My previous comments about whether you should get a PhD in biology were incomplete. There are some people who really must go to grad school in the field, no matter how stressful it is and damn the difficulties in getting a job. How do you know if you are one of those people? Here’s a little quiz to help you out.

PZ Myers’ Advanced Biology Aptitude Test

1. A stray dog has been killed by a car in front of your house.

1. You call the police and the ASPCA, and tell them to track down the criminals who did this.
2. You call the streets department and ask them to pick up the carcass.
3. You grab your shovel and bury the poor creature in the garden.
4. You snap on your latex gloves, grab a butcher knife and pair of pliers, and take it down the basement, where your family knows not to disturb you.

2. You’re in a hot and heavy make-out session with a person to whom you are romantically attached. How do you refer to the various organs and secretions that are subsequently unveiled?

1. Not at all. Ladies and gentlemen do not talk about such things.
2. Plainly, but respectfully, and with a little humor.
3. In Latin.
4. In Latin, in deeply fascinated detail. Hand lenses and microscopes are involved.

3. When you watch The Bride of Frankenstein, with whom do you sympathize?

1. The monster and the bride, hapless victims of amoral experimentation.
2. The villagers who suffer from the depradations of the monster.
3. Karl, the crippled laboratory assistant, who needs a new body.
4. Henry Frankenstein and Dr. Pretorius, creators of a new world of gods and monsters.

4. The characteristics you look for in a family pet are:

1. Small. Cuddly. Big eyes.
2. Furry. Friendly.
3. Smart. Independent. Loyal.
4. Fangs or chelicerae. Chitin or scales.

5. Your beverage of choice is

1. beer.
2. tea.
3. coffee.
4. anything with caffeine in it, any time of day.

6. The kinds of insect you would like to collect are

1. Ick. Insects? I would never collect those. I like stamps. And coins. (-1 penalty for beanie-babies.)
2. butterflies and moths, because they are so pretty.
3. beetles and dragonflies, because they are so diverse.
4. maggots and parasites. No justification needed.

7. At Thanksgiving, when it is time to carve the turkey,

1. you defer the job to others. Cutting up meat ruins your appetite.
2. you’re first in line for a big slab.
3. you get the job, because you always do it so professionally and efficiently.
4. everyone conspires to keep you away from it. You’re just a little too keen about it, and hearing the details about muscle groups, arteries, veins and nerves ruins everyone else’s appetite. And your slices are...unconventional.

8. It’s summertime, and the gang all heads down to the swimming hole. How do you spend the afternoon?

1. Lazing in the sun, getting a tan.
2. Diving off a rock and splashing about.
3. Relaxing and savoring the beauty of the natural world.
4. Turning over rocks, collecting leeches, arthropods, and other interesting invertebrates.

9. Your idea of a romantic evening with your beloved is to

1. snuggle up and watch a video.
2. take a pleasant stroll through the park.
3. snuggle up and read books together.
4. take a pleasant stroll through the local cemetery, to observe the bats and lichens.

10. Your favorite household tools are

1. Sorry. I don’t do tools.
2. socket wrenches, hammers, screw drivers, that sort of thing.
3. torx wrenches and soldering iron.
4. It’s amazing how handy a set of dental picks and a needle-nose rongeur can be.

11. Ouch. You smash your finger in the car door.

1. You cry for help. You feel faint and can’t bear to look at your injury.
2. You drive down to the local clinic to get it looked at and bandaged.
3. You wash, debride, and bandage the injury yourself, and are diligent in caring for it until healed.
4. You make daily measurements of the progress of the injury, taking digital photos that you consider turning into a time-lapse recording. When the nail falls off, you keep it in a jar.

12. When you die, you think

1. you will be with the angels.
2. your family will be comforted with a traditional funeral.
3. your organs should be donated, to help others.
4. it would be really cool for your corpse to end up at the Body Farm, and be used for forensics research.

Now, give yourself 2 points for every (d) answer, 1 point for every (c), and subtract one for every (a). Here’s my career recommendation for you:

22-24: You must go on to do advanced study in biology. Your life will be meaningless and incomplete without it. And if you don’t get a degree, your neighbors will think you are just plain creepy.

16-21: Well, it’s an option. You’d probably find it rewarding, and it might correct some of your deficiencies of taste.

11-15: You don’t quite make the grade. Med school.

0-10: My father used to tell me that refrigerator repair was a lucrative career.

<0: We’re from different worlds, you and I. You shouldn’t even be asking me for advice.

Steve Krause asks a question:

"Should I get a PhD?” you ask?

He gives three answers, geared more towards the English major, and discusses them at some length. I’ll try to address it for the biology major, and only include the greatly shortened version of his answers (you know, like, go read the whole thing).

The first part is “probably not."

Sadly, I have to agree. In a perfect world, we’d be free to pursue intellectual dreams without concern for the consequences, and explore the world of ideas without concern for what comes after. Unfortunately, grad school can be an extremely painful process (but not always; I was lucky enough to have a good, supportive advisor, but it still wasn’t exactly a bed of roses), and the job market afterwards is ghastly.

Also, if you have to ask, it probably isn’t for you.

So here’s the second part of the answer: before you get yourself into a PhD program, go get a job for a year or two.

I have mixed feelings about this. It’s a good idea if you think you might not be cut out for grad school, but only because you might find something better to do with your life and end up not going to grad school at all (see answer #1).

On the other hand, if you are excited about biology and want to do biology, don’t waste time, plunge in. It is very rare to get a job really doing biology without some kind of advanced degree. Taking a job before grad school usually means not doing anything related to biology...which is not a good thing for a biologist.

I would also add that going into academia means deferring lots of things as it is—you’re going to spend 4-6 years in grad school, another handful of years as a postdoc, and then if you’re lucky, you’ll land a job and spend a bunch more years working towards tenure. It takes a long time to get where you’re going, and putting it off for another year or two to work on something else just means you’ll be a year or two closer to geezerhood by the time you get through the process.

The third part to my answer is you should realize that the laws of supply and demand apply to English departments and PhD studies. Or here’s another way of putting it: there are way too many people with PhDs in literature and way too few positions to go around.

I don’t think there is any field of science with a deficiency of PhDs. Not only will you have trouble landing a position, but once you do, you’re going to be working for cheap.

I would add that another important issue is the matter of family. It isn’t unusual to find yourself doing the academic dance, marching all over the country chasing down jobs, and if you’ve got roots somewhere, they are definitely going to be ripped up. My roots are all in Seattle, and if I’d realized I’d have to move to Utah, Pennsylvania, and Minnesota before I’d be able to settle down in my forties, I know I would have had second thoughts. Marriages are also going to be subject to some harsh stresses in this whole mess, too, especially if that significant other is also an academic, as often happens. Kids? I’ve had to yank mine out of schools and away from friends to move them a thousand miles away a couple of times.

This is a cruel, cruel business.

Here’s a couple of strange and obscure groups of invertebrates that most people haven’t heard of: the Priapulida, Kinorhyncha, and Loricifera, some small marine worms that have no medical significance, aren’t used as research models, tend to live in odd and inaccessible places, and each phylum has no more than a few hundred species. They are obscure enough and so little studied that their classification is even in flux—the Loricifera were only recognized as a discrete phylum in 1983, and there is talk of reorganizing all four (including the Nematomorpha) into a single phylum. You’ll also see the groups referred to by different names; the Cycloneuralia, the Introverta, the Scalidophora. They’ve been grouped with arthropods, onychophorans, and tardigrades in the Ecdysozoa.

They’ve been called the Cycloneuralia because they don’t have much of a brain, but what they do have is organized in a ring wrapped around their esophagus. They belong to the Introverta because they have that curiously eversible anterior portion of the head—they can pop their mouth parts in and out on a stalk, as you can see in the figure to the right. The Ecdysozoa are animals that periodically molt their cuticles. They’ve been labeled the Scalidophora because they posess rings of sharp bristles around their mouth parts, called scalids.

Basically, these are weird, spiky, tiny little marine worms that you may never encounter in your life. What’s so interesting about them?

One fascinating thing is that they may be closely related to the arthropods (Aguinalda et al., 1997), which you certainly will encounter, and represent a simpler version of the most diverse and populous animal phylum on the planet.

Another is a recent paper by Dong et al. (2004)—we now have fossils of their embryos from the Cambrian. This is amazing stuff. Embryos of marine invertebrates tend to be tiny, delicate things that are easily destroyed, so no one expected we’d ever find any that were half a billion years old...but there they are. Some of the Cambrian fossil beds in China are unique in composition, formed under unusual chemical conditions, and the details of these tiny specimens are preserved in fine-grained calcium phosphate. Here, for example, is one of the new fossils (Markuelia hunanensis), a tiny blastula less than 250 μm across and made up of less than 500 cells:

The authors have multiple specimens from this collection, and here’s another, later stage. The embryo is wormlike, curled into a ball around its yolk, and you can see the annulae, or rings, that form its body.

In yet older animals, we can see the structures that allow the authors to identify the organism. In this close-up of the oral end of the embryo, you can see the array of spines that ring the terminal mouth: it’s got scalids. It belongs to the Scalidophora, the Cycloneuralians.

Another interesting property of these embryos is that they exhibit direct development—that is, they develop into the adult form without taking any detours into a specialized larval feeding morphology. The accompanying News and Views article mentions the curious fact that the extant scalidophorans are so obscure and so poorly studied that this may actually be a case where we have a better picture of the development of a species that died out half a billion years ago than we do of its still-living cousins!

Aguinaldo AMA, Turbeville JM, Linford LS, Rivera MC, Garey JR, Raff RA, Lake JA (1997) Evidence for a clade of nematodes, arthropods and other moulting animals. Nature 387:489-493.

Dong X-p, Donoguhe PCJ, Cheng H, Liu J-b (2004) Fossil embryos from the Middle and Late Cambrian period of Hunan, south China. Nature 427:237-240.

Jaquandor wants to googlebomb his way to the top of the list for searches for the “Buffalo blog”. I’m happy to help, here’s my little bit.

I’d ask him to reciprocate, but I’m afraid that if my weblog got associated with my hometown, everyone would think of me as the Morris blogger: wearing ribbons and bells and waving a hankie as I typed. No, no, no, we can’t have that.

(There is at least one Morris dancing group in Minnesota, but not in Morris, Minnesota.)

The family made it back from their trip to Iowa safely. They spent Saturday going door-to-door in very cold weather, basically polling people and reminding them of the upcoming caucases. It sounds like it was a bit tedious.

They did get some instruction in what to do, and mostly what they were told was to be respectful, to apply no pressure at all, and to just try and get people’s opinions. I can now say from the perspective of an insider that there was no advocacy of dirty tricks (as we all knew was the case).

The picture is of my boys making a call on someone’s house. They said that mostly what they encountered was apathy—most of the Iowans they met simply weren’t interested in the caucuses. I suppose that was to be expected, too.

They did all get those extremely cool (and very warm) bright orange “Perfect Storm” hats. I am so jealous.

Via Portage, I found this engrossing source for bizarre graphics: The Fantastic in Art and Fiction at the Cornell Institute for Digital Collections.

There are woodcuts and metal engravings and prints, of everything from some of Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire’s technical illustrations of conjoined twins, to creepy images of nightmares, to images that will help you classify any dragons that turn up in your backyard.

My favorite so far is this more contemporary illustration of a super fly:

Phenomenal stuff, well worth a browse.

Chad Orzel is daydreaming about GenEd courses. I sometimes do the same thing. I’m currently on a fairly fixed schedule of courses exclusively for biology majors, so I don’t see it happening any time soon, but there’s something appealing about a course where you step back and focus on the big idea, rather than digging deep into details. I think it also taps into a bit of evangelicism: sometimes, you just want to grab that English or theater or math or sociology major and say, “Hey! Biology matters to you—you should learn a little bit of it.” (It is also true that English and theater and math and sociology matter to us biologists, too; this is an exercise in non-exclusive, reciprocal evangelizing.)

Anyway, here are a few general education courses I’ve fantasized about teaching, someday.

• An interdisciplinary course that ties together art, mathematics, physics, computer science, history, and biology, with the theme of...beauty and biology. I used to teach a course in biological imaging that was a more narrowly focused version of my ideal; we talked about the physics of optical systems, microscopy, digital image processing, etc., all wrapped around the idea of visualizing biological phenomena. It was basically a course in making pretty pictures with a hard core of scientific rigor. I’d like to broaden the topic more, and teach a course centered on D’Arcy Thompson’s words, “For the harmony of the world is made manifest in Form and Number, and the heart and soul and all the poetry of Natural Philosophy are embodied in the concept of mathematical beauty.” Wouldn’t it be cool to have a course where you could, for instance, look at pictures of patterns in butterfly wings, and discuss reaction-diffusion models, gene regulation, and pigment chemistry? Or the Golden Mean? Or Acetabularium?
• I could also see teaching an ugly course: cancer biology. At the non-majors level, this would be an excuse to teach them a little basic cell biology, a little statistics, a little applied health care. Mostly, though, it’s biology everyone would use, because all of us are going to stare cancer in the face at some time in our lives, either in us or someone we care about. This is something I got trained in more than I like to think about—my post-doctoral work was funded in part by a cancer training grant, that involved weekly sessions at a university hospital listening to oncologists and surgeons drone on about clinical matters—but I really felt for the poor patients who were informed of their condition with a bunch of ten-dollar latin words, and who were so clearly confused and frightened in their utter ignorance of what was going on.
• One that would be just fun, and is probably much better suited to being a freshman seminar than a more serious course, would be biology in science fiction. There is an incredible amount of appallingly bad and unimaginative biology in SF, with some of the worst being found in the most popular works. Personally, I find Star Trek in all of its incarnations thoroughly unwatchable in any episode that includes an alien—my kids know that I’ll start grumbling and moaning, and have to stomp out of the room. The goal of the course wouldn’t be to ruin SF classics, of course, but to teach a little speculative xenobiology, talk about constraints and possibilities, and try to stretch our brains a bit. There are interesting aliens in SF (CJ Cherryh’s and Bruce Sterling’s come to mind), and if you want weird, imaginative life-forms, browsing an invertebrate zoology text is a great place to start.
• Chad mentions a course in lying with statistics. I think a course in medical quackery, fad cures, and snake oil would be the analog for a biologist. There’s a huge history in the subject, and no shortage of new material: all you’ve got to do is turn on late night TV and watch an infomercial or two. And it’s funny stuff! Breatharians, homeopaths, chiropractic subluxions, Orgone therapy, psychic healing...just open up Quackwatch and there’s your syllabus. Inspiring students to apply more critical thinking towards their health also sounds like a worthy goal.

Ouch. The Ten Mistakes Writers Don’t See. I cringed. I blushed. I wanted to go back and edit everything I’ve posted here.

At least it’s subtitled “(But Can Easily Fix When They Do)”. As long as I’m not paralyzed with self-consciousness from now on, I’ll try.

(via fembat)

Yeah, it’s a bone weekend. I found this nice image of Solea solea (Dover sole) in the Fish Specimen Collection at the Natural History Museum of London—it’s been stained with Alcian Blue (for cartilage) and Alizarin Red (for bone).

I just thought it was pretty.