…which led to the (in)famous Scopes Trial. On May 5, 1925 John Scopes was charged and subsequently tried, found guilty, and fined $100 for teaching Evolution, a violation of Tennessee’s Butler Act. The trial became a battleground for science vs. religion, evolution vs. creationism, and the interpretation of the Establishment Clause and Freedom of Speech in the US constitution.

I published a blog post two years ago, on the 85th anniversary of the trial, July 2010. Today  marks the 87th anniversary of the arrest, so it seems like a good occasion to repost. Especially since there is still some work needed in the area of teaching evolution:

Source Wikimedia Commons. Credit: John D. Croft. Based on: New Scientist Magazine 2006 191:2565 p11

To follow is the original post: “The Scope(s) of Substance”,  from July 29, 2010. Still relevant, I believe:

Bora Zivkovic, the BUCA (Best Universal Common Ancestor) of science bloggers has tagged this blog with with a Blog of Substance award. As a grateful recipient of this award I am obligated to do two things:
1. Sum up my blogging motivation, philosophy and experience in exactly 10 words.
2. Pass this award on to 10 other blogs.

Of course, I never do anything without researching it first, because I am such an awesome scientist, or detail-oriented !@#*^, depending on whether you ask me or my students. So I looked up “substance” in the Merriam-Webster dictionary. Here is what I found:

Main Entry: sub·stance
Pronunciation: \ˈsəb-stən(t)s\
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English, from Anglo-French, from Latin substantia, from substant-, substans, present participle of substare to stand under, from sub- + stare to stand — more at stand
Date: 14th century

1 a : essential nature : essence b : a fundamental or characteristic part or quality c Christian Science : god 1b
2 a : ultimate reality that underlies all outward manifestations and change b : practical importance : meaning, usefulness
3 a : physical material from which something is made or which has discrete existence b : matter of particular or definite chemical constitution c : something (as drugs or alcoholic beverages) deemed harmful and usually subject to legal restriction

4 : material possessions : property

Hmmm… 2a and 2b seem to be relevant. Perhaps 3c should be too, as my blogging could be construed harmful to other more productive activities, which I am obviously not engaged with at this moment. Actually you, gentle reader, are not engaged in more productive activities either right now. Be that as it may, the word substance does seem to have an air of permanence about it, which is contrary to the perceived ephemeral nature of blogging. Bora is actually one of the people who are doing something about making blogs less ephemeral by publishing The Open Laboratory collection (full disclosure: I’m published in the 2009 book) and by supporting science bloggers, blogging and activities wherever they may be. This makes me so happy to be among Bora’s chosen 10 (OK, 11, he cheated a bit) among the hundreds of blogs he must be reading. Thanks Bora!

I do wonder though, eighty-five years from now, how many of us science bloggers would be remembered for our blogging? Well, maybe not as individuals, but what kind of impact are we having now, and how much will it remain 85 years from now? Hopefully as a collective, science bloggers are impacting the understanding of science, which is one of the reasons I am blogging. Hopefully, we do have substance, as a group if not as individuals.

Why eighty-five years? Well, the answer to that brings me to the main topic (substance?) part of this post, which is the anniversary of the Scopes trial. This month, 85 years ago, a schoolteacher in Tennessee was convicted of a high misdemeanor for violating the State of Tennessee’s Butler Act which prohibited the teaching of evolution in any of the state’s public schools and universities. He was fined $100.

PUBLIC ACTS

OF THE

STATE OF TENNESSEE

PASSED BY THE

SIXTY – FOURTH GENERAL ASSEMBLY

1925

________

CHAPTER NO. 27

House Bill No. 185

(By Mr. Butler)

AN ACT prohibiting the teaching of the Evolution Theory in all the Universities, Normals and all other public schools of Tennessee, which are supported in whole or in part by the public school funds of the State, and to provide penalties for the violations thereof.

Section 1. Be it enacted by the General Assembly of the State of Tennessee, That it shall be unlawful for any teacher in any of the Universities, Normals and all other public schools of the State which are supported in whole or in part by the public school funds of the State, to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.

Section 2. Be it further enacted, That any teacher found guilty of the violation of this Act, Shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and upon conviction, shall be fined not less than One Hundred $ (100.00) Dollars nor more than Five Hundred ($ 500.00) Dollars for each offense.

Section 3. Be it further enacted, That this Act take effect from and after its passage, the public welfare requiring it.

Passed March 13, 1925

W. F. Barry,

Speaker of the House of Representatives

L. D. Hill,

Speaker of the Senate

Approved March 21, 1925.

Austin Peay,

Governor.

Seems incredible at this day an age… or maybe not so incredible given recent events in Louisiana.

William Jennings Bryan, counsel for the prosecution, attacking evolution

The city of Dayton as the organ grinder profiting from the Scopes trial

The trial, which originated as something of a publicity affair for the town of Dayton, Tennessee, quickly became a battleground for evolution vs. creation. In the short term, the trial actually increased the number of anti-evolution bills proposed in different state legislatures in the US. In the long term, however, Tennessee vs. Scopes is seen as a watershed moment in the teaching and public acceptance of evolution, and has had long terms ramifications in the US and internationally. Scopes himself spoke only once at the trial, was not called to testify, and only had this to say when granted a statement after sentence was passed:

Your honor, I feel that I have been convicted of violating an unjust statute. I will continue in the future, as I have in the past, to oppose this law in any way I can. Any other action would be in violation of my ideal of academic freedom — that is, to teach the truth as guaranteed in our constitution, of personal and religious freedom. I think the fine is unjust.

Now that is substance.

Back to the award; I still have some conditions to fulfill:

1. Sum up your blogging motivation, philosophy and experience in exactly 10 words.

¹Blogging ²motivation, ³philosophy ⁴and ⁵experience ⁶cannot ⁷be ⁸summed ⁹in ¹⁰ten ¹¹words.

2. Pass this award on to 10 other blogs

Given the 10ⁿ growth rate of tagged blogs, chain-letter fashion, I wonder about how this Blogging with Substance award has originated. Search engines was no help, as so many blogs are now tagged with the Blogging with Substance. If someone has an answer, let me know. Anyhow, here are my 10 tags, based on what I am reading nowadays, ephemerality of blogging substance, and all that jazz. Tough choices though, so many good blogs out there:

1. Blue Collar Bioinformatics

2. Sandwalk

3. Thoughtomics

4. The Loom

5. Mike the Mad Biologist

6. Genomics, Evolution and Pseudoscience

7. Circle of Complexity

8. Buried Treasure

9. The Tree of Life

10. Mystery Rays form Outer Space

Final word: if this post seems a bit confused, and you are not sure that you are “getting it”, well, that’s this post’s substance.

A quick post for International Women’s Day: how did the gender symbols originate in biology? What do ♀ and ♂ actually stand for?

The answer starts in antiquity, when planets and gods were almost synonymous. Religious rites (at least in Europe) were also associated with the working of metals. Thus, each heavenly body was associated with a metal, a god and provided with a proper symbol, thus:

1. Sun (gold) 2. Moon (silver) 3. Saturn (lead) 4. Jupiter (tin) 5. Mars (iron) 6. Mercury (mercury, duh) 7. Venus (copper) After woodcuts by Friz Kredel, published in Stearn 1962.

But how did the symbols of Mars (iron) and Venus (copper) migrate to describe sex in biology? It seems obvious to us that of all symbols, that of the god of war be assigned to male, and the goddess of love to female (stereotypes nonwithstanding), but who was the first who did that?

The answer can be traced to one of the greatest biologists of all times: Carl Linnaeus. He is better known for being the father of modern taxonomy: Linnaeus  is the reason that we uniquely identify organisms using genus and species names in Latin grammatical form, a system known as Linneael binomial nomnclature. From Homo sapiens to Escherichia coli, we all owe our scientific names to Linnaeus.

But Linnaeus was also the one to appropriate the planet symbols to biology. In his notes, he used the Venus symbol as shorthand for female and the Mars symbol as shorthand for male. He also used Saturn to denote woody plants, the Sun for annual plants and Jupiter for perennials. As for gender, the Mercury symbol was used by Linnaeus for hermaphrodite plants. However, that symbol’s meaning has changed over the years, at least in scientific shorthand, and is now used to denote virgin female (e.g. in genetic analysis).  Mars was also used by Linnaeus, somewhat confusingly, for biennial plants.

But how did the symbols actually originate? The accepted thought now is that they were derived by the Roman from the Greek initial letters for the planets / deities. So Phosphoros  Φωσφόρος (Greek: “Morning Star” or later the planet Venus) was abbreviated to Φκ and Thouros (Mars) to θρ further contracted over the years, by metal workers, astrologers and alchemists to the modern symbols.

Kronos (saturn); Zeus (Jupiter); Thouros (Mars); Phosphoros (Venus) Stilbon (Mercury). After Stearn 1962

William T. Stearn (1962). The Origin of the Male and Female Symbols of Biology Taxon, 11 (4), 109-113

Well, actually, he posted the following on the Usenet group alt.hypertext. For those of you who are too young to remember Usenet, think of it as a working version of Google+.  Scroll down to message 3, in which the first web-page server is announced.

But not only academia, and not only in the present day.

Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci was, among many other things, a civil and military engineer.  Marc Cenedella has this report on Da Vinci’s resume, sent to the Duke of Milan, who apparently was in need of some military hardware.  The resume, such as it is, is truly a great piece of self-marketing. Note how LDV tailors his resume to the Duke’s needs. He does not list his artistic achievements (which were many by the time), but only those achievements and skills that fit his prospective employer’s interests. My observations are in boldface.

“Most Illustrious Lord, Having now sufficiently considered the specimens of all those who proclaim themselves skilled contrivers of instruments of war, and that the invention and operation of the said instruments are nothing different from those in common use: I shall endeavor, without prejudice to any one else, to explain myself to your Excellency, showing your Lordship my secret, and then offering them to your best pleasure and approbation to work with effect at opportune moments on all those things which, in part, shall be briefly noted below.

1. I have a sort of extremely light and strong bridges, adapted to be most easily carried, and with them you may pursue, and at any time flee from the enemy; and others, secure and indestructible by fire and battle, easy and convenient to lift and place. Also methods of burning and destroying those of the enemy. [Before the legendary British WWII Bailey Bridge]

2. I know how, when a place is besieged, to take the water out of the trenches, and make endless variety of bridges, and covered ways and ladders, and other machines pertaining to such expeditions.

3. If, by reason of the height of the banks, or the strength of the place and its position, it is impossible, when besieging a place, to avail oneself of the plan of bombardment, I have methods for destroying every rock or other fortress, even if it were founded on a rock, etc.

4. Again, I have kinds of mortars; most convenient and easy to carry; and with these I can fling small stones almost resembling a storm; and with the smoke of these cause great terror to the enemy, to his great detriment and confusion. [Battlefield smoke].

5. And if the fight should be at sea I have kinds of many machines most efficient for offense and defense; and vessels which will resist the attack of the largest guns and powder and fumes.

6. I have means by secret and tortuous mines and ways, made without noise, to reach a designated spot, even if it were needed to pass under a trench or a river.

7. I will make covered chariots, safe and unattackable, which, entering among the enemy with their artillery, there is no body of men so great but they would break them. And behind these, infantry could follow quite unhurt and without any hindrance. [Yes, LDV invented the tank! Note also the combined infantry / armor tactics].

8. In case of need I will make big guns, mortars, and light ordnance of fine and useful forms, out of the common type. [Not only can I do it, I can do it cheaply, by re-purposing your existing ordinance.]

9. Where the operation of bombardment might fail, I would contrive catapults, mangonels, trabocchi, and other machines of marvelous efficacy and not in common use. And in short, according to the variety of cases, I can contrive various and endless means of offense and defense.

10. In times of peace I believe I can give perfect satisfaction and to the equal of any other in architecture and the composition of buildings public and private; and in guiding water from one place to another. [Dear Duke: you want to hire me even if you are not fighting, or you will want to keep me after your wars are over.]

11. I can carry out sculpture in marble, bronze, or clay, and also I can do in painting whatever may be done, as well as any other, be he who he may. [Another peacetime skill.]

Again, the bronze horse may be taken in hand, which is to be to the immortal glory and eternal honor of the prince your father of happy memory, and of the illustrious house of Sforza. [Catering to the employer's vanity. Gotta know how to do it right...]

And if any of the above-named things seem to anyone to be impossible or not feasible, I am most ready to make the experiment in your park, or in whatever place may please your Excellency – to whom I comment myself with the utmost humility, etc.” [I realize make big claims, but I can back them up. Just get me an interview.]

edw513 at Ycombinator.com has adapted this resume to fit current market needs:

If it worked for Leonardo da Vinci, maybe it could work for me. The next time I’m looking for a job, I’ll try this:“Most Illustrious Proprietor, Having now sufficiently considered the specimens of all those who proclaim themselves skilled developers of applications of business, and that the invention and operation of the said programs are nothing different from those in common use: I shall endeavor, without prejudice to any one else, to explain myself to your Company, showing your Management my secret, and then offering them to your best pleasure and approbation to work with effect at opportune moments on all those things which, in part, shall be briefly noted below.

1. I have a sort of extremely light and strong functions and modules, adapted to be most easily ftp’d, and with them you may pursue, and at any time combine them with others, secure and indestructible by standard mean time to failure of hardware and denial of service, easy and convenient to compile and catalog. Also methods of unzipping and storing the data of the customers.

2. I know how, when a website is besieged, to shard data onto the cloud, and make endless variety of mirrors, and fault tolerant disks and RAIDs, and other machines pertaining to such concerns.

3. If, by reason of the volume of the data, or the structure of the btrees and its indexes, it is impossible, when conducting a search, to avail oneself of sub-second response time, I have methods for benchmarking every process or other function, even if it were interpreted, etc.

4. Again, I have kinds of functions; most convenient and easy to ftp; and with these I can spawn lots of data almost resembling a torrent; and with the download of these cause great terror to the competitor, to his great detriment and confusion.

5. And if the processing should be on the desktop I have apps of many machines most efficient for data entry and reporting; and utilities which will satisfy the needs of the most demanding customers and users and consumers.

6. I have means by secret and tortuous scripts and modules, made without leaving tracks, to generate source code, even if it were needed to run on a client or a server.

7. I will make secure firewalls, safe and unattackable, which, entering among the hackers with their utilities, there is no body of crackers so great but they would break them. And behind these, software could run quite unhurt and without any hindrance.

8. In case of need I will make big properties, methods, and collections and useful forms, out of the common type.

9. Where the operation of compiling might fail, I would contrive scripts, functions, routines, and other parameter driven processes of marvellous efficacy and not in common use. And in short, according to the variety of cases, I can contrive various and endless means of data entry, reporting, and storage.

10. In times of low revenue I believe I can give perfect satisfaction and to the equal of any other in maintenance and the refactoring of code public and private; and in guiding data from one warehouse to another.

11. I can carry out code in Javascript, PHP, or C, and also I can do in network administration whatever may be done, as well as any other, be he who he may.

Again, the intranet app may be taken in hand, which is to be to the immortal glory and eternal honor of all your customers of happy memory, and of the illustrious house of Google.

And if any of the above-named things seem to anyone to be impossible or not feasible, I am most ready to make the experiment in your data center, or in whatever place may please your Businessperson – to whom I comment myself with the utmost humility, etc.”

Today is the 366th birthday of Sir Isaac Newton. Formulator of the three laws of motion, the theory of gravity, inventor of the first reflecting telescope, theory of color, calculus (with due credit to Gottfried Leibniz), the generalized binomial theorem, and president of the Royal Society.

Newton in a 1702 portrait by Godfrey Kneller

All which ties in directly to retail, and biodiversity. Huh?

Co-operative Farms (UK) recently bought 1,000  rare and endangered apple varieties, with colorful names like Great Expectations, Fairie Queen, Northern Spy, Forty Shilling, Duck’s Bill and Bloody Ploughman. (I wonder how the last name came to be; actually, maybe I shouldn’t.) This also includes Isaac’s Newton’s Tree: the apple variety cultivated from the descendants of the tree which inspired Newton to formulate the Theory of Gravity. Many of those apples were dessert apples, but some fell out of favor the strains were no longer grown, threatening to disappear.

Co-op Farms are bottling them up as the “Truly Irresistible Tillington 1,000″ pressed apple juice. I think it is great that a retail chain is funding crop diversity and finding a way to make some money in the process. Although with 7,500 cultivars worldwide, apples as are not exactly under an extinction threat. But there is also the matter of food variety, cultural heritage and, of course, preserving the history of physics. Or bottling it up, whichever the case may be.

Also, fruit, including apples, are important in the small-arms industry:

In the Hatena story about symbiosis, I posted the following picture drawn by Ernst Haeckel:

Lichen, from "Art Forms of Nature" / E. Haeckl

Beautiful!  In this day and age of imaging, high resolution photography, and molecular graphics, we forget that scientific drawing was a skill as necessary to life scientists  as microscopic imaging, or molecular graphics is today.  Indeed, biology was very much a descriptive discipline in the 19th century, and being able to articulate your findings –in words as well as in art — was as valuable a skill as the ability to posit a hypothesis and then design an experiment to test it.  Possibly even more valuable in some circles. Scientists won medals and were awarded promotions based on their drawing skills. A naturalist’s drawings could not be inaccurate, nor could the images be occluded or embellished, they had to be very precise. But that does not mean that there was no room for artistic input.  Those could be found in the hues, the lighting, the composition, point of view angles and arrangement of the subjects drawn. Haeckel definitely had his distinctive style: part Romantic, with a Gothic undercurrent. In Art Forms of Nature he would take a series of subjects in the same genus, and arrange them in the contemporary style tessellated form, like this (all pictures are from Wikimedia Commons and are in the public domain):

[Show as slideshow]

[View with PicLens]

Darwin himself was so impressed by Haeckel’s drawings that he wrote they were “..the most magnificent works which I have ever seen, & I am proud to possess a copy from the author“. Haeckel himself was a staunch supporter of evolution by natural selection, and held Darwin in great esteem. It very brave stand taken by a young assistant professor in Jena in Germany  at a time when evolution itself was already quite accepted in many scientific circles, but Darwin’s theory of natural selection was still hotly debated. Haeckel served to popularize evolution, and his popular lecture series in Jena attracted hundreds of listeners. His beautiful drawings serve as a frontispiece to his scientific writings, serving not only to illustrate, but to attract his readers.

His was a troubled soul. The love of his life, Anna Sethe Haeckel died of a sudden illness at a young age. He remarried, but never recovered from his broken heart, calling Anna the “only true love” of his life. While being a popular advocate of natural selection, he also attracted a lot of ire form his peers and the public. He was strongly opposed to any form of organized religion, even more so following his personal tragedy. His was the religion of Spinoza and Goethe — that of monism. Unlike Darwin, Haeckel zealously recruited Evolution to a cultural fight, and has caused a massive backlash from established religious circles that is lasting to this very day. He was  Romantic, in the sense that he was influenced by such as Goethe and Humboldt, seeking underlying unities in nature and in life, a quest which may have lead him to his greatest  — yet  false — achievement.

The central medusae are Desmonema annasethe. Haeckel named them after his late wife Anna Sethe. The medusae tentacles reminded him of her "long flowing hair".

Haeckel is best known for formulating the now-rejected Biogenetic Law which states that the embryonic development of an individual organism (its ontogeny) followed the same path as the evolutionary history of its species (its phylogeny). The Biogenetic Law, or Law of Recapitulation (ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny) was in the books until the late 20th century. Although it is pretty clear that the phases an embryo goes through do not match the species history, it is still an idea that is circulating in popular culture and pseudo-scientific circles. Haeckel was accused at his time and later of forging the famous embryo sketches, an accusation that, if it weren’t for the support of Darwin and other prominent scientists of his time, would probably have caused him to lose his job. The forgery vs. overzealous interpretation debate continues to this very day, and unfortunately serves  in very a warped interpretation as an argument against evolution. The creationist reasoning goes something like: “Haeckel lied –> the law of recapitulation is founded on a fraud –> all evolution is a fraud”.  Not a very smart argument, since recapitulation was never a pillar of natural selection.

In 1997 Michael Richardson and colleagues published an article titled:  “There is no highly conserved embryonic stage in the vertebrates: implications for current theories of evolution and development”.  In the article, they compared photographs of embryos to Haeckel’s illustrations, and found gross discrepancies, which they interpreted as probable fraud.The other side of the story is that Richardson et. al left the yolk sacs in, (Haeckel removed them) and compared their photos to a derivative work rather that Haeckel’s drawings where the embryos are actually quite different from each other.  In 2002 they published another paper, where they explored Haeckel’s ideas as well as his drawings, and concluded that although deeply flawed, it is hard to show fraud especially since Haeckel himself was not the strict recapitulationist that his later followers were.

Haeckel, E. 1874. Anthropogenie: Keimes- und Stammes-Geschichte des Menschen; From left to right: fish, salamander, turtle, chicken, pig, cow, rabbit, human. The uppermost row of illustrations represents a conserved stage across Vertebrata

I’m not getting into this discussion, really, which sometime seems like a 150 year old flame war on fark.com (Let’s see if this link gets my blog farked, hehe). My take is that an amazing artist and naturalist such as Haeckel was seeing from his own heart’s desire, but so were a lot of other embryologists, way down to  my biology teacher in high school. (I dropped the developmental biology course in college, something I regret now, so I don’t’ know what went on there). The seduction of an all-encompassing elegant theory explaining embryonic development has caused many to go, in some form or another, for the Biogenetic Law.

Man, but his drawings are amazing. I can’t wait for my mail order of  Art Forms of Nature to come in. and I wonder how Haeckel, if he had lived today, would have injected from his artistic talent into macromolecular drawings such as this:

Illustration of aquaporin, a membrane molecule that controls the flow of water to the cell. The central mesh in A and B shows the water flow. ischer G, Kosinska-Eriksson U, Aponte-Santamaría C, Palmgren M, Geijer C, et al. 2009 Crystal Structure of a Yeast Aquaporin at 1.15 Å Reveals a Novel Gating Mechanism. PLoS Biol 7(6): e1000130. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1000130

Update: Art forms of Nature in PDF and HTML is available here.

Richardson, M., Hanken, J., Gooneratne, M., Pieau, C., Raynaud, A., Selwood, L., & Wright, G. (1997). There is no highly conserved embryonic stage in the vertebrates: implications for current theories of evolution and development Anatomy and Embryology, 196 (2), 91-106 DOI: 10.1007/s004290050082

RICHARDSON, M., & KEUCK, G. (2002). Haeckel’s ABC of evolution and development Biological Reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, 77 (4), 495-528 DOI: 10.1017/S1464793102005948

Robert J. Richards (2008). The Tragic Sense of Life

Ernst Haeckl Kunstformen der Natur (in HTML and PDF format, German).