Science
pharyngula | July 31, 2006
The other day, I was asked a simple question that I knew the answer to, right off the top of my head, and since I'm nothing but lazy and lovin' the easy stuff, I thought I'd expand on it a bit here. The question was, "How do flounder get to be that way, with their eyes all on one side of the head?" And the answer is…pedantic and longwinded, but not too difficult.
The Pleuronectiformes, or flatfish, are a successful teleost order with about 500 known species, some of which are important commercially and are very tasty. The key to their success is their asymmetry: adults are camouflaged ambush…
catdynamics | July 31, 2006The issue of what to do with surplus frozen embryos has had high profile recently
As has a recent french study on nature vs nurture in IQ development, in particular both the elasticity of IQ (is it sensitive to nurture early on but "rebounds" towards the genetic mean as you age?) and the role of the opportunities for intellectual stimulation to develop IQ potential (as opposed to diet or environmental insults etc).
So... IF the snowflake baby adoption ever took off big time - enough for a serious sample to be studied.
And, IF, someone simultaneously funded a long time study of the development…
catdynamics | July 31, 2006Good catch by Cocktail Party Physics...
Prof Blair Hedges applies genetic error clock techniques to date manuscripts and books!
Ok, so I don't read PSU Press Releases either...
"The discovery that the wood blocks and metal plates used for printmaking deteriorate at a clock-like rate means that we can now use the prints as a "print clock" for determining the date a work was printed," says Blair Hedges, professor of biology at Penn State and author of the paper describing the research, which will be published in the scientific journal Proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical…
catdynamics | July 31, 2006About ten years ago I heard Fred Hoyle give a talk where he argues that "junk" DNA segments in fact must code for something else - his particular conjecture was that they coded for structural instructions (the example he used was the shape of leaves).
It was intriguing, there is a lot of junk DNA in some genomes, but on the other hand we understand how it comes about as a result of transcription errors and mutations - genes are truncated or erroneously partly duplicated, or skipped over, leaving randomly mutating junk which is both added to and deleted under weak secondary selection.
Further…
catdynamics | July 31, 2006Avida is Caltech's Digital Life Laboratory "auto-adaptive genetic system".
I first came across it when I heard one of the DLab researchers (Adami, I think) give talk at Astrobio'04.
Thought it was neat. And filed under "check it out sometime".
The recent discussion on evolution and synthetic life made me think of it again, so I visited the DLab website, and behold, there is an Avida executable for the Mac.
5 minutes later I am command of my own 100x100 world, running a 10,000 generation mutation and adaption experiment - few thousand generations in I see 12 surviving lineages, and it looks…
catdynamics | July 31, 2006WaPo ponders the possibilities of synthetic virii and genetically modified bacteria
Yawn. been there, done that.
Ok, they go in depthish as benefits a proper newspaper. Only slightly hysterical.
Or we could just read some Greg Egan, Charlie Stross or Vernor Vinge for perspective.
Certainly more fun, and arguably more informative.
catdynamics | July 30, 2006Hotz at the LA Times Sunday Book Review looks at three books on evolution and intelligent design..
The Reluctant Mr. Darwin
An Intimate Portrait of Charles Darwin and the Making of His Theory of Evolution
David Quammen
Intelligent Thought
Science Versus the Intelligent Design Movement
Edited by John Brockman
Why Darwin Matters
The Case Against Intelligent Design
Michael Shermer
Good review. Books on the "to read" list.
pharyngula | July 30, 2006Carel Brest van Kempen has posted one of his paintings of Cambrian animals—be sure to click on it to get the larger size. I wish I had a pet anomalocarid in my aquarium.
pharyngula | July 30, 2006
Assuming that none of my readers are perfectly spherical, you all possess notable asymmetries—your top half is different from your bottom half, and your front or ventral half is different from you back or dorsal half. You left and right halves are probably superficially somewhat similar, but internally your organs are arranged in lopsided ways. Even so, the asymmetries are relatively specific: you aren't quite like that Volvox to the right, a ball of cells with specializations scattered randomly within. People predictably have heads on top, eyes in front, arms and legs in useful locations…
pharyngula | July 29, 2006I'm not a cosmologist and I don't even pretend to be one on the internet, but as an evolutionist I hear far more about the Big Bang from creationists than I should…and it's everything from the Big Bang never happened to the Big Bang disproves evolution, and often both opinions are held by the same person, who will often also tell me both that the Cambrian is proof of sudden creation and that the earth is less than 10,000 years old (consistency is not a quality valued by most creationists). It's therefore rather handy to have a summary of misconceptions about the Big Bang all in one place.
pharyngula | July 27, 2006
I am going mildly nuts right now—somehow, I managed to arrange things so multiple deadlines hit me on one day: tomorrow. I've got a new lecture to polish up for our introductory biology course, a small grant proposal due, and of course, tomorrow evening is our second Café Scientifique. Let's not forget that I also have a neurobiology lecture to give this afternoon, and I owe them a stack of grading which is not finished yet. I'm really looking forward to Wednesday.
Anyway, so my new lecture for our introductory biology course is on…creationism, yuck. What I'm planning to do is to describe…
catdynamics | July 27, 2006Chad has kicked off a thematically linked discussion:
A response to Jonah on why science is so much work
and, Why they're leaving a pointer to an InsideHigherEd article
My very personal response: poor math prep, lack of professional opportunities, acute labour shortages, and It Is Not A Lot of Hard Work, but it is Difficult To Do.
Chad and Jonah respond from the perspective of experimental work, which, to be fair, is the bulk of work in science; but, the same problem exists, arguably to a greater extent, in theory. People who ought to be able and eager to do science walk out on it, and it is…
drorzel | July 27, 2006Jonah Lehrer at the Frontal Cortex asks an interesting question: Why is science so much work?
But I'm curious why science takes so long. I know this is an incredibly naive question, but why do post-docs have to work so hard? What is it about the scientific process that forces the average researcher to come in on Saturday (and sometimes Sunday)?
My own limited experience tells me that one of the main reasons science remains so labor-intensive is failure. Perhaps I was simply inept, but an astonishing amount of my time in the lab was spent repeating failed experiments, or repeating successful…
drorzel | July 27, 2006Inside Higher Ed had a piece yesterday about leaks in the science pipeline-- that is, reasons why so few students end up majoring in science, math, or engineering these days. The hook for the article is some Congressional hearings on the subject, but the author lists some possible explanations related to the structure of academia (bold headings are from the article, the summaries are mine):
Greener Grade Pastures: Students in science and engineering get lower grades than humanities students, and some students choose majors based on projected GPA.
Weeding Out: The culture of science presumes…
pharyngula | July 27, 2006Peter Doran published a paper several years ago showing that parts of Antarctica were actually cooling, rather than warming—that there were local variations in temperature trends. This is not surprising. It's also not surprising that he was quote-mined like mad by the global warming denialists. He has now written a calm, solid rejection of the misuse of his data in the NY Times.
Our results have been misused as "evidence" against global warming by Michael Crichton in his novel "State of Fear" and by Ann Coulter in her latest book, "Godless: The Church of Liberalism." Search my name on the Web…
pharyngula | July 26, 2006John Wilkins has been off visiting the ghosts of Owen, Darwin, Buffon, and Saint Hilaire, while I'm sitting in Morris. Ah, if only I had an excuse (and the means!) to escape…
pharyngula | July 26, 2006I just watched the Francis Collins/Charlie Rose interview (it starts at about 35 minutes on that clip), and although I struggled manfully to appreciate the fellow's accomplishments and status in science, I failed. All I could see is that he was illogical, irrational, and downright goofy—all the symptoms of a severe affliction with a bad case of religion. That video ought to be a warning to scientists: even a prestigious scientist can suffer Christian mind-rot.
He started by telling us about his godless youth, when atheism meant he "wasn't responsible to anyone but me." Barely a few minutes…
pharyngula | July 26, 2006
People, scientists included, are always looking for simple, comprehensible explanations for complex phenomena. It's so satisfying to be able to easily explain something in a sound bite, and sound bites are so much more easily accepted by an audience than some elaborate, difficult collection of details. For example, we often hear homosexual behavior reduced to being a "choice," the product of a "gay gene," a "sin," or something similarly absolute and irreducible…suggesting that it is part of a diverse spectrum of sexual behaviors with multiple causes and that different individuals are…
catdynamics | July 26, 2006I heard that within 15 years, global warming will have made Napa County too hot to grow good wine grapes. Is that true? What other changes are we going to see during our lifetimes because of global warming?...
Er, I don't know.
The detailed claim is that 1) the number of extremely hot days (T > 35 C (95 F)) will increase, and 2) that this degrades sugar and inhibits photosynthesis in wine grapes, so you get a worse crop.
Part 2) sounds likely - except of course there are heat tolerant grapes (which is obvious, Greece, Italy and Spain grow a lot of wine grapes), but for the classic french…
pharyngula | July 25, 2006I usually like Cornelia Dean's science reporting, but this recent collection of book reviews put me off from the opening paragraph. She begins with the tired old claim that "scientists have to be brave" to embrace religion. Malarkey. I've never heard a scientist bring up the subject of religion, pro or con, at a scientific conference or associated informal gathering. You can be as devout as you want to be with no risk to your professional career (you may even find yourself an icon for the compatibility of science and religion!), and as for your personal life, being religious in a country in…