Here is my message: Use training in “Framing,” “Race Class Narrative,” or similar ways to improve your communication abilities to become a better producer of messages in the same way an athlete uses strength and aerobic cross training to become a better athlete. Message training is to the hopeful messenger what running 5 miles a day and pumping iron three times a week is to an amateur softball player. You will get better.

Practicing softball itself is of course also a great way to be a better softball player. Messaging training by repeatedly applying techniques you are learning, to a test case, especially in a group with some guidance and some critique, can work wonders on your muscle memory, when the muscle is your brain and the sport is convincing people. Doing it well will become more automatic.

In addition to a discussion of messaging training, I have a few words on writing letters to the editor, and suggest a few items to read.

Why “message?”

Your job in developing messages is to take an internalized desire, having to do with policy or behavior or something, and turning that into words that will change the brain cells in others in a way that causes them to make better decisions, join up with your idea, vote a certain way, or start or stop doing a certain thing. Part of that is knowing what the point is, what you want to happen, and turning that into sensible articulate concepts or statements.

Think about what some of those points might be. I want there to be fewer guns around generally, and less dangerous ones. I want people who have been traditionally kept from voting to vote all the time. I want us to adopt electric cars and trucks, and to replace internal combustion engines. What do you want? If this was a workshop, you’d write some of your ideas down and share them with the person to your right. Or left. Or anywhere on the political spectrum, really.

The second part of that is rephrasing or reforming your message in a way that uses the tools of messaging, so all that hard work you did thinking of a concept actually makes a difference.

The current message improvement culture has three main approaches, which overlap, are not exclusive, and all three of which work and should be used.

Let’s take them in reverse order.

Rhetoric

Rhetoric is the time honored process of persuasive communication. The whole shebang of messaging can be called “rhetoric” but here I refer to intentional rhetorical technique. There are a gazillion rhetorical forms, most identified in great antiquity, because even then, people had been speaking for many thousands of years. When we use rhetorical forms, a certain magical thing happens. The reshaping of the brain cells in the recipient of our message that we are going for happens quicker, more strongly, or lasts longer. Often, the rhetorical form outlives the message. I can’t believe I ate the whole thing but I have no memory of what product I was supposed to buy because I did eat the whole thing. (Kidding: It was Alka Seltzer.)

The great speeches used rhetorical forms, enhancing the impact at the moment, making the messages more memorable. Joe Romm in his book on this topic called it being “clicky and sticky” (see below for links to books).

For example, repetition or enumeration comes naturally and shapes brain cells nicely. One of the most memorable and powerful speeches ever given was Churchill’s “fight on the beaches” ditty. He used meter (putting your words out in packages of similar cadence and size, like a poem might do), alliteration (reusing the same sound) and most notably, repetition.

We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be.

We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender …

This speech was brought to you by the letter F, S, and G, and powerful concept that “we shall fight.” (And, as you may learn if you investigate framing theory, this speech used a protection frame, and also keyed into the relatable concepts of fighting in the air, streets, and landing grounds, very much in the average British person’s mind as the Nazis were dropping bombs on them.)

Rhetorical form is sometimes scoffed at as “bumper sticker thinking” or cheap jingle-making. Fine. But Donald Trump became the President of the United States and is still in the business of ruining democracy and advancing fascism, and much of the energy that launched that Juggernaut came from rhetorical tropes developed, repeatedly tested, and frequently applied. Do not think “lock her up” came out of his butt. No. It came out of Steve Bannon’s butt along with a bunch of other crap, and survived testing by Cambridge Analytics, and then became the slogan of the Trumpian movement, along with a few other phrases.

Rhetorical form does not, I quickly add, imply one sentence slogans. Churchill readied the British people for war, Roosevelt psyched the American people back to the banks during the Great Depression, and Emmeline Pankhurst got women the vote, using rhetorical forms, and I only slightly exaggerate.

We wear no mark; we belong to every class; we permeate every class of the community from the highest to the lowest; and so you see in the woman’s civil war the dear men of my country are discovering it is absolutely impossible to deal with it: you cannot locate it, and you cannot stop it.

Enumeration (highest to lowest), repetition and alliteration (we wear we belong we etc. etc.) irony (dear men) and so on. Auxesis and crescendo (the sequence of statements about class being ever bigger and bolder). You can’t stop a speech like this.

Ask not what you can do for your sentences, ask what your sentences can do for you. Rhetorical mastery equals compelling writing and speech making, period. Without this, framing and RCN training are nothing.

(Did I mention that exaggeration is a time honored rhetorial device?)

Race Class Narrative as a sea of good

Race Class Narrative is an approach to writing that involves contextualizing your message as a push-back against systemic racist (and classist) repression. It involves identifying the racism (often by identifying and naming dog whisles) and identifying the bad guy (usually the utterer of the dog whistle).

This whopping helping of “j’accuse” is sandwiched between layers of value statements, usually a broad one at the top, and a more speicfic one at the bottom. It is usually served with a side of ask, as in, the message doesn’t just say something, it tells you what to do next.

The best way to grok the RCN is to take one or two of the free and frequent training sessions provided by various organizations. It is worth your time.

Framing

This concept is near and dear to me, because of its role in the study of meaning generation and semiotics, a subfield of Anthropology (from my perspective) that I studied in graduate school. Years later, I saw framing emerge as a proposed method of making more effective messages, and I objected to the way the theory was being used, and misunderstood. This led to a major on line controversy with PZ Myers and me on one side, and Chris Mooney and a guy named Nesbit on the other.

The blogging network PZ and I wrote on worked together with the Bell Museum of the University of Minnesota to have a “steel cage death match” between those two guys and us two guys. It was a widely publicized and well attended public four way debate held in Ford Hall in Minneapolis with a follow-up drunken seminar at the Kit Kat Klub.

During the debate, I batted last, like Nature, and I’m afraid I might have surprised some people. Instead of giving a cogent and unbeatable anti-framing followup, I declared that I had changed my mind, and though Nisbet was totally wrong about everything he ever said, Mooney was mostly right, and using framing to make better messages could be a thing if done right. Which they weren’t quite doing yet.

That was decades ago, and since then framing has undergone a number of cycles of populatarity and refinement. The method comes to us today, in our community, in the form of Connections Lab, with George and Lisa Green and their crew. So now we have framing training, not just framing as an idea.

Pre-messaging, framing was an obscure linguist concept that had to do with how meaning is correctly generated in a recipient. All messages (aka utterances, aka meaning generation, aka acts of semiosis) have a frame. A message has to have a frame to be understood, and the frame, in its simplist and most obvious form, is often an agreement between message sender and message recipient on what the topic of conversation is. This agreement is usually subconscious and contextual. A common language, a common dialect, and a shared lexicon can be part of the frame. Things that seem outside language, but that provide context, can be part of the frame.

So, if I say, “I’m going on a fishing expedition” and I’m a prosecutor standing in front of the grand jury room wearing a nine thousand dollar Italian suit, you know I’m going to go in that room and ask questions of a witness that may or may not lead to an indictment of someobody, depending on what the answers are, and I dont’ know for sure what those answers will be. If I say “I’m going on a fishing expedition” and I’m wearing my fishing vest with the creel case and there are lures stuck to my hat and I’m about to climb into my Lunds 202 Pro V GL outboard docked on Leech Lake, you know my intent is to catch some walleye.

The suit/boat and other features of the context “key the frame” so the term “fishing expedition” is understood. The keying of frames is a way of shifting meaning, or playing around with ambiguities in meaning. You see examples of this all the time in humor. There is an example in the first few paragraphs of this thing you are reading, in reference to the political spectrum. See what I did there? I shifted the frame on you, and made you slip on a rhetorical banana.

We also see the power of framing in the mistakes we make. Framing is often from context, and can include auxiliary information. One day I left work and walked to the multi floor parking lot where I always parked on the third floor. I took the elevator to the third floor and walked directly to my blue Volvo 740. When I put the key in the door, it did not work. I then noticed that someone had switched the car seat in the back to a different brand, and I wondered why that would happen. I then noticed that the trash laying around on the floor and seats of the car was different trash than I usually had in the car, and wondered how that could happen. Eventually, it occurred to me that this was not my car, but only after several layers of framing — the parking lot, the third floor, the model of car, the color of car, all framing the inference that this was my car — the assumption that this is my car unraveled, and against a good deal of frame-induced inertia. Often, we most clearly see a frame when the frame is either broken, or somehow, it breaks us.

In framing a message, the point is to make the recipient receptive to your message in a positive way. So, if I’m wearing all black and I’m drinking a latte chai leaning against the counter in a grungy coffee shop and I say, “I’d like you to vote for Jane because she wants us to have great broadband” and you are a farmer in Freeborn County, Minnesota. You won’t give me the time of day and this “Jane” character can go to heck. If, on the other hand, I’m wearing my plaid farmer suit sitting on a tractor hooked up to a potato harvester, and I say “Vote for Jane, she wants us to have great broadband” you’ll like Jane because you want great broadband, but you’ll hear and accept my message because I’m already on your side. (Or at least, not a member of what to you is an unsavory counter culture.)

Framing is like laying down a road bed before you put down the pavement. It is like providing an excellent, entertaining, informative, likable guide on a safari. Good framing induces comfort. The people who get a better framed message will be comfortable with the message, will more deeply and accurately internalize the meaning. The reshaping of other people’s brain cells is a difficult and dangerous thing that can go wrong. How often do you tell someone something and they totally miss the point? Your intentional control of the framing that is going to happen anyway helps avoid that. How often do you tell someone something and they get it, but irrationally fail to agree with you because of discomfort in the way the message was sent and received? Or, the discomfort is simply in the mismatch between your message and what they see as reality?

An example of that last point because it is both key and not totally obvious: Assume that I want you to vote for a referendum to spend money on education. A framing analyst would instantly note that most Americans believe we live in a world of scarcity, so we can’t pay for things. Indeed, scarcity is a right wing frame that is used to scare people off of “liberal” ideas and to underscore the falsehood of “tax and spend” Democrats. Any referendum starts out as a firm “no” for a majority of voters because this scarcity frame is wildly successful.

A well framed message supporting spending on education may follow or be part of a message that demonstrates that we actually live in a society with plenty. This is not the same as the message that compares a school building with the cost of a smart bomb, which is bad framing because it links education with bombs or pits education against national defense. Nor is it like a frame that paints education as a superior thing to like over some other thing, which is bad framing because it reminds the recipient that we are all in the business of judging each other’s moral standing. Rather, it changes the mind of the recipient to be more comfortable with talking about spending money, without pushing the recipient away. If done right, it might even play on the message recipient’s sense of fairness.

Framing training like Connnections Lab does is not exclusively about framing, but about great messaging, with framing theory as a key guiding, er, framework. And, again, it is training your brain, not handing you a recipe card.

When you write a letter to the editor…

Rule number one is to write the damn letter.

Rule number two is to write your own letter. Don’t send in someone else’s letter, don’t write a letter for someone else. Yes, collaborate, yes, help with editing, yes, pass around bullet points that might be helpful. But do your own letter, put your own name on it.

Rule number three: Write your message in your own voice, and using your own approach. No one should look at your message and see the imprint of an organized entity, or a different writer.

When we look at messaging that was designed and promulgated by entities such as the Kochtupus (via Bradley Foundation, ALEC, Center of the American Experiment, etc) it is blindingly obvious that the letter writer (or speaker at the school board) is parroting a canned message. No matter how well that message was originally constructed, it is ruined by virtue of its assembly line manufacturing. This is a flaw in the current right wing strategy, a chink in their armor. We can do better, if we don’t produce assembly line messages.

Do use the messaging training we have access to. The Race Class Narrative Deli Sandwich is a great way of constructing messages, but if you follow the recipe and that’s all you do, you will have a Big Mac. If, on the other hand, you practice the RCN approach and internalize it, your own voice and your own approach will refine and become better. Then, writing messages in your own voice and using your own approach is made better by your RCN work. Instead of a Big Mac, you will have a luscious three-decker deli sandwich.

Understanding the point of framing will help you structure your messages and your logical arguments, and especially, it will help you recognize counter-productive framing in your own rhetoric. The framing approach is less recipe based than the RCN method, so it is more natural when applied. But remember, the word “framing” does not mean “tricking the audience” or even shaping the message. Framing is how we set up our messages so the context of interpretation is made (usually) more comfortable and acceptable by the target audience. It can also be used to make a message more clear and less ambiguous, so misfires are less frequent. It isn’t so much message shaping as it is message delivery and refinement.

Becoming a messaging expert, or let’s just say, improving your message, is not possible by taking a couple of introductory meetings with RCN trainers or a group like Connections. A colleague of mine started out working with framing and other messaging experts to develop a message for a particular organization. He would tell you that he very quickly improved in his understanding of how to put a message together. Then, he moved to a phase of being able to recognize badly framed messaging. Then he realized what he needed to do to refine the method more. In the middle of this process of development, he presented a draft of his message to a large audience, and there was not a dry eye in the house (in a good way, that was the intent).

Then, he went back and refined. And when I say “he” I mean a small group of about four individuals. This whole thing went on for three years. Sometime over the next year, the message will be deployed. It will be fantastic, and it will be so good because the team included framing experts.

That is not a terribly extreme case.

On the other hand, I’ve observed in workshops individuals trying out framing techniques, or RCN techniques, and going from being an average communicator as all humans naturally are to having a much better approach, and truly appreciating what is learned on the very first day. It can make a huge difference over the short term.

The mistake we don’t want to make is this: Hearing a single lecture on messaging by someone who read a book, or attending a single workshop, then believing it possible to pivot to your own group and guide a set of volunteers to develop excellent messaging. I promise that the best message creator in your group BEFORE that influx of a little training will still be the best message creator in your group afterwards, simply because prior experience and talent in writing is going to beat a three hour tour through RCN, Framing, or any messaging strategy, every time.

One more item: A mistake I see made all the time. Folks show up for training, but it is clear from what they are saying that they are not listening to the training and how it challenges what they are already thinking. They are not changing. They reinforce their bad habits. This is why we give tests in school. If you don’t learn, don’t change, you don’t do well on tests. It is very inadvisable for RCN or framing teachers to be hard on their clients and prove to them that they are not learning, that they have to get their heads out of their butts to really change. They need to be nice, they are glad you showed up, they figure you will eventually get it.

But I can be a jerk about it and lose absolutely nothing in the way of credentials or friends, because that is what my friends expect of me and that is what I am credentialed to do. I am an anthropologist, hear me whine. So I’m telling you: check in with yourself. Did you leave the training session thinking you had some stuff wrong, and thinking you know new stuff? If not, do it again, in a different frame of mind. As it were.

Your reading assignment

Pursuant to the matter of messaging, I hereby recommend a few items. These are not necessarily new, but they are current. Newness is not the key to success. One of the best references in how we communicate with words is well over 2,000 years old.

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath.

Mark Twain once observed, “A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can even get its boots on.” His observation rings true: Urban legends, conspiracy theories, and bogus news stories circulate effortlessly. Meanwhile, people with important ideas—entrepreneurs, teachers, politicians, and journalists—struggle to make them “stick.”

In Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath reveal the anatomy of ideas that stick and explain ways to make ideas stickier, such as applying the human scale principle, using the Velcro Theory of Memory, and creating curiosity gaps. Along the way, we discover that sticky messages of all kinds—from the infamous “kidney theft ring” hoax to a coach’s lessons on sportsmanship to a vision for a new product at Sony—draw their power from the same six traits.

How To Go Viral and Reach Millions: Top Persuasion Secrets from Social Media Superstars, Jesus, Shakespeare, Oprah, and Even Donald Trump by Joe Romm*.

How To Go Viral And Reach Millions is the first book to reveal all the latest secrets for consistently generating viral online content—words, images, or videos that are seen and shared by hundreds of thousands and eventually even millions of people, something Romm and his colleagues in three different organizations achieve routinely.

The ALL NEW Don’t Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate by George Lakoff.*

Ten years after writing the definitive, international bestselling book on political debate and messaging, George Lakoff returns with new strategies about how to frame today’s essential issues.

In this updated and expanded edition, Lakoff, urges progressives to go beyond the typical laundry list of facts, policies, and programs and present a clear moral vision to the country?one that is traditionally American and can become a guidepost for developing compassionate, effective policy that upholds citizens’ well-being and freedom. (NB: “All New” here does not mean all new now. It was all new a few years ago.)

*Most of these links are tied to my Amazon Associates account, so if you go there and buy the book I become wealthy. If there are a lot of you.

Here, I want to look at one example of communication to critique it from the perspective of framing, to give an idea of what framing is all about.

Have a look at this bumper sticker:

Framing is always part of linguistic communication. Linguistic communication is a symbolic process, by which meaning is generated in a recipient, meaning that originated from another linguistic being, by reference to a commonly understood system of symbols and symbolic relationships. If I say the word “fish” you might think of some aquatic vertebrate animal easily available to your mind, maybe a trout. That is not because the word “fish” sounds, looks, or feels inherently fishish, but because we are communicating in a language in which “fish” is a shared symbol.

Which of the following words is not a word for “fish”?

se i?a
seekor ikan
hove
eng Geess

You would not know that the first three mean “a fish” while the fourth one means “a goat” unless you also know Samoan, Indonesian, Shona, and Luxembourgian. The link between the thing and the word is arbitrary. That is what makes the word a symbol for a fish, instead of, say, an icon for a fish (which would look at least somewhat like a fish, and might be hard to say out loud using voice).

But what if I meant the verb “fish” instead of the noun? Go get a fishing pole, a worm, and the other gear, and try to catch a fish. You would probably know the difference between the noun and the verb because of other parts of the sentence. Like I might say, “Hey you, go fish” (verb) as opposed to “Hey you, look at that fish” (noun).

The difference here is typically thought of as grammatical. The actual symbol being used is not really “fish” but rather the collection of words arranged in such a way to be identified as a noun, or a verb, or some other thing. This can be less obvious in English which tends to disassociate the grammatical elements compared to some other languages. (This is probably a feature of both Romance and Germanic languages generally). Thinking of words as distinct sets of letters set off by surrounding white space is a hindrance for English speakers when it comes to understanding the symbolic nature of language.

But what about this difference: I say to you “go, fish!” as you stand on the dock next to a boat loaded up with angling gear. This might compel you to get in the boat and start hunting for fish. But if instead of standing on the dock, we are inside sitting around a table and we have a bunch of playing cards in play, and I say “go fish!” we are probably playing the card game by that name, and your next move is to look for a card in the deck.

The difference between being on the dock and looking in the deck is a matter of framing. The symbolic utterance is “go fish” but it has multiple possible meanings. But there is something else involved in this act of symbolizing, that allows you to be more likely to correctly interpret my words. In this case, it is the physical context (out by the lake vs inside at the table) and the presence of certain artifacts (the paraphernalia of angling vs a deck of cards). That additional information keys the frame to either being about an outdoor activity involving fish or an indoor activity involving a deck of cards.

In the symbolic structure represented in the NCSE bumper sticker, what is the meaning of the three elements “EVIDENCE”, “>”, and “Misinformation”?

I believe you are supposed to take the “>” as a greater than sign, so EVIDENCE is greater than Misinformation. The details of the typeface (bold vs. not bold) reinforces this. The additional symbol, the Darwin’s Phylogeny drawing in the earthy sphere tells us this bumper sticker is about science and evolution, and is anti-misinformation, but never mind that for now. Just given the two words and the greater-than sign tell us all we need to know.

Or does it? Stick with the assumption that the symbols are symbols, ie., arbitrary in meaning. If so, why is “>” greater than? If this bumper sticker is meant to convince mathematicians that evidence is greater than misinformation, then yes, that makes sense, the meaning is clear, but this is also a waste of good paper and glue, because mathematicians, or sciency people who have some affinity to math, already know that. But what if the person interpreting this symbolic entity happens to be primarily a computer expert who programs in the scripting language bash? That might sound like a small, obscure, group, but it is not. Raise your hand if you know enough bash to know what two words with a “>” between them means! In bash, greater than is symbolized by “-gt” and the “>” symbol means something totally different. Like this, for example:

cat EVIDENCE

means spew the contents of a file named “EVIDENCE” to what is called “standard output,” which means onto the screen, normally. However,

cat EVIDENCE>Misinformation

means redirect from standard output, and copy the contents of a file named “EVIDENCE” to the end of the file called “Misinformation” and if that file does not exist, create “Misinformation” and fill it with the contents of “EVIDENCE”.

From the bash point of view, evidence is the basis for misinformation. This bumper sticker is, maybe, saying that evidence is bullpucky, or creates bullpucky, or the basis for bullpucky. This would be an example of the framing stepping big time on the message.

Here, the framing is pre-done, or primed, in advance. A person who is likely to see a “>” as a mathematical symbol understands the bumper sticker as meant. A person who spends all day with bash scripts may well get the same meaning, but their brain may alternatively go right to “>” as the redirect symbol, and figure that evidence becomes misinformation, or that misinformation is made out of evidence. That would be a bumper sticker fail.

On top of this, consider that even though the meaning of symbols is arbitrary, icons also exist as part of our linguistic communication. So, that green thing that looks like an arrow might be showing us that EVIDENCE becomes, or goes to, Misinformation. That is still a matter of framing, but in this case, more the absence of a key to set the frame up properly. The recipient of the message is simply trying to interpret what starts out as nonsense (as do all symbols until our brains figure them out), by giving a meaning of implied directionality to the thing that looks like an arrow, and coming up with a reasonably comfortable interpretation of the message. Evidence leads to misinformation.

I love the NCSE. I’m a big supporter. They have helped me greatly in the past. This bumper sticker, though … might be lesser than other options.

*Framing was originally formulated in the work of Anthropologist Gregory Bateson, though not everyone acknowledges (or knows) that. This was picked up and greatly expanded by Erving Goffman, and his work was sufficiently significant to attribute the origin of framing to him, though he was building on Bateson. Framing then spread as an idea across anthropology, linguistics, and philosophy, and was noticed by linguist George Lakoff and evile Republican strategist Frank Luntz, and applied to communication strategy. Biographies of the framing concept will vary, but this is my story and I’m sticking to it.

These bits of advice often do more damage then good. They are potentially sharp knives, or meaty mallets, or highly useful duct tape, in the tool kit of novices, but just as likely to cut or pound a finger or gum something up as to help. These bits of advice are like the tricks surgeons used to close off a bleeder or work around a key nerve without harming it. They are nice to know if you are a trained surgeon, but really not that useful if you are not. They serve mainly to make people think they are suddenly good communicators.

My advice is to either let other people do it, or to ramp it up. By ramp it up I mean don’t attend one seminar on how to communicate, but ten. Not three or four, but ten. Don’t read the first four paragraphs of a commentary on communication in The Atlantic, but read five books. Not one or two books, but five books. Or seven,even.

You need to do enough study of the matter to go through the phase when you realize you know way less than you thought.

Pursuant to this effort, I hereby recommend a few items. These are not new, but they are current. Newness is not the key to success. One of the best references in how we communicate with words is well over 2,000 years old.

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath*. Mark Twain once observed, “A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can even get its boots on.” His observation rings true: Urban legends, conspiracy theories, and bogus news stories circulate effortlessly. Meanwhile, people with important ideas—entrepreneurs, teachers, politicians, and journalists—struggle to make them “stick.”

In Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath reveal the anatomy of ideas that stick and explain ways to make ideas stickier, such as applying the human scale principle, using the Velcro Theory of Memory, and creating curiosity gaps. Along the way, we discover that sticky messages of all kinds—from the infamous “kidney theft ring” hoax to a coach’s lessons on sportsmanship to a vision for a new product at Sony—draw their power from the same six traits.

How To Go Viral and Reach Millions: Top Persuasion Secrets from Social Media Superstars, Jesus, Shakespeare, Oprah, and Even Donald Trump by Joe Romm*. How To Go Viral And Reach Millions is the first book to reveal all the latest secrets for consistently generating viral online content—words, images, or videos that are seen and shared by hundreds of thousands and eventually even millions of people, something Romm and his colleagues in three different organizations achieve routinely.

The ALL NEW Don’t Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate by George Lakoff.* Ten years after writing the definitive, international bestselling book on political debate and messaging, George Lakoff returns with new strategies about how to frame today’s essential issues.

In this updated and expanded edition, Lakoff, urges progressives to go beyond the typical laundry list of facts, policies, and programs and present a clear moral vision to the country?one that is traditionally American and can become a guidepost for developing compassionate, effective policy that upholds citizens’ well-being and freedom. (NB: “All New” here does not mean all new now. It was all new a few years ago.)

** Pronoiunced “meem-ish” not “mem ish”.

I don’t think so. Although I personally am not like some of my fellow secularists in reacting viscerally to any and all stylistic or symbolic references to Judeo-Christian religious themes, I am aware that there are recognizable religious visual or literary elements which, if used as part of a teaching tool, can be easily construed as promotion of a religion. “Promotion” is not standing on a soap box preaching, or telling students that a particular religion is bad while another is good, or giving extra credit points for prayer. Well, it is that. But promotion is also something as simple as a person in authority casually wearing a religious symbol or having such a symbol on a desk or wall in a classroom, or making references to a particular religious metaphor while teaching. These casual representations and references are relatively benign among adults, or in college, or probably even in senior high school, but in grade school they are regarded as promotion and public school teachers must not engage in this behavior.

Which brings us to the Science Marketing’s Boner of the Year award. Which, tongue in cheek, I just made up to draw attention to an interesting development.

You are familiar with Marketing for Scientists, the blog and the effort, as well as Marc Kuchner, science marketing guru. Marc’s thing is that marketing is important because without it you mostly get ignored. He’s right, of course, and I generally support and appreciate his efforts. You’ll remember the discussion a while back of Bill Nye‘s dressing down of creationism. Some people thought that Bill Nye being a meanie was a marketing disaster, and I disagreed. In retrospect, I’m sure I was right, because the controversy over Bill Nye pointing out that creationist parents are doing it wrong led to a widespread discussion of creationism in schools, and that discussion has to happen frequently. Also, Bill was right. Hard to go totally wrong if you’re right.

Marc just sent me a link to the latest post on Marketing for Scientists, which is “The Top Six Science Marketing Hits of 2012.” Number 5 is The Flame Challenge, of which Marc says:

This contest, held by the Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University with help from actor Alan Alda, dared scientists and educators to submit videos explaining what a flame is—a subtle concept. What set this contest apart from other science communication contests is that the judges were 11-year old students: some 6000 of them at 130 elementary schools. The results taught us something deep, I think, about how children view scientists.

Here is the video, which is discussed here:

(If you can’t see that for some reason, go to the link.)

I happen to think this video does a great job of explaining the science of the flame. The visuals and the dialog bring the viewer to a question, then address the question in a way that explains it but raises another question, which is then addressed, until the whole thing is explained at a fairly high level. That is a very good technique. The voice over, visuals, music, and overall production are high-value, attractive, attention grabbing, well timed, and all that. In short it is a very nice piece of work.

Unfortunately, the video can’t be used in a public school classroom in the US because it promotes Abrahamic religious themes. Promotes as in uses which is really all you need. The video opens with a man who looks a LOT like Charles Darwin chained to a wall in hell, surrounded by flames. The narrator then goes on to explain to the possibly holocaust-victim evolutionary biologist all he might ever want to know about flames. Satan (or some other high ranking devil) makes an appearance a bit later. He is used in the story to demonstrate incandescence by heating up his pitchfork in the hell-fire. Later, during the wrap-up, Satan plays air guitar with the pitchfork, which is cute.

I know, a lot of people are going to say that I’m being ridiculous, that these themes are just part of culture, that they don’t mean anything, that kids are exposed to this sort of thing anyway, that the science teacher can use the video anyway and then have a lecture on the conflict of science and religion, etc. etc. etc. But all that is wrong, sorry. It is promoting a particular religion with state funds which is a violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, it is inappropriate and could probably get a teacher in trouble if the right people knew the teacher was showing it. Making a science video and not taking into account the fact that teachers who have not thought about what they are doing could get in trouble is not good marketing. Well, it isn’t bad marketing either, it simply isn’t about marketing. It is about end user safety. This is like making a child’s toy and it is a) very fun, b) very desirable, everybody wants one, c) very well marketed and d) hurts some of the kids. And, no, we casual denizens of the internet don’t get to write off the fact that the negative effects potentially caused by a certain choice could be mitigated against by having an additional set of lectures.

On top of all this, I know there are teachers out there who will see this video and think it a great idea to use in the classroom precisely because it has a Judeo-Christian religious theme, and some will even like it because it depicts Charles Darwin burning in hell. Indeed, this is a physical science video, and there are probably more physical science teachers who happen to be Christian Creationists than life science teachers who are creationists, and the latter number is known to be well above 25%. So, yeah, Ben Ames, the maker of this video, may have produced a product that supports a creationist agenda, in a small but not insignificant way, even though that was presumably not his intention.

There may be a flaw in the process that could easily be fixed. Ben Ames is a communications and journalism guy, not a middle school teacher, or even a middle school education expert (I think … subject to correction). This project in communicating science, which I’m sure is a good one, will continue. I recommend that language be placed in the guiding documents for the project reminding producers that iconography or reference, even seemingly benign, to religious themes would likely disqualify a work from actual use in actual schools and would be best avoided. Also, having a science education expert familiar with the grade level and the legal and socio-cultural aspects of “marketing” science in the mix somewhere would be good. The idea would be to not let developers get beyond concept stage with unusable elements in place, in order to avoid wasting effort. As I say, this little film on flame is outstanding and really does the trick. It is simply unusable in the classrooms for which it intended, and unfortunately, will be used to potentially negative effect, and, here and there, exploited in a negative way. (This whole discussion must be adjusted, of course, for cases outside the US, where the First amendment does not apply, but where there may be similar issues.)

In this case, describing what a flame is, Hell seems like an obvious theme because there would be a lot of flames there. In some future year, perhaps the project will focus on floods … what could go wrong then?

The background is that Bill Nye made a video called Creationism is Not Appropriate for Children that some viewed as controversial because of Bill’s approach, which is a bit strong-sounding. In addition, Kyle Hill wrote, on Scientific American Blogs, Bill Nye is Not a Businessman). Additionally, this conversation has drawn a number of interesting comments on those blogs as well as on Google+ and Facebook.

First I want to thank my colleagues in the blogosphere for the simple fact that this conversation has two characteristics rarely found together: 1) People are saying things that are in potentially strong contrast with each other; 2) People are keeping the conversation very polite by any standards, especially Internet standards, even if the remarks made by various commenters are somewhat edgy at times.

Responding specifically to FURYGuitar’s comments about the audience, in which it is noted that Nye was speaking at Big Think, I’ll reiterate what I said on that blog with some additional information.

Big Think is a giant somewhat elite meta-blog that has a couple of thousand contributors that produce content that is culled based on the editor’s ideas of “significance, relevance, and application.” (see their about page.) The topics are diverse and the political views of those who’s work is highlighted is fairly broad. And, there is a certain amount of meta-blogging going on there, including this analysis of the reaction to Bill Nye’s video which oddly ignores all of the blogospheric discussion and focuses on sources such as The Onion. So much for “significance, relevance, and application”!

My contention is that Bill Nye is in part talking to a certain audience, which is a portion of the people who are most likely to pay attention to Big Think. These are people who are generally well educated, interested in learning, all that, but who also happen to be in professional (or other) areas that don’t focus on Life Sciences and happen to include a lot of people I would call “Casual Creationists.” I’m reminded for instance of several engineers I used to know fairly well (my sig-oth worked for their firm). These guys ranged from liberal to conservative politically (this is the context in which I attended various liberal-leaning fundraisers and it is also where I learned the phrase “a bullet costs nine cents” as an argument for skipping the appeals process in Death Penalty cases). The centrist-to-conservative among them probably got their political views from the usual places, and probably learned that it was appropriate to accept some form of creationism. Young Earth creationism would be absurd to them but a god-of-the-gaps variety, or a divine guidance or even mild Intelligent Design system might have worked for them as well, had they not thought about it much. So, if asked in a survey or in some other context what they felt about evolution, they would likely have been tallied in the database as “creationist” of some form or another. But they are also smart guys who are in fact in the business of “intelligently designing” things that are complicated, and are probably less woo’ed by the idea that some things are beyond imagination in complexity, and they have some sort of science background and above all, they don’t want to look stupid.

So, if the context they palpably live in when the question arises (the survey about evolution, for instance) they may well give creationist-sounding answers. But if prior to this they are primed by people like Bill Nye or some other thought-leader type person to take note of the fact that creationism has broader meaning than just some detail about evolution, that it is stupid and that it makes you look stupid when you embrace it, etc. etc. (all the stuff Bill Nye says or implies in his video), they may well come down on the other side, with answers to the surveyor’s questions that cause them to get tallied into the “not creationist” column.

Much of the conversation about this topic asks how we can most effectively speak to people who have this or that belief. But I don’t think that is the appropriate question. The appropriate question is how do we make “acceptance of evolution” something that is normal and desirable and not embarrassing to profess, and at the same time “belief in creationism” something that IS embarrassing to profess, and better left unspoken.

It is a little like racism. In large sectors of Western society, saying racists things is seen as a negative, so even people with racist thought learn to STFU, as it were. In this way, the next generation grows up with a larger percentage of people who don’t learn to be racists as completely and overtly as they otherwise might. We don’t rid a society of racism by convincing everyone it is wrong (though that would be nice). Rather, we rid a society of racism by using social pressure to make everyone who has racist thoughts keep them to themselves.

Bill Nye’s video, I think (but I’d love to hear is opinion on it!) serves the role of encouraging that middle ground of potential “casual creationists” to keep it to themselves more than they otherwise might, helping, potentially very significantly, to move the conversation in the right direction.

Although many animals communicate vocally, no extant creature rivals modern humans in language ability. Therefore, knowing when and under what evolutionary pressures our capacity for language evolved is of great interest. Here, we find that our closest extinct relatives, the Neandertals, share with modern humans two evolutionary changes in FOXP2, a gene that has been implicated in the development of speech and language. We furthermore find that in Neandertals, these changes lie on the common modern human haplotype, which previously was shown to have been subject to a selective sweep. These results suggest that these genetic changes and the selective sweep predate the common ancestor (which existed about 300,000-400,000 years ago) of modern human and Neandertal populations. This is in contrast to more recent age estimates of the selective sweep based on extant human diversity data. Thus, these results illustrate the usefulness of retrieving direct genetic information from ancient remains for understanding recent human evolution.

The authors actually get more specific regarding the role of FOXP2 in language:

Although language and speech are clearly genetically complex phenomena, the only gene currently known that has a specific role in the development of language and speech is FOXP2. The inactivation of one FOXP2 copy leads primarily to deficits in orofacial movements and linguistic processing similar to those in individuals with adult-onset Broca’s aphasia

While the paper by Krause et al is an important contribution because it involves allele-level comparison of nucleic genetic material between hominid groups and across living and extinct forms, the role of FOXP2 and the characterization of the genetics of language may be misleading, if not simply very very wrong.The paper describes how nuclear DNA was recovered from Neanderthal material, and demonstrates that the FOXP2 variant found in modern humans is also present in this ancient material. The extraction process is very carefully done, there are piles of controls and checks for contamination and there is no particular reason to believe that the results are not real. However, these results are so sensitive from an interpretive perspective, and recovery of ancient DNA is so new, it is necessary to replicate this work with additional recovery attempts.The authors conclude:

… the current results show that the Neandertals carried a FOXP2 protein that was identical to that of present-day humans in the only two positions that differ between human and chimpanzee. Leaving out the unlikely scenario of gene flow, this establishes that these changes were present in the common ancestor of modern humans and Neandertals. The date of the emergence of these genetic changes therefore must be older than that estimated with only extant human diversity data, thus demonstrating the utility of direct evidence from Neandertal DNA sequences for understanding recent modern human evolution. Whatever function the two amino acid substitutions might have for human language ability, it was present not only in modern humans but also in late Neandertals. Ongoing in vivo and in vitro experiments should help to delineate these functions.

The news that Neanderthals have the same FOXP2 gene as modern humans, indicating that they may, therefore, have had modern human speech and language, has been misinterpreted in my view. I’d like to make the following points:1) It is not true that this evidence can be used to draw this conclusion.2) The FOXP2 gene is not a gene for speech and language.3) Science reporting has always used framing, this is an example of framing, and this is an example of framing that sucks. This may not mean that all framing sucks, but it does demonstrate how framing can suck.The role often attributed to the FOXP2 Gene in both the scientific literature and the science press can be summarized in this set of phrases from a recent report in the New York Times:

“Neanderthals, an archaic human species that dominated Europe until the arrival of modern humans some 45,000 years ago, possessed a critical gene known to underlie speech … a gene called FOXP2 which is associated with language … The human version of the gene differs at two critical points from the chimpanzee version, suggesting that these two changes have something to do with the fact that people can speak and chimps cannot.”NYT:”Neanderthals May Have Had Gene for Speech”

So clearly, it is on the table … in the nation’s premier daily science news print outlet, that FOXP2 is thought (but not with total certainty, of course) to be a speech and language gene. Is it necessary for me to demonstrate that lesser news outlets make this conclusion seem even firmer? No, but it would be fun. The following are phrases from such sources, not attributed here because I don’t want to embarrass anybody.

• Modern speech gene found in Neanderthals
• Neanderthals had same version of FOXP2 “language gene” as modern humans
• It’s the only gene known so far that plays a key role in language. When mutated, the gene primarily affects language without affecting other abilities.
• Neandertals, humans share key changes to ‘language gene’

Let’s see, that’s one blog, two major news outlets, and the journal Nature. I’ll let you guess which source uttered which phrase.But what is the FOXP2 gene really?

Language is a uniquely human trait likely to have been a prerequisite for the development of human culture. The ability to develop articulate speech relies on capabilities, such as fine control of the larynx and mouth, that are absent in chimpanzees and other great apes. FOXP2 is the first gene relevant to the human ability to develop language. A point mutation in FOXP2 co-segregates with a disorder in a family in which half of the members have severe articulation difficulties accompanied by linguistic and grammatical impairment. This gene is disrupted by translocation in an unrelated individual who has a similar disorder. Thus, two functional copies of FOXP2 seem to be required for acquisition of normal spoken language. We sequenced the complementary DNAs that encode the FOXP2 protein in the chimpanzee, gorilla, orang-utan, rhesus macaque and mouse, and compared them with the human cDNA. We also investigated intraspecific variation of the human FOXP2 gene. Here we show that human FOXP2 contains changes in amino-acid coding and a pattern of nucleotide polymorphism, which strongly suggest that this gene has been the target of selection during recent human evolution. Enard W, Przeworski M, Fisher SE, Lai CS, Wiebe V, Kitano T, Monaco AP, Pääbo S.. (2002). Nature. Aug 22;418(6900):869-72. Epub 2002 Aug 14.

It is arguably true that language is a prerequisite for the phenomenon of “human culture” in the sense of social ontogeny, but not individual ontogeny and not as the chicken as in “chicken before the egg” (or the reverse if you prefer) to human culture as egg. In other words, language does not precede human culture in evolutionary time, but rather, language is part of human culture. The neural differences between a hypothetical pre-cultural human (and that is very hypothetical) and a post-“dawn of culture” human would be those brain differences that we see as distinguishing between the non-cultural (arbitrarily defined as such for the present purposes but obviously a falsehood) chimpanzee-like ape ancestor and, say, you or me.So when we speak of human intelligence, we may be speaking about the FOX2P gene. Is this the gene that Klein refers to in his somewhat insightful but mostly misguided “one gene theory” ? (Yes, he would likely say, … or at least “Yea, this really could be the gene.”)OK, that was the first sentence of the FOX2P abstract of Enard et.al. Onward.We have now switched topics, from language to speech. This happened in the reverse direction in the verbiage cited from the more recent NYT piece on FOXP2 and Neanderthals. One of the great findings of the Language Research Boom of the latter half of the 20th century was this, now pretty much undisputed: Language operates independently of modality. Speech is no more language than getting to work is my car. Now, I quickly add that the authors of the above cited texts do not explicitly tell us that they are conflating speech and language. They are doing it implicitly and tactfully, to avoid the obvious error. But they need to make this leap … and it is a leap across a fairly narrow but very, very deep chasm … in order to link the physical (genetic) trait that they have in hand with the grand concept of that one feature that makes us human.Then, we learn about a broken family. It is not clearly articulated in the paper cited here, but this information came out in later reports as well as under friendly interrogation at conference venues by Terrence Deacon and others: The FOXP2 family — the grammar-error correlated with a base pair mutation family — presents a wide range of abnormalities. If FOXP2 caused the consistent grammatical goofiness than it also caused these other attributes.Many traits work that way. There is a single, widespread phenotype and a smaller number of “mutants” each the expression of a simple mutation that causes some protein to either not be functional at all or to fail in function in a number of contexts. Quite often such individuals are not so dysfunctional that they can’t survive, but there is likely overall selection against the variant most of the time. So, each time such a mutation arises, it makes the turn towards that old exit door we call “fixation” and pretty soon everyone in that “deme” is reduced to the more typical and widespread variant.Sometimes this tells us about a gene that relates to a particular system. Many examples that come to mind have to do with pigment. This is because we humans, as primates, fixate on the visual so we “get” pigment, we see pigmentation. Where I live there are many pockets of all-white squirrels (always in urban areas) and a few pockets of nearly all black squirrels (they can be anywhere) and mostly gray squirrels. If I went out and sampled the squirrels, I could probably put together a pretty good story of pigmentation variation involving a single gene or maybe two for the grey-very dark grey variants (I’m thinking one gene because it does not look like a smooth range to me) and maybe a set of common mutations in any one of a handful of genes that produces the white variety. I would test the hypothesis that the white squirrels have lower individual fitness owing to problems other than pigment loss that arise from this mutant allele, as well as, perhaps, being white all summer (instead of doing what other critters around here do, turning white in winter and back to brownish in summer). And so on.When I’m done with this research, I’d have a story of metabolic process mainly but not entirely having to do with pigmentation. In fact, I’d have small set of metabolic pathways sharing their “roots” with many other metabolic pathways, but their “branches” largely having to do only with pigmentation. So alleles that “block” the pathway later on cause visible changes in pigmentation, and other secondary changes that also have to do with pigmentation (negative effects on eyesight, increased chance of skin cancer?, being visible to the predators, etc.). Alleles that block the pathway early on also block other pathways, so the direct genetic effects analogous to the simple lack of production of a pigment also occur in other pathways, some of which may be developmental. So you end up not with a white squirrel that may be more likely eaten by a hawk, but rather with a half formed embryo.The FOXP2 mutation seems to be a non-deadly allele (but we can’t be sure of that … there may be prenatal synergistic effects. What is the rate of miscarriage in FOXP2 women? We don’t know) causing a broad-spectrum mutation that has, among many other things, a negative effect on neural development, which is manifest in several ways, one of which happens to be related to linguistic production.The affected individuals have a range of cognitive problems, but they are all very minor, but one happens to be dyspraxia and thus of great interest. These individuals have difficulty articulating speech and performing certain semi- or fully-automated tasks that are centered in Broca’s Area and one or two other spots. FOXP2 in mammals is involved in development of a number of organs, including brains and lungs and esophagus in mice and neural systems related to echolocation in bats. This does not mean it is not involved in lung formation in bats … that experiment has not been done. In birds, the same gene is involved at least in neural development focusing on the avian cortex, but we don’t know about its other functions. The same gene is found in exemplars of most if not all of the vertebrates.The reason why the gene works this way is because FOXP2 is, you will not be surprised to know, one of the FOX genes, a set of transcription factors. These are genes that turn on during development and ultimately affect the transcription of other genes that are part of that developmental process. An error in a FOX coded transcription factor is likely to have broad effects, most of which will be deleterious.There are genes that vary a lot (have a lot of alleles) and this makes sense. In some systems, variation is associated with positive fitness (like the MHC genes). Other genes vary very little, and this is generally in the systems where variation is almost always bad. This is probably the case with FOX genes in general, and FOXP2 in particular.Damage Brains, Damaged TheoriesMuch of the early understanding of how the human brain works was based on the study of damaged patients. Strokes or trauma would cause an aphasia or other behavioral effect. You study the effect until the patient dies, then you look at the brain to see which part was damaged, and eventually, you get a model of the distribution of functional areas within the brain itself.Subsequent studies from patients in surgery and MRI’s or similar technology indicate that while there is a rough correspondence to the earlier ideas of brain function, things are in fact very different than first expected. There are more areas involved in any given function, with individual areas often having antagonistic subdivisions. So damage to a particular area of the brain, at the gross level, could have very opposite effects each time it happens to a different individual. Naturally, many of the possible kinds of damage that might have revealed something about the function of the brain could not do so because damage to those areas typically resulted in death. For these reasons, the damage-based models were very under determined and very inaccurate.Think of it this way: Say you knew absolutely nothing about how a car worked inside, but you wanted to find out so you could at least describe how a car works (accurately) and maybe eventually build one from scratch. So you go out and get a bunch of cars You never open the hood, never look at the guts of the car. Instead, you take a shot gun and fire the shotgun at one of the cars and see how it affects performance. Record your results. Fire the shotgun at this car and keep testing the effects, recording them, until the car utterly stops working. If you happen to “kill” the car on the first shot, then you won’t get much data from that car.Now move on the the next car and do the same thing. And so on.You will eventually get a model of how the car works but it will be pretty coarse, and you will probably have a lot of misconceptions that make your model useless. Especially if you had a mixture of engine-in-front and engine-in-back cars (as would the the case of human brains, studying a mixture of males and females, French-speaking vs. Chinese-speaking, etc. .. as they would have differences in the distribution of linguistic and other functions owing to various hormonal and social effects while growing up).The linkage between FOXP2 and language is like this. A broken FOXP2 gene is probably almost always fatal early in development. The few alleles that result in a human growing to maturity are going to have strange effects that will not really make much sense. Taking these effects to the next level … to attributing prior allelic evolution in this particular gene the role of evolutionary foundation for language … is misleading and inappropriate.There are probably hundreds of genes like FOXP2 that have to be working a certain way or language function will be impaired. If they are developmental genes, there will be very few alleles. Most alternate alleles will result in inviable embryos or otherwise catastrophic effects that ultimately provide no information to us.Most or all of these genes probably have a variant in chimpanzees that is also conservative in chimps, but owing to an accumulative 10 to 16 million years of evolutionary time, they will be variant. If you go looking in Neanderthals for these genes, you will almost always find the human variant rather than the chimpanzee variant. This pattern is exactly what we would expect under a basic neutral model, the most likely to apply in this case.In the broad picture, FOXP2 is very interesting. In the context in which it is usually discussed these days (as the “language gene”) it is little more than annoying._______________________________Krause, Johannes, Carles Lalueza-Fox, Ludovic Orlando, Wolfgang Enard, Richard E. Green, Hernán A. Burbano, Jean-Jacques Hublin, Catherine Hänni, Javier Fortea, Marco de la Rasilla, Jaume Bertranpetit6, Antonio Rosas and Svante Pääbo. (2007) The Derived FOXP2 Variant of Modern Humans Was Shared with Neandertals. Current Biology. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2007.10.008

• The scientific sounding languge.
• The cool 3D graphics
• The guy bloating up because he has not eaten his SKRMs yet. Then he eats the SKRMs and gets better.