A Senior Editor at PLoS ONE has notified me that the paper I first complained about back in September (“A cautionary tale on reading phylogenetic trees“) has been retracted. I still have lots of questions.
Just a quick followup on yesterday’s post (“Those beautiful Research Features articles? The authors get £50.“). If you could write two such articles a day, five days a week, you would earn around £26,000 ($35,000) per year:
£50/article x 2 articles/day x 5 days/week x 52 weeks/year = £26,000/year.
At the end of a year, you’d have written around half a million words, a bit more than The Lord of the Rings.
Back in August, I wrote a fairly critical post about an outfit called Research Features (“Research Features: seems sketchy to me“). My main complaint was that they call themselves a magazine but seem to me to be closer to paid advertising:
What’s sketchy about this is that it’s self-promotion passing itself off as journalism.
Image from www.micropia.nl/en/discover/microbiology/volvox/
Micropia, the museum of microbes in Amsterdam, has a page devoted to Volvox:
Ponds and ditches are not only home to unicellular green algae, but also to multicellular forms.
Some ‘colonies’ are nothing more than a mass of single cells all doing exactly the same thing, but with the spherical volvox it’s a slightly different story. Here different cells have specialised and work together. All the cells are located on the outside of the sphere. There are cells with flagella (whip-like hairs) to help the colony move around and cells which are responsible for reproduction.
I have an interest with the philosophy of biology, but I’m a dilettante. My background is in evolutionary biology; I haven’t had a philosophy class since I was an undergrad at UCF. Nevertheless, if you study the so-called Major Transitions, you’re inevitably going to end up reading some philosophy. Topics such as multilevel selection, emergence, and the nature of biological individuality come up over and over again in this field, and philosophers of biology have made important contributions in all of them.
Among these, I find discussions of the nature of biological individuality fascinating, and I’ve written about it often here. Volvox and its relatives often come up in these discussions, and they have for a long time. A new edited volume, Nature Alive, continues this trend in a chapter by Lukasz Lamza (“Cells, organisms, colonies, communities–the fuzziness of individuality in modern biology”).
ResearchGate likes to send notifications when your papers are cited. If you’re signed up for Google Scholar alerts, you’ll already know about most of these, but I confess I usually follow the links anyway. I haven’t previously seen too many preprints reported on ResearchGate, but I don’t see any reason researchers shouldn’t do so. One thing I noticed, though, is that that there’s no link to the preprint!
The website for the Fifth International Volvox Conference (Volvox 2019) is live, with registration set to begin January, 2019:
A Ph.D. position studying the development of the brown alga Saccharina latissima is available at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). The project is a collaboration between Bénédicte Charrier at CNRS and Hilde-Gunn Opsahl Sorteberg at the Norwegian University of Life Science (NMBU).
I checked out Ethics for the New Millennium for my post on secular ethics, and as long as I’ve got it I figured I might as well read it. One thing that’s usually poorly defined is spirituality, as in “I’m spiritual but not religious”. I’ve never been clear exactly what that means, but I usually take it as something like “I don’t go to church, but I have some fuzzy idea that there’s something out there that cares about humans.”
In one of the few explicit definitions I’ve ever seen, the Dalai Lama makes it clear that that’s not what he means by spirituality (p. 22):
