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Difficulties in Defining Errors in Case Against Harvard Researcher
By NICHOLAS WADE, The New York Times, October 25, 2010
The still unresolved case of Marc Hauser, the researcher accused by Harvard of scientific misconduct, points to the painful slowness of the government-university procedure for resolving such charges. It also underscores the difficulty of defining error in a field like animal cognition where inconsistent results are common.
The case is unusual because Dr. Hauser is such a prominent researcher in his field, and is known to a wider audience through his writings on morality. There seemed little doubt of the seriousness of the case when Harvard announced on Aug. 20 that he had been found solely responsible for eight counts of scientific misconduct.
But last month two former colleagues, Bert Vaux and Jeffrey Watumull, both now at the University of Cambridge in England, wrote in the Harvard Crimson of Dr. Hauser’s “unimpeachable scientific integrity” and charged that his critics were “scholars known to be virulently opposed to his research program.”
Also last month his principal accuser outside of Harvard, Gerry Altmann, allowed that he may have spoken too hastily. Dr. Altmann is the editor of Cognition, a psychology journal in which Dr. Hauser published an article said by Harvard to show scientific misconduct.
When first shown evidence by Harvard for this conclusion, Dr. Altmann publicly accused Dr. Hauser of fabricating data. But he now says an innocent explanation, based on laboratory error, not fraud, is possible. People should step back, he writes, and “allow due process to conclude.”
Due process, in this case, includes an independent inquiry by the Office of Research Integrity, a government agency that investigates scientific misconduct. Its inquiries take seven months on average, ranging up to eight years, says John Dahlberg, director of the agency’s investigations unit.
Under Harvard’s faculty policy, the university cannot make known its evidence against Dr. Hauser, nor can he defend himself, until the government’s report is ready. That leaves both in difficult positions. Harvard has accused a prominent professor of serious failings yet has merely put him on book leave. Dr. Hauser, for his part, cannot act publicly to prevent the derailment, at least for the moment, of his rising scientific career.
Harvard’s investigation has been “lawyer-driven,” says a faculty member who spoke on condition of anonymity, and has stuck so closely to the letter of government-approved rules for investigating misconduct that the process has become unduly protracted — it lasted three years — and procedurally unfair to the accused.
“I think it legitimate to ask why the Harvard brass did not push back against their lawyers,” this member said. “At Harvard we now have the Un-Larry administration — no risk-taking, no thinking outside the box, no commitment to principles that challenge standard university practice,” he said, referring to Harvard’s previous president, the economist Larry Summers.
Dr. Hauser’s difficulties began in 2007 when university officials went into his lab one afternoon when he was out of the country and publicly confiscated his records, an action based on accusations by some of his students.
For the next 18 months he had no idea what he was accused of. A troika of Harvard department heads then delivered a secret report. Dr. Hauser has amassed substantial legal debts in defending himself, his friends say. Harvard presumably has substantial evidence against Dr. Hauser.
He was investigated by a committee of fellow professors, and their findings were endorsed by the dean of the faculty of arts and sciences, Dr. Michael D. Smith. But from what is on the record so far, at least, Harvard’s charges may or may not meet the government’s definition of scientific misconduct, which is reserved for ethical offenses, like fabrication, falsification or plagiary, that directly undermine the research process.
Two of Harvard’s eight charges of scientific misconduct involve published papers for which some of the original raw data is missing. But Dr. Dahlberg, of the Office of Research Integrity, said: “Missing data is not scientific misconduct. The whole purpose of O.R.I. is to go after serious fraud and not the peccadilloes one might find in many labs.”
Dr. Hauser and a colleague have redone the experiments and notified the two journals involved that they got the same results as reported. A third charge, apparently the most serious, concerns the article in Cognition.
The article, published in 2002, reported that rhesus monkeys can distinguish a novel string of sounds from a control sequence, an issue which has important bearing on their capacity for language. The novel and control sound sequences must be alternated so as to keep background conditions as similar as possible. But the video of the experiment contains only novel sequences.
Critics like Dr. Altmann at first charged that the controls had never been done, and that since control conditions are reported in the paper, they must have been concocted. But Dr. Altmann, a psychologist at the University of York in England, now says his earlier accusation was “heavily dependent on the knowledge that Harvard found Professor Hauser guilty of misconduct.” When he gave the issue further thought, he saw an alternative explanation.
In the experimental setup, the monkey is in a soundproof box. The researchers can see the computer is playing a sound but cannot hear it. What could have happened is that the computer, through a programming error, substituted a second test sound for the control sounds, and the researchers, unaware of the problem, wrote up their report assuming the control sounds had been played as planned. Even so, it is far from clear how the data on the video led to the reported results. This would be a devastating error, but not fraud. “It is conceivable that the data were not fabricated, but rather that the experiment was set up wrong, and that nobody realized this until after it was published,” Dr. Altmann wrote.
Mr. Watumull, a linguistics student, said that when he worked in Dr. Hauser’s lab in 2007 he performed a similar experiment. It is “perfectly possible” that such an error could occur, he said, because the experimenters are blinded to the conditions of the experiment.
Harvard’s five other charges of scientific misconduct involve disagreements between Dr. Hauser and his students, all of which were corrected before any articles were published. E-mails in one of these cases, leaked to The Chronicle of Higher Education, concerned the same kind of experiment as the Cognition paper: researchers scored how often a monkey turned its head to the loudspeaker, meaning it heard the sound as novel.
In analyzing the experiment, Dr. Hauser scored the head turnings as significant, but a graduate student and a research assistant both found the monkey did nothing. The e-mails show Dr. Hauser telling his students that “we need to resolve this because I’m not sure why we are going in circles.”
The research assistant later wrote to the Harvard authorities, “The most disconcerting part of the whole experience to me was the feeling that Marc was using his position of authority to force us to accept sloppy (at best) science.” It was this complaint that prompted the inquiry.
In at least one previous disagreement with students, Dr. Hauser backed off when challenged. A former student who worked in Dr. Hauser’s lab before 2007 said Dr. Hauser had required the use of a statistical test that provided a publishable result.
The student, who spoke on condition of anonymity, felt the test was inappropriate and objected. After discussion, Dr. Hauser agreed and the result was not published. “I worked with Marc for years on dozens of experiments, and I never saw any problems with the handling of data that were this serious,” this student said, referring to the Harvard committee’s charges.
A more recent student, Mr. Watumull, said he never saw Dr. Hauser putting improper pressure on people to reach a conclusion. “He’s truly one of the greatest teachers I had as an undergraduate,” Mr. Watumull said. “He’s very well known in the department for being solicitous of students and inviting them to offer their own opinions.”
One of the few people to have seen any documents from the Harvard inquiry is Bennett Galef, an expert on animal behavior at McMaster University in Ontario. Because of his interest in research ethics, he was asked by Dr. Hauser to review the charges relating to the three published papers. Dr. Galef said he concluded, based on what he was shown, that there was no clear evidence that Dr. Hauser had acted unethically.
Dr. Galef referred to the tensions that can arise in a large laboratory where some students are more successful than others. “Marc should have supervised more closely,” he said. Dr. Galef also questioned whether those conducting the inquiry fully understood the culture of an animal behavior laboratory. “As I understand it, the investigating committee were all physical scientists, and they have a very different approach to research and data-keeping than behavioral researchers do,” he said.
In an interview, Dr. Hauser declined to discuss the eight charges against him. But he did talk about another of his experiments cited by critics, a mirror recognition test, which is not part of Harvard’s investigation.
In 1995 he published a finding, which he later wrote that he could not repeat, that cotton-top tamarin monkeys could recognize themselves in a mirror. This contradicted a well-known finding by the psychologist Gordon G. Gallup that only humans, chimps and orangutans can recognize themselves.
Dr. Gallup asked for a tape of the experiment, which Dr. Hauser provided. But Dr. Gallup could see no evidence, he has said, that the monkeys were reacting as Dr. Hauser had reported. To critics, this seemed an example of Dr. Hauser rushing to unsustainable conclusions.
In Dr. Hauser’s view, his article correctly reported the cotton-tops’ reactions. One of the difficulties of the animal cognition field is that experimenters have to recognize often subtle changes in an animal’s head movements, and judge whether this is a response to the test sound. Scoring an animal’s responses is quite subjective. It can take months to train someone to score rhesus monkeys, and a person skilled at scoring rhesus may fail with tamarins.
Dr. Hauser’s 1995 article was written with two colleagues trained in scoring cotton-top tamarins reliably. Dr. Gallup may not have spotted the reactions because he is not trained in scoring cotton-tops, Dr. Hauser said.
Why, then, could Dr. Hauser not repeat the experiment? The reason, he believes, has to do with another unresolved problem in the animal cognition field, that of how to deal with the variability in individuals.
Just as with people, some animals are gifted, others less so. Alex was the wonderfully intelligent gray parrot studied by Irene Pepperberg; no other parrots have equaled his abilities to distinguish colors and numbers. A collie dog called Rico was reported in Science in 2004 to possess a 200-word vocabulary, but has never been heard of since, suggesting that for whatever reason the experiment cannot be repeated.
The prodigy problem can interfere with less spectacular experiments. Dr. Hauser says that the first group of tamarins he tested for self-recognition may have included a few very adept individuals but that later groups were more average. He was unable to get the same result, and published his failure to do so.
Disagreements over the appropriate method are quite common in the animal cognition field, as is evident in the fact that some of the most spectacular experiments cannot be repeated. Disagreements over method also seem to have been involved in at least some of the five cases involving differences between Dr. Hauser and his students.
The e-mails leaked to The Chronicle of Higher Education were portrayed as an instance of Dr. Hauser pressuring his students to reach conclusions they thought unjustified. But they could also have involved a technical difference of opinion about how to score rhesus monkey behavior, a matter in which Dr. Hauser is trained and the two students were not.
Dr. Hauser has already acknowledged making “significant mistakes,” but has admitted to nothing worse. It remains to be seen whether or not the Office of Research Integrity will see these mistakes as serious enough to count as scientific misconduct.
“Maybe down the line there’ll be some forgiveness and a way to re-enter,” Dr. Hauser said. “I feel I have a lot more to contribute. But it’s been brutal.”
Encased in Amber, a Trove of New Species
By SINDYA N. BHANOO, The New York Times, October 25, 2010
An amber excavation in western India has led to the discovery of more than 700 ancient insects, arachnids and crustaceans, and many plant, floral and fungal remains.
“We have at least 100 new species of insects, possibly many more,” said David Grimaldi, one of the study’s authors and an entomologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
The specimens are estimated to be about 50 million to 53 million years old. The area was then a lush tropical rain forest, similar to the forests found today in Borneo and other parts of Southeast Asia.
Researchers from the United States, Germany and India reported these findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They found that there were similarities between the new specimens and fossils found in Mexico and Central America.
Dr. Grimaldi said that about 100 million years ago, India, Madagascar, the Seychelles and Sri Lanka broke off from Gondwana, a landmass that also encompassed land that became four present-day continents: Africa, Antarctica, Australia and South America.
After separating from present-day Africa, India began drifting. Eventually, after about 50 million years, India collided with Asia, creating the Himalayas.
“If anything, we thought the fossils would be unique or have obvious connections to Africa or Madagascar,” Dr. Grimaldi said. “This suggests that India was not as isolated at that time period as we thought, and that it’s possible there were other geologic scenarios.”
In addition, the researchers found mammalian remains that need further study, including those of bats, primates and primitive rabbits.
The plant specimens also need to be looked at more closely by a paleobotanist, who can determine how many previously unknown species were found.
Why Sisterly Chats Make People Happier
By DEBORAH TANNEN, The New York Times, October 25, 2010
“Having a Sister Makes You Happier”: that was the headline on a recent article about a study finding that adolescents who have a sister are less likely to report such feelings as “I am unhappy, sad or depressed” and “I feel like no one loves me.”
These findings are no fluke; other studies have come to similar conclusions. But why would having a sister make you happier?
The usual answer — that girls and women are more likely than boys and men to talk about emotions — is somehow unsatisfying, especially to a researcher like me. Much of my work over the years has developed the premise that women’s styles of friendship and conversation aren’t inherently better than men’s, simply different.
A man once told me that he had spent a day with a friend who was going through a divorce. When he returned home, his wife asked how his friend was coping. He replied: “I don’t know. We didn’t talk about it.”
His wife chastised him. Obviously, she said, the friend needed to talk about what he was going through.
This made the man feel bad. So he was relieved to read in my book “You Just Don’t Understand” (Ballantine, 1990) that doing things together can be a comfort in itself, another way to show caring. Asking about the divorce might have made his friend feel worse by reminding him of it, and expressing concern could have come across as condescending.
The man who told me this was himself comforted to be reassured that his instincts hadn’t been wrong and he hadn’t let his friend down.
But if talking about problems isn’t necessary for comfort, then having sisters shouldn’t make men happier than having brothers. Yet the recent study — by Laura Padilla-Walker and her colleagues at Brigham Young University — is supported by others.
Last year, for example, the British psychologists Liz Wright and Tony Cassidy found that young people who had grown up with at least one sister tended to be happier and more optimistic, especially if their parents had divorced. Another British researcher, Judy Dunn, found a similar pattern among older adults.
So what is going on?
My own recent research about sisters suggests a more subtle dynamic. I interviewed more than 100 women about their sisters, but if they also had brothers, I asked them to compare. Most said they talked to their sisters more often, at greater length and, yes, about more personal topics. This often meant that they felt closer to their sisters, but not always.
One woman, for example, says she talks for hours by phone to her two brothers as well as her two sisters. But the topics differ. She talks to her sisters about their personal lives; with her brothers she discusses history, geography and books. And, she added, one brother calls her at 5 a.m. as a prank.
A prank? Is this communication? Well, yes — it reminds her that he’s thinking of her. And talking for hours creates and reinforces connections with both brothers and sisters, regardless of what they talk about.
A student in my class recounted a situation that shows how this can work. When their family dog died, the siblings (a brother and three sisters) all called one another. The sisters told one another how much they missed the dog and how terrible they felt. The brother expressed concern for everyone in the family but said nothing about what he himself was feeling.
My student didn’t doubt that her brother felt the same as his sisters; he just didn’t say it directly. And I’ll bet that having the phone conversations served exactly the same purpose for him as the sisters’ calls did for them: providing comfort in the face of their shared loss.
So the key to why having sisters makes people happier — men as well as women — may lie not in the kind of talk they exchange but in the fact of talk. If men, like women, talk more often to their sisters than to their brothers, that could explain why sisters make them happier. The interviews I conducted with women reinforced this insight. Many told me that they don’t talk to their sisters about personal problems, either.
An example is Colleen, a widow in her 80s who told me that she’d been very close to her unmarried sister throughout their lives, though they never discussed their personal problems. An image of these sisters has remained indelible in my mind.
Late in life, the sister came to live with Colleen and her husband. Colleen recalled that each morning after her husband got up to make coffee, her sister would stop by Colleen’s bedroom to say good morning. Colleen would urge her sister to join her in bed. As they sat up in bed side by side, holding hands, Colleen and her sister would “just talk.”
That’s another kind of conversation that many women engage in which baffles many men: talk about details of their daily lives, like the sweater they found on sale — details, you might say, as insignificant as those about last night’s ballgame which can baffle women when they overhear men talking. These seemingly pointless conversations are as comforting to some women as “troubles talk” conversations are to others.
So maybe it’s true that talk is the reason having a sister makes you happier, but it needn’t be talk about emotions. When women told me they talk to their sisters more often, at greater length and about more personal topics, I suspect it’s that first element — more often — that is crucial rather than the last.
This makes sense to me as a linguist who truly believes that women’s ways of talking are not inherently better than men’s. It also feels right to me as a woman with two sisters — one who likes to have long conversations about feelings and one who doesn’t, but who both make me happier.
Deborah Tannen is a professor of linguistics at Georgetown University and the author, most recently, of “You Were Always Mom’s Favorite! Sisters in Conversation Throughout Their Lives.”
Astronomers Say They've Found Oldest Galaxy So Far
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, October 20, 2010
WASHINGTON (AP) — Astronomers believe they've found the oldest thing they've ever seen in the universe: It's a galaxy far, far away from a time long, long ago.
Hidden in a Hubble Space Telescope photo released earlier this year is a small smudge of light that European astronomers now calculate is a galaxy from 13.1 billion years ago. That's a time when the universe was very young, just shy of 600 million years old. That would make it the earliest and most distant galaxy seen so far.
By now the galaxy is so ancient it probably doesn't exist in its earlier form and has already merged into bigger neighbors, said Matthew Lehnert of the Paris Observatory, lead author of the study published online Wednesday in the journal Nature.
"We're looking at the universe when it was a 20th of its current age," said California Institute of Technology astronomy professor Richard Ellis, who wasn't part of the discovery team. "In human terms, we're looking at a 4-year-old boy in the life span of an adult."
While Ellis finds the basis for the study "pretty good," there have been other claims about the age of distant space objects that have not held up to scrutiny. And some experts have questions about this one. But even the skeptics praised the study as important and interesting.
The European astronomers calculated the age after 16 hours of observations from a telescope in Chile that looked at light signatures of cooling hydrogen gas.
Earlier this year, astronomers had made a general estimate of 600 to 800 million years after the Big Bang for the most distant fuzzy points of light in the Hubble photograph, which was presented at an astronomy meeting back in January.
In the new study, researchers focused on a single galaxy in their analysis of hydrogen's light signature, further pinpointing the age. Garth Illingworth of the University of California, Santa Cruz, who was the scientist behind the Hubble image, said it provides confirmation for the age using a different method, something he called amazing "for such faint objects."
The new galaxy doesn't have a name — just a series of letters and numbers. So Lehnert said he and colleagues have called it "the high red-shift blob. "Because it takes so long for the light to travel such a vast time and distance, astronomers are seeing what the galaxy looked like 13.1 billion years ago at a time when it was quite young — maybe even as young as 100 million years old — Lehnert said. It has very little of the carbon or metal that we see in more mature stars and is full of young, blue massive stars, he said.
What's most interesting to astronomers is that this finding fits with theories about when the first stars and galaxies were born. This galaxy would have formed not too soon after them.
"We're looking almost to the edge, almost within 100 million years of seeing the very first objects," Ellis said. "One hundred million years to a human seems an awful long time, but in astronomical time periods, that's nothing compared to the life of the stars."
By NICHOLAS WADE, The New York Times, October 25, 2010
The still unresolved case of Marc Hauser, the researcher accused by Harvard of scientific misconduct, points to the painful slowness of the government-university procedure for resolving such charges. It also underscores the difficulty of defining error in a field like animal cognition where inconsistent results are common.
The case is unusual because Dr. Hauser is such a prominent researcher in his field, and is known to a wider audience through his writings on morality. There seemed little doubt of the seriousness of the case when Harvard announced on Aug. 20 that he had been found solely responsible for eight counts of scientific misconduct.
But last month two former colleagues, Bert Vaux and Jeffrey Watumull, both now at the University of Cambridge in England, wrote in the Harvard Crimson of Dr. Hauser’s “unimpeachable scientific integrity” and charged that his critics were “scholars known to be virulently opposed to his research program.”
Also last month his principal accuser outside of Harvard, Gerry Altmann, allowed that he may have spoken too hastily. Dr. Altmann is the editor of Cognition, a psychology journal in which Dr. Hauser published an article said by Harvard to show scientific misconduct.
When first shown evidence by Harvard for this conclusion, Dr. Altmann publicly accused Dr. Hauser of fabricating data. But he now says an innocent explanation, based on laboratory error, not fraud, is possible. People should step back, he writes, and “allow due process to conclude.”
Due process, in this case, includes an independent inquiry by the Office of Research Integrity, a government agency that investigates scientific misconduct. Its inquiries take seven months on average, ranging up to eight years, says John Dahlberg, director of the agency’s investigations unit.
Under Harvard’s faculty policy, the university cannot make known its evidence against Dr. Hauser, nor can he defend himself, until the government’s report is ready. That leaves both in difficult positions. Harvard has accused a prominent professor of serious failings yet has merely put him on book leave. Dr. Hauser, for his part, cannot act publicly to prevent the derailment, at least for the moment, of his rising scientific career.
Harvard’s investigation has been “lawyer-driven,” says a faculty member who spoke on condition of anonymity, and has stuck so closely to the letter of government-approved rules for investigating misconduct that the process has become unduly protracted — it lasted three years — and procedurally unfair to the accused.
“I think it legitimate to ask why the Harvard brass did not push back against their lawyers,” this member said. “At Harvard we now have the Un-Larry administration — no risk-taking, no thinking outside the box, no commitment to principles that challenge standard university practice,” he said, referring to Harvard’s previous president, the economist Larry Summers.
Dr. Hauser’s difficulties began in 2007 when university officials went into his lab one afternoon when he was out of the country and publicly confiscated his records, an action based on accusations by some of his students.
For the next 18 months he had no idea what he was accused of. A troika of Harvard department heads then delivered a secret report. Dr. Hauser has amassed substantial legal debts in defending himself, his friends say. Harvard presumably has substantial evidence against Dr. Hauser.
He was investigated by a committee of fellow professors, and their findings were endorsed by the dean of the faculty of arts and sciences, Dr. Michael D. Smith. But from what is on the record so far, at least, Harvard’s charges may or may not meet the government’s definition of scientific misconduct, which is reserved for ethical offenses, like fabrication, falsification or plagiary, that directly undermine the research process.
Two of Harvard’s eight charges of scientific misconduct involve published papers for which some of the original raw data is missing. But Dr. Dahlberg, of the Office of Research Integrity, said: “Missing data is not scientific misconduct. The whole purpose of O.R.I. is to go after serious fraud and not the peccadilloes one might find in many labs.”
Dr. Hauser and a colleague have redone the experiments and notified the two journals involved that they got the same results as reported. A third charge, apparently the most serious, concerns the article in Cognition.
The article, published in 2002, reported that rhesus monkeys can distinguish a novel string of sounds from a control sequence, an issue which has important bearing on their capacity for language. The novel and control sound sequences must be alternated so as to keep background conditions as similar as possible. But the video of the experiment contains only novel sequences.
Critics like Dr. Altmann at first charged that the controls had never been done, and that since control conditions are reported in the paper, they must have been concocted. But Dr. Altmann, a psychologist at the University of York in England, now says his earlier accusation was “heavily dependent on the knowledge that Harvard found Professor Hauser guilty of misconduct.” When he gave the issue further thought, he saw an alternative explanation.
In the experimental setup, the monkey is in a soundproof box. The researchers can see the computer is playing a sound but cannot hear it. What could have happened is that the computer, through a programming error, substituted a second test sound for the control sounds, and the researchers, unaware of the problem, wrote up their report assuming the control sounds had been played as planned. Even so, it is far from clear how the data on the video led to the reported results. This would be a devastating error, but not fraud. “It is conceivable that the data were not fabricated, but rather that the experiment was set up wrong, and that nobody realized this until after it was published,” Dr. Altmann wrote.
Mr. Watumull, a linguistics student, said that when he worked in Dr. Hauser’s lab in 2007 he performed a similar experiment. It is “perfectly possible” that such an error could occur, he said, because the experimenters are blinded to the conditions of the experiment.
Harvard’s five other charges of scientific misconduct involve disagreements between Dr. Hauser and his students, all of which were corrected before any articles were published. E-mails in one of these cases, leaked to The Chronicle of Higher Education, concerned the same kind of experiment as the Cognition paper: researchers scored how often a monkey turned its head to the loudspeaker, meaning it heard the sound as novel.
In analyzing the experiment, Dr. Hauser scored the head turnings as significant, but a graduate student and a research assistant both found the monkey did nothing. The e-mails show Dr. Hauser telling his students that “we need to resolve this because I’m not sure why we are going in circles.”
The research assistant later wrote to the Harvard authorities, “The most disconcerting part of the whole experience to me was the feeling that Marc was using his position of authority to force us to accept sloppy (at best) science.” It was this complaint that prompted the inquiry.
In at least one previous disagreement with students, Dr. Hauser backed off when challenged. A former student who worked in Dr. Hauser’s lab before 2007 said Dr. Hauser had required the use of a statistical test that provided a publishable result.
The student, who spoke on condition of anonymity, felt the test was inappropriate and objected. After discussion, Dr. Hauser agreed and the result was not published. “I worked with Marc for years on dozens of experiments, and I never saw any problems with the handling of data that were this serious,” this student said, referring to the Harvard committee’s charges.
A more recent student, Mr. Watumull, said he never saw Dr. Hauser putting improper pressure on people to reach a conclusion. “He’s truly one of the greatest teachers I had as an undergraduate,” Mr. Watumull said. “He’s very well known in the department for being solicitous of students and inviting them to offer their own opinions.”
One of the few people to have seen any documents from the Harvard inquiry is Bennett Galef, an expert on animal behavior at McMaster University in Ontario. Because of his interest in research ethics, he was asked by Dr. Hauser to review the charges relating to the three published papers. Dr. Galef said he concluded, based on what he was shown, that there was no clear evidence that Dr. Hauser had acted unethically.
Dr. Galef referred to the tensions that can arise in a large laboratory where some students are more successful than others. “Marc should have supervised more closely,” he said. Dr. Galef also questioned whether those conducting the inquiry fully understood the culture of an animal behavior laboratory. “As I understand it, the investigating committee were all physical scientists, and they have a very different approach to research and data-keeping than behavioral researchers do,” he said.
In an interview, Dr. Hauser declined to discuss the eight charges against him. But he did talk about another of his experiments cited by critics, a mirror recognition test, which is not part of Harvard’s investigation.
In 1995 he published a finding, which he later wrote that he could not repeat, that cotton-top tamarin monkeys could recognize themselves in a mirror. This contradicted a well-known finding by the psychologist Gordon G. Gallup that only humans, chimps and orangutans can recognize themselves.
Dr. Gallup asked for a tape of the experiment, which Dr. Hauser provided. But Dr. Gallup could see no evidence, he has said, that the monkeys were reacting as Dr. Hauser had reported. To critics, this seemed an example of Dr. Hauser rushing to unsustainable conclusions.
In Dr. Hauser’s view, his article correctly reported the cotton-tops’ reactions. One of the difficulties of the animal cognition field is that experimenters have to recognize often subtle changes in an animal’s head movements, and judge whether this is a response to the test sound. Scoring an animal’s responses is quite subjective. It can take months to train someone to score rhesus monkeys, and a person skilled at scoring rhesus may fail with tamarins.
Dr. Hauser’s 1995 article was written with two colleagues trained in scoring cotton-top tamarins reliably. Dr. Gallup may not have spotted the reactions because he is not trained in scoring cotton-tops, Dr. Hauser said.
Why, then, could Dr. Hauser not repeat the experiment? The reason, he believes, has to do with another unresolved problem in the animal cognition field, that of how to deal with the variability in individuals.
Just as with people, some animals are gifted, others less so. Alex was the wonderfully intelligent gray parrot studied by Irene Pepperberg; no other parrots have equaled his abilities to distinguish colors and numbers. A collie dog called Rico was reported in Science in 2004 to possess a 200-word vocabulary, but has never been heard of since, suggesting that for whatever reason the experiment cannot be repeated.
The prodigy problem can interfere with less spectacular experiments. Dr. Hauser says that the first group of tamarins he tested for self-recognition may have included a few very adept individuals but that later groups were more average. He was unable to get the same result, and published his failure to do so.
Disagreements over the appropriate method are quite common in the animal cognition field, as is evident in the fact that some of the most spectacular experiments cannot be repeated. Disagreements over method also seem to have been involved in at least some of the five cases involving differences between Dr. Hauser and his students.
The e-mails leaked to The Chronicle of Higher Education were portrayed as an instance of Dr. Hauser pressuring his students to reach conclusions they thought unjustified. But they could also have involved a technical difference of opinion about how to score rhesus monkey behavior, a matter in which Dr. Hauser is trained and the two students were not.
Dr. Hauser has already acknowledged making “significant mistakes,” but has admitted to nothing worse. It remains to be seen whether or not the Office of Research Integrity will see these mistakes as serious enough to count as scientific misconduct.
“Maybe down the line there’ll be some forgiveness and a way to re-enter,” Dr. Hauser said. “I feel I have a lot more to contribute. But it’s been brutal.”
Encased in Amber, a Trove of New Species
By SINDYA N. BHANOO, The New York Times, October 25, 2010
An amber excavation in western India has led to the discovery of more than 700 ancient insects, arachnids and crustaceans, and many plant, floral and fungal remains.
“We have at least 100 new species of insects, possibly many more,” said David Grimaldi, one of the study’s authors and an entomologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
The specimens are estimated to be about 50 million to 53 million years old. The area was then a lush tropical rain forest, similar to the forests found today in Borneo and other parts of Southeast Asia.
Researchers from the United States, Germany and India reported these findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They found that there were similarities between the new specimens and fossils found in Mexico and Central America.
Dr. Grimaldi said that about 100 million years ago, India, Madagascar, the Seychelles and Sri Lanka broke off from Gondwana, a landmass that also encompassed land that became four present-day continents: Africa, Antarctica, Australia and South America.
After separating from present-day Africa, India began drifting. Eventually, after about 50 million years, India collided with Asia, creating the Himalayas.
“If anything, we thought the fossils would be unique or have obvious connections to Africa or Madagascar,” Dr. Grimaldi said. “This suggests that India was not as isolated at that time period as we thought, and that it’s possible there were other geologic scenarios.”
In addition, the researchers found mammalian remains that need further study, including those of bats, primates and primitive rabbits.
The plant specimens also need to be looked at more closely by a paleobotanist, who can determine how many previously unknown species were found.
Why Sisterly Chats Make People Happier
By DEBORAH TANNEN, The New York Times, October 25, 2010
“Having a Sister Makes You Happier”: that was the headline on a recent article about a study finding that adolescents who have a sister are less likely to report such feelings as “I am unhappy, sad or depressed” and “I feel like no one loves me.”
These findings are no fluke; other studies have come to similar conclusions. But why would having a sister make you happier?
The usual answer — that girls and women are more likely than boys and men to talk about emotions — is somehow unsatisfying, especially to a researcher like me. Much of my work over the years has developed the premise that women’s styles of friendship and conversation aren’t inherently better than men’s, simply different.
A man once told me that he had spent a day with a friend who was going through a divorce. When he returned home, his wife asked how his friend was coping. He replied: “I don’t know. We didn’t talk about it.”
His wife chastised him. Obviously, she said, the friend needed to talk about what he was going through.
This made the man feel bad. So he was relieved to read in my book “You Just Don’t Understand” (Ballantine, 1990) that doing things together can be a comfort in itself, another way to show caring. Asking about the divorce might have made his friend feel worse by reminding him of it, and expressing concern could have come across as condescending.
The man who told me this was himself comforted to be reassured that his instincts hadn’t been wrong and he hadn’t let his friend down.
But if talking about problems isn’t necessary for comfort, then having sisters shouldn’t make men happier than having brothers. Yet the recent study — by Laura Padilla-Walker and her colleagues at Brigham Young University — is supported by others.
Last year, for example, the British psychologists Liz Wright and Tony Cassidy found that young people who had grown up with at least one sister tended to be happier and more optimistic, especially if their parents had divorced. Another British researcher, Judy Dunn, found a similar pattern among older adults.
So what is going on?
My own recent research about sisters suggests a more subtle dynamic. I interviewed more than 100 women about their sisters, but if they also had brothers, I asked them to compare. Most said they talked to their sisters more often, at greater length and, yes, about more personal topics. This often meant that they felt closer to their sisters, but not always.
One woman, for example, says she talks for hours by phone to her two brothers as well as her two sisters. But the topics differ. She talks to her sisters about their personal lives; with her brothers she discusses history, geography and books. And, she added, one brother calls her at 5 a.m. as a prank.
A prank? Is this communication? Well, yes — it reminds her that he’s thinking of her. And talking for hours creates and reinforces connections with both brothers and sisters, regardless of what they talk about.
A student in my class recounted a situation that shows how this can work. When their family dog died, the siblings (a brother and three sisters) all called one another. The sisters told one another how much they missed the dog and how terrible they felt. The brother expressed concern for everyone in the family but said nothing about what he himself was feeling.
My student didn’t doubt that her brother felt the same as his sisters; he just didn’t say it directly. And I’ll bet that having the phone conversations served exactly the same purpose for him as the sisters’ calls did for them: providing comfort in the face of their shared loss.
So the key to why having sisters makes people happier — men as well as women — may lie not in the kind of talk they exchange but in the fact of talk. If men, like women, talk more often to their sisters than to their brothers, that could explain why sisters make them happier. The interviews I conducted with women reinforced this insight. Many told me that they don’t talk to their sisters about personal problems, either.
An example is Colleen, a widow in her 80s who told me that she’d been very close to her unmarried sister throughout their lives, though they never discussed their personal problems. An image of these sisters has remained indelible in my mind.
Late in life, the sister came to live with Colleen and her husband. Colleen recalled that each morning after her husband got up to make coffee, her sister would stop by Colleen’s bedroom to say good morning. Colleen would urge her sister to join her in bed. As they sat up in bed side by side, holding hands, Colleen and her sister would “just talk.”
That’s another kind of conversation that many women engage in which baffles many men: talk about details of their daily lives, like the sweater they found on sale — details, you might say, as insignificant as those about last night’s ballgame which can baffle women when they overhear men talking. These seemingly pointless conversations are as comforting to some women as “troubles talk” conversations are to others.
So maybe it’s true that talk is the reason having a sister makes you happier, but it needn’t be talk about emotions. When women told me they talk to their sisters more often, at greater length and about more personal topics, I suspect it’s that first element — more often — that is crucial rather than the last.
This makes sense to me as a linguist who truly believes that women’s ways of talking are not inherently better than men’s. It also feels right to me as a woman with two sisters — one who likes to have long conversations about feelings and one who doesn’t, but who both make me happier.
Deborah Tannen is a professor of linguistics at Georgetown University and the author, most recently, of “You Were Always Mom’s Favorite! Sisters in Conversation Throughout Their Lives.”
Astronomers Say They've Found Oldest Galaxy So Far
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, October 20, 2010
WASHINGTON (AP) — Astronomers believe they've found the oldest thing they've ever seen in the universe: It's a galaxy far, far away from a time long, long ago.
Hidden in a Hubble Space Telescope photo released earlier this year is a small smudge of light that European astronomers now calculate is a galaxy from 13.1 billion years ago. That's a time when the universe was very young, just shy of 600 million years old. That would make it the earliest and most distant galaxy seen so far.
By now the galaxy is so ancient it probably doesn't exist in its earlier form and has already merged into bigger neighbors, said Matthew Lehnert of the Paris Observatory, lead author of the study published online Wednesday in the journal Nature.
"We're looking at the universe when it was a 20th of its current age," said California Institute of Technology astronomy professor Richard Ellis, who wasn't part of the discovery team. "In human terms, we're looking at a 4-year-old boy in the life span of an adult."
While Ellis finds the basis for the study "pretty good," there have been other claims about the age of distant space objects that have not held up to scrutiny. And some experts have questions about this one. But even the skeptics praised the study as important and interesting.
The European astronomers calculated the age after 16 hours of observations from a telescope in Chile that looked at light signatures of cooling hydrogen gas.
Earlier this year, astronomers had made a general estimate of 600 to 800 million years after the Big Bang for the most distant fuzzy points of light in the Hubble photograph, which was presented at an astronomy meeting back in January.
In the new study, researchers focused on a single galaxy in their analysis of hydrogen's light signature, further pinpointing the age. Garth Illingworth of the University of California, Santa Cruz, who was the scientist behind the Hubble image, said it provides confirmation for the age using a different method, something he called amazing "for such faint objects."
The new galaxy doesn't have a name — just a series of letters and numbers. So Lehnert said he and colleagues have called it "the high red-shift blob. "Because it takes so long for the light to travel such a vast time and distance, astronomers are seeing what the galaxy looked like 13.1 billion years ago at a time when it was quite young — maybe even as young as 100 million years old — Lehnert said. It has very little of the carbon or metal that we see in more mature stars and is full of young, blue massive stars, he said.
What's most interesting to astronomers is that this finding fits with theories about when the first stars and galaxies were born. This galaxy would have formed not too soon after them.
"We're looking almost to the edge, almost within 100 million years of seeing the very first objects," Ellis said. "One hundred million years to a human seems an awful long time, but in astronomical time periods, that's nothing compared to the life of the stars."
