Too Lazy to Read the Paper

In this podcast the author explains a paper to me, your host, Professor Sune Lehmann (https://sunelehmann.com). The participants are authors of a paper in network science or data science. Sometimes I feature a group of co-authors! The intended audience is PhD students, PostDocs and other scientists. The idea is to start with a bit about the paper's author, the idea for the paper. Then talk about the research itself. And we’ll end by gossiping about the reviewing process, etc. The whole thing is based on the idea that papers are so formal. And that when two people talk to each other informally, it’s often more fun – and tends to get ideas across more effectively.

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Too Lazy to Read the Paper

Too Lazy to Read the Paper: Episode 3 with Dirk Brockmann

April 19, 2021 • Sune Lehmann • Season 1 • Episode 3

Via the response to the first couple of episodes I realized that not only my science-friends listen to the podcast, but many other people.

So while I want to keep this part short, I should probably provide a short intro to present the interview subject.

Today’s guest is Dirk Brockmann.

Dirk is a physicist and complex systems researcher. He’s a professor at the Department of Biology, Humboldt University of Berlin and the Robert Koch Institute, Berlin. Berfore returning to his native Germany, he was a professor at Northwestern University.

He’s a man of many talents. His academic work spans pioneering papers on human mobility and has also pioneered work on its connection to Infectious Disease Dynamics (there’s a super nice paper developing the idea of effective distance in Science a few years ago, but also many more). But that’s not all, he has many other papers, to give you a sense, he has a recent one on social networks of honey bees. Read all about him and his amazing group of researchers here: https://rocs.hu-berlin.de

Finally Dirk has been a crucial voice of reason during the COVID-19 … dare I say becoming a bit of a celebrity in his native lands … all the while also making important scientific contributions on a number of aspects related to the epidemic.

Now. Dirk is also a rebel, so he decided to rebel against the “rules” of the podcast. And submitted a paper to me that wasn’t even his own work. But experience tells me, that unexpected paths are often the best ones, so I decided to roll with it. And it sure was worth it.

In the podcast, we talk about a review paper by Ilana Zilber-Rosenberg and Eugene Rosenberg concerning the “hologenome theory of evolution” (1). And it was glorious! Relentlessly and methodically, Dirk took me into an amazing world of little creatures I knew little about. And I also detected a beautiful political undercurrent, in this story of life and evolution as a massive collaborative and mutually supporting endeavor.

Check out his hand-drawn illustrations here: https://twitter.com/suneman/status/1383359122700001283

If you love science and discovery, this podcast is for you

[0:00:00] Intro by Sune
[0:04:08] We talk about headphone settings and friendship.
[0:08:50] Why is Dirk a scientist?
[0:12:40] Patterns in Biology.
[0:16:15] Origin story. An anti-arrogance view of the world.
[0:25:10] We get started talking about the paper. The hologenome.
[0:33:33] An evolutionary theory that goes beyond the individual; beyond the concept of the species. It's about collaboration.
[0:43:00] Meddling with Nature.
[0:55:22] What about variability?
[0:59:30] The collaborating Aphid.
[1:03:10] The "Ship of Theseus" and adaptability
[1:15:16] The invisible Squid; too complex to be intelligent design.
[1:19:20] One more thing.

(1) https://academic.oup.com/femsre/article/32/5/723/2398937

The podcast has theme music by Waylon Thornton. Songs are "American Heart" and "Seven". Via freemusicarchive.org and licenced under CC BY-NC-SA. The podcast was funded in part by the Villum Foundation.