Figure 4 A & B from McFadden & Lusk 2016. Views about mandatory labeling.
A recent paper in The FASEB Journal by Brandon R. McFadden and Jayson L. Lusk examines views on mandatory labeling of genetically modified (GM) foods (that’s the best link I could find; it’s not the final, formatted version, and it may differ in content as well). What a shitshow:
Image from http://www.teddunlap.net/.
Think you’re special, Virginia, because one of your candidates for Congress looks at porn? Pfft. Here in Montana, we have a full-blown conspiracy theorist running for governor. I’m talking (or rather he is) chemtrails, Sandy Hook, and 9-11 Truth.
The last couple of posts have shown up in my feed reader the way I always thought they should: with the image I chose in WordPress as the “Featured Image.” In the past, they have included the first image, no image, or the FreeThought blogs logo.
I don’t see what the point of identifying an image as “Featured” is if it doesn’t show up in the rss feed. I hope this means I can count on this to happen in the future. Let’s see…I’ve included one image in this post and identified a different image (of the rss icon) as the Featured Image. [Read more…]
100 pages ought to do it, I think. If you’re worried that that won’t pass the weight test, just add on a great big appendix; nobody’s going to read it. Think of the time and money you can save! Think of the poor slobs pipetting their youth away while you’re partying. Don’t think about how your committee is going to react to a data-free dissertation at your defense. What can they say? They have to pass you; it’s 200 pages!
Facebook reminded me the other day that it’s been a year since I started the original Fierce Roller blog. I didn’t know back then if I’d stick to it this long, and I still don’t know if I’ll keep it up another year. One step at a time.
My very first blog post.
What is Fierce Roller, exactly? I guess it’s a few different things. One of the ideas from the start was to be a service to the Volvox community, reporting new papers, meetings, and news relating to volvocine algae. But that has only been one aspect. It is also a place for me to talk about my research interests, both scientific and philosophical. Scientific usually means that it has to do with the so-called ‘major transitions’ or related evolutionary themes. I wish I could cover this topic more thoroughly, but it has become a big subfield within evolutionary biology, and I can’t possibly keep up with the relative flood of papers. Philosophical usually means that it has to do with the one discussion in the philosophy of science that I’ve contributed to, about the meaning of biological individuality. There is also, of course, a thread of skepticism, occasionally about ‘alternative’ medicine, but usually responding to creationist arguments.
Image from www.twoheadedquarter.net. Only $6.95!
I have previously complained that, for cdesign proponentsists,
…if multicellularity is really complicated, that’s evidence for intelligent design. But if multicellularity is really simple, that’s evidence for intelligent design.
Now here’s another example of this logic. Fellows of the Discovery Institute have been arguing for some time that the human and chimpanzee genomes differ by more than is usually reported, and that this (of course) supports intelligent design. [Read more…]
Gonium pectorale. Credit: Kansas State University.
Yes, they live in ponds; no they don’t form any kind of scum. The press release from Kansas State on the Gonium genome paper, which is reprinted here, here, and here, is titled “Pond scum and the gene pool: One critical gene in green algae responsible for multicellular evolution, understanding of cancer origin.” Gonium forms planktonic colonies of (usually) 8, 16, or 32 cells that swim under their own power and exhibit phototaxis (they’ll swim toward a light source). They are not pond scum. ‘Algae’ and ‘pond scum’ are not synonyms, dig? Leaving aside the distinction between algae and cyanobacteria, calling Gonium pond scum is like saying pineapples are lemons (because both are fruits).
Also…cancer origin, really? You went there? The word ‘cancer’ does not appear in the paper except in the funding acknowledgements (Bradley Olson is partly funded by the KSU Johnson Cancer Center).
Figure 2 from Hanschen et al. 2016. (a) Predicted number of genes in each phylostratum (PS1–PS9) for Chlamydomonas, Gonium and Volvox. (b) Heatmap of transcription factor abundance for all green algae. Significant over- (+) and under-representation (−) in colonial/multicellular lineages (Gonium and Volvox) is denoted (G test of independence, α=0.05). Rows are clustered (left), an accepted phylogeny is depicted (top). (c) Phylogenetic analysis of gene family evolution. Bars to the left and right of the vertical axis denote the lost and gained gene families respectively, relative to its parental node. (d) Venn diagram of the species distribution of Pfam A domains unique to the volvocine algae.
Erik Hanschen, the lead author on the Gonium genome paper, is also an old friend of mine from when we were both in Michael Doebeli’s lab at the University of British Columbia. He kindly agreed to write a guest post responding to Evolution News and Views‘ misunderstandings of his paper. Everything below the fold was written by Erik:
Maureen O’Malley and Russell Powell say that the major transitions framework is in need of repair. They have a point, or rather several good points. I have looked at their criticisms of three different versions (the original framework as laid out in the book by John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry, Rick Michod’s ‘evolutionary transitions in individuality‘ framework, and Szathmáry’s revised ‘Major Transitions 2.0‘). But what is their proposed fix, and will it have the intended effect?
Figure 4 from O’Malley and Powell 2016. Two major aeons of evolution (modified from Falkowski 2006). ‘Gya’ stands for ‘billion years ago’; the date for the origin of photosynthesis may need to be pushed back (see Crowe et al. 2013).
To be fair, the time from submission to acceptance had been pretty ridiculous.