I got your heritage

Confederate Flag

Right here. Confederate Vice President Alexander H. Stephens’ “Corner Stone” speech:

The new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution African slavery as it exists amongst us the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution…

Those ideas [that slavery would pass away], however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the “storm came and the wind blew.”

Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.

[Read more…]

Dangerous nonsense

I may have to take back some of the things I’ve said about Andrew Weil (“Pseudoscience at the University of Arizona,” “Journey into bullshit with Deepak Chopra and Andrew Weil,” “Andrew Weil advocates cupping“). Not that any of it isn’t true; he really does season his mostly sound health advice with some pseudoscientific bullshit. But damn, Dr. Weil is a paragon of rationality compared to these two:

The article the tweet links to is by Larry Malerba, DO, DHt, “Physician, educator, author, and pioneer of new paradigm medical thinking.” I don’t know what a DHt is: distributed hash table? Dihydrotestosterone? If anyone knows, please share in the comments.

Malerba

[Read more…]

Research Features: seems sketchy to me

I see that it’s been nearly three weeks since I posted, maybe the longest gap since I started this. It wasn’t a conscious decision, just a combination of deadlines and life in general.

Research Features

Back in April, I got an email out of the blue from a ‘Project Manager’ at Research Features, a digital magazine “…born from a passion to break down barriers that exist in the dissemination life cycle from researcher to the mass audience.”

Dear Dr. Herron

I would like to speak with you concerning your work with the Collaborative Research: De Novo Evolution of Multicellularity in a Unicellular Volvocine Alga study.

[Read more…]

Extant taxa cannot be basal

Page 74 from Notebook B

Page 74 from Darwin’s Notebook B: Transmutation.

Shortly after the return of the HMS Beagle to Cornwall, Charles Darwin jotted down the following note:

It is absurd to talk of one animal being higher than another.

In the subsequent twenty years, Darwin either forgot or reconsidered his note to himself.* He shouldn’t have.

[Read more…]

Another take on volvocine individuality

Dinah Davison & Erik Hanschen

Dinah Davison and Erik Hanschen.

A couple of weeks ago, I indulged in a little shameless self-promotion, writing about my new chapter on volvocine individuality in Biological Individuality, Integrating Scientific, Philosophical, and Historical Perspectives. Now two graduate students in the Michod lab at the University of Arizona, Erik Hanschen and Dinah Davison, have published their own take on volvocine individuality in Philosophy, Theory, and Practice in Biology (“Evolution of individuality: a case study in the volvocine green algae“). The article is open-access, and Hanschen and Davison are listed as equal contributors.

[Read more…]

Non-model model organisms

Jim Umen, the lead organizer of the upcoming Volvox meeting, has written a section for a new paper in BMC Biology, “Non-model model organisms.” Like all of the BMC journals, BMC Biology is open access, so you can check out the original.

The article surveys organisms that, while not among the traditional model systems, have been developed as model systems for studying particular biological questions. The paper has an unusual format, with a discrete section devoted to each species, each written by one or two of the authors. Aside from Volvox, there are sections on diatoms, the ciliates Stentor and Oxytricha, the amoeba Naeglaria, fission yeast, the filamentous fungus Ashbya, the moss Physcomitrella, the cnidarian Nematostella, tardigrades, axolotls, killifish, R bodies (a bacterial toxin delivery system), and cerebral organoids (a kind of lab-grown micro-brain).

Dr. Umen presents Volvox and its relatives as a model system for understand the evolution of traits related to the evolution of multicellularity:

[Read more…]