Reposted as a separate entry 10-06 from an earlier "Notes" post.
Gulled?
Once upon a time, kids had very little to play with. Video games were not yet invented and children no longer had to herd farm animals, so they amused themselves by playing jacks, and red-light/green-light, and games like "telephone", also known as "Gossip", or "Chinese Whispers" and other ethnocentric names. Have you heard of this game? Children sit around a circle and whisper a message one to another and then at the end marvel and laugh at how distorted the message turns out when the last child announces what he heard. You probably don't remember, but that's what they say. The point is, this happens in science too.
An essay by Carel ten Cate in the journal Animal Behavior criticizes this foundational study of animal behavior, ethology, one that most college biology textbooks feature. In ten Cate's "Niko Tinbergen and the red patch on the herring gull's beak", the author analyzes Nikolaas Tinbergen's Nobel Prize winning research that describes how herring gull chicks beg to be fed by pecking on the red dot on the adult gull's beak. Tinenberg found that the baby gulls will peck at a red spot more vigorously than black or other colors. He called the red dot phenomena "signal stimuli". In response to the chick peck the adult bird regurgitates half-eaten food for the chick to eat. You can read ten Cate's essay in Animal Behavior Volume 77, Issue 4, April 2009, Pages 785-794.
(Photo: Herring Gull Chick, by John Haslam, via Wikicommons licensed under Creative Commons 2.0 License.)
When ten Cate looked over the research he found that Tinbergen never did the definitive experiment to prove his theory, rather he extrapolated from data collected in various of his experiments, then in a series of retellings, came to an abridged tale of his actual research experiments that he printed in his books and which has been subsequently retold incompletely in many other textbooks. The problem, ten Cate says, is that these summaries make Tinbergen's experiments look much more clear cut then they actually were. Ten Cate's assessment of Tinbergen's research as rather incomplete and sloppy science contradicts what the Nobel Prize Committee wrote in 1973:
"One of Nikolaas Tinbergen's most important contributions is that he has found ways to test his own and other's hypothesis by means of comprehensive, careful and quite often ingenious experiments."
Of course all the history books have it that Tinbergen did the research, but ten Cate not only vigorously questions his subject's methods, but points out that "mostly undergraduate students" did the work. But wait. Ten Cate's lab actually repeated Tinbergen's experiments and found that his theories did hold true, that is, herring gull chicks do peck at red more than other colors. So the bottom line criticism is that Tinbergen took some shortcuts that make modern scientists blanche? Or blush? Or nothing?
Why the ta-do? The experiments have been proved, behavioral psychology and ethology are solidly established as branches of science -- decades of pigeons pecking at red and green lights, mice running through their paces. Before ten Cate's analysis of Tinbergen's post-experiment data analysis, other scientists had also pointed to various experimental flaws in Tinbergen's research. But scientists seem to concur that overly critical analysis of experiments from 50 years ago is unfair and unwarranted. So then what then should we make of ten Cate's results?
Should we examine more closely the work of priests and their peas, or experiments done by neurobiologists in their lonely labs? Should we comb through all the textbooks with all those way too neat, way too definitive descriptions of historically worthy experiments? Would that benefit the science endeavor? Or should we take ten Cate's paper as an interesting footnote to Tinbergen's still fascinating and landmark research?
