Science
pharyngula | July 10, 2006Billmon reviews An Inconvenient Truth, and its more of a lament for the fact that science and reason seem to have little compelling power to a nation raised on ranting idiots and authoritarian dogma.
In my darker moments, it sometimes seems as if the entire world is in the middle of a fierce backlash against the Age of Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution and the ideological challenges they posed to the old belief systems. The forces of fundamentalism and obscurantism appear to be on the march everywhere—even as the moral and technological challenges posed by a global industrial…
pharyngula | July 10, 2006I was going to just restore one old post, but it linked to another, and that one linked to others, and finally I just went ahead and dragged in the whole interlinked conglomeration.
pharyngula | July 10, 2006
I've written about this fascinating Drosophila gene, bicoid, several times before. It's a maternal effect gene, a gene that is produced by the mother and packaged into her eggs to drive important early events in development, in this case, establishing polarity, or which end of the egg is anterior (bicoid specifies which end of the egg will form the fly's head). Bicoid is also a transcription factor, or gene that regulates the activity of other genes. We also see evidence that it is a relatively new gene, one that is taking over a morphogenetic function that may have been carried out by…
pharyngula | July 9, 2006
Intelligent Design creationists are extremely fond of diagrams like those on the left. Textbook illustrators like them because they simplify and make the general organization of the components clear—reducing proteins to smooth ovoids removes distractions from the main points—but creationists like them for the wrong reasons. "Look at that—it's engineered! It's as if God uses a CAD program to design complex biological systems!" They like the implication that everything is done with laser-guided precision, and most importantly, that every piece was designed with intent, to fill a specific role…
pharyngula | July 9, 2006
Last week, I wrote a bit about maternal genes, specifically bicoid, and described how this gene was expressed in a gradient in the egg. Bicoid is both a transcription factor and a morphogen. The gene product regulates the activity of other genes, controlling their pattern of expression in the embryo. Today I thought I'd get more specific about the downstream targets of bicoid, the gap genes.
Expression domains of the gap genes. The pink bars chart the strength of gene expression as a function of position along the lengths of the embryo for hunchback (hb), huckebein (hkb), tailless (tll),…
pharyngula | July 9, 2006
In my previous comments about maternal effect genes, I was talking specifically about one Drosophila gene, bicoid, which we happen to understand fairly well. We know its sequence, we know how it is controlled, and we know what it does; we know where it falls in the upstream and downstream flow of developmental information in the cell. So today I'm going to babble a bit more about what bicoid is and does, and how it works.
Bicoid is a transcription factor.
The diagram above illustrates what a transcription factor (in this case, called "gene X") is. Gene X is transcribed to form a strand of…
pharyngula | July 9, 2006
In developmental biology, and increasingly in evolutionary biology, one of the most important fields of study is deciphering the nature of regulatory networks of genes. Most people are familiar with the idea of a gene as stretch of DNA that encodes a protein in a sequence of As, Ts, Gs, and Cs, and that's still an important part of the story. Most people may also be comfortable with the idea that mutations are events that change the sequence of As, Ts, Gs, and Cs, which can lead to changes in the encoded protein, which then causes changes in the function of the protein. These are essential…
pharyngula | July 9, 2006Today, we have a little something for the neuroscientists, and something for the atheists. Godless neuroscientists are especially fortunate.
The Synapse 1(2)
Carnival of the Godless #44
Carnival of Socialism #6
pharyngula | July 7, 2006If you've read this outrageous WaPo op-ed that basically says you can't expect moral behavior from scientists who are glorified baby-killers, you might appreciate this rebuttal at the Give Up Blog. The foundation of the fundiecrat anti-science article is that 1) Hwang Woo Suk was bad, therefore all stem cell/cloning research is tainted, and 2) alternative techniques (most of which they don't seem to understand) and adult stem cells will give us all the answers we need.
Which actually leads into this week's "ask a science blogger" question:
On July 5, 1996, Dolly the sheep became the first…
oracknows | July 6, 2006Fellow ScienceBlogger Janet Stemwedel, in reference to the declining NIH budget, asks: Hey, where'd that gravy train go? She makes a number of good points and the article she references discusses Case Western Reserve University, where I spent eight years doing residency and graduate school.
I may very well have more to say on this issue next week from my perspective as a physician-scientist who is already very worried about renewing his very first NIH R01 grant, even though it doesn't expire for nearly four years. However, contemplating the bleak funding situation for grants is just too…
catdynamics | July 6, 2006I don't want to see anyone picking on Al Gore again.
Apparently, Bush is "in the process of solving" the debate over whether global warming is caused by human activity
Well, no, dear, you're not.
"In an interview with People magazine, President George W. Bush said there is "a worthy debate" on whether global warming is caused by human activities.
"It's a debate, actually, that I'm in the process of solving by advancing new technologies, burning coal cleanly in electric plants, or promoting hydrogen-powered automobiles, or advancing ethanol as an alternative to gasoline," he said.
Bush said…
catdynamics | July 6, 2006Ask a Science Blogger: On July 5, 1996, Dolly the sheep became the first successfully cloned mammal. Ten years on, has cloning developed the way you expected it to?...
Yes. More or less exactly as I expected, in fact. So there.
Oh, an explanation...
The original cloning effort was an early breakthrough, it was looking likely that mammalian cloning would work, what remained was "engineering", but the team that did it stumbled on a crude but successful approach.
After a breakthrough like that, people get overexcited and start making wild short term predictions, none of which come true. People…
ddobbs | July 6, 2006My interest in global warming grows apace, both because it stands to impose some very grim effects and because it makes an interesting (if dismaying) study in culture's attitude toward science (see my post on "Climate change as a teset of empiricism and secular democracy") and how vested interests can affect same.
Florida at present (left) and what it will look like if seas rise 20 feet. from Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth
The puzzle at this point is why so many people, including intelligent people with decent scientific literacy, still doubt humans are causing the earth to warm…
pharyngula | July 6, 2006Dave Thomas explains Genetic Algorithms and demonstrates that, as usual, the Intelligent Design bigwigs don't have any idea what they're talking about.
oracknows | July 5, 2006This week's issue of Nature features a list of the top five science blogs, based on Technorati rankings for number of incoming links, narrowly defining its science blogs as blogs written by working scientists.
Not surprisingly, a ScienceBlogs blog Pharyngula came out on top at number one, followed by that stalwart resource for information about evolution and the debunking of creationism, The Panda's Thumb. Coming in at number five is new ScienceBlog The Scientific Activist. Not a bad showing at all, with seven of the top ten science blogs belonging to the ScienceBlogs collective, particularly…
pharyngula | July 5, 2006
Last week, I received some delusional e-mail from Phil Skell, who claims that modern biology has no use for evolutionary theory.
This will raise hysterical screeches from its true-believers. But, instead they should take a deep breath and tell us how the theory is relevant to the modern biology. For examples let them tell the relevance of the theory to learning…the discovery and function of hormones…[long list of scientific disciplines truncated]
Dr Skell is a sad case. He apparently repeats his mantra that biology has no need of evolution everywhere he goes, and has never bothered to…
pharyngula | July 5, 2006Declan Butler has a short article in this week's Nature on the "Top 5 Science Blogs". This was determined by identifying blogs written by scientists and determining their rank on Technorati. The top five are:
Pharyngula, at #179
The Panda's Thumb, at #1647
RealClimate, at #1884
Cosmic Variance, at #2174
The Scientific Activist, at #3429
Declan asked each of us to say a little bit about why we were succeeding in this medium, and that's given in a short summary. It's seriously edited down, though—I have no complaints at all about what he wrote, but he didn't use one part I wrote to him. I can…
pharyngula | July 4, 2006Carl Zimmer tells us all about the recent big dodo find, in both the pages of the Grey Lady and a podcast. He's a master of multimedia, that guy.
ddobbs | July 4, 2006Several bloggers have commented on Paul Bloom's Seed plaint about brain imaging studies receiving too much attention and a certain false credibility. (See the posts at Cognitive Daily , Mixing Memory and — in refutation — Small Gray Matters, as well as other citing blogs via Technorati or BlogPulse.) Bloom has a point: Both popular and science media show an outsized fondness for brain imaging studies, inspiring much work more diverting than informative. The most overhyped of these studies and stories suggest that in some busy brain area lies the locus of love, the center of empathy, or the…