My Truck Bumper Sticker: “Entropy was just a concept… Until I got a cat!”

After spending the previous two weekends immersing myself in the Science Network’s Beyond Belief 2006 video’s online, watching Richard Dawkins, Ann Druyan, Richard Sloan and other monsters of science discuss science and religion, I was totally psyched for this event. I was also very cognizant of the fact that I hadn’t updated my blog in forever, and I’m really 50% science blogger and %50 political, film critic, and book reviewer… and I don’t even have a comments section on my blog, so there’s no real reader-feedback. Of course, a comments section on this blog would be like nipples on males, pointless. Well, that’s not entirely true, they do feel nice when they get hard no matter your gender and–

Ryan Somma’s Official Nametag!

Anyways! Staying jazzed for the event, I updated my blog with my long-procrastinated post on embryonic recapitulation, packed my new Cingular 8525 PDA/Phone/Camera, burned six hours worth of NPR’s Science Friday to keep me energized, and set off for UNC Chapel Hill.

Will Raymond of Citizen Will, who pronounced my blog “e-dio-nexus,” which I realized was probably more valid than my own pronunciation (eye-dio-nexus), but then I’m a reader, not a speaker. Will was very friendly and sociable throughout the various conference sessions, and after checking out his blog, I realized he’s one of those people we’re happy to have in society who acts on their conscience.

NCSB 2007 Free Stuff

I didn’t realize until later I was supposed to put colored buttons on my nametag identifying what characteristics brought me to the conference (ie. blogger, educator, scientists, journalist, etc). I’ll be sure to properly label myself next year. The bag of goodies was awesome, and included free copies of nature. The Lancet, American Scientist, The Scientist, Natural History, endeavors, Seed, and a copy of “The Best American Science Writing 2006. All of these magazines are wonderful, and the book is the type of fox-scientist reading I really enjoy.

Anton Zuiker

There was also a 5 DVD set of science reports from PBS’sThe News Hour, which rocks, and free t-shirts for the Public Library of Science, which is “committed to making the world’s scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource.”

Anton Zuiker of mistersugar opened the conference and made the welcoming remarks. He was followed by Bora Zivkovic of A Blog Around the Clock, who continued the introductions with “Science Blogging 101.” Bora has also compiled a collection of the year’s best science blog posts into a book titled “The Open Laboratory.”

“Promoting public understanding of science” Dr. Hunt Willard

Dr. Hunt Willard followed with a session titled “Promoting public understanding of science,” where he covered how science writing should strive to get the public to visualize science and explain why science matters. Science issues affect us all, whether we care or not. He brought up a topic recently tingling imaginations online of cloning Neanderthals and what we could learn from them, but then, he asks, what do you do with the Neanderthal once you’re done with it? Send it to a sanctuary like we have for primates? These kinds of complex ethical questions are another means for communicating science. An mp3 of Dr. Willards talk is found here via Audio Activism

Dr. Janet D. Stemwedel of Adventures in Ethics and Science led a discussion on science blogging titled “Adventures in Science Blogging.” Just a few high points of her talk were to cover the strengths of blogs as a medium, more permanent than a conference, quicker feedback than journals, and more back and forth than press releases. She also covered the importance of understanding what your reader’s know, what they want to know, and using blogs to have a conversation and less of a lecture. She ran through a wide variety of intriguingly-titled blog posts from a wide variety of sources, which she has kindly posted to her blog for readers, and her power point presentation can be found here.

Terrell Russell claimID.com

Free lunch was sponsored by JMP Software and BlogBurst. I was pleased to find my recent conversion to vegetarianism didn’t leave me hanging. Luck put me in the vicinity of one Terrell Russell, a PhD Student at SILS, co-founder of claimID.com and the creator of Cloudalicious, where you can visualize how tagclouds change over time. I couldn’t help but find myself drawn into a conversation he was having with another attendee about identity-management online, how the things we post online are permanent thanks to caching, and how the ignorant posts we make as youth are out there long after we’ve wised-up. I was reminded of a post I made one night a few years back while completely tanked that still comes up when googling my name. I was also reminded of my new information-age habit of googling the names of girls I date to learn more about our compatibility.

Rosalind Reid “Illustrating Your Posts”

Then I was off to see Rosalind Reid, Editor for American Scientist, for a session on “Illustrating Your Posts.” Here I learned all about how my habit of taking photos from other sites and posting them on this blog without permission is illegal–just like the banner at the top of this page! Isn’t that interesting? Through the ensuing discussion, I learned of many sources for royalty-free photos or cheap science photos for my blog such as David Goodsell, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Government Websites, istockphoto, and Cornell’s News Archive.

I followed this by attending a session on “Teaching + Science” hosted by Adnaan Wasey from PBS’s The Online NewsHour,

Reed A. Cartwright and Burt Humburg of the Pandas Thumb (don’t know who’s who in this photo)

which provides online exhibits and lesson plans for educators. An interesting debate broke out early into this session, when Laurence A. Moran of Sandwalk questioned how Newshour knew their reporting was accurate, which led into a brief debate on accuracy in blogging. With Dr. Moran taking the position that blogging hasn’t been all good because we have people posting on topic outside of their realm of expertise (cough. cough.) and there’s no accountability. The guys from Pandas Thumb took the counterpoint that we can’t get so wrapped up in accuracy that we don’t produce anything. It provided a great deal of food for thought that I will put into a blog post somewhere down the line.

Professor Steve Steve of the Pandas Thumb

The session continued with bloggers and public school teachers exchanging links. Here I learned about such online resources as
NCSU’s Science House educational outreach organization,
The Globe Programme “linking students and scientists in 109 countries,” and Verizon’s

“Truth in science can be defined as the working hypothesis best suited to open the way to the next better one.”

     - Konrad (Zacharias) Lorenz (1903-89) Austrian ethologist. [Nobel prize for medicine, 1973]

I’ve caught some criticisms over the past year and a half since I posted this image in my article summarizing evolution, where I erroneously accepted Ernst Haeckel’s theory of “Embryonic Recapitulation,” or that an organism’s embryonic development mimics the evolutionary development of those organisms leading up to it. Stephen J. Gould, in his book Ontogeny and Phylogeny, tackles the very complex reasons for why this theory fails. Haeckel’s drawings, shown here, were not faithful to their subjects, and exaggerated the similarities between the different embryos while minimizing their differences. As we can see with the following comparison between Haeckel’s drawings and actual images:

Lacking a scientific background, it’s important for me to revisit and correct inaccuracies I post on this site, especially as this site was intended as a place for me to flesh out my understanding of science and my worldviews. When I found out Embryonic Recapitulation theory was wrong, I was stunned; after all, it makes perfect sense. Haeckel’s deception aside, human embryos really do go through stages where they resemble segmented worms, fish, amphibians, and reptiles. Consider this quote from Carl Sagan, which primed me to believe in the ER theory:

“By the third week . . . it looks a little like a segmented worm. By the end of the fourth week . . . it’s recognizable as a vertebrate, its tube-shaped heart is beginning to beat, something like the gill arches of a fish or an amphibian have become conspicuous, and there is a pronounced tail. It looks something like a newt or a tadpole…. By the sixth week . . . the eyes are still on the side of the head, as in most animals, and the reptilian face has connected slits where the mouth and nose eventually will be….

By the end of the eighth week the face resembles a primate’s but is still not quite human.”


     - Carl Sagan


     ”Is It Possible To Be Pro-Life and Pro-Choice“. Parade Magazine, 22 April 1990

It can’t simply be coincidence that embryos go through these stages of resembling their more primitive ancestors. It cannot be unreasonable to look at these stages in embryonic development and see increasing layers of complexity. What’s wrong with drawing such conclusions from these observations? As Encarta notes:

Such similarities formed the basis for German biologist Ernst Haeckel’s biogenetic law, which states that an animal’s embryonic development recapitulates its evolution. Although scientists now know that this law does not hold absolutely, Haeckel’s idea has remained influential.


     - “Vertebrate Embryos” from Encarta

So I hit the books– Ummm… Okay, so I hit the Internet, and tried to understand how I was taken in by this seemingly plausible, however incorrect, theory. This was very difficult, I quickly found, because Creationist disinformation has so overwhelmed the Internet for this topic.

Haeckel has become a sort of rhetorical Holy Grail of Intelligent Design advocates, keeping with their misguided reliance on disproving evolution as a means of “proving” intelligent design. They revel in his “hoax” drawings, and delight in using words like “totally discredited” to describe his theory, but these are unfair characterizations.

The major problem with Haeckel’s theory is that embryonic development does not trace a clear-cut path through our genetic lineage. For instance, were Recapitulation Theory absolutely true, then we would see the human embryo go through a distinctly chimpanzee-like stage as it developed through our two species’ common ancestor, but this does not happen. Instead, despite our genes being 95-98.5% identical, our embryonic developments take distinctly different paths between week seven and 19, when the genes believed responsible for development of the cerebral cortex kick into action in humans.

Another problem with Haeckel’s theory is that it fails to account for Analogous structures, similar traits in different species that evolved independently. The eye is a trait that (sort of) evolved in more than one species separately. Wings evolved separately in birds, insects, bats, and dinosaurs.

Despite Creationist oversimplifying his theories and unfairly characterizing their validity to discredit Haeckel’s legacy and evolution in general, the fact remains that the scientist contributed greatly to the lexicon of Evolutionary Theory and provided the framework for our current understanding of the Evolutionary Process. We continue to employ this understanding of evolution to our modern research. Consider this observation on a whale missing-link recently found by archeologists:

Janjucetus throws new light on the evolution of baleen whales. Such whales were already known to have originated from toothed whales; modern baleen whales go through a stage as embryos in which they have teeth. (Emphasis mine)


     - “Ancient whale ‘truly weird’” nature.com

Haeckel’s theory is wrong not because the evidence available to him did not support his theory, there are inarguable similarities in embryonic development across species that are evidence of evolution, but because later facts contradicted his theory. “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” was simply the first draft of a theory based on Comparative Anatomy. The fact remains that embryos of different species do resemble one another, just as mature representatives of species may share traits. Haeckel’s specific theory fails because the reality is much more complex. Evolution is a series of increasing layers of complexity in a very broad and oversimplified sense, but the details of evolutions’ means are a myriad of mechanisms and strategies. Evolution is not a tree growing ever upward, but a complex web of interconnections.

Homologous structures, Vestigial Organs, and similarities in embryonic development are all part of the overwhelming evidence supporting Evolutionary Theory. It doesn’t matter that Haekel’s specific theory was wrong, because he was on the right track. Just homo sapiens are the latest and greatest version of the primates, our modern understanding of Evolutionary Theory is the latest and greatest over Ernst Haekel’s. Humans will continue to evolve and our understanding of reality will continue to evolve with us.

Further Reading:

Wikipedia article on “Recapitulation theory”