Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the News of the Week story “All that glitters” (14 September, p. [1277][1]), Beverley Glover of the University of Cambridge describes the iridescent fruit of the African perennial herb Pollia condensata by saying, “The fruit's dazzling display may have evolved to capitalize on birds' attraction to sparkly objects, or to trick them into eating something that looks like a blueberry without going to the trouble of actually making juicy flesh.” At a time when remarkably few people seem to understand the basic mechanism of evolution, it seems inappropriate for Science to publish such comments without clarifying them to ensure that no one is misled. If our present understanding of evolution is correct, nothing has evolved to do a specific task. If birds do indeed eat or otherwise disperse the seeds of Pollia condensata , this phenomenon could be more accurately described by saying that the coloration of the fruit has the presumed function of attracting the attention of birds, which may then disperse the seeds. Glover's second point—that fruit has evolved to trick birds into eating something that looks like a blueberry without going to the trouble of actually making juicy flesh—combines teleology with anthropomorphism. The colloquialism “going to the trouble of” should have been stated as “at lower energetic cost,” if that is what was meant. Unfortunately, the same teleological and anthropomorphic language is used in the otherwise excellent paper on the “Pointillist structural color in Pollia fruit” to which the Science News item refers ([ 1 ][2]), which is indicative of how widely and unfortunately such inaccurate and misleading language is now used in the scientific literature. 1. [↵][3] 1. S. Vignolinia 2. et al ., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 109, 15712 (2012). [OpenUrl][4][Abstract/FREE Full Text][5] [1]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.337.6100.1277-a [2]: #ref-1 [3]: #xref-ref-1-1 View reference 1 in text [4]: {openurl}?query=rft.jtitle%253DProc.%2BNatl.%2BAcad.%2BSci.%2BU.S.A.%26rft_id%253Dinfo%253Adoi%252F10.1073%252Fpnas.1210105109%26rft_id%253Dinfo%253Apmid%252F23019355%26rft.genre%253Darticle%26rft_val_fmt%253Dinfo%253Aofi%252Ffmt%253Akev%253Amtx%253Ajournal%26ctx_ver%253DZ39.88-2004%26url_ver%253DZ39.88-2004%26url_ctx_fmt%253Dinfo%253Aofi%252Ffmt%253Akev%253Amtx%253Actx [5]: /lookup/ijlink/YTozOntzOjQ6InBhdGgiO3M6MTQ6Ii9sb29rdXAvaWpsaW5rIjtzOjU6InF1ZXJ5IjthOjQ6e3M6ODoibGlua1R5cGUiO3M6NDoiQUJTVCI7czoxMToiam91cm5hbENvZGUiO3M6NDoicG5hcyI7czo1OiJyZXNpZCI7czoxMjoiMTA5LzM5LzE1NzEyIjtzOjQ6ImF0b20iO3M6MjI6Ii9zY2kvMzM4LzYxMDgvNzQxLmF0b20iO31zOjg6ImZyYWdtZW50IjtzOjA6IiI7fQ==
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.014 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".