Archive for the 'Genetics'

It’s going to be a good season, I can tell already. It’s finals week, so I’ll still have an abrupt pile of grading to do on Thursday, but otherwise, my teaching obligations are done for the semester. Now I’m trapped, trapped I tell you, in Morris for almost (I do have two quick trips to Europe planned) the entire summer with a collection of administrative responsibilities, but the good part of that is that I have ambitious plans for what I’ll be doing in the lab. I’m also going to be living the good life. So this morning I slept in to 7:00. I know, it’s slothful of me, but I have the freedom to indulge myself a little bit now and then. After I got up, I took a nice brisk walk downtown, did some shopping, stocked up on some fresh vegetables, and once I got home, chopped them up and set them to soak in a tasty marinade. I’ll roast them up for dinner tonight. Then I started reading up an accumulated mass of papers that’ll give me some implementation ideas for the work I have planned. I’ll have a student working with me, and we’ve got a couple of projects in the works. There’s some boring scut work to be done: lab cleanup, clearing out old reagents from the refrigerator, making up new stock solutions. Don’t be disillusioned, but part of the research life is janitorial…so much dishwashing. My grand plan requires an expansion of my fish colony to include multiple genetic strains, so we’re going to be scrubbing tanks, sterilizing surfaces, setting up new tanks with boring feeder fish to get the nitrogen cycle going and condition the water, getting the brine shrimp hatchery (live fish food!) thriving, all that sort of stuff that qualifies you to be a clerk in a pet store. Once all the tanks are bubbling away happily, we’re getting some new strains from the zebrafish stock center. Then it’s a few months of nursing them along, collecting eggs, propagating...
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Casey Luskin is such a great gift to the scientific community. The public spokesman for the Discovery Institute has a law degree and a Masters degree (in Science! Earth Science, that is) and thinks he is qualified to analyze papers in genetics and molecular biology, fields in which he hasn’t the slightest smattering of background, and he keeps falling flat on his face. It’s hilarious! The Discovery Institute is so hard up for competent talent, though, that they keep letting him make a spectacle of his ignorance. I really, really hope Luskin lives a long time and keeps his job as a frontman for Intelligent Design creationism. He just makes me so happy. His latest tirade is inspired by the New York Times, which ran an article on highlights from the coelacanth genome. Luskin doesn’t think very deeply, so he keeps making these arguments that he thinks are terribly damaging to evolution because he doesn’t comprehend the significance of what he’s saying. For instance, he sneers at the fact that we keep finding conserved elements in the genome, because as we all know, there are lots of conserved elements. Hox genes are known to be widely conserved among vertebrates, so the fact that homology was found between Hox-gene-associated DNA across these organisms isn’t very surprising. Read more

I’m giving you a heads-up in advance: the last Cafe Scientifique in Morris for the school year is next Tuesday, the 30th, and you-know-who is giving it. I expect to see you all there. If you’re not, don’t come around asking me for a Christmas present later.

For some random reason, this post from the Scienceblogs era Pharyngula, “There are no marching morons“, is getting some sudden attention, so I thought I’d bring it here. Most people have probably never heard of Kornbluth, or read The Marching Morons, but now you can! It’s on scribd, or you can just read the summary on wikipedia. The modern reference is of course, Idiocracy, and I suspect a lot of you have seen it. I detest Idiocracy, too, and cringe when people bring it up. It’s nonsense. It’s the same failure to recognize that reality is not a possession of the elite that you find in eugenics. Idiocracy and Marching Morons is what you get when smart people are unable to recognize their common humanity with others — when you sneer at whole classes and regard them as inferior breeders. But onward: here’s the original post. Surprisingly, since NatGeo hosed most of the comments when they transfered the site to WordPress, it looks like a lot of the comments on this article survived, too. I was sent a link to this editorial by the science-fiction writer, Ben Bova. I like part of the sentiment, where he’s arguing that it’s worth the effort to try and change the world, but a substantial part of it bugs me. The most prescient — and chilling — of all the science fiction stories ever written, though, is “The Marching Morons,” by Cyril M. Kornbluth, first published in 1951. It should be required reading in every school on Earth. The point that Kornbluth makes is simple, and scary: dumbbells have more children than geniuses. In “The Marching Morons” he carries that idea to its extreme, but logical, conclusion. Kornbluth tells of a future world that is overrun with dummies: men and women who don’t know anything beyond their own shallow personal interests. They don’t know how their society works, or who is running it. All they care about is their personal...
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Last night at #nwc36 we were talking about evodevo, and one of the topics that came up was the importance of Drosophila reasearch in providing the foundation for comparative genetic analysis…which led to Sarah Palin. Remember Palin’s ignorant mockery of fruit fly research? This is what we get from the Republican party. Now Michelle Malkin’s blog chimes in with a similar complaint. John Logsdon got an NSF award to study reproduction in snails. WASTE OF MONEY! CUT THE DEFICIT! HOW DARE THEY SPEND MONEY ON SOMETHING SO STUPID!