The Knowledge Factory Crisis: A different, anthropological way to view universities

Nothing we humans do lives up to its own mythology. We are fallible, social, competitive, acquisitive, our understanding is incomplete, and we have competing interests to address, in our lives and as a society.  I posted yesterday about universities as 'knowledge factories, reacting to a BBC radio program that discussed what is happening in universities, when research findings seem unrepeatable.

That program, and my discussion of what is going on at universities, took the generally expressed view of what universities are supposed to be, and examined how that is working.  The discussion concerned technical aspects that related to the nature of scientific information universities address or develop.  That is, in this context, their 'purpose' for being.  How well do they live up to what they are 'supposed' to be?

Many of my points in the post were about the nature of faculty jobs are these days, and the way in which pressures lead to the over-claiming of findings, and so on.  I made some suggestions that, in principle, could help science live up to its ideal.

Here in this post, however, I want to challenge what I have said about this.  Instead, I want to take a somewhat distanced viewpoint, looking at universities from the outside, in a standard kind of viewpoint that anthropologists take, rather than simply accepting universities' own assessments of what they are about.

Doing poorly by their ideal standard
My post noted ways in which universities have become not just a 'knowledge factory', but more crass business factories, as making money blatantly increasingly over-rides their legitimate--or at least, stated--role as idea and talent engines for society.  Here's a story from a few years ago about that, that is still cogent.  The fiscal pursuit discussed in this post is part of the phenomenon.  As universities are run more and more as businesses, which happens even in state universities, they become more exclusive, belying their original objective which (as in the land-grant public universities) was to make higher education available to everyone.  In addition to becoming money makers themselves, academia has become a boon for student-loan bankers, too.

But this is a criticism of university-based science, and expressed as it relates to how universities are structured.  That structure, even in science, leads to problems of science.  One might think that something so fundamentally wrong would be easy to see and to correct.  But perhaps not, because universities are not isolated from society--they are of society, and therein lies some deep truth.

Excelling hugely as viewed anthropologically
If you stop examining how universities compare to their ideals, or to what most people would tell you universities were for, and instead look at them as parts of society, a rather different picture emerges.

Universities are a huge economic engine of society.  They garner their very large incomes from various sources: visitors to their football and basketball stadiums, students whose borrowed money pays tuition, and agencies private and public that pour in money for research.  Whether or not they are living up to some ideal function or nature, they are a major and rather independent part of our economy.

Their employees, from their wildly paid presidents, down to the building custodians, span every segment of society.  The money universities garner pays their salaries, and buys all sorts of things on the open commercial economy, thereby keeping many other people gainfully employed.  Their activities (such as the major breakthrough discoveries they announce almost daily) generate material and hence income for the media industries, print and electronic, which in turn helps feed those industries and their relevant commercial influences (such as customers, television sales, and more).

Human society is a collective way for we human organisms to extract our living from Nature.  We compete as individuals in doing this, and that leads to hierarchies.  Overall, over time, societies have evolved such that these structures extract ever more resources and energy.  Via various cultural ideologies we are able to keep things going smoothly enough, at least internally, so as not to disrupt this extractive activity.

Religion, ownership hierarchies, imperialism, military, and other groups have self-justifications that make people feel they belong.  This contributes to building pyramids--whether they be literal, or figurative such as religions, universities, armies, political entities, social classes, or companies.  Often the justification is religious--nobility by divine right, conquest as manifest destiny, and so on.  That not one of these resulting societal structures lives up to its own ideology has long been noted.  Why should we expect universities to be any different?  These are the cultural ways people organize themselves to extract resources for themselves.

Universities are parasites on society, very hierarchical with obscenely overpaid nobles at the top?  They show no limits on the trephining they do on those who depend on them, such as graduating students with life-burdening debt?  They churn through those who come to them for whom they claim to 'provide' the good things in life?  Of course!  Like it or not, by promising membership and a better life, they are just like religions or political classes or corporations!

Institutions may be so caught up in their belief systems that they don't adapt to the times or competitors, or they may change their actions (if not always their self-description).  If they don't adapt they eventually crumble and are replaced by new entities with new justifications to gain popular appeal or acceptance.  However, fear not, because relative to their actual (as opposed to symbolic) role in societies, universities are doing very well: at present, they very clearly show their adaptability.

In this anthropological sense, universities are doing exceedingly well, far better than ever before, churning resources and money over far faster than ever before.  Grumps (like us) may point out the failings of lacking to live up to our own purported principles--but how is that different from any other engine of society?

In that anthropological sense, whether educating people 'properly' or not, whether claiming more discoveries that stand up to scrutiny, universities are doing very, very, very well.  And that, not the purported reason that an institution exists, is the measure of how and why societal institutions persist or expand.  Hypocrisy and self-justification, or even self-mythology, are always part of social organization. A long-standing anthropological technique for understanding distinguishes what are called emics, from etics: what people say they do, from what they actually do.

Yes, there will have to be some shrinkage with demographic changes, and fewer students attending college, but that doesn't change the fact that, by material measures, universities are incredibly successful parts of society.

What about the intended material aspect of the knowledge factory--knowledge?
But there is another important side to all of this, which takes us back to science itself, which I think is actually important, even if it is naive or pointless to crab at the hypocrisies of science that are explicable in deep societal terms.

This has to do with knowledge itself, and with science on its own terms and goals.  It relates to what could, at least in principle, advance the science itself (assuming such changes could happen without first threatening science's and scientists' and universities' assets).  That will be the subject of our next post.

The 'knowledge factory'

This post reflects much that is in the science news, in particular our current culture's romance with data (or, to be more market-savvy about it, Big Data).  I was led to write this after listening to a BBC Radio program, The Inquiry, an ongoing series of discussions of current topics.  This particular episode is titled Is The Knowledge Factory Broken?

Replicability: a problem and a symptom
The answer is pretty clearly yes.  One of the clearest bits of evidence is the now widespread recognition that too many scientific results, even those published in 'major' journals, are not replicable.  When even the same lab tries to reproduce previous results, they often fail.  The biggest recent noise on this has been in the social, psychological, and biomedical sciences, but The Inquiry suggests that chemistry and physics also have this problem.  If this is true, the bottom line is that we really do have a general problem!

But what is the nature of the problem?  If the world out there actually exists and is the result of physical properties of Nature, then properly done studies that aim to describe that world should mostly be replicable.  I say 'mostly' because measurement and other wholly innocent errors may lead to some false conclusion.  Surprise findings that are the luck of the draw, just innocent flukes, draw headlines and are selectively accepted by the top journals.  Properly applied, statistical methods are designed to account for these sorts of things.  Even then, in what is very well known as the 'winner's curse', there will always be flukes that survive the test, are touted by the major journals, but pass into history unrepeated (and often unrepentant).

This, however, is just the tip of the bad-luck iceberg.  Non-reproducibility is so much more widespread that what we face is more a symptom of underlying issues in the nature of the scientific enterprise itself today than an easily fixable problem.  The best fix is to own up to the underlying problem, and address it.

Is it rats, or scientists who are in the treadmill?
Scientists today are in a rat-race, self-developed and self-driven, out of insatiability for resources, ever-newer technology, faculty salaries, hungry universities....and this system can be arguably said to inhibit better ideas.  One can liken the problem to the famous skit in a candy factory, on the old TV show I Love Lucy.  That is how it feels to many of those in academic science today.

This Inquiry episode about the broken knowledge factory tells it like it is....almost.  Despite concluding that science is "sending careers down research dead-ends, wasting talent and massive resources, misleading all of us", in my view, this is not critical enough.  The program suggests what I think are plain-vanilla, clearly manipulable 'solutions.  They suggest researchers should post their actual data and computer program code in public view so their claims could be scrutinized, that researchers should have better statistical training, and that we should stop publishing just flashy findings.  In my view, this doesn't stress the root and branch reform of the research system that is really necessary.

Indeed, some of this is being done already.  But the deeper practical realities are that scientific reports are typically very densely detailed, investigators can make weaknesses hard to spot (this can be done inadvertently, or sometimes intentionally as authors try to make their findings dramatically worthy of a major journal--and here I'm not referring to the relatively rare actual fraud).

A deeper reality is that everyone is far too busy on what amounts to a research treadmill. The tsunami of papers and their online supporting documentation is far too overwhelming, and other investigators, including readers, reviewers and even co-authors are far too busy with their own research to give adequate scrutiny to work they review. The reality is that open-publishing of raw data and computer code etc. will not generally be very useful, given the extent of the problem.

Science, like any system, will always be imperfect because it's run by us fallible humans.  But things can be reformed, at least, by clearing the money and job-security incentives out of the system--really digging out what the problem is.  How we can support research better, to get better research, when it certainly requires resources, is not so simple, but is what should be addressed, and seriously.

We've made some of these points before, but with apology, they really do bear stressing and repeating.  Appropriate measures should include:

     (1) Stop paying faculty salaries on grants (have the universities who employ them, pay them);

     (2) Stop using manipulable score- or impact-factor counting of papers or other counting-based items to evaluate faculty performance, and try instead to evaluate work in terms of better measures of quality rather than quantity;

     (3) Stop evaluators considering grants secured when evaluating faculty members;

     (4) Place limits on money, numbers of projects, students or post-docs, and even a seniority cap, for any individual investigator;

     (5) Reduce university overhead costs, including the bevy of administrators, to reduce the incentive for securing grants by any means;

     (6) Hold researchers seriously accountable, in some way, for their published work in terms of its reproducibility or claims made for its 'transformative' nature.

     (7) Grants should be smaller in amount, but more numerous (helping more investigators) and for longer terms, so one doesn't have to start scrambling for the next grant just after having received the current one.

     (8) Every faculty position whose responsibilities include research should come with at least adequate baseline working funds, not limited to start-up funds.

     (9)  Faculty should be rewarded for doing good research that does not require external funding but does address an important problem.

     (10)  Reduce the number of graduate students, at least until the overpopulation ebbs as people retire, or, at least, remove such number-counts from faculty performance evaluation.

Well, these are snarky perhaps and repetitive bleats.  But real reform, beyond symbolic band-aids, is never easy, because so many people's lives depend on the system, one we've been building over more than a half-century to what it is today (some authors saw this coming decades ago and wrote with warnings). It can't be changed overnight, but it can be changed, and it can be done humanely.

The Inquiry program reflects things now more often being openly acknowledged. Collectively, we can work to form a more cooperative, substantial world of science.  I think we all know what the problems are.  The public deserves better.  We deserve better!

PS.  P.S.:  In a next post, I'll consider a more 'anthropological' way of viewing what is happening to our purported 'knowledge factory'.

Even deeper, in regard to the science itself, and underlying many of these issues are aspects of the modes of thought and the tools of inference in science.  These have to do with fundamental epistemological issues, and the very basic assumptions of scientific reasoning.  They involve ideas about whether the universe is actually universal, or is parametric, or its phenomena replicable.  We've discussed aspects of these many times, but will add some relevant thoughts in the near future.

The solution to all professors' wardrobe dilemmas

I swear. The regularly scheduled Mermaid's Tale programming that you've come to expect (and to love?) is gearing up to return in full force.

But because so many of us are also gearing up to return to campus...

And while doing so, we're coming across articles like "Female academics: don't power dress, forget heels – and no flowing hair allowed" ...

I need to share something about what I'll be wearing my first semester as a tenured professor.

But to get us there, I'll need to pose a string of rhetorical questions:

• Tired of students rating your course according to what you wear?
• Can't find a way to make the professional looks that you prefer pair with flats or sneakers or anything other than torturous high heels or other dressy shoes?
• Tired of spending precious time and money on work clothes that you change out of the second you get home?
• Tired of choosing between this garment made in a sweat shop and that garment made by children?
• Hate suits?
• Work clothes feel like a costume? Especially out-of-style ones that are too expensive to replace as trends change?
• Tired of spending money on dry-cleaning and all those chemicals?
• Hate the unfair fact that some faculty (like those with white hair, white privilege, or beards) can get away with comfortable and often inexpensive t-shirts, jeans, and flip-flops but others cannot or cannot take the risk to find out if they can?

If you answered yes to even one of those questions (or to related questions that didn't dawn on me to ask) then may I suggest you try wearing an academic gown to teach?

If your profession comes with its very own costume, why not take advantage of it? It's what I'm going to do starting this semester. I bought a cheap academic gown on-line and I've even started decorating it:

Kind of makes my chair look professorial, doesn't it?

I know this is tradition at a few American schools, but do any of you do this where it isn't? Anyone want to start?

One mermaid's path to tenure

I’m not writing this in hopes that you’ll congratulate me. This is just meant to give readers a peek behind the curtain.

I’m writing because maybe you, or maybe someone who has sway over your career, has read an academic's blog and wondered how it would affect their chances for tenure. Or, maybe you or a colleague, your chair or department head, your dean, or your provost has wondered why anyone would bother going to the trouble to write on a blog when there are more important things to accomplish. Well, in my case, there clearly weren’t, because I managed to write on this blog and still be awarded tenure. What's more, I know, without a doubt, that my writing on this blog was integral to it.

Not me and not Proconsul.
This is the seriously awesome result of googling for "Mermaid Professor." (source)

I’ve written about why I blog before. And, looking back, there is so much more I could add to that post because of what's occurred over time since. However, the main reason still stands: Writing on The Mermaid’s Tale has been immensely important for my academic life. The reading and writing I do here enhances my teaching and research and the enlightening discussions I participate in here and elsewhere (facilitated by my writing here) boost my teaching and research even more.  And the people who make the decisions about my tenure definitely noticed. My departmental colleagues, my dean, and the provost all readily acknowledged the value of my blogging in their letters recommending me for tenure. And the good people who served as my external reviewers didn't see my blogging as damning enough to withhold their support. And the good... no, great people who collaborate with me certainly never turned up their noses either!

I've known since receiving the provost's letter that I owe it to readers and other bloggers to post something about getting tenure. I also thought a tenure-related post could help out younger academics, in general, by exposing how someone who's never taught in a graduate program--with all the intellectual buzz and the worker bees to help, you know, the academic model us Ph.D.s are most familiar with--can still get awarded tenure.

But I've been dreading such a post because I really don't want to write a biography right now. It feels quite narcissistic to get tenure and then to post your life story as if tenure somehow validated that, as if anyone could possibly emulate another person's detailed path to tenure, as if anyone would want to!

Plus, where to begin? So much so deep in my past has set me up for getting awarded tenure, so many people have been crucial to this outcome, that it's impossible to know where or with whom to start except, obviously, at conception.

But what I really don't feel like writing about publicly, and in association with hooray-for-tenure, is about why I haven't done much work on early Homo despite studying with a terrifically wonderful advisor, Alan Walker, to do just that. And that's because part of the reason is a statistic here. That, as well as other parts of the explanation take away from the fact that I'm very happy with the way my career has panned out and I continue to look very much forward to every single day I'm an anthropologist.

So instead of a tour through my influenced and circumstantial history leading up to tenure, maybe I'll post the narratives I included in my portfolio. It's going to be uncomfortable. I'm going to have to look away while I paste the text, like I do when the phlebotomist pricks my vein. But here you go, minus the files of evidence that go along with each narrative.* This is a successful tenure portfolio at a small state school, in an undergraduate-only program. Hope it's useful because ouch it feels quite personal:

Tenure Portfolio Narratives

Statement of Teaching and Learning
I’ve taught four different courses so far at URI and they all focus on human origins, evolution and variation. The introductory course, APG 201: Human Origins, counts as a general education requirement for the natural sciences and also is a requirement for majors and minors in anthropology. The upper level courses attract not just anthropology majors and minors but students from diverse scholarly backgrounds who are interested in the in-depth examination of issues in biological anthropology. These upper level courses include: APG 300: The Human Fossil Record (a hands-on course which is why I dedicated a large portion of my start-up funds to the purchase of new fossil casts which augmented the existing collection); APG 310: Sex and Reproduction in Our Species (a course I created because of my new research interests in the evolution of human reproduction, as well as in procreative beliefs and how they have influenced human evolution.); APG 350: Human Variation (in which I will continue to use personal genomics to engage students.). In all of these courses, my two most important teaching goals are:

(1) Students should get as strong a handle on evolution as possible, shedding as many misconceptions as possible, so that they can best comprehend the biological, ecological, and cultural significance of human variation and evolution. (That, in a nutshell, is why human evolution is taught and studied within an anthropological context!)

(2) Students should achieve as much of this evolutionary and anthropological understanding on their own as possible, by thinking creatively, synthetically, and critically about the evidence.

Number one means that I probably take more time with evolutionary theory than most of my colleagues at other institutions. But because biological anthropology is the only college-level exposure to evolution (let alone biology) that many undergraduates have, it’s important that it's strong. Once they graduate, they’re consuming, producing, and voting based in no small part on their understanding of their place in nature and their (and others') place in the human species. This one chance that we get to represent evolutionary theory and human ecology and biology is crucial make-or-break time for us anthropology professors. Number two means that I have to deviate far from the conventional format for the introductory course.

In January 2012, I was awarded a $21,842.50 from the Provost’s Office under their initiative called “Innovative Approaches Using Technology to Enhance the Student Experience at URI”. The title of my proposal, “145 URI undergraduates peer into their genomes to trace their ancestries, discover their individualities, ponder their futures, and celebrate their unified humanity,” sums up nicely what students were able to do. It has been a transformative new curriculum on many planes, from my perspective as a teacher, from student perspectives as learners, and also for the impact it is making on how my colleagues in my field and beyond will use personal genomics to teach anthropology. That is why I will continue to use personal genomics in APG 350.

I'm always updating APG 201, every semester, with new findings in human evolutionary biology and physical/biological anthropology. I'm also always modifying pedagogy and adapting activities with the goals of improving and broadening student learning. For example, I use colored index cards (in lieu of clickers) for regularly practicing questions with immediate feedback, which seem to engage and motivate students in new ways. I also used personal genomics in this course when I awarded the Provost’s grant, however, I plan to only use it in the upper level course (APG 350) in the future, not because it wasn’t a success, but because it takes up too much time away from fundamentals that need to be covered in this introductory course.

Since arriving at URI, I have dramatically rearranged the traditional presentation of APG 201 course materials (as they are presented in every major textbook for this popular Gen Ed course in North America) and have taught it for three years in this new way with great success. The major difference is that I start with active observations and then work on explaining them with evolutionary theory rather than beginning with evolutionary theory and then asking students to apply it thoughtlessly to spoon-fed information. Starting in Spring 2015, I will begin teaching it without a textbook, using two excellent popular science books and many on-line high-quality readings instead. The syllabus for this new curriculum is included in my portfolio. I will provide essential, fundamental material in handouts when it is not covered explicitly in the readings—something I’ve been poised to do since I wrote a reference/textbook Human Origins 101 in 2007. I plan to eventually publish a paper describing this new strategy of guiding who I call “naturalists in a molecular age.” Because word has gotten out to my colleagues about both the personal genomics as well as this new curriculum, I’ve been invited to participate in an education symposium (that’s been accepted) at this year’s physical anthropology meetings in March 2015.

One of the most positive outcomes of the first run of APG 310: Sex and Reproduction in Our Species was the recruitment of a student (name withheld, Anthropology and Chemistry major, class of 2014) to take on a project in APG 470: Directed Research with me, guided by constructive input from the whole class. He updated a survey from a 1960s Master’s thesis at URI that looked into “premarital sexual behavior” of undergraduates here at URI. After earning IRB approval to administer the survey to volunteer participants, he presented his research at the end of the Spring 2014 semester to a group of students and faculty. Most interesting was the result showing no significant difference in the amount of premarital sexual behavior that male and female students reported, as opposed to the significant difference between the sexes that the first survey found, decades ago. This sort of work piques student interest and two anthropology majors from my second-run of APG 310, name withheld and name withheld, have worked with original student name withheld to rewrite the survey to bring it up to date, to be more health-focused, and in hopes of making the results more instructive to the URI community. Name withheld and name withheld will be submitting their proposal to the IRB committee in October 2015 and if approved they’ll be collecting the data and analyzing it over the course of the academic year.

I have been very lucky that some of the most enthusiastic researchers and clever minds have opted to work on projects with me for credits in APG 470. I asked name withheld (Anthropology & Biology) to co-author an article on the evolution of childbirth with me for the Annual Reviews of Anthropology because of her research skills and also her relevant interests as demonstrated in prior anthropology courses with me. And then name withheld (Anthropology & Biology) has gotten a head start on her Honors project with me already. She’s taken up a project that I’ve been wanting to get started since 2006. She’s figuring out how apes lost their tails and, thus, why we ended up tailless. In the coming academic year, she’ll be applying for funding to travel to regional museums to collect data on primate skeletons.

In the next few years, I will be devising short courses and field trips through the study abroad office to sites of anthropological interest—not just to my fossil field sites in Kenya, but to other sites in Africa, Europe, and Latin America where students can chase primates in the wild or crawl into painted Paleolithic caves.

Statement of Research
How did humans become humans, how did apes? How does evolution work? And does it work differently in humans or because of humans? These are the questions that drive my research and educational endeavors. Since arriving in Fall 2011, URI has encouraged and supported my scientific and scholarly activity as I have pursued two main areas of research (below). I have also begun a book project that brings all of these things together. These three research areas should continue to challenge me and create opportunities for students for many years to come.

1. Augmenting and making sense of the fossil record for ape and human evolution.
As part of an international and interdisciplinary team, funded by the Leakey Foundation and the NSF, I perform paleoanthropological fieldwork on Rusinga and Mfangano Islands in Western Kenya. Fossils from these sites represent plants and animals that lived in the early Miocene epoch (dating to about 20-18 million years ago), some of which, like the primate Proconsul, are good candidates for some of the earliest apes. Without the origin of apes, chimpanzees and humans would not have occurred. This work is not only geared toward finding more specimens of Proconsul and other primates, but we are also reconstructing the paleoenvironments in which these primates lived and evolved. Our latest paper to come of this project was published in Nature Communications this year.

Here at home, I continue to work on the functional anatomy and growth and development (ontogenetic) patterns of fossil apes like Proconsul, particularly in their feet and hindlimbs, as those traits relate to locomotion and to the ability to cling to mother during development, and over evolutionary time. It’s important to reconstruct how this fossil ape was moving about if we’re to understand how modern ape and human behavior came about. Since coming to URI I have taken advantage of our proximity to the primate skeletal collections at the American Museum of Natural History where I have gathered data on extant primates to compare against the fossils. Up until recently this work has been a continuation of my doctoral dissertation on anthropoid feet and hindlimbs, but recently I have begun a similar project with undergraduate anthropology/biology major and honors student name withheld on tails. By looking to primates in the fossil record (like the tailless Proconsul), to variation in extant primate tails, and to known genes for tail development, we are answering the question, “Why don’t humans have tails?”

Although there’s much to keep us busy in addressing these matters here in the U.S., I would still like to return semi-regularly to Kenya to continue the lifetime of work that needs to be done at Rusinga and Mfangano Islands, in both fossil collection and analysis. I hope to create a short course with International Programs to give URI students a marvelous experience doing paleoanthropology.

2. Reconstructing the evolution of human pregnancy, childbirth, and infant development
Living apes, not just fossils, also offer a glimpse of evolution. So along with another team of collaborators, I study energy use in apes and other mammals. Mammals process energy differently from one another and these differences may reflect different evolutionary selection pressures both internally within the organism and externally from the environment. Energetic use in humans is fairly well understood but it's only through comparison with other species that we can understand human energetics from an evolutionary perspective. Likewise, human data are necessary for understanding the energetic use of other primates. To this end, I’ve collected energetic and behavioral data from the chimpanzees and gorillas at Lincoln Park Zoo. The first paper to come of this work was published this year in PNAS.

I am particularly interested in the energetics and metabolic parameters of pregnancy, fetal growth, infant growth, and lactation and how those determine the timing of birth in humans and other mammals. This is a significant area of anthropological research, given how it has long been assumed that the unique human skeleton, particularly the pelvis and how it’s metamorphosed for upright walking, has limited gestation and fetal growth—that the skeleton explains why our babies are difficult to birth and are quite helpless when they arrive. My research has shown that this traditional pelvic explanation (the “obstetrical dilemma”) is much weaker than its popularity indicates and that maternal metabolism and how mothers process energy are likely to be the primary determinants of gestation length and fetal growth, not just in humans but across primates and placental mammals. Although it is my primary goal to reconstruct human evolutionary history as accurately as possible (or at least as plausibly as possible), there are also potential applications of this research toward better understanding the causes of pregnancy disorders like preeclampsia.

This research has attracted attention and I have been invited to give talks at numerous college campuses as a result. The highlight so far has been the invitation from organizers (and established human reproduction researchers) Karen Rosenberg and Wenda Trevathan to participate in a scholarly seminar at Santa Fe’s School for Advanced Research (SAR) titled “Costly but cute: How helpless babies made us human.” The collection of our papers is currently under peer-review and the volume should be published next year. I’ve also been invited to write on the evolution of childbirth for the Annual Reviews of Anthropology. That manuscript is due in January 2015 and I’ve enlisted a keen undergraduate anthropology/biology major, name withheld, to co-author the piece with me.

I am currently scheming up my next research steps. (The rest of this paragraph is redacted because it's a big fun secret for now.) 

The Baby Makers: Scholarly/Popular Trade Book Project
For the last two years I’ve been working with a literary agent on a proposal for a book that I’m very excited about. It’s requiring me to scratch at the overlap between evolutionary biology and cultural anthropology—disciplines that are diametrically opposed in the eyes of many scholars. Reconciling these two schools of thought as well as discovering what, perhaps, evolutionary biology cannot explain is challenging but feels necessary in order for me to go on as both an anthropologist and an educator. The book assumes, as its premise, that ... (The rest is redacted because it's a big fun secret for now. It's a project that I've since partnered-up with Anne in, and we'll gladly talk about it but not post much about yet. We're very excited and having a ball.)

Statement of Service and Professional Outreach
I have participated in service projects at many levels at URI and within my field, while I have also prioritized outreach, locally and beyond. I will continue to perform these duties and hope to increase my contributions and impact, but here is what I have done so far:

Our department had a successful search for a new colleague and I’m proud to have been on the committee that helped to accomplish it. In addition to our regular advising majors and minors, I served as the anthropology advisor at University College for the 2013-14 academic year. The same year I joined the Faculty Senate and I served on name withheld’s Master’s committee in CELS where he defended a stellar thesis on shark feeding morphology. This year I served on the search committee for a multicultural postdoctoral fellow in BES/CELS chaired by name withheld.

Beyond URI, I have reviewed manuscripts for several scientific and scholarly journals, as well as grant proposals for NSF and the Leakey Foundation. In 2013, Nature Education launched the room of open-access, peer-reviewed articles on The Human Fossil Record, which I edited as part of their Biological Anthropology series. There are even more articles in press that will be posted soon. In addition, I was invited to give a talk at the California Academy of Sciences in November 2012 about my experience with personal genomics (23andMe) as an educator, as an anthropologist, and as a human being. While I was in San Francisco I visited an assembly of 3-8 graders as well as a high school genetics class and talked with them about science, genetics, paleoanthropology, and evolution. There, I also gave a presentation to the Leakey Foundation’s Scientific and Executive Boards about the research I’ve done that they’ve funded and will hopefully continue to support. It was well received and I was encouraged to keep applying for funding. Here in Rhode Island I have presented on evolution at a public library, a Masonic lodge, a Catholic elementary school, and three times at assisted living/retirement homes.

For the past three years I have been a core team member of the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History’s Human Origins Program Educator’s Network (HopEdNet). My duties include fielding questions about human evolution, via email, that visitors to the exhibit hall in Washington DC type into the computer. I’m also involved with the Smithsonian in a magnificent project called “Teaching Evolution Through Human Examples” (or “TetHE”) which is led by PIs name withheld and name withheld of the Smithsonian’s Human Origins Program. I have helped to create new resource activities and teaching strategies focused on human evolution for AP Biology. My primary role is as scientific content consultant but I am part of a larger group of people, including the leaders of the AP Biology standards as well as pedagogy experts, all working together on this project. These curricular packets will be complete in date withheld and I am very much looking forward to using them in APG 350: Human Variation, both to teach biological anthropology but also to expose our students to this pedagogy should they become educators themselves. It’s through my TetHE colleagues that I got my scientific process lesson plan published at Berkeley’s Understanding Science site. It’s currently one of the top three teacher resources there.

I try very hard, where and when I can, to engage the greater public in anthropology, evolution, and science and so I continue to write on the blog The Mermaid’s Tale. I write about new discoveries in biological anthropology, including my own, as well as educational issues (mainly for my colleagues), and larger “how do we know what we know” questions. This is most definitely an outreach endeavor, however, the boost to my own research and teaching that comes from writing here, and engaging with my blog’s co-authors and colleagues who read the blog, is significant. A list of my best, most popular posts is here. In total, my posts have received 110,000 hits since I began writing in 2009. Most of my posts are read by hundreds, but a few have been seen by as many as 13,000+ because some colleagues assign them to students (as do I) and others have cited or re-published them on their own websites. My most recent post on natural selection was republished by the on-line science magazine io9. Another of my posts was re-published on Scientific American’s site. It’s due in part to my activity on my blog that my anthropological research got noticed by the BBC and I was asked to be part of an episode of their science program Horizon (equivalent to our Nova). Here’s the piece in the Guardian that discusses my research and that was published to announce this television program. I also filmed all about ape and human tail loss for PBS’s “Your Inner Fish” program: “How do we know when our ancestors lost their tails?”

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Do you have questions? Anonymous or otherwise, feel free to post here or on Facebook or Twitter and I'll do my best to answer them. Cheers.


*Here's my CV and here's my scholar.google profile. In the above narratives, you may see some new typos because I've just copied and pasted them from a pdf and also because I make typos. Hyperlinks are gone because they're not the point, and I replaced all names with "name withheld" because Google searches for those people shouldn't land on this.