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Inside-out, or Outside-in, multi-level selection "vs." inclusive fitness debate

An interesting exchange in Nature on ways to conceptualize the evolution of virulence. First, Adaptation and the evolution of parasite virulence in a connected world: Adaptation is conventionally regarded as occurring at the level of the individual organism, where it functions to maximize the individual's inclusive fitness...However, it has recently been argued that empirical studies on the evolution of parasite virulence in spatial populations show otherwise...In particular, it has been claimed that the evolution of lower virulence in response to limited parasite dispersal...provides proof…

Blog matters: who is "revere"?

The person who taps the keys here over the signature "revere" (or sometimes "Revere"; it's at most one at a time) is not Paul Revere. The real Paul Revere died in 1818. If you want to know the name or names of any of the key tappers here I'm going to disappoint you right away. This post doesn't reveal how many people do the tapping or who they are. If you are a regular reader you already know quite a bit about us -- in fact much more than about many people whose names you know (or think you know; if you read a news by-line do you really know who wrote the article?). While sometimes there is…

in High Summer

We shared two cherry tomatoes this morning, the first ripe ones of the year, and that, to us, is the proof we're fully into high summer. If I don't pick the zucchini every day, I'm sorry. The weather is hot and sultry, the apricots are close to ripe and the peaches are following. The boys drown in fruit every day - it is the one thing I can't say no to. The fireflies sparkle like fireworks. The kids live in the creek and under the sprinkler, and seem to stretch out daily, getting taller, stronger, learning new things. Tonight we're headed to a baseball game (local minor league) - what…

Michael Ruse probably won't be able to read this, either

We have made Michael Ruse very sad and very angry. He has an essay up called Why I Think the New Atheists are a [Bloody] Disaster, in which he bemoans the way he has been abused by these brutal atheists, and explains how he thinks these godless scientists are damaging the cause of science and science education. Here's the heart of his pitiful complaint. Richard Dawkins, in his best selling The God Delusion, likens me to Neville Chamberlain, the pusillanimous appeaser of Hitler at Munich. Jerry Coyne reviewed one of my books (Can a Darwinian be a Christian?) using the Orwellian quote that only…

In which Andrew Brown gets everything completely wrong

Brown has posted a reply to my angry criticisms, and as is increasingly common among the accommodationists, he gets everything backwards, upside down, and inside out. Let's start with the first paragraph. PZ posted a tremendous rant about me and Michael Ruse last week, which concluded with a heartfelt exhortation to both of us to “fuck off” (his emphasis). The cause was a piece I did on the grauniad site about Ruse’s visit to a creation museum in which he experienced, for a moment, “a Kuhnian flash” that it might all be true. Never mind that this was a momentary feeling. It was unmistakable…

Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future

Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum were right about one thing. They sent me a copy of their new book, Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), with a strange request: "We hope that like Dr. Coyne, you will suspend judgment until reading the book, at which point we'll be interested to hear what you think." I was a bit offended; of course I was going to read it with an open mind. Why would they think it necessary to ask me to do so? That was before I got to chapters 8 and 9, however, which open with very direct and personal attacks on me and…

Poorer health, shorter lives and lower incomes: ‘We don’t really appreciate the magnitude of the problem’

Low income and poor health tend to go hand in hand — that’s not a particularly surprising or new statement. However, according to family medicine doctor Steven Woolf, we have yet to truly grasp the extent to which income shapes a person’s health and opportunity to live a long life. And if we don’t confront the widening income inequality gap, he says things will only get worse. “There’s a general awareness that people who have poor education or low incomes have worse health outcomes, but our sense is that we don’t really appreciate the magnitude of the problem,” Woolf told me. “Every time I…

Religious Right Exploits Goodridge Breakup

Last week it was announced that Julie and Hillary Goodridge, the lesbian couple whose lawsuit prompted the Massachusetts court decision and launched our ongoing national debate over gay marriage, were breaking up. The moment I read this, I knew we'd be subjected to a string of "A ha! We told you so! Gay marriages can't last!" arguments from gay marriage opponents. I was right. And it's coupled with lots of bigoted nonsense about how gay couples are incapable of the same human emotions and attributes that straight couples are. Brian Camenker, executive director of the group Article 8 Alliance…

The True Heroes of the Hamdan Case

One of the most fascinating aspects of the Hamdan case was that it was argued not by a prominent legal scholar or law professor, nor by a private defense attorney, but by a military lawyer from the JAG office, Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift. Think about the position this put him in as an officer, taking a public stand against the policy of the Commander in Chief and against the Pentagon. And he didn't just do it because he believed that all defendants deserve legal representation; he did it because he truly believes that if we do not remain consistent in applying the rule of law, we will have lost…

100 Funniest Movies

Thanks to Fishy Fred for tracking down Bravo's list of the top 100 comedy movies of all time. I caught part of it and wanted to comment on the list. For the most part, I thought the list was abysmal. Four Weddings and a Funeral no higher than 96? Preposterous. Dr. Strangelove only at 53? No way. Only one Kevin Smith movie in the top 100? Unthinkable. I'm gonna post the full list, with my comments about the ones I have strong feelings about one way or the other. 100. Anchorman - Probably about as good as Will Ferrell is ever going to get in movies. Like many others before him - Dana Carvey,…

The Cherry Blossom Classic, Part Two

After my win in round two I was excited for round three. My opponent sported a 1952 rating, and he had white. He opened with 1. e4. Now, over the years I've tried most of the major defenses to e4. I was an aficionado of the Dragon Sicilian for a while, until I noticed I kept getting mated on h7 against stronger opponents. Then it was the Scandinavian for many years. I had many good games with it, but eventually I lost confidence. If white knows what he's doing he can make things pretty unpleasant for black. So I've recently turned to the open games. This is not a move (ha!) to be taken…

Gregariousness Is the Refuge of Mediocrity, and Bosons

In the previous installments, I talked about identical particles and symmetry, and what that means for fermions. Given that there's only one other type of particle in the world, that sort of means that I need to explain what symmetry means in the case of bosons. When I explain this to the first-year seminar, I generally do this by anthropomorphizing the particles somewhat, to describe fermions as "antisocial," and bosons as "gregarious." Not only does this give me the chance to use "anthropomorphize" and "gregarious" in class, thus confusing the hell out of a bunch of frosh, it's actually…

Are Christians Required to Accept Evolution?

I often write posts arguing that it is difficult to reconcile evolution and Christianity. When you consider that evolution challenges certain claims of the Bible, refutes the traditional design argument, exacerbates the problem of evil, and suggests that humanity does not play any central role in creation, you have a pretty strong cumulative case. But I always stop short of saying bluntly that you cannot accept both evolution and Christianity. That is not for political reasons or out of fear of offending anyone. It is simply that I do not believe that the question “Can a Darwinian be a…

What's the Best Way to Know A Flower?

[Basic concepts: Epistemology.] Adolph Quetelet, a mathematician of the High Enlightenment, explained with scientific precision how to know when lilacs will bloom (this was about the year 1800). The lilacs, he said, bloom "when the sum of the squares of the mean daily temperature since the last frost added up to (4264C) squared." So now we know. Whew! That's one way to put it. This, to me, offers one way to get into the basic concept of what's called epistemology. Perhaps calling it a basic concept is a bit askew, since it is complicated and philosophically thick. But it's interesting,…

Alternative medicine---back to basics

A long time ago (in blog years) I wrote a series on alternative medicine over at my old Wordpress blog. It's time to dust off the old post and get back to some basics. What is alternative medicine, anyway? That's a great question. I know it is, because I asked it. I get this question almost daily. The secret answer is that there is no such thing as alternative medicine. You don't believe me? Why not--I am a doctor. There are several ways to define alternative medicine, and sometimes it is contrasted with "complementary medicine". CM refers to treatments that "complement" traditional…

Basic Concepts: Measuring Fitness

In 1862, the British philosopher Herbert Spencer used the phrase "survival of the fittest" to describe Darwin's concept of natural selection. It's not a bad phrase, really, and it doesn't do a bad job of describing natural selection - the individuals in any population that are "fittest" - best suited to reproduce - are the ones most likely to reproduce successfully. If this is correct (and it is), we can expect that "fitness" would be a very important concept in evolutionary biology. It is, of course, and John Wilkins has already provided a good explanation of the concept in general. I'm…

Differential Interference Contrast Microscopy, or the question I'm never asked

Thirty, almost forty, years ago when zebrafish were an up and coming model system and very few labs were working on them, we were used to going to conferences and reciting the zebrafish litany, a list of attributes that justified us working on such an oddball animal: we'd explain, for instance, that it was prolific, fast developing, and optically transparent, so we could see right into the nervous system in the living embryo. And you know, not once have I ever been asked the really simple and obvious question: if it's transparent, then how do see anything inside it? I know. It takes a moment…

The facts aren't always pretty: doctored images in scientific journals.

In today's Chronicle of Higher Education there's an article about the methods journal publishers are deploying to detect doctored images in scientific manuscripts. From the article: As computer programs make images easier than ever to manipulate, editors at a growing number of scientific publications are turning into image detectives, examining figures to test their authenticity. And the level of tampering they find is alarming. "The magnitude of the fraud is phenomenal," says Hany Farid, a computer-science professor at Dartmouth College who has been working with journal editors to help…

Homeopathy for malaria? Again?

I know I've said it many, many times before, but it's something that, in my opinion at least, can't be repeated too often. Homeopathy is ridiculous. Arguably, it's the most ridiculous of "alternative" therapies ever conceived. And that's saying a lot. After all, among "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) or "integrative medicine" (IM), we have therapies in which people claim that they can tap into some sort of "universal source" and channel it into you for healing effect (reiki, a.k.a. faith healing based on Eastern mysticism instead of Christian beliefs); they can change the flow…

Quack attack on Wikipedia

Early on in its history, I wasn't particularly thrilled with Wikipedia as a project or reference source. To put it mildly, I viewed the very concept behind the project with a great deal of skepticism, some of which was voiced nine years ago when a medical Wikipedia was proposed. In particular, the fact that anyone could become an editor and edit articles seemed to me to be a recipe for disaster. After all, it's the cranks and pseudoscientists who have a lot more time on their hands to edit than most experts, and they tend to be far more passionate about their favorite pseudoscience or…

Elizabeth Edwards and bone metastases from breast cancer

As odd as it seems, my timing in posting about removing chemotherapy ports yesterday was eerily coincidental. I've alluded to this before, but I'm most definitely not a big fan of John Edwards and would never vote for him for President. That being said, I can't help but feel for him and, even more so, his wife Elizabeth, given their announcement today that Elizabeth's breast cancer has recurred (see here as well), with a biopsy proving that it has metastasized to a rib. Neither she nor he nor their family deserve this, nor does any patient with cancer. I've gotten a few e-mails asking what…

The eye as a contingent, diverse, complex product of evolutionary processes

Ian Musgrave has just posted an excellent article on the poor design of the vertebrate eye compared to the cephalopod eye; it's very thorough, and explains how the clumsy organization of the eye clearly indicates that it is the product of an evolutionary process rather than of any kind of intelligent design. A while back, Russ Fernald of Stanford University published a fine review of eye evolution that summarizes another part of the evolution argument: it's not just that the eye has awkward 'design' features that are best explained by contingent and developmental processes, but that the…

Wading through more Choprawoo

I tried not to do it. I really did. I tried to resist the temptation to respond to Deepak Chopra's latest incursions into woo as he flailed futilely at Richard Dawkins' arguments for science. Fortunately, PZ Myers and MarkCC have been around to take down his idiocy. But then I thought about it Why should they have all the fun? Besides, the discussion I've been having over the last week or so about the infiltration of pseudoscientific woo into the nation's medical schools and its promotion by medical students is just way too depressing. I needed to switch topics, although I'm not sure that…

A physician takes umbrage at Orac's criticisms of medical schools

A couple of days ago, I wrote a criticism of the increasing tendency to teach woo in American medical schools and then later followed up with a post questioning the contention that teaching woo has the benefit of improving the doctor-patient relationship. A physician going by the 'nym Solo Practitioner took umbrage: As a physician, I find the anger with which this blog is written disturbing. The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine was created by the NIH to provide grant money and motivation for research to be performed in these fields in order to apply evidence-based…

Spongeworthy genes

What are the key ingredients for making a multicellular animal, or metazoan? A couple of the fundamental elements are: A mechanism to allow informative interactions between cells. You don't want all the cells to be the same, you want them to communicate with one another and set up different fates. This is a process called cell signaling and the underlying process of turning a signal into a different pattern of gene or metabolic activity is called signal transduction. Patterns of differing cell adhesion. But of course! The cells of your multicellular animal better stick together, or the…

Against accommodationism

Scott Aikin and Robert Talisse are not accommodationists. At least, they say they aren't, and that's hard to evaluate, because "accommodationist" is a bad word, and to ensure that it stays a bad word, critics of accommodationists give it protean meanings. Sometimes it's supposed to mean the belief that science and religion are compatible. Sometimes it's just about atheists working with religious people toward shared goals. Other times, "accommodationist" seems to constitute the subset of anti-creationists who oppose gnu atheists. The label "accommodationist" has been thrust upon me…

An appalling tale of surgical "teaching" in the operating room

As much as I write about the foibles, pseudoscience, and misadventures of cranks and quacks that endanger patients. However, never let it be said that I don't also pay attention to the foibles and misadventures of real doctors that endanger patients. Sometimes that occurs due to incompetence. Sometimes it's due to the persistent use of invasive modalities that have been shown not to work far longer than they should have been abandoned (e.g., vertebroplasty). Sometimes it's poor judgment. Of course, because I'm a surgeon, I tend to gravitate towards discussions of surgery when I leave my usual…

ICU beds and swine flu: the southern hemisphere experience

When swine flu poked its head above water in the northern hemisphere in April our "normal" flu season was just ending. A surge of swine flu cases during a time when influenza was not usually seen was bewildering and confusing, not to mention alarming. We didn't know what to expect nor were we sure if it would peter out over the summer, as flu usually seems to (we may learn differently in the future as we start to do surveillance over that period) and then come roaring back or just disappear. While it didn't peter out very much, the big question was going to happen when the northern…

Tail Recursion: Iteration in Haskell

In Haskell, there are no looping constructs. Instead, there are two alternatives: there are list iteration constructs (like foldl which we've seen before), and tail recursion. Let me say, up front, that in Haskell if you find yourself writing any iteration code on a list or tree-like structure, you should always look in the libraries; odds are, there's some generic function in there that can be adapted for your use. But there are always cases where you need to write something like a loop for yourself, and tail recursion is the way to do it in Haskell. Tail recursion is a kind of recursion…

Mann, did Judith Curry ever get Rogered!

I was just thinking about Roger Pielke Jr. and Judith Curry, and the interesting situation they have found themselves in. The hole they dug and climbed into. The corner they've painted themselves into. The metaphor that mightily mired them. I'm talking about the situation they've created for themselves over the last few years as they've sunk into various states of denial of the reality or importance of global warming and its effects. Don't confuse the two of them, they are very different. If anything, Roger is a true believer warmist who has a particular ax to grind that blinds him to…

Replying to Kuznicki on Churches Endorsing Candidates

Jason Kuznicki has written what he terms a respectful disagreement with my post yesterday advocating that we change the IRS rules to allow churches to endorse candidates without losing their tax exemption. All disagreements between the two of us, rare as they may be, will of course be respectful on both parts. Jason is a first rate thinker and his views on any subject should be taken seriously and given all due consideration. Having said that, I don't think he's quite convinced me. Let's take a look at the arguments. Jason writes: If a church holds a pre-election forum, it is required to…

Explosives, Round 3

Ding, ding: Look, I don't know what happened to these explosives, and I'm pretty sure Ed Brayton doesn't either. But my point was not about what happened to them. My point was about whether it is fair to declare this as an example of alleged incompetence in the White House. Once again, without having the evidence at hand, with at least plausible alternative explanations for these missing weapons, Brayton leaps onto the Kerry explanation like a starving man on a steak--without pausing even to ask whether it is technically feasible for anyone to have kept track of this particular site. Well,…

Weekend Diversion: Our years of shared songs

"Every day we should hear at least one little song, read one good poem, see one exquisite picture, and, if possible, speak a few sensible words." -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe I don't always have all the answers, but every weekend I strive to bring you something interesting -- in some form or other -- to help remind you that whatever it is you may be most passionate about, there's a diverse world (and Universe) out there for you to discover, no matter how you look at it. And one of the best parts of that (at least for me) is music, something I try and share with you every week. The new song I'…

Rosenau on Harris

My SciBling Josh Rosenau had a different reaction to the exchange between Sam Harris and Andrew Sullivan. Sadly, he gets most of the important points wrong. Rosenau writes: As for “the myth that a person must believe things on insufficient evidence...,” I'd merely note that this ought to lead us to a state of profound agnosticism. There can be no natural evidence for God (philosophy of science and theology generally agree on this point), and neither could there be natural evidence against the supernatural. Insisting that others acknowledge the fundamental importance of one's own answer to…

A little cis story

I found a recent paper in Nature fascinating, but why is hard to describe — you need to understand a fair amount of general molecular biology and development to see what's interesting about it. So those of you who already do may be a little bored with this explanation, because I've got to build it up slowly and hope I don't lose everyone else along the way. Patience! If you're a real smartie-pants, just jump ahead and read the original paper in Nature. A little general background. Let's begin with an abstract map of a small piece of a strand of DNA. This is a region of fly DNA that encodes a…

Obesity Panacea Interviews Boston Marathon Champ Amby Burfoot

Apologies for the lack of posts the past few days - the workload at school has been very high for both of us this week.  In honour of this weekend's Boston Marathon, below is an interview I conducted last year with former Boston Marathon Champion and prolific writer Amby Burfoot. Amby is a fascinating guy and extremely knowledgeable about running and physiology in general, and it was a real pleasure to be able to ask him a few questions. My girlfriend and I competed in our first Boston Marathon last year, and if you're curious to know what it was like, be sure to check out my lead-up post, or…

Carr, Pinker, the shallows, and the nature-nurture canard

Last week's spat between Nicholas Carr and Steven Pinker generated a lot of attention â and, happily, delivered a couple of the more lucid framings yet of the debate over whether digital culture makes us shallow, as Carr argues in his new book, or simply represents yet another sometimes-distracting element that we can learn to deal with, as Pinker countered in a Times Op-Ed last Thursday.   I sympathize with both arguments; I see Carr's point but feel he overplays it. I find digital culture immensely distracting. I regularly dive down rabbit holes in my computer, iPhone, and iPad,…

The fixed mindset of medical pseudoscience

One of the key principles of skepticism, particularly in medicine, is that correlation does not necessarily equal causation. I emphasize the word "necessarily" because sometimes skeptics go a bit too far and say that correlation does not equal causation. I myself used to phrase it that way for a long time. However, sometimes correlation does equal causation. However, much, if not most, of the time it does not. So how do we tell the difference between when correlation might well equal causation and when it does not? Science, of course, and critical thinking. Science is the main reason that we…

Dr. Bob Sears: Stealth anti-vaccinationist?

Dr. Bob Sears is the bane of science- and evidence-based pediatricians everywhere. As pediatrician Dr. John Snyder relates, whenever he hears a parent say "I was reading Dr. Sears" or sees a patient in his office holding a copy of Dr. Sears' The Vaccine Book: Making the Right Choice for Your Child, he knows what's coming next: Resistance to vaccination. It would be one thing if this resistance were based on evidence or science-based concerns about the safety of vaccination, but it's not. As Dr. Snyder explains, while playing the "open-minded" "tell both sides" gambit, Dr. Sears credulously…

Your Friday Dose of Woo: The Alchemy of Woo

You know, I really wish I could have made it to The Amazing Meeting this year. It would have been really cool to have a chance to hear in person such skeptical luminaries, such as The Amazing Randi, Penn and Teller (although I do concede that Penn's Libertarianism does occasionally border on credulity for some dubious propositions), and Phil Plait. And who wouldn't want to meet the purveyors of what's become my favorite skeptical podcast, The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, such as Steve Novella and The Skepchick? And, of course, it's been a long time since I've had the opportunity to…

More on the declining funding of R01 grants

I hadn't planned on writing about this again after yesterday. The subject is profoundly depressing to those of us needing to compete for declining NIH grant resources with only a 9% chance of success the first time. However, given that Your Friday Dose of Woo will make an appearance tomorrow to make everything all right; that is, assuming that my O.R. day tomorrow isn't too stressful. After all, there's little better to lift your spirits than a bit of amusing woo, you know. In any case, a commenter named Theodore Price said: Orac, maybe (almost certainly not actually) you didn't mean it this…

When "minor" cases go bad

"It's just minor surgery." How many times have surgeons said that to patients? How many times have you, as a patient heard that? How many times have I said that to patients? It's supposed to be reassuring, and most of the time it is. Unfortunately, there's no such thing as "minor" surgery if it's you at the wrong end of the knife. And, in fact, even "minor surgery can on rare occasions have truly bizarre and unexpected complications. I've been thinking of writing about perhaps the most memorable and strange complication of a "minor" procedure (in this case, a breast biopsy) that I've even…

New autism study: science or nonsense?

Bad medical ideas often start with good intentions.  Most doctors are interested in preventing and treating disease, and some diseases are particularly challenging.  Some rise to this challenge, forming clever hypotheses and finding accurate ways to test them, but others aren't so successful.  Sometimes, hypotheses are too implausible to be worth spending much time on.  Sometimes, the method used to test a hypothesis is simply not valid. This story begins on the website Age of Autism. AoA is one of the homes of the antivaccination movement and gives a lot of time to those who still believe…

Adventures in bad veterinary medicine reported by the local media (2017 edition)

Acupuncture is a theatrical placebo, nothing more. It has no "curative powers," and, when studied objectively in good double-blind, randomized controlled clinical trials with proper sham acupuncture controls, there is consistently found to be no difference between sham and "true" (or, as they like to call it, "verum") acupuncture. (Indeed, I have written about this many times.) The only exceptions to this rule tend to be studies that come out of China. Basically pretty much all acupuncture studies that come out of China are positive because they appear to be conducted with the intent to…

What About Judaism's Sins Against Science?

Well, that got your attention, didn't it? Actually, I'm referring to a post by PZ where he discusses his objections to religion. In reading them, they really didn't seem to describe my religion, so I thought it would be interesting to go through them. For background, I guess I'm a Reconstructionist when it comes to theology, Reform when it comes to politics (i.e., my politics and stands on social issues most resemble those of the Reform movement), and Conservative when it comes to observance (what Christians would call practice). I'm not going to pretend to speak for "Jews", but simply…

Moving On

Every time my life settles down enough for me to return to regular blogging, crazy stuff happens.  First there was the sudden arrival of newborn baby Z. - we were called at 2:30 pm and by 4:30, Eric was picking him up at the hospital.  Since normally one gets more than umm...two hours to prepare for the arrival of a new baby, we were a little discombobulated. Then there was much back and forth insanity as the County and C. and K.'s family attempted to make possible a visit from across the US to our area.  We didn't know until last Friday whether it would happen - and all of a sudden it was.  …

Christianity's sins against science

Brent got asked a question by Vox Day: to list Christianity's 10 greatest sins against science. He expands a little bit: I'm reading all of these New Atheist books, I keep reading these condemnations of Christians being anti-science, but no one ever bothers to explain exactly what they mean by that. I mean, what the Hell does Galileo's trial have to do with Christian attitudes today, except as some sort of analogy for... something current? But what? I mean, if the worst thing people have done is put someone on trial 500 years ago, is it really such a huge deal? Now, I'm assuming that there…

Reply to Sandefur on Political Lies

Timothy Sandefur has once again taken me to task, this time about my post concerning the Bush campaign's consistent distortions of things said by John Kerry. It hardly needs to be said that I have enormous respect for Sandefur. Not only do I think he's one of the best bloggers around, I also think that he is on his way to becoming an important and influential constitutional scholar. But here I think he is either misunderstanding, or unintentionally oversimplifying, my views on the matter in at least two respects. First, in his understanding of the point of my earlier entry. He states: Ed…

Fixing Science Education

In the comments to last week's science majors follow-up post, commenter Jim G calls me out: OK, I agree with that 100%, and I'm sure everyone who reads this post has observed the phenomena you mention dozens of times or more. But I wonder whether you have a proposal, or if you're just pointing out the problem. With no snarkiness intended, to change this we need something a bit more concrete than "it's the fault of the kids/parents/media/poverty," or "someone needs to spend more money" to fix it. Really, I'm curious. I don't want to clutter up your blog with my own theories; but this is your…

Cultural Evolution from Mosquitos to Worm Grunting

A very good day of grunting worms. Credit: Ken Catania So-called Gene-Culture Co-Evolution can be very obvious and direct or it can be very subtle and complex. In almost all cases, the details defy the usual presumptions people make about the utility of culture, the nature of human-managed knowledge, race, and technology. I would like to examine two cases of gene-culture interaction: One of the earliest post-Darwinian Synthesis examples addressing malaria and sickle-cell disease, and the most recently published example, the worm-grunters of Florida, which it turns out is best…