Congratulations to Gregory Simonian!

Thanks for posting this! I was jonesing for a little more Pharyngula content.

My son and I have discovered that the daily Christopher Hitchens interview is the perfect accompaniment & distraction for sorting tax receipts.

I was a little skeptical about this before reading the essay. I could sort of imagine a good doctor who happens to also be a creationist nut. After all, my doctor's main task seems to be to push pills on me that he's seen commercials for on TV.

The essay did convince me. Now I really hope my doctor understand the basics of evolution even if he is just a glorified pill pusher.

...it seems a few high school students are far smarter than the entire gang of evolution deniers at the Discovery Institute.

While I won't argue they're indeed smart students, being smarter than the DI is really no trick. Hell, the average pen is smarter than the DI (a complete lack of believing false things is in the pen's favor).

#2,

If your doctor really understood evolution he might feel very uncomfortable being a glorified pill pusher. Nah, not really he'd have to have a grounding in ethics as well. Somehow I don't think the pharmaceutical companies would like doctors who understand evolution and are ethical as well.

In this context, it may be appropriate to recall what happens when creationists hold a contest for teenagers' anti-evolution essays: You get embarrassingly naive rehashes of the same old talking points (gaps mean God did it, 2nd law of thermodynamics, wacky probability computations, and -- of course -- Naziism).

If you remember these from last December, you probably want to spare yourself further exposure. Otherwise, here's a link to my post on the essays.

By comparison, the Alliance for Science essays are a breath of fresh air.

Actually, my only complaint about the winner is the assumption that Mad Cow is a *disease* in the normal sense. Its not caused by a virus, just a malformed protein. Somehow this protein has the capacity to replicate by literally causing other proteins around it to be warped into a new rogue protein. The reason it can jump to pretty much "any" species is that it doesn't have any "genetic" mechanisms that make it reliant on a host to replicate, all it needs it *just* proteins, which every species has. The only real defense is to a) not be exposed or b) hope your immune system wipes it out before it gets into the brain, where the immune system can't attack it as effectively.

Interestingly, no one is entirely sure what they Prions actually do in the body and they exist in a non-rogue form in a number of species, including humans. This is why its possible to get the human version, without having eaten anything that contained them. Your own prions can malform and go rogue too. This is something else that makes it different than a normal disease. You don't generally find a situation where a plague just *pops up* as a result of a species own cells manufacturing a virus from their own genetic code. Prions... will do that.

But, its not like the kid would have necessarily have read anything on the subject, beyond how it jumps species, which would *seem* to imply a virus, instead of something as bizarre as a rogue protein structure.

Still, it got me thinking, what if prions are a remnant of early life. I mean, one major complaint of abiogenesis by some people is that no one can show how chemicals suddenly become "life". Well, why not something like a prion, able to self replication almost like crystals grow, solely based on their own structure interacting with available chemicals of the type needed to make more of them. The only question is then, what change to one of these simple proteins made it possible for one to "protect" itself from immediate conversion to a new prion, long enough for something closer to life to happen? But, it potentially fills the, "chemical one moment, early life the next", gap they whine about so much.

I remember I tried to explain the Jeans Criterion to that one kid from the AiG contest who said that star formation without God violated Newton's laws (I was nice, didn't flame). He also seemed to be of the mind that we've never observed protostars. I gave him some examples. Even showed him how to find peer-reviewed articles on the subject (he didn't think there were any). I'm not really sure what that had to do with evolution, but he said it anyway.

Anyway, after I (nicely) explained to the kid he was mistaken, I flamed Chapman. Said the IRS was going to find him, and then he'd be sharing a cell with Hovind. Sure enough, the IRS came after him, he quit his job, and vanished. Unfortunately he took his websites with him, so I don't know if the kid listened.

So, in addition to having an understanding of the material which most high schoolers do not, Cactuar isn't hanging around someone who is going to eventually have him dragged into a cult or prison.

Dustin, I don't think you were able to persuade the boy to change his opinion appreciably, although you may have talked him into abandoning one particular argument. True believers are quite resilient. Even though the Chapman site vanished along with Chapman himself, his teenaged "ID advisor" (who is really more of a young-earth creationist than a true IDist) has a couple of his own blogs now. You can see what the kid is up to here. He seems to have scaled back from presidential politics and was most recently working a city council campaign (his candidate lost).

The speculation must be general! KAGEHI and I were bit by the same bug concerning prion characteristics, it appears. As an old geologist I picked the molecular "rules" of crystallography for a start on abiogenisis. It simply had to happen. A crystal "grows" in an impure medium and is "satisfied" with "fits" of molecular angle at the temperature and presure. A geotechnical field engineer can drive and speculate at the same time. Is the pecular life found at the "black smokers" an adaptation or a repetition? Is the predatory prion a molecular "negative" of an organized protein built on a model of a "dissatisfied" molecule stripped by a growing crystal?
Speculation without trial remains that, speculation.

My previous spouse was at one point a TA for a Prof. teaching mythology to freshmen at UCSD, so I got to see their papers. And I have to say, without any hyperbole, that the four papers these kids wrote are better than anything I saw by the university's frosh that year.

Which leads me to an OT question for P-Zed: What kind of education do you see your students bringing into your class nowadays, and what is the breakdown in numbers, off the cuff, between atheists and liberal religious persons (I assume you have no fundies lurking about in the back rows or, if you do, they don't reasonably count as students)? And, assuming you have liberal religious persons in your class, do you see a change in their attitude, over the length of the course, favoring atheism?

Just curious, really; I'm always wondering about the state of education in America these days for some reason. Thanks for your response.

kagehi:

Still, it got me thinking, what if prions are a remnant of early life. I mean, one major complaint of abiogenesis by some people is that no one can show how chemicals suddenly become "life". Well, why not something like a prion, able to self replication almost like crystals grow, solely based on their own structure interacting with available chemicals of the type needed to make more of them.

Dawkins explored this in some detail in The Blind Watchmaker.

check out the little blurb on clay particle reproduction, for example.

The prion does add additional depth that wasn't there when Dawkins wrote that book, though.

I loved the intro to the 4th Place winners essay:
Imagine if when someone said, "I finished reading a book!" they had in actuality only read three-fourths of it. Would you ask this person for help concerning the book? Unlikely, since there is a possibility that the information you want is in the one-fourth of the book that they didn't read. This same concept can be applied to evolution and the current medical school curriculum.
hehehehehe! LOVE it!

The only question is then, what change to one of these simple proteins made it possible for one to "protect" itself from immediate conversion to a new prion, long enough for something closer to life to happen?

Erm... no, no, no. The propagation of misfolding only happens with prions. Prions are a protein family only occur in... I don't know... mammal brains or something. It just so happens that prions 1) have a metastable and a stable folding, 2) form large aggregates in the stable folding, 3) only fulfill their normal functions (whatever those are) in the metastable state, and 4) prions in the stable state catalyze the state transition of prions in the metastable state. The cooccurrence of all four factors is nowhere near normal.

Is the pecular life found at the "black smokers" an adaptation or a repetition?

Wrong question -- there's nothing whatsoever peculiar about it. We are clearly looking at several independently evolved symbioses with hydrogen sulfide-eating bacteria. The famous tube worms with the big red gills are annelids, in case you wondered.

What wonderful essays, with clear thinking and some interesting insights - also each quite different to the other.
The winner, Gregory Simonian said:
"However, in some European countries, doctors encouraged their patients to wait to see if the infection would clear up by itself, without the aid of antibiotics. Most of the time, it did."

Well in case you read this Gregory, I was one of those who got "no antibiotics" when I was 17 in London and had peritonitis due to burst appendix. They only had three antibiotics in those days and in the hospital environment bugs were becoming immune to all of them. So if they figured you would live without them you did. When you are young you can get over these things - but do not think it is easy. I was in hospital for five weeks and got my parents to sign me out when I clearly was not getting better. It was 6 months before I became somewhat able to do things and over a year before I felt back to normal. If they had given me antibiotics I suspect it would have been a matter of weeks.

Merve Fejzula in case you read this I just loved your ending:

"As I finish that thought, Dr. Tantawi walks in. Of course, I will not be exposing the gap in her medical education anytime soon. She is a fairly intimidating woman, particularly when she turns her chin up at you to stare miles down her nose. I'll leave that to you. But then again, it is my health... "

The only question is then, what change to one of these simple proteins made it possible for one to "protect" itself from immediate conversion to a new prion, long enough for something closer to life to happen?

Erm... no, no, no. The propagation of misfolding only happens with prions. Prions are a protein family only occur in... I don't know... mammal brains or something. It just so happens that prions 1) have a metastable and a stable folding, 2) form large aggregates in the stable folding, 3) only fulfill their normal functions (whatever those are) in the metastable state, and 4) prions in the stable state catalyze the state transition of prions in the metastable state. The cooccurrence of all four factors is nowhere near normal.

Is the pecular life found at the "black smokers" an adaptation or a repetition?

Wrong question -- there's nothing whatsoever peculiar about it. We are clearly looking at several independently evolved symbioses with hydrogen sulfide-eating bacteria. The famous tube worms with the big red gills are annelids, in case you wondered.