loom | August 23, 2006From his latest column:
Liberals see the political value to teaching evolution in school, as it makes teachers and children think they are no more special than animals. Childhood joy and ambition can turn into depression as children learn to reject that they were created in the image of God.
He may not be in office any more, but this piece wins Kemp an honorary spot in the creationist-friendly political pantheon.
Update: Thursday 8/24 Turns out this is the work of the old foe of evolution, Phyllis Schlafly. Kemp's view on evolution remain a mystery. More here.
loom | August 22, 2006I'm happy to report that the eyes are back.
My third book, Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea, came out in 2001. It's a survey of the history and cutting edge of evolutionary biology, from the origin of new species to mass extinctions, from the rise of complex life to the emergence of humans. The book explores evolutionary races between hosts and parasites, between males and females. It puts evolution in a historical context as well, showing how Darwin's theory emerged out of the science of his time and how social and political tensions foster hostility to evolution today. Scientific American…
loom | August 21, 2006Like many parasites, a species of bacteria called Wolbachia takes charge of its own fate. Wolbachia can only survive inside the cells of its hosts--invertebrates such as this lovely common eggfly. This way of life limits Wolbachia's opportunities for long-term survival. If Wolbachia lives inside a female insect, it can infect her eggs. When those eggs hatch and mature into adult insects, they will be infected by Wolbachia as well. But if Wolbachia should find itself in a male, it has reached a dead end. It cannot infect sperm cells, and thus it has no escape from a male host. When a male host…
loom | August 21, 2006The Sunday Times in the UK reported yesterday on an upcoming paper that claims that the ever-fascinating Homo floresiensis (a k a the Hobbit) is not a new species, as previously reported. Instead, it was a human with a genetic defect called microcephaly that gave it a small head.
This is a long-standing criticism, but only a couple papers based on it have been published since the Hobbit fossils were discovered almost two years ago. The article doesn't have a lot of details. When the new paper comes out (in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) I guess we'll get more.
For my…
loom | August 18, 2006I was happy to see that my post on Tuesday about the evolution of whales attracted a lot of readers. One commenter asked about seals and manatees. As other commenters kindly explained, those mammals descend from other ancestors (relatives of bears and elephants, respectively) that independently moved into the water. This transition has occurred many times since vertebrates moved on land. In some cases, the animals have adapted completely to the water (such as marine reptiles). In other cases, the transition has not been so complete. Other relatives of elephants evolved into desmostylians,…
loom | August 16, 2006The textbook explanation of DNA goes something like this: enzymes in our cells read a stretch of DNA and convert its code into a single-stranded RNA molecule, which is then used by ribosomes as a template for building a protein. That stretch of DNA biologists call a gene. The protein it encodes drifts off to do some job--building cell membranes, maybe, or switching off other genes, and so on.
This is a fairly accurate picture--for less than two percent of the human genome. The rest of our DNA does not encode proteins. Much of it may be made up of genetic material from viruses and disabled…
loom | August 15, 2006Whales are beautifully ridiculous. They are majestic divers, in some cases plunging nearly two miles underwater. And yet sooner or later they must rise back to the surface to breathe air. They breathe through a rather ridiculous-looking hole on top of their head. Unlike fish, which often reproduce by spraying millions of eggs and swimming away, whales give birth to one calf at a time, which they proceed to nurse for months. Some whales are like underwater bats, shrieking through their blowholes and listening to the echoes. And perhaps most ridiculous of all are whales that turn themselves…
loom | August 9, 2006Can a tumor become a new form of life?
This is the freaky but serious question that arises from a new study in the journal Cell. Scientists from London and Chicago have studied a peculiar cancer that afflicts dogs, known as canine transmissible venereal tumor (CTVT) or Sticker's sarcoma. It is a cancer of immune cells called histiocytes, and dogs typically develop grapefruit-sized tumors that disappear after a few months.
Some scientists have suggested that Sticker's sarcoma can be transmitted from dog to dog, either by mating or by licking or touching a tumor. They noted that the tumor cells…
loom | August 7, 2006Last night, as my family settled into a three-hour drive home, I began scanning the AM radio dial. The tuner stopped at on a well-produced segment in which the announcer was talking about recent evolution of pigmentation genes and lactose-digestion genes in humans. This is a surprise, I thought, and I settled in for a listen. It took about twenty seconds for me to realize that this was the work of creationists. I spent the next fifteen minutes listening to the piece with jaw aslack, making sure I didn't get so distracted I missed my exit. There is something so absorbing about the elaborate…
loom | August 4, 2006 I'm heading out of blog contact for a couple days, so allow me to share one of my favorite posts, from last January--on wasps that perform brain surgery.
I collect tales of parasites the way some people collect Star Trek plates. And having filled an entire book with them, I thought I had pretty much collected the whole set. But until now I had somehow missed the gruesome glory that is a wasp named Ampulex compressa.
As an adult, Ampulex compressa seems like your normal wasp, buzzing about and mating. But things get weird when it's time for a female to lay an egg. She finds a cockroach to…
loom | August 2, 2006This morning the Kansas State Board of Education is all shook up.
Last year the board voted 6-4 for much-criticised, creationism-friendly science education standards. Yesterday the primaries for the board elections took place, and on balance, the science-standards bloc lost two seats to Republic opponents. So it looks as if the balance is going to shift to 4-6, and the standards are going to go down.
The vote is all the more notable for the fact that the primaries saw a big media campaign carried out by the Discovery Institute, the main organization pushing intelligent design (a k a "the…
loom | August 1, 2006Once again, I hear the siren song of Toxoplasma, the parasite that dwells in the brains of 50 million Americans.
Toxoplasma gondii is an extraordinary creature, whose exploits I've chronicled in previous posts , an article in the New York Times and my book Parasite Rex. This single-celled organism has a life cycle that takes it from cats to other mammals and birds and back to cats again. Studies have shown that the parasite can alter the behavior of rats, robbing them of their normal fear of cats--and presumably making it easier for the parasites to get into their next host.
Toxoplasma is…
loom | August 1, 2006John Noble Wilford has a long, interesting article in today's New York Times on the rehabilitation of the alchemist. Once the icon of the bad old days before the scientific revolution, alchemy has been emerging in recent years as more of a proto-science. Indeed, a fair number of the heroes of the scientific revolution were dyed-in-the-wool alchemists. Robert Boyle, one of the founders of chemistry, wanted to reform alchemy, not destroy it. He chased after the philsopher's stone for his whole life. Many of his papers were destroyed in the eighteenth century because they were loaded with…
loom | July 24, 2006The Washington Post has an article today called And the Evolutionary Beat Goes On . . .. It is based on some interviews with scientists who are documenting evidence of natural selection in humans. I won't be surprised if it gets emailed hither and yon, but not for the text, which is based on stuff that's been out for some months now. No, it's got a slick animation with the following caption: "A morphing demonstration of human evolution shows the transformation from a small lemur, up the evolutionary ladder into a human: seen here as legendary evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould."
The…
loom | July 20, 2006As I wrote in May, there have been some signs that scientists were gearing up to reconstruct the Neanderthal genome. Now it's official, as Nicholas Wade reports in the NY Times. [link fixed] I'm particularly intrigued that the paleoanthropologists doing this work are teaming up with a hot little biotech company down the road from me in Branford, Connecticut called 454. They had a paper out recently showing how they can sequence DNA much faster than by conventional methods. Combine classic fossil work with the latest in genome sequencing, and voila...
Update, seconds later: Whoops, forgot to…
loom | July 19, 2006
As I browsed the new papers published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, I was brought up short by this frolicsome picture. It's a nice example of the visual display of information done right. It shows the spread of primates 55 million years ago across the Northern Hemisphere. I'm always game to learn about what primates were up to in Wyoming and Greenland. But this picture--and the paper that goes with it--have an extra value. They offer some clues to what sort of world we may be creating by pumping billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.…
loom | July 17, 2006If our genes are wired like circuits, does that mean nature is an electrician?
One of the most important sorts of jobs that genes do is to switch other genes on or off. The classic example comes from Escherichia coli, and how it eats milk. (I'm afraid Escherichia coli will be progressively infecting this blog in the months to come, as I finish my new book on this remarkable bug.) Escherichia coli can make the enzymes necessary for digesting lactose, the sugar in milk. But it normally doesn't, because it makes proteins that clamp onto its DNA next to these genes and prevent gene-reading…
loom | July 13, 2006Randy Olson visited the Loom a few months ago in connection with his movie about our national fun and games with evolution and intelligent design, Flock of Dodos. He provoked a lot of discussion with his main point, that biologists were doing a poor job of reaching out to the public. Some skeptics wondered whether accepting Olson's argument would lead to dumbing science down and engaging in the same bogus PR as creationists. This morning Randy dropped me an email note to point out what he considers a depressing confirmation of his thesis.
Kansas--where the science standards have been…
loom | July 12, 2006It was eight years ago that some computer programmers got together and issued a manifesto for something they called open source software. Conventional software development--kept hidden behind walls of intellectual property, copyright, and secrecy--was clumsy and slow. It would be far better, the open source advocates declared, to make software open to all. It would foster the growth of a vast decentralized community of developers and consumers who could work together to create better software together. Individuals would grab software created by others, tinker with it, and then make it…
loom | July 11, 2006A good article on the importances of big animals helps put the new dodo fossil discoveries in some ecological context. If you can't bring dodos back, at least bring in the giant tortoises!