I am very pleased to note that an my article on the impact of social media and especially of blogs and Twitter on peer review in chemistry in particular and science in general has just come out in a special issue of the journal 'Accountability in Research'. This project has been in the works for almost a year and I have spent quite a bit of time on it. The whole issue is open access and it was made possible by the dedicated and generous efforts of my colleague and friend, the eminent historian of chemistry Jeff Seeman. I am privileged to have my article appear along with those by Roald Hoffmann, William Schulz, Jeffrey Kovac and Sandra Titus. All their papers are highly readable.
Here in a nutshell is what I say. I have had a very dim view of Twitter recently as a vehicle for cogent science communication and rational debate, but in this article I find myself full of praise for the medium. This sentiment has been inspired by the use of Twitter in recent times for demolishing careless science and questioning shoddy or controversial papers in the scientific literature. In my opinion the most spectacular use of Twitter to this effect was Nature Chemistry editor Stuart Cantrill's stark highlighting of 'self-plagiarism' in a review article published by Ronald Breslow in JACS in 2012 (I hold forth on the concept of self-plagiarism itself in the article). As I say in my piece, to my knowledge this is the first and only instance I know in which Twitter - and Twitter alone - was used to point our errors in a paper published in a major journal. If Cantrill's analysis was not a resounding example of peer review in the age of social media, I don't know what is.
I have had a much more consistent and positive views of blogs as tools for instant and comprehensive peer review, and thanks to the vibrant chemistry blogosphere that I have been lucky to be a part of for almost eleven years, have witnessed the true coming of age of this medium. There is no doubt that peer review on blogs is here to stay, and in my article I address the pitfalls and promises inherent in this development. One of the most important concerns that a naive observer would have regarding the use of blogs or Twitter for peer review is the potential for public shaming and ad hominem attacks - and such an observer would find plenty of recent evidence in the general Twittersphere to support their suspicions. Yet I argue that, at least as far as the limited milieu of chemistry blogs is concerned, the signal to noise ratio has been very high and the debate remarkably forward-thinking and positive; in fact I think that, by and large, chemistry blogs could serve as models of civil and productive debate for blogs on more socially or politically contentious topics like evolution and climate change. I am proud to be part of this (largely) civil community.
What I aim to do in this piece is to view the positive role of Twitter and blogs in effecting rapid and comprehensive peer review through the lens of three major case studies which would be familiar to informed observers: the debacle of 'arsenic life', the fiasco of hexacyclinol and the curious case of self-plagiarism in the Breslow 'space dinosaurs' review. In each case I point out how blogs and Twitter were responsible for pointing out mistakes and issues with the relevant material far faster than official review ever could and how they circumvented problems with traditional peer review, some obvious and some more structural. The latter part of the review raises questions about the problems and possibilities inherent in the effective use of these tools, and I muse a bit about how the process could be made fairer and simpler.
Due to the sheer speed with which blogs and social media can turn our collective microscopes on the scientific literature and the sheer diversity of views which can be instantly brought to bear on a contentious topic, there is no doubt in my mind that this new tier of scientific appraisal is here to stay. In my opinion the future of completely open peer review is bright and beckons. How it can complement existing modalities of 'official' peer review is an open question. While I raise this question and offer some of my own thoughts I claim to provide no definitive answers. Those answers can only be provided by our community.
Which brings me to the crux of the article: although my name is printed on the first page of the piece it really is of, by and for the community. Hope there will be something of interest to everyone in it. I welcome your comments.
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Showing posts with label Breslow. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Breslow. Show all posts
Would Ron Breslow's dinosaurs be typing this post?
The paper would have remained an interesting chemistry curiosity about the origin of life. It could have even served to remind the public that the origin of life is chemistry's Big Question, had it not been for two lines at the end of the piece:
"An implication of this work is that elsewhere in the universe there could exist life forms based on D amino acids and L sugars...Such life forms could even be advanced versions of dinosaurs, if mammals did not have the good fortune to have the dinosaurs wiped out by an asteroidal collision, as on Earth. We would be better off not meeting them."
What was interesting was that when I first came across the paper, I spent about two seconds on this line and moved on. The line is an amusing attempt at humor. You usually don't see humor in a technical paper, but in fact I am all for it; I think we need to spice up our otherwise dry scientific literature with the occasional joke. The content of the paper obviously had nothing to do with dinosaurs; it was about a specific technical chemical puzzle in the origins of life. And nothing would have come out of it had not the ACS PR office created a sensationalized news piece wrongly centered around these two lines. Scant attention was paid to the scientific substance of the paper, and it didn't help when other popular venues like The Huffington Post also questioned Breslow about it and received the following answer:
"From there, Breslow makes the jump to advanced dinosaurs. But why might extraterrestrial life be in that form? “Because mammals survived and became us only because the dinosaurs were wiped out by an asteroid, so on a planet similar to ours without the asteroid collision it is unlikely that human types would be there, more probably advanced lizards (dinosaurs),” Dr. Breslow told The Huffington Post in an email."
This set of events led to some unfortunate consequences. For one thing, the undue emphasis on dinosaurs at the expense of homochirality was another nail in the coffin of the public communication of chemistry. Here was a chance to explain to the public why the origin of life is chemically fascinating, but instead the chemical substance got overwhelmed by the precipitate of publicity surrounding dinosaurs. If the ACS is wondering why chemistry is having such a PR problem, now would be the time to look in the mirror.
The situation was exacerbated by more serious matters. Following a tip from some commentators, Stu Cantrill of Nature Chemistry looked up two old Breslow papers on the same topic and found out an extreme case of self-plagiarism; most of the paper seems to have been copied verbatim from the other sources. Breslow should not be blamed for inserting that little joke at the end - it was the media which sensationalized it - but he cannot be excused for the gratuitous self-plagiarism.
That's about what I want to say about this unfortunate episode since others have extensively covered it, but I do want to focus on Breslow's reply to The Huffington Post. Some have chided him for it, but the statement is actually not as absurd as it sounds since Breslow is asking a famous, age-old question in evolutionary theory: If the tape of evolution were re-run, would it again produce dinosaurs, Breslow and ACS editors? Or in other words, how predetermined is evolution, and how dependent is it on accidents? This question is a profound one , since if the answer is even an affirmative "yes", it has serious implications for not just science but for theology and philosophy and the whole puzzle of human existence.
Stephen Jay Gould was a powerful advocate of contingency in evolution, and his argument is not surprising to see. Evolution has been shaped by so many quirks of environment and the fate of individual organisms and species, that it would be naive to think that chance did not play a role in it. A single piece of wood accidentally drifting apart and carrying a few species on it to an isolated island can sculpt the evolution of that species. And we know for a fact that more massive events like volcanoes and earthquakes certainly did this. In fact it was geologist Charles Lyell's descriptions of such seismic events that started Darwin down the path to evolution and natural selection. It seems thus that if one could hypothetically run "what if" scenarios, it's very unlikely that anything approximating modern humans and dinosaurs could ever arise.
But this answer is not as obvious as it sounds. The biologist Simon Conway Morris has put forth a competing scenario in which certain universal features of evolution guarantee the presence of common adaptations during the evolution of species. This argument is based on what's called "convergent evolution" which essentially refers to the existence of common solutions to diverse evolutionary problems. A typical example would be all kinds of mammals, fish, amphibians and reptiles whose bodies are adapted to swimming. In most of these creatures you see similarly shaped, streamlined bodies, muscles and bones which are suited for swimming. Another principle concerns homologous structures (and not convergent evolution, as a commentator reminded me) like the digits of the hand, whose basic plan seems to be conserved across species. Indeed, homologous evolution provide some of the strongest pieces of evidence for common evolutionary origins. Thus Morris's argument is that even if the evolutionary tape were to run again, something similar to humans, dinosaurs, frogs and eagles (although the details would certainly differ) would be seen if the process were allowed to keep to itself for a few billion years. This interpretation acquires even greater significance when applied to humans; would such an intelligent, successful and self-centered species as Homo sapiens have evolved in an alternative evolutionary universe?
There is a lot of interesting discussion to be had about this topic. It's equally fascinating when applied to chemistry and leads to similar questions. For instance, what are the chances that the foundational compounds of life - DNA, RNA, amino acids, sugars, ATP - would have formed had evolution been left to run again with different tweaks and quirks of fate? Personally I find the questions somewhat easier to answer in case of chemistry since the formation of many of these compounds is governed by relatively simple energetic arguments. ATP's express purpose is to make otherwise unfavorable reactions possible by driving them downhill through high-energy bonds, and if not ATP it's hard to see how some other chemical compounds performing the same function could not have evolved. A great example of an attempt to answer these questions is seen in Frank Westheimer's classic paper "Why Nature Chose Phosphates?" in which he points to the unique properties of phosphate that make it such a dominant source in life's workings, both in metabolism and heredity.
Breslow's question is therefore quite sensible and its implications are fascinating to ponder. How would 2012 have looked like had the dinosaurs not been wiped out by an asteroid? Would they still have been alive and would humans have had the unfortunate fate of co-existing with them? Would they be as smart as humans? Naturally such scenarios would have profoundly affected the evolution and character of our civilization. Or would the dinosaurs have precluded the rise of Homo sapiens, perhaps by nipping our scarce population in the bud and making us extinct? Or would they have become extinct themselves through some other cause, perhaps extreme climate change? How indeed would planet earth have looked like had it still been ruled by dinosaurs?
Naturally we don't know the answers to these questions. But Breslow's little joke at the end, while sounding silly, inadvertently asks a very important and thought-provoking question. Too bad it was all obscured by the charges of self-plagiarism.
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