So, right now we are in a time of rapidly changing environments.  The stability that Ireland saw from about 1994 until 2008 is now in shreds and the population (super-organism) must respond in whatever way it can.

So, how is it likely to respond?

Evolutionary theory tells us that this organism will begin to evolve rather quickly, much more quickly than it was evolving in a time of stability.

The analogy I could use is the analogy with Darwin’s finches.  Darwin got to the Galapagos islands and discovered that, unlike on mainland Ecuador, where there was a single species of dull brown finch, there were at least 13 or 14 different finch types on the islands.

This presented Darwin with a quandary.  Given tectonic plate movement, the islands were relatively new.  Perhaps some millions of years old.  Whereas, the mainland was part of Gondwanaland which was around since God was a child (ahem). How, then, could this happen?  The NEWER land mass had the greater diversity?  Surely there should be much more diversity on the land mass that had been around for longer?

Well, the explanation is known as ‘positive selection’.  When competition for scarce resources started to occur for the small population of finches that must surely have arrived on the island relatively recently, then they mutations that would otherwise not have provided any advantage to a finch would now become very useful indeed.  In Darwin’s words, these small advantageous changes would have been “preserved and added up”.

The net result - competition for meagre resources on the island resulted in diversification at a rapid rate.  The first finches could only make use of one kind of resource, but within a relatively short period of time, all available resources were utilised.

So, changed environments promote evolutionary diversification on geological timescales.  Can the same happen in a short period of time in a different context?

I suspect the answer is that yes, the exact same features will manifest themselves, though the nature of these features are obviously different.

People losing jobs is analogous to resources drying up.  The stable food supply of 2008 (the building industry, apparently) is no more.

NUI Maynooth have never spun-out more companies, than they did in 2009.  The rate of patenting in Ireland has increased massively - up by 18% in 2009, from the previous year (though, worryingly, still much fewer than we should have if we were to hit the EU average).  We are responding to the environmental change, just as evolutionary theory would predict.

But, there is one other thing to think about.

A rabbit cannot evolve into a bird.

It just doesn’t have the capacity - what we might call ‘pre-adaptation’.

A rabbit can evolve so that it has greater speed to escape predators, or it can evolve the ability to resist disease or the ability to use a different food source.

It cannot evolve into a bird though.

There is evidence that we are adapting at a rapid rate, but not at the rate we need to respond.

Look at our broadband service nationally - rubbish.  This is the smart economy.  This is the pathway for rapid evolution. And it doesn’t exist.

The Irish superorganism wants to evolve.  It is making the moves.  It is diversifying.  It is adapting. It wants to fly. But it is stuck on the ground like some kind of myxomatosing rabbit, nibbling nettles.

Scrap Saturday had a skit in the early 1990s and it involved Dermot Morgan parodying Charles Haughey’s disappointment at the fact that his Fianna Fail colleagues lacked intelligence, with the line “How can I soar like an Eagle, when I am surrounded by Turkeys”.

Until we get national high-speed broadband (50 Megs per house), we are stuck on the ground, with limited opportunity to evolve.

Rapid evolution is the only solution.

It’s a good slogan.

I see in the news today that Louis Vuitton has recorded a staggering 11% jump in sales for the first quarter of this year.  Also in news today, the Restaurants Association of Ireland has appealed for the minimum wage to be lowered so that poorly-paid people can be paid less.

What does this mean?  Well, for some time now, Wall Street has been going through the roof while main street has been going through the floor.  The super-wealthy now are earning money from companies that are more ‘efficient’ than they were before the economic crisis.  This means they can make more profit.  When I say efficient, I mean that ordinary workers are now working their socks off, turning up to work when they are sick, doing stuff that they wouln’t normally have to do just to keep their jobs.  This causes a trickle-up effect for the super-wealthy who now can buy more brown handbags thanks to this efficiency.

The restaurant people don’t want to pay their staff badly.  Why would they? Unhappy staff really are not a help in a restaurant.  Unhappy waiters? Nein Danke. Just ask Manuel. However, ordinary folk just don’t have the money to go to restaurants as often as they used to and restaurants need to cut costs or go extinct.

Not that this is an issue for the indifferent LV customer.

This is a classic shell game.  Divert attention away from what is actually happening.  Let the private sector worker tear the public sector worker apart, let fear build, because fear is important in this game and sit back and watch while everything becomes better and better for those who actually matter.

The question to ask is “Cui bono?” - To whose benefit.

It will take me a minute to explain what I mean, but this is how I see Ireland at the moment.

We have pitched ourselves as a high earning and high tech economy.  This hasn’t happened quickly enough and although we are moving in that direction, we are not world leaders, therefore something had to give.  We were building too many houses, this much is true, but if we were actually top-of-the-heap primary producers, then it wouldn’t matter much, we could all have a couple of houses and it would be OK.

However, we really weren’t primary producers.  Our software industry was engaged in large part in software localisation, not in developing the IP for being the software producers (exceptions being HAVOK, etc.). Our chemicals and pharmaceuticals industries are all foreign-owned and the profits are lightly taxed and repatriated to the mother country (they provide employment and for that we are grateful).  The rate at which we patent technology and the rate of indigineous start-ups is/was not in line with our ambitions and perceptions.

And in that environment, our investments in bricks and mortar were a distraction.  We lacked the ambition to invest in technology and perhaps, given our history, we had an attachment and a faith in the solidity of owning property that eventually turned houses into a celtic crack cocaine.

Which leads us to where we are today.  Salaries are dropping, but more fundamentally, the fear of losing a job is at an all-time high.  The stakes are high on this one.

In 1990 if you lost your job then it was a bit of tough luck and desperately disappointing, but perhaps things might improve.

Today if you loose your job, the family home might have to be sold at a loss of a quarter of a million Euro, leaving you homeless and with a huge debt.  This is an entirely different kind of fear.

So, today, the average person in Ireland is prepared to work longer hours, won’t give backchat, will work for less, will work harder and is frightened to within an inch of their lives.

And is prepared to attack the others around them if they perceive that they are doing even slightly better than them.

Two years ago, people that wouldn’t have ever dreamed of taking a low-paid teaching job or a nurses job are now incredulous that public servants want to draw a line in the sand after taking a pay cut of almost one-fifth.

It seems a loose-loose situation for public servants.  In the good times of full employment, their permanent job status had no real value and it was used as justification for their lower wages, but now that it has value, they have to take pay cut after pay cut.

The private sector PAYE worker lives in fear of job termination and religiously rips into the public sector and their ‘perks’.

All the while, those wealthy people, the people that matter, those who used to own the site of the bottle factory in Dublin and those that sold land during the boom or those that had been reasonably sensible in not overextending themselves are waiting and waiting and waiting.

Cui bono?

Soon they will get employees who are happy to work like trained monkeys and are willing to be paid peanuts.  It is the best thing in the world for them to see the private sector workers ripping onto the public sector workers - because if the public sector employees have their conditions of employment reduced, then it is justifiable to replicate this for the private sector workers.

And so it spirals downwards, with all talk of being a smart economy - which requires ambition, initiative and hunger - disappearing intothe distance like the celtic tiger we thought we had.

We’ll soon be back to the Ireland that Christy Moore used to sing about.  A land of labourers, emigrants and the downtrodden.  Cheap maleable labour, tipping our caps to the owners.

Ryanair just posted a massive profit.  That profit will now only increase, given that they will be easily able to slash salaries for their employees.  Remember when Michael O’Leary used to boast that his emloyees were all Irish?  Not anymore they are not. Though they might be again soon, when we are happy to accept salaries lower than he would have to pay in Warsaw.

Cui bono?

Here are the lyrics that the post title refers to:

When routine bites hard
And ambitions are low
And resentment rides high
But emotions won’t grow
And we’re changing our ways, taking different roads
Then love, love will tears us apart again
Love, love will tears us apart again
Why is the bedroom so cold
You’ve turned away on your side
Is my timing that flawed?
Our respect run so dry
Yet there’s still this appeal that we’ve kept through our lives
But love, love will tears us apart again
Love, love will tear us apart again
You cry out in your sleep
All my failings exposed
And there’s a taste in my mouth
As desperation takes hold
Just that something so good just can’t function no more
But love, love will tear us apart again

Good news, you say? Well, we all need a bit of good news, what is it?

Well,  as I said, it looks like good news, but in fact it is a terrible story.

So, it’s good and bad?

No, just bad. Though in some ways it is good.

OK, what’s the news, then? You’re banter s getting a bit tiresome.

It is the news that Iarnrod Eireann is to run a train from Dublin to Cork today and the train will have Wifi.

Surely that is good news.  The customers will be able to sit on the train and open up their laptops and surf away to their hearts content for the entire journey.  Surely that is great news!!

No, my optimistic friend, it is not good news.  It is not good news because this is five years late.  It is not good news simply because it is making the news.  It is not good news because it says how desperately antedeluvian we are in Ireland.  It is not good news because the train from southern Sweden to Copenhagen has had Wifi for donkeys years, they have been opening their laptops and working away nicely on the train for years, so long in fact that some people that get the train every day cannot remember a time when there was no Wifi.  That is why this is an awful news story.  It shows us how far behind we really are.

http://www.rte.ie/news/2010/0406/rail.html

What abusers did was wrong. It was dreadful, but was it always sinful? It was always wrong. Sinful? I am not so sure at times.

You can read the full article here, but it is now clear to me, as if it were ever in doubt, this church needs to take a look at itself, its membership, its doctrine, its values and how it continues justifying itself in the face of incontrovertible evidence that it is as very sick organisation.  Monsignor Stenson’s chief apologectic tactic is to say that the church’s intentions were to maintain respect and confidentiality for all concerned.  It is difficult to believe this.  It seems to me that the Church was primarily concerned with maintaining its position of authority in this country and they were damned if a few raped children were going to get in their way. The justification of the Bishop’s actions are layered on top of the current tactic of saying that its intentions were always good.

Yesterday I saw a bunch of hooligans burning some rubbish on a building site near a secondary school.  I phoned the Garda Siochana and the Fire Brigade.  I thought this was an obvious thing to do.  You see something happening that is wrong and you call the relevant authorities. I didn’t respect the privacy of the criminals that were setting the fire.  I didn’t see a need for confidentiality.  I phoned the cops and got the thing sorted.

It would have been wrong not to!

First of all, it always galls me that the media, in the interest of ‘balance’ has a scientist and a quack on opposite sides of a debate.  They are not equivalent in any way.  One uses logic and careful testing, the other uses quackery, whatever that is.

Anyway, in the middle of the debate, the homeopath said that in fact there was lots of scientific proof emerging for the scientific basis of homeopathy.

At this point, I nearly spluttered my coffee all over my nice American jeans and my freshly ironed (thank you Edita) white shirt.

“There’s scientific proof for Homeopathy?” I spluttered? “This changes everything”.

Just as an aside.  Being a scientist, I am obliged to go along with whatever the data tells us.  Even if I hate the outcome, I must go along with the data.  I pblished a paper some years ago on the Ecdysozoa and now with new data, I think the paper is not correct and I go along with the other papers that point out one of the flaws of my study.  I accept it.  I wish I was right, but the new data is much more convincing and therefore, I spin around and accept it.

I am a scientist, so I MUST do this.

Therefore, you can imagine my astonishment this morning when this homeopath claimed that there was rigorous science behind homeopathy.

She first mumbled something about Luc Montagnier, a famous scientist who discovered HIV (or at least he discovered what the virus was, I guess some patients discovered HIV).  I couldn’t understand what her argument was in this case.

However, she then mentioned a study on piglets whose diarrhoea was cured by homeopathy at levels that were much higher than the rate for those piglets that were given a placebo.

It sounds like science indeed.

She flummoxed the Clinical Psychologist, who was not aware of the study.

Pat Kenny said there should be a ’round two’ in order to give the scientist some time to look at the scientific paper that proved homeopathy.

I too was amazed.  If there was a real scientific study that proved homeopathy, then I would have heard of it.  I would definitely have heard of it.

This Homeopath person knew it intimitely.

THEN WHY DIDNT SHE KNOW ABOUT THE SUBSEQUENT PAPER PUBLISHED BY PROF. DREW THOMAS OF IMPERIAL COLLEGE THAT SHOWED THAT THE PIGLET STUDY WAS FLAWED????

Of course she knew.

Of course she knew that what she was saying was nonsense.

She now stands accused of either being dishonest by holding back the evidence that showed that the first study was flawed or she is incompetent.

Either way, this fact should be known.  This morning on Pat Kenny’s programme, a person presented a case that homeopathy has a real and meaningful effect and that this had been proven scientifically.

It has been discredited.  That is what has happened.

I hate it when people are being dishonest or incompetent.

I wrote to the programme, but I don’t know if my email was read out.

I’m with Dara O’Brien on this.

References:
1: Original study

R.M. Soto, E.R. Vuaden, C.dP. Coelho, NR. Benites, LV. Bonamin and SS. de Azevedo, A randomized controlled trial of homeopathic treatment of weaned piglets in a commercial swine herd, Homeopathy 97 (2008), pp. 202–205.

2: Letter that shows that the study is flawed

Drew M. Thomas, Homeopathic treatment of weaned piglets. Homeopathy, Volume 98, Issue 2, April 2009, Pages 132-133

Well, to add to the whole cauldron of variables in the numbers soup, we have a new publication that was undertaken in the US and published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, a very prestigious and august publication.  There are four authors - 3 female, one male - and they work at Colombia University, one of the very best in the US.

The abstract of their publication is here:

People’s fear and anxiety about doing math—over and above actual math ability—can be an impediment to their math achievement. We show that when the math-anxious individuals are female elementary school teachers, their math anxiety carries negative consequences for the math achievement of their female students. Early elementary school teachers in the United States are almost exclusively female (>90%), and we provide evidence that these female teachers’ anxieties relate to girls’ math achievement via girls’ beliefs about who is good at math. First- and second-grade female teachers completed measures of math anxiety. The math achievement of the students in these teachers’ classrooms was also assessed. There was no relation between a teacher’s math anxiety and her students’ math achievement at the beginning of the school year. By the school year’s end, however, the more anxious teachers were about math, the more likely girls (but not boys) were to endorse the commonly held stereotype that “boys are good at math, and girls are good at reading” and the lower these girls’ math achievement. Indeed, by the end of the school year, girls who endorsed this stereotype had significantly worse math achievement than girls who did not and than boys overall. In early elementary school, where the teachers are almost all female, teachers’ math anxiety carries consequences for girls’ math achievement by influencing girls’ beliefs about who is good at math.

So, we may have a self-perpetuating situation in relation to mathematics education (there are no figures for Ireland, but I’m betting we are not so different).  Girls may - in some cases - develop maths anxieties due to the anxieties of their female teachers, who developed these anxieties from their teachers, etc.  The absence of this effect in boys might explain why boys are found in excess numbers in university courses that have a substantial mathematics component.

I guess this warrants further research and ‘fixing’ this issue is unlikely to have a major impact on people’s perception of maths in general, however, it seems more like causation that simple correlation to me. Could we radically change the outcomes for girls by putting some additional assistance into primary schools - getting teachers who are anxious about their mathematics abilities to self-identify and then to provide them with assistance?

It would seem disappointing, that a young girls perception of maths might not be based as much on their actual ability as their perception of their ability.

Link to the paper.

I was told I couldn’t see all the results, but nobody told me I couldn’t talk about the results that I did see.

The study was carried out by a Dutch company who specialise in this kind of thing.  It is to help NUIM focus on those areas where research output is the highest.

So, here it is.  The department of biology at NUI Maynooth is now rated as being about 37% above the average for a biological science department among the top 275 universities in the world.

Included in this comparison would be places like Cambridge, Harvard, Oxford, Imperial College, London etc.

What this means is that we would fit easily into a university that is in the top 100, despite NUIM only being in existence as an independent university for about 16 years, despite only receiving moderate amounts of funding for the past decade (in global terms).  I think this is a pretty awesome result.This report is an assessment of our research output.  Research is done by academics carefully reading huge amounts of literature, identifying research questions that are really important and getting the answers before their competitors get them.  This takes time, intelligence and hard work. Very hard work.

What is not being considered in this report is the amount of students that we look after - 15 permanent, full-time academics are teaching about 750 students.

We were reviewed a few months ago by a professor from the UK and a professor from the US.  Again, this is an independent view and believe me, these people are independent-minded.  Their verdict?  They couldn’t believe that we were doing to much work with so few resources.  The full report is yet to be published, but this is the feedback we have gotten so far.

At NUI Maynooth there are approximately 275 academic staff and about 5,000 undergrads and 1,500 post-grads.

At Imperial College London, there are approximately 9,000 undergrads and apporximately 4,500 post-grads (a little more than double the student population), however, there are 3,000 academics.  Yes 3,000!!!

When Batt O’Keeffe makes his comparisons with the UK, is he taking into consideration how much we work? How much value for money he gets? How much he would really have to spend if he wanted Irish students to have the same resources as the students at Imperial College?

His latest statement about Irish academics working four hours per week is embarassing for him and dangerous for the rest of the country - who wants to go back to a situation where our 3rd level students are being taught by people who have no research record?  Do we want the best for our students or do we not?  Do we want the best academics to leave because they are not getting support from the Minister who should be supporting them? Does Batt O’Keeffe know the difference? What do we want for our students?

If Batt O’Keeffe damages the 3 level sector any more than it has been damaged, it will be 2030 before we recover - these things take time.

This will mean that Irish academics will be heading to India or China to get jobs there, because believe me, the ministers for education in India and China are not so stupid.

It is not clear why this figure came out from Bat O’Keeffe’s mouth, but it smacks of a ’softening up’ of the third level sector in an effort to reduce funding even more than before.

In my department, we have a total of 15 permanent academic staff right now and 14 who have a full teaching load.  We are dealing with about 750 students.  It is relatively easy to do the maths and see that this is really not a good way to try to teach.  We have massive classes and any degree courses that have small numbers are being shelved, even if they are, arguably, useful degree courses.

We put together demonstrations for the Young Scientists exhibitions, we constantly visit schools, hoping to inspire young people to go to university, we deal with student issues - both academic and personal, we write grant proposals (almost endlessly), we read research papers (day and night), we write research articles (http://bioinf.nuim.ie/pubs.html), we mark exams (almost all of January was taken up with this), we design new courses, we deal with endless administration, audits, quality reviews, benchmarking exercises…

And now we endure being demeaned and denigrated by the government minister who is tasked with building and improving the education sector.

O’Keeffe might have worked in the third-level sector once, but clearly either he wan’t suited for it, or it wasn’t too kind to him.  Either way, he didn’t make a lifelong career out of it.  Clearly, either he has no idea what is involved when you are working in an Irish University, in which case he is a fool, or he does know and is being dishonest.

The problem with this is that it comes 12 years after his initial publication (13 authors on the publication, the journal was the Lancet and now 10 of the authors have retracted the paper) and by now, there is firmly a link, or question of a link between MMR and Autism planted in people’s minds.

Naturally, this has led to a decrease in uptake of the MMR vaccine and unquestionably the unnecessary deaths of innocent children who might otherwise have been safely vaccinated and who would be alive today.

That a scientist can hide data from other scientists is nothing new and that graduate students go along with the dishonesty of their supervisors is nothing new.  As a graduate student, you are in a bit of a bind - if you go against this person who is in charge of your career, then where does this leave you? You might never graduate, your parents, friends and family will wonder about it and you don’t get the qualification and career that you dreamed about.  So, stay quiet and get your qualification and move on…

But now, do you have blood on your hands?

Parents who were spooked by your publication refused vaccination for their children as a consequence?

Parents now refuse other vaccines because “if there is  aproblem with one vaccine, then there might be a problem with them all”…

It is a lot of responsibility to place on the shoulders of a young and inexperienced scientist.

This is why Science needs tight regulation - to stop rogue scientists.

Fortunately, they ALL get caught out.

You see, one of the most important facets of the scientific method is that science is reproducible and also that it is reproduced.  Every paper I publish is met with emails requesting copies of my data, details of the analysis method, etc.  You can get away with nothing!!

And this is how it should be.