won’t know what hit you. Everything you worked so hard for and sacrificed so much for — your deep and raw need for acknowledgment – everything just played itself out in a single hour of seminar theater followed by a cold plate of scallops and a weak iced tea. When you get back to your hotel room, the existential emptiness of it all will hit you like an 18-wheeler descending Donner Pass. A long bubble bath and a DVD of old Jackass episodes is the only constructive way to deal with this.

18. If they are going to offer you the job, you’ll know. You’ll just know. It’s like meeting your soulmate for the first time. Except your soulmate won’t ask you to attend weekly meetings for the next 10 years during which your senior colleagues will complain bitterly about things that happened before you were born.

19. The time after the interview is like a break-up. Don’t dwell on it. Don’t stalk the department on FB and try to figure out who else is interviewing. Move on with your life. Do your best to forgive and forget. Then if you ever hear from them again, it will be a pleasant surprise.

20. Repeat as necessary.

Footnotes

*The anonymous author can say this because she grew up in rural Minnesota and she loves it there, even though she was 12 when she first visited a building with more than three floors.

**In the good old days (when the anonymous author was young and innocent) the 20 minutes could be used as a smoke-break. Many a hypothesis was expounded by the author’s shivering frame while Professor Marlboro Man got his fix.

***Maybe the anonymous author runs a lab.

About the author: The author anonymously lives in Hawaii and she’s published a bazillion papers though none of them in Nature anyway. Her dad says, “honey, I love you but you should probably stop trying to be funny and go back to work”. He’s been saying that since she was in second grade.

PhD Comics by Jorge Cham

But! I’m not alone. There are hundreds of us all over the world, staring at screens until we dream about R code or PCR results, and getting tendonitis in our wrists from typing or operating an auto-pipetter. And we will laugh hysterically at comics that only a subset of people would find funny. Let’s laugh, cry, write, compile, analyze, and triumph together! I’ll be tweeting using the hashtag #PhD2012 in the coming year, and I hope you’ll join me (or, start your own #PhD2013, etc.). If nothing else, we can have fun procrastinating networking together.

P.S. Did you know I’m a finalist for the 2011 Blogging Scholarship? Check out the blogs and vote here (and, you can vote once every 24 hours).