Here I am, minding my own business, looking at my local newspaper, and just reading what is happening locally. Then, out pops this profound quote of the week that is just gobsmacking.
The first line of the story starts out like this:
CHICO — A graduate student researching local rattlesnakes has something to prove, but he isn’t yet sure of what.
Sounds like some climate science RFC’s I’ve read. But wait, there’s more. Get a load of the punchline:
Like I said, gobsmacking. I have no desire to quash any study of rattlesnakes, but the sheer arrogance of the statement about publishing a scientific paper “even if it’s garbage” was just mind blowing. I hope Mr. Woodruff uses better judgement in the future. For now, I’ll just assign it to the youthful indiscretion file that I’m sure every one of us has.
Full story here.
I am reminded though, of the Seinfeld episode.
(SarcOn) Here we are up to our wazoo in political stupidity and incalculable debt; here we are about to go bankrupt and become slaves to the ChiCom Empire, and you laugh at and pick on a poor, defensless, 25 year old grad student? You people are incredible! Just listen to yourselves! Why I’ll bet you’ll all soon be out making speeches in the Park, stuffing mail boxes, phone canvasing the countryside, conducting bake sales, supporting scout troops, camping with your kids, chopping wood, planting veggies, canning jam, and.. gag, gag… praying and going to services. Is there nothing you value? Really? What is the country coming to anyway? Laughing at grad students! Is nothing off limits? Soon, I have no doubt, you will be rioting in the streets and burning courthouses because the USGovt wants to give free universal healthcare to everyone on the planet. You people are really sick.(SarcOff)
Other than unfortunate language about garbage this seems a reasonable experiment:
Thesis: That the isolation of the rattlesnake population over the last 50 years has led to a modification of the snake’s venom
Procedure: Collect venom from a representative sample of rattlesnakes and compare serology to known populations.
Discussion: past observation of species differentiation due to population isolation
Data: detailed breakdown of the serology reports
Analysis: show key marker changes or lack of changes.
Conclusion: whatever the data showed confirm, refute or inconclusive to the original thesis statement.
Looks like a good paper to me.
First point: “Garbage” is printed in parentheses, which indicates that the writer of the article modified whatever the researcher actually said, so we’re discussing a word, in depth, that he probably didn’t even say. (My money would be on “sh*t”, by the way.)
Second point: With the internet, there’s no excuse for not publishing negative results, even if they’re not solidly peer-reviewed, and publication of negative results is needed in order to counteract the effect of journals only tending to publish the “outliers.” In a better world, the negative results would have already been published, and the outliers would then be known for what they are, a random result that happened to hit the tail of the distribution of sample outcomes. Instead, such outliers become accepted scientific wisdom for a generation or so before eventually succumbing to reality as future attempts at confirmation result in reversion to the mean.
By the way, I had no clue about any of this until I started reading WUWT, along with the many helpful comments accompanying most of the articles. Thanks.
I suspect that the venom will not have changed much and current antivenoms will prove to be sufficient to the task, but we will not know for sure until such a study is completed. So it is good science even if it finds no change. I do wonder if there might be some other behavioral or physical changes to these snakes and if he is doing any other observations besides the venom. How long does a species need to be isolated before we see observable variation? This study could be a minor piece of the answer to that question if done thoroughly.
We regularly have visiting rattle snakes joining the indigenous population in our county, and few counties are as isolated as ours. How do they get here? They hitch a ride on log trucks. This guy needs to nail down “isolated population” before he assumes it. That involves DNA tests. If he lacks funding (DNA tests are very expensive), his research on venom chemicals will most decidedly be garbage. Sounds like his advisor needs to go back to school.
Let us not be too harsh with Mr.Woodruff. The genesis and success of What’s Up With That owes much to the publishing of garbage in the field of Climate Science.
Looks like all of the low level fruit has already been picked.
The science of herpetology was one of the first “hard” sciences to succumb to lefty nonsense, but those who are interested in rattlesnakes seem to be a bit more committed to science. Just the fact that this young man not only recognizes, but is intrigued enough to comment on, the nature of the modern trends in publishability, speaks volumes.I don’t think most leftie pseudoscientist recognize that their garbage is garbage, but consider it a worthy and noble effort in framing the narrative.
well collected data is never garbage … if he shows the venom to be no different then he has contributed something to science just as he will if he shows a difference … either wau the only way his work would be garbage is if he is not doing good sample gathering …
I assume he means garbage is a disproved theory … which of course it is not … it is science but may not make you rich/famous …
Oh, BTW, the possibility of habitat fragmentation encouraging specification in rattlesnakes has been a subject of research for awhile. A good example being some of the large desert parks in the Phoenix metro area. I am pretty sure that agriculture would not provide a significant population barrier.
The arguments about assuring that the snakes actually are isolated are exactly right. One must first isolate that variable before the rest of the experiment is worth doing. One can’t test for variability caused by isolation if the subjects aren’t really isolated!
Thinking about it, I don’t see that there would be much variability in this instance: the prey is still small birds and rodents, the territory is still open land (albeit with neat rows of monolithic species of plants), and the successful hunting techniques would likely be the same. There could possibly be some variation in coloration as a different camouflage scheme would probably be more successful. Prey species should actually be more plentiful as rodents love fields of grains.
I wonder if anyone has radio tagged a rattlesnake to see how far it travels in its life. It would be funny if one were to find that the snakes travel from the coastal range to the Sierras over the course of a couple of years. Likewise it would be strange to find that all rattlesnakes are isolated populations traveling no more than a few miles from their birthplace.
@Philip Peake
Fortran is actually very good for computational science. For example, GAUSSIAN, a very good quantum chemistry package that sells for like +20k dollars, is written in Fortran.
Owen
July 20, 2011 at 10:05 am
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Its been a few years, and I am at work so can’t really verify, but I am pretty sure that most Crotalus sps. tend to stick around the area that they were born, traveling less the 10KM. I also seem to remember that only about %1 live to breeding age.
Welcome to academia. Notice that this was a STUDENT who said this….an associate professor seeking tenure would never be so bold.
Keep turning the rocks over, Anthony, you’ll keep finding snakes, I promise.
DesertYote:
Thanks, that is what I suspected, which really does put a bit of a damper on this whole experiment. If in general these snakes are within a fairly limited gene pool, one wouldn’t expect a short isolation to significantly impact something as complex as synthesizing neurotoxins, though they must travel somewhat for mating, because one wouldn’t expect a stable genetic environment if all the potential mates were too closely related. Oh well, I’ll just have to add it to the list of things I know that I don’t know and will find out when I stumble upon a good article.
“Our Sun varies over many time scales: There are Maunder minimums, which do not occur for many centuries or longer and have caused “mini ice ages” even as recently as during the 17th century.” – NASA
http://kepler.nasa.gov/Mission/QuickGuide/faq/
answer to faq A6.
Might be wrong, but i think nasa ‘popular media writings’ stating solar activity causes mini ice ages, e.g the previous LIA, are rare and collectable?
Well I agree his attitude and statement are disturbing. But, the first thing that occurs to me on reading this is shouldn’t something being publishable be independent of the results? In other words shouldn’t a paper saying basically “I conducted an experiment to determine if x was true and the result is my experiment failed to tell me.” Be a publishable result. The pressure to only report success somewhat distorts the process.
DesertYote says: “The science of herpetology was one of the first “hard” sciences to succumb to lefty nonsense, but those who are interested in rattlesnakes seem to be a bit more committed to science….”
A very serious young lady at a party assured me with a straight face that rattlesnakes don’t bite humans. I did the best I could to disabuse her of this ludicrous and dangerous notion. Undoubtedly some professor of Herpetology with a sadistic bent or a liberal outlook had told her this. Ah, the joys of Academe!
his arrogance is astounding
He has a great career ahead of him as a climate scientist.