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Birthday Quotes.

It's the 199th birthday of two extraordinary people: Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin. One was extremely controversial when he was alive; the other has become more controversial since he died. In honor of the two birthdays, I'll be posting quotes from them over the course of the day. Let's begin with a quote from Lincoln. It's taken from the first of the famous Lincoln-Douglas Debates, and it falls into the category of "the more things change": MY FELLOW-CITIZENS: When a man hears himself somewhat misrepresented, it provokes him,--at least, I find it so with myself; but when…

A totally futile poll

Here's a silly poll from Eric Hovind, and we know from experience how it will go: if he doesn't like the results, he'll jigger everything around until he gets what he wants. Make him dance anyway. How do we know God exists? Without Him we can't know anything 47% Um...He doesn't 35% Examined evidence 18% Hovind hasn't juggled the contents of the poll around (yet), but he has snuck in a redirect to take you away from it. When you follow the link, you'll end up on a page without the poll; to get to it, either go to the home page for the site, or just paste the address " drdino.com " directly…

Proverbial psychology

Today's Independent contains an extract from Taking the Proverbial, a book about the psychology of proverbs by Geoff Rolls. The extract includes sections from the book which discuss the proverbs "An elephant never forgets" and "Practice makes perfect". The section about the first includes a nice summary of some animal cognition studies, and the second includes mention of the neuropsychology of motor learning and performing in front of an audience. This part however, from the section on elephants' memory, sounds familiar: Whether [elephants] deserve their status as the memory experts of the…

Mapping brainland

The cover of the current issue of Neuron features this brainland map, by Sam Brown, a cartographer based in New Zealand. Printed A3, A2 and A1 sized copies of the map can be purchased from Unit Seven. ...created from a reference photo of a real human brain which was used to build the 3D terrain. This digital elevation model was then used to create contour line data, relief shading and to plan where the roads and features should be placed for map compilation. Real New Zealand public domain data was then added for the surrounding islands. I've just written an essay about Axon Turning…

Bottled Holy Water....May Burn Sinners

Water is water....unless its holy water, of course! I'm not quite sure what's special about this gimmicky beverage, except its from Canada and might raise my eyebrows slightly more than Aquafina or Evian. I'm pretty sure this water isn't any holier than Detroit's finest tap water. Uh oh, looks like THOSE holy water sellers have competition from THESE holy water sellers. In fact these guys think their water will save you from sin. (Not really, its a joke.......) When I tried to place an order, they gave me a confirmation number and said my order would be filled through omnipotence. I wonder…

Need a last minute gift?

Just FYI: a DonorsChoose gift card is a great idea. The recipient gets to browse teachers' projects and pick one to fund, and when the project is complete, several weeks to months later, they'll get a letter from the teacher and thank-you notes from students. I just got the thank-you package for one of the projects I contributed to during my DonorsChoose Challenge, and it was adorable. I also received a generous gift in my name from one of my readers - thank you! - so I get to look forward to even more thank-yous down the line. It's a feel-good experience all around. PS. no, they totally do…

Macro Kingdom

Perfect for a holiday* with big fluffy slo-mo snowflakes** and wintry, brittle light, Clemento's Macro Kingdom short films. The most recent one is below, and the two prior films are below the fold. I love the incorporation of the fragile, distorted type, but can't resist observing that the words are more in the nature of a poem than labels. Don't expect clarity (or scientific accuracy) about what you are seeing - just enjoy the lovely juxtapositions. :) macro kingdom III from clemento on Vimeo. macro kingdom II from clemento on Vimeo. macro kingdom from clemento on Vimeo. *for many of you,…

Going to China!

From December 11th to the 26th I'll be in Shanghai visiting my parents there, for my birthday and the holidays. Fear not, I'll still be blogging and probably posting interesting pictures from China. I always have a blast when I go and am really looking forwards to having a bit of down time away from school, work, and stress. I think we might even fly out to the Wolong Panda Reserve where China's panda breeding and research facility is. Don't be surprised if posts go up at 3am, as the time difference is 12 hours. Not looking forward to that loooong flight. Thank the FSM that they have free…

All that's left standing between me and my sabbatical.

I'm on sabbatical for academic year 2008-2009. This being summer, you'd think I'd consider the sabbatical officially begun. Not quite. But I'm getting closer. All that remains: Grading the papers from the graduate seminar that I was persuaded to team-teach. Calculating final grades for the students in the aforementioned graduate seminar and filing those final grades by Friday. Helping my advisees usher two masters theses into final form. Helping a student from last fall complete an "incomplete". One last committee meeting. There's also some desk cleaning and family vacation taking. But…

BP's oil well seeping, leaking

Breaking news: It seems as though the cap placed on BP's deep sea oil well may be leaking, and there is seeping gas and/or oil from nearby indicating that the oil is leaking from the bore hole into surrounding sediments. A White House spokesman says BP's ruptured oil well is leaking at the top, along with seepage about two miles away. Robert Gibbs also says officials are monitoring bubbles that can be seen on an underwater camera. Leaks could mean the cap on the well has to be opened to prevent oil and gas from escaping elsewhere. The mechanical cap on the well stopped the flow of oil into…

Dumbest creationist anti-evolution rant ever?

You be the judge: I believe, first of all, evolution is a crock. It takes a lot of faith to believe that I came from an ameba. A lot of faith! So evolution should be taught in Faith Class, otherwise known in parochial schools as Religion Class. It's a crazy world we live in. Crazier every day. But one of the craziest notions that ever came down the pike is evolution. Who in his right mind would ever believe that the complicated homo sapien derived from a speck? That's getting the larger from the smaller. No, it's an even crazier world when a clueless twit like Grant Swank can write something…

What accent?

Lots of other bloggers seem to be taking this one; so what the heck? It's surprisingly accurate for a silly Internet quiz. And, yes, it is pop, not soda. No matter how long I'm stranded here on the East Coast, it will always be pop! What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Inland North You may think you speak "Standard English straight out of the dictionary" but when you step away from the Great Lakes you get asked annoying questions like "Are you from Wisconsin?" or "Are you from Chicago?" Chances are you call carbonated drinks "pop." The Midland The Northeast…

Media watch on Monckton

Media Watch has examined some more of Monckton's outlandish claims. It turns out that the graph he claimed came from the "Barrier Reef Authority" actually came from John McLean. And if you actually look at the McLean graph, rather than showing no change it shows warming. You can see it here at Marohasy's. The very first comment is from Louis Hissink: Eyeballing the above graph, (based on professional experience) suggests a slight increase in SST over the time period. And the trends over a longer period can be seen here, showing plenty of warming on the GReat Barrier Reef. Also on Media Watch…

Blinky Bling Bliss

Kids at the candy shop... from the DairyAire launch event this weekend. For a sense of how the photonic Ritalin works, this is what my rocket looks like as an example: For a while, I've wanted to use a funky armored car fisheye lens from Belarus for night rocketry. I tested it at dusk: and at night... Green propellant - burnout - orange burst from the BP charge popping the parachute - blinking spiral back to Earth. That a cable spool with a high power motor in the middle flies straight as an arrow is amazing enough. Strap on some lights, and fly at night, priceless. Next, I'll show some…

BioCouture

I don't usually like to post links from BoingBoing because I imagine everyone has already seen this already, but as it is about some of my favorite things (synthetic biology, biomaterials, and fashion) I couldn't resist! Designer Suzanne Lee makes clothes using cellulose-based fabrics made entirely by cultures of yeast and bacteria. From what I could understand from the ecouterre article, the process is similar to how kombucha is made, using the microbes to ferment a green tea mixture, although I thought that the film that forms on top of the fermenting tea in kombucha is some sort of yeast/…

Japanese 3D Fog Bunny

This is a glimpse into the future of 3D technology, utterly fascinating. From PopSci: A new, truly 360-degree 3-D display has been developed by researchers at Osaka University. The fog display is created by three projectors each beaming a different image into a column of thin fog, making the resulting image appear 3-dimensional from all angles. This technique means that viewers can physically walk around the display to see it from different vantage points without losing the 3-D effect. My colleagues at Kean University have been using CAVE⢠Virtual Reality for their research and teaching,…

Genetics of Speciation

The most recent issue of the Journal of Heredity contains a bunch of articles from a symposium on the "Genetics of Speciation" organized by Loren Rieseberg. Included in the collection is an article by Allen Orr and two of his students on speciation in Drosophila, which discusses mapping speciation genes, the role of meiotic drive in speciation, and Dobzhansky Muller incompatibilities via gene translocation (the latter two are the topics of recent papers from Orr's group -- here and here). Also in the special issue is an article from Mohamed Noor's lab on mapping inversion breakpoints between…

Gamma Ray Mystery Remains Mysterious

The ever-present fog of energetic gamma rays permeating the universe isn't created by what astronomers expected, new observations from NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope reveal, leaving scientists with a new cosmic mystery to solve. The sky glows in gamma rays even far away from well-known bright sources, such as pulsars and gas clouds within our own Milky Way galaxy or the most luminous active galaxies. Conventionally, astronomers thought that the accumulated glow of active galactic nuclei -- black hole-powered jets emanating from active galaxies -- accounted for most of this gamma-ray…

Having daughters makes you more left-wing (in Britain and Germany) or more right-wing (in the United States)

Sociologists Dalton Conley and Emily Rauscher claim: Using nationally-representative data from the [1994] General Social Survey, we [Conley and Rauscher] find that female offspring induce more conservative political identification. We hypothesize that this results from the change in reproductive fitness strategy that daughters may evince. But economists Andrew Oswald and Nattavudh Powdthavee have found the exact opposite: We [Oswald and Powdthavee] document evidence that having daughters leads people to be more sympathetic to left-wing parties. Giving birth to sons, by contrast, seems to make…

Friday Flower Porn: A Double-Headed...

...coneflower Echinacea purpurea. Double your pleasure, double your fun; two heads, as they say, are better than one: This rascal popped up along the border of our driveway. It appears to be two stems that just didn't separate, with the heads sort of mashed up against each other. Upon closer inspection though, it is apparent that the backs of the flower heads are fused. Here is a better view from directly overhead: In spite of what the Garden Guides link above says about "Seeds collected from the garden often do not come true", we have several clusters of these, all of which were propagated…

Madoff henchman admits guilt

'It Was All Fake,' Madoff Aide Tells Court: Frank DiPascali was an 18-year-old "kid from Queens" with a high school education when he landed a job with a rising star on Wall Street named Bernard L. Madoff. ... "No purchases or sales of securities were actually taking place in their accounts," Mr. DiPascali said. "It was all fake. It was all fictitious. It was wrong, and I knew it was wrong at the time." He said he used data from the Internet to create fake trade blotters, sent out fraudulent account statements to clients and carried out wire transfers between Mr. Madoff's London and New York…

Power in the sea

A visualization from NOAA representing the dissipation of energy from the Chilean earthquake.

Walking Fish

From 120m in the North Sea. A frogfish maybe from the genus Antennarius

Another Week of Climate Disruption News, August 4, 2013

This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup skip to bottom Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years August 4, 2013 Chuckles, COP19+, Violence, Hallowich, Rebuilding, Potash, Bottom Line, Cook Fukushima: Note, News, Policies Melting Arctic, Methane, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food: Crisis, Fisheries, GMOs, Production, N-Fix Hurricanes, Extremes, New Weather GHGs, Temperatures, Feedbacks, Aerosols Paleoclimate, Oceans, Biosphere, Extinctions, Bees & CCD, Volcanoes,…

To the Sahara in quest of dinosaurs (living and extinct)

Several weeks ago, I and a group of colleagues from the University of Portsmouth (Dave Martill, Robert Loveridge and Richard Hing) set off on a trip to the Cretaceous exposures of Morocco. We were to be joined by Nizar Ibrahim from University College Dublin - our team leader - and by Samir Zouhri and Lahssen Baidder from the University of Casablanca. Our primary aim was to discover Cretaceous dinosaurs, pterosaurs and other fossil reptiles, but we were also interested in studying the region's geology, and to learn about the sedimentology, palaeoenvironment and taphonomic setting of the rocks…

Comments of the Week #19: From black hole formation to the far future

"Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time." -Albert Camus After a week at Starts With A Bang filled with a huge variety of topics, from Ninja Warrior to the Moon to the far future of our Universe, you've responded with plenty of original thoughts that have been worth listening to. To recap, and for you to review if you missed anything, this past week saw us cover the following: What came first, black holes or galaxies? (for Ask Ethan), Imagine a hero (for our Weekend Diversion), A…

Comments of the Week #10: Dark Skies, Clear Sight, Can't Lose

"There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception." -Aldous Huxley From tiny, laser-light wavelengths to dark skies to dark matter on the largest scales in the Universe, it's been quite a week at the main Starts With A Bang collection over at Medium. New this week, we've talked about: Is there a limit to Lasers? (for our Ask Ethan series), Finding darkness (for our Weekend Diversion), The globular cluster Messier 4 (for Messier Monday), The Unparalleled Power of Experiment, The Death of Dark Matter's #1 Competitor, and The Whole Story on Dark…

Reaction to Darwin's Descent

When Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection in 1859, he largely avoided the issue of human evolution. The implication that our species had evolved was there, and many were concerned with our connection to "lower" animals, but Darwin did not provide his opponents any extra ammunition in this area. In 1871, however, Darwin's two-volume The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex was printed, and this was a somewhat belated contribution to debates already stirred by T.H. Huxley's 1863 pamphlet Evidences as to Man's Place in Nature and Charles…

CB-1 Antagonists: Wacky Tobaccy's Pharmacological Legacy

Today, the FDA's Endocrinologic and Metabologic Advisory Committee reviews rimonabant, the cannabinoid receptor antagonist developed by Sanofi-Aventis, for recommendations, or lack thereof, as an anti-obesity medication. Rimonabant was approved in Europe for limited cohorts of obese patients, but rejected as an anti-smoking medication. Approval for marketing rimonabant in the US is pending next month, and the advisory committee's assessment will weigh heavily on this decision. There are other 'bants in the pharma pipeline so it should be interesting to see how today's decision plays out…

Science always has been, and always will be, political

Inevitably, with the announcement of The March for Science on Earth Day, April 22nd of this year, come the inevitable naysayers decrying the politicization of science. Astroturf groups such as ACSH (diversity excludes white dudes and scientists from industry!), have of course decried the effort as a liberal conspiracy, but I was sad to see even the New York Times found a scientist to rain on our parade. A march by scientists, while well intentioned, will serve only to trivialize and politicize the science we care so much about, turn scientists into another group caught up in the culture…

Official Prediction of US Winter

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has released its official prediction of what this winter is going to be like. And yes, it is in ALL CAPS!!! I've pasted it below, but first a summary of the relevant points. According to NOAA El Nino There will be a weak El Nino, late Autumn or Winter. Or, there could be a moderate EL Nino. Or, there could just be this thing that might someday be an El Nino but doesn't quite do that for an indefinate period of time. November, December, January Temps Warmer along the West and Northwest, all the Northern State and New England, and the…

Comments of the Week #74: from the Universe's age to the love of science

“To me there has never been a higher source of earthly honor or distinction than that connected with advances in science.” -Isaac Newton And the advances continue, not just here at Starts With A Bang but everywhere humans are engaged in the practice of gathering knowledge about the world and Universe itself. This past week, we covered: Is everything in the Universe the same age? (for Ask Ethan), The horror and beauty of California's wildfires (for our Weekend Diversion), A pulsing cosmic echo (for Mostly Mute Monday), How fast are we moving through space?, 10 things you should know about…

Comments of the Week #108: from runaway spaceships to the Universe's age

"Science is the only self-correcting human institution, but it also is a process that progresses only by showing itself to be wrong." -Allan Sandage As April leaves us and May commences here at Starts With A Bang, I'm so pleased to inform you that amazing things are happening! Thanks to the support of everyone on Patreon, we're over 95% of the way towards our next goal: the creation of the most accurate, beautiful, scientific timeline of the Universe's history poster ever made! We've also covered the following topics this past week for you to ring in on: Could an atmosphere slow down a…

Groups and Symmetry

In the last post, I talked about what symmetry means. A symmetry is an immunity to some kind of transformation. But I left the idea of transformation informal and intuitive. In this post, I'm going to move towards formalizing it. The group theoretic notion of immunity to transformation is defined in terms of group isomorphisms. A group isomorphism is a structure preserving mapping between two different groups. If you know category theory, it's defined very easily: a group isomorphism is an iso arrow in the category of groups. Of course, that's a bit of a hand-wave, because I haven't…

Textbooks and Haeckel again

[When I started this weblog, one of the hot topics in the Creationist Wars was Jonathan Wells, a Moonie who had trained as a developmental biologist and written a screed against evolutionary biology titled Icons of Evolution. This book purported to document serious flaws in some of the major examples of evolutionary biology, although what it actually did was parrot old creationist arguments and get much of the science wrong. One of the subjects he focused on was the pharyngula—the embryonic stage that exhibits a common morphology across all vertebrates. This fascinating developmental period…

Indonesia plays the Intellectual Property card

This was an incident waiting to happen. Indonesia has signed a preliminary agreement with vaccine maker Baxter international an arrangement to supply with with viral vaccine seed in exchange for an unknown compensation. It is unclear whether the arrangement is exclusive to Baxter or not (see today's New York Times, says not). Until the deal is completed they will not continue to send viral isolates to other scientists for research or other purposes. Sharing of sequence data is said to be unaffected. The deal with Big Pharma Baxter International puts viral seed strains from the world's…

World AIDS day 2007 - Denialism is still a problem

Today is World AIDS day, and it's important to take a minute to discuss HIV and AIDS since this blog addresses HIV/AIDS denialism. While the the UN made a mistake overestimating world HIV/AIDS statistics (it is good news and not for the reasons cranks like) Estimates of new HIV transmission in the US are rising. This is bad news. At the same time you have HIV/AIDS denialists still persisting in spreading their nonsense, cranks like Michael Fumento spreading the misinformation that heterosexual transmission of HIV is a "myth", and that the figures for Africa are a conspiracy by UNAIDS and…

MSHA, OSHA, and "Compliance Assistance"

By Liz Borkowski  Although work has begun on a fifth borehole into the Crandall Canyon mine, officials acknowledged yesterday that the six miners may not be found. This LA Times article describes the anguishing choice between leaving the miners underground â a notion âakin to soldiers leaving comrades on the battlefieldâ â and risking more fatalities in a rescue operation thatâs already claimed three lives. In todayâs Washington Post, Karl Vick and Sonya Geis report that the focus has now shifted to determining the cause of collapse, and the retreat mining techniques being used are the first…

The answers we seek: on 'goodbyes', the necks of caseids, and weird mystery sauropods

Long-time blog readers will know that I am atrocious at keeping promises. And I will confess that part of the reason for titling an article 'Goodbye Tetrapod Zoology' was to cause a burst of panic, a rash of visitors (the strategy didn't really work: look at the counter... no spike on the graph). In seriousness, fear ye not oh followers, as I will indeed keep the blog ticking over, it's just that the only things I'll post will be short and sweet. And, unfortunately/fortunately, some bits of news come in that just demand a quick write-up... Lurking in the Tet Zoo shadows are a number of…

Some people never learn: the genetics of learning from our mistakes

In its simplest sense, we imagine that learning occurs through a series of positive and negative rewards. Some actions lead to pleasure, others to pain, and it seems reasonable to expect that people will repeat the actions with pleasurable results and avoid those that ended in pain. Yet, we all know people who aren't deterred by the idea of punishment. We all know people who never seem to learn. Could there be a physical reason, hidden in their genes? In December 2007, Science published a study by Klein et. al. (1) where they asked if a specific genotype at a location called "DRD2-TAQ-IA"…

Sacrificial Sites: Sorunda and Turinge

Spring is late this year in Sweden, and the weather has been dreary. But now things have perked up, and suddenly I felt the itch to get out and check out some sites before the leaves and grass sprout in earnest and ruin visibility. So Sunday night I hurriedly checked through my database of Bronze Age sacrificial finds and picked out two nearby sites where the find spots are known to good precision. I printed out maps from the sites & monuments register and checked for coeval rock art & burnt mounds nearby. And I got the 1000 BC shoreline map for each site from the Swedish Geological…

Arctic Methane Emergency Group?

From Climate 'tech fixes' urged for Arctic methane I find ameg.me who say: AMEG POSITION DECLARATION OF EMERGENCY We declare there now exists an extremely high international security risk* from abrupt and runaway global warming being triggered by the end-summer collapse of Arctic sea ice towards a fraction of the current record and release of huge quantities of methane gas from the seabed. Such global warming would lead at first to worldwide crop failures but ultimately and inexorably to the collapse of civilization as we know it. This colossal threat demands an immediate emergency scale…

Where does an earthquake's energy come from?

"As seismologists gained more experience from earthquake records, it became obvious that the problem could not be reduced to a single peak acceleration. In fact, a full frequency of vibrations occurs." -Charles Francis Richter You've all been around long enough to be familiar with the severe damage that earthquakes can cause, rattling and cracking the ground, shaking down buildings, and creating catastrophic tsunamis tidal waves. In short, the largest ones that occur in the wrong places will cause billions of dollars worth of damage and will kill thousands of people. Image credit: AP / Press…

Evolution and Science Education

No idea in science is as controversial as the theory of evolution. The controversy comes not from within science, but in that grey area where science and religion intersect. This is an issue I've been involved with for many years. Since my late teen years, in fact. I'm part of a group that administers the Talk.Origins Archive, which is probably the largest repository of information about the evolution vs creationism battle on the web. I'm also a founder and advisory board member of Michigan Citizens for Science and have worked closely with the National Center for Science Education for many…

Alvastra in the 1st Millennium

I really enjoyed my work yesterday. The forenoon saw me in the stores of the Museum of National Antiquities looking through Otto Frödin's uncatalogued finds from the "SverkersgÃ¥rden" site near Alvastra monastery. Not only did I find all the elusive 1st Millennium stuff that's mentioned in the literature but never illustrated, but I was also able to identify for the first time two small pieces of iron military equipment of the same date. These strengthen the case for counting SverkersgÃ¥rden among the province's rare Vendel Period elite settlements. After lunch at the Chinese place where I…

Natural Disasters and the "End Times"

The Worldnutdaily has this piece by Greg Laurie giving the usual "the end is near" screed that we hear after every major disaster. Laurie is a regular WND contributor and is the pastor of one of the largest churches in America, Harvest Christian Fellowship. So naturally, he can be relied upon to pass along a good bit of nonsense and false scientific claims to his followers while he's peddling his end-times theology: As we prepare to remember the horrific attack on American soil on 9-11, we may wonder could it be that all these things that are happening in our world today are actually signs of…

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band

Kate and I went to see Bruce Springsteen last night in Albany. The show was listed as starting at 7:30, but it was 8:25 before the band took the stage. At about 9:30, they were playing "Devil's Arcade," one of the slower and more political songs off the new record, which gave me time to look at my watch. "Huh," I said. "Must be getting near the end of the set." They finished "Devil's Arcade," and went into "The Rising." "Well," I thought while singing along, "This is a good song to end the set on." They finished, and went right into "Last to Die." "Bold call, ending on a track from the new…

Coffee as a source of biodiesel: A closer look

Owing to popular demand among the readership of this blog, I've taken a closer look at the original article claiming that spent coffee grounds can be employed as a source of fuel. There are several important details that come though in the paper coming out in the next issue of the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry that have not come through in the press reports. From the paper: Figure 1. Schematic representation of the biodiesel production process from spent coffee grounds. The other value-added products such as H2, ethanol, and fuel pellets can also be achieved from this waste…

Horrific beetle sex - why the most successful males have the spikiest penises

If you've ever complained about having bad sex, you really have no idea. Human women may have to complain about poor stamina or incompetent technique but the female seed beetle (or bean weevil; Callosobruchus maculatus) has to contend with her partner's nightmarish penis - an organ covered in hard, sharp spikes. Just see if you can look at the picture on the right without wincing. It's no surprise then that females sustain heavy injuries during sex. But why have male beetles evolved such hellish genitals? What benefits do they gain by physically harming their partners? It's possible that…

Networks Under Construction

As biologists figure out more about how life is, they can then figure out how it got to be that way. First there were genes. Mendel noticed that somehow the wrinkles on wrinkled peas could be transmitted down through the generations, even if some of those generations had no wrinkles at all. It turned out that the wrinkles were the result of a gene; a different version of the gene produced smooth peas. For much of the twentieth century, evolutionary biologists worked out how changes in genes produced evolutionary change. A mutation that alters one position in a gene (or chops out a whole chunk…