When the animal is a squid, of course, which are beautiful even in death. Here’s the dance of dying chromatophores:
(via Arthropoda)
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
When the animal is a squid, of course, which are beautiful even in death. Here’s the dance of dying chromatophores:
(via Arthropoda)
This is beautiful, I’d hang it on my wall. It’s a genetic map of the first synthetic organism, and it and many others will be on display in the Serpentine Gallery in London this weekend.
And gosh, what do you know, I am going to be in London this weekend! I may have to sneak out of The Amazing Meeting a bit, which is going to be hard to do since it’s so jam-packed with cool people and cool stuff, but some of them might want to join me in a little extracurricular travel as well.
Awesome. A father and son launch an iPhone into outer space.
I would never have guessed this one. The Nobel Prize in Medicine has gone to Robert G. Edwards for his pioneering work in in vitro fertilization. It surprises me because it’s almost ancient history — he is being rewarded for work done over 30 years ago. It’s also very applied research — this was not work that greatly advanced our understanding of basic phenomena in biology, because IVF was already being done in animals. This was just the extension of a technique to one peculiar species, ours.
I don’t begrudge him the award, though, because the other special property of his research was that it was extremely controversial. These were procedures that simply burned through scores (or hundreds, if you count the ones with such little viability that they weren’t implanted) of human zygotes in order to work out reliable protocols, and throughout faced serious ethical risks — these were procedures that had a chance of producing the worst possible result, a viable embryo that came to full term, but had serious birth defects. The public opposition to the work was tremendous, funding was tenuous, and even many in the scientific community opposed the work and ostracized Edwards and his colleague, Steptoe (who did not live to see this day, and so did not receive the award).
Nowadays, IVF is practically routine and about 4 million people were ‘test tube babies’. It’s still controversial, though, with extremist anti-abortion groups, such as the Catholic church, still fighting it, and the redundant, unused zygotes from the procedure still being a point of major contention (ever heard of ‘snowflake babies’? That’s what they’re talking about).
I’m reading a couple of messages in this award. One is simply acknowledging a hard-working scientist, but the other is a signal that we should soldier on through all of the opposition to reproductive health technologies, that science will be rewarded and the Luddites will find themselves in the dustbin of history. I can’t help but see this as, in part, the Nobel committee making an unmistakeably rude gesture at the anti-science, anti-choice fanatics of the religious right.
(For those who are unfamilar with the IVF procedure that Edwards and Steptoe developed, here’s a lovely summary diagram from the Nobel Foundation.)
It’s a contest: the Nobel prizes will be announced next week, and right now you can make guesses about who will win and submit them for a chance at prizes.
Let’s see…Michael Egnor for Physiology/Medicine, Dembski for physics, and Behe for Chemistry…
No, only guess those if you want to guarantee that you’ll lose.
It’s a python digesting a rat, imaged with a combination of CT, MRI, and considerable image processing, and it’s lovely. There is also a time series taken over 132 hours of the rat being digested.
All right, it’s not so pretty a picture if you’re a rat.
People are always asking me for the source of those nice t-shirts that illustrate how long we’ve diverged from a given species. I think the name must be hard to remember: they’re at evogeneao.com. Now there’s a little software widget that will be just as neat-o.
Look up TimeTree, and remember to show it to the kids. This is a page with a simple premise: type in the name of two taxa (it will accept common names, but may give you a list of scientific names to narrow the search), and then it looks them up in the public gene databases and gives you a best estimate of how long ago their last common ancestor lived.
Grasshoppers and I, for instance, shared a many-times-great grandpa 981 million years ago. My zebrafish and I are practically cousins, with our last shared ancestor living a mere 454 million years ago. Hey, tree, we’ve been apart for 1407 million years, how’s it going? Sparrow! Long time no see! 325 million years, huh?
You get the idea. It’s great for getting the big perspective. The kids will pester you all the time for dates. Especially since…it’s got an iPhone app! Get on the App Store on your smart phone or iPad and search for TimeTree — it’s totally free (except for the cost of owning such a gadget, of course).
Oh, and once you’re done entertaining the children and yourself, it’s actually a serious tool. Tap on the results and it’ll take you to all the scientific details: breakdown of mitochondrial vs. nuclear date estimates, source papers, all that sort of thing.
For details on how it works, there’s also a published paper:
Hedges SB, Dudley J, Kumar S (2006) TimeTree: a public knowledge-base of divergence times among organisms. Bioinformatics 22(23):2971-2972.
Look, a cat! 92 million years.
The Encyclopedia of Life is a cool tool which is a sort of wikification of taxonomy — it allows a large number of contributors to add descriptions of species with the goal of eventually documenting all 1.8 million known species in a single searchable source. Look at the page for my experimental animal, Danio rerio; lots of information in a standard format with links and references. Thumbs up!
However, there’s a problem here: the sources. To organize that much data, a large mob of contributors are needed, and that means some fairly open policies to allow contributors have been instituted, and that in turn means that there will be parasites on they system. And a reader sent me an example of a doozy.
Take a look at the page for the order Decapoda. It has an oddly random article on the reflecting superposition eyes of lobsters up top.
A lobster’s eye works on a principle of reflection rather than that of refraction…The most outstanding characteristic of the lobster eye is its surface, which is composed of numerous squares…these squares are positioned most precisely.
It’s OK — it seems to be a rough and unhelpful paraphrase of a section of Michael Land’s wonderfully informative book, Animal Eyes, and it’s correct as far as it goes — lobster eyes do have an array of mirrored light guides that are square in section. The surprise is at the end, where it names the author: Harun Yahya. That’s right, the Turkish creationist. This is taken straight from one of his creationist ravings, where he discusses some amazing detail of biology and concludes that it couldn’t possibly have evolved because he, a wealthy playboy and former mental patient and convicted criminal now representing himself as the Islamic source of creation science, could not imagine it so.
How did Harun Yahya become a source on EoL?
The page links to its source and holder of the copyright on the article: it’s the Biomimicry Institute, an entirely credible educational source, with a specific page, the Ask Nature reference, which is, again, an open source resource with multiple contributors. And yes, there’s Harun Yahya stuffing articles in there.
I did a google search on a few of the phrases in the text, and whoa — it’s everywhere. Harun Yahya’s organization has been dumping this same bit of text, and others, in various of their own websites and also in just about any legitimate source that allows them to open an account and create public content, including Ask Nature and EoL. It has also been picked up by numerous creationist sites as well, all echoing the same unwarranted conclusion: this eye works really well, therefore it couldn’t have evolved.
Try googling for information on lobster eyes. It’s a mess. There are a few credible sources that appear on the first page, like Wikipedia, but for the most part it’s a smear of creationist sites.
I know, this is a truism: don’t trust the Net of Lies, learn to vet your sources, watch out for anything on the net. But it looks to me like the Turkish creationists have been waging a successful astroturf campaign to infiltrate sources that we would normally regard as pretty good, and are thereby corrupting sources even more. It also allows them to pass casual review because their articles are very widely sourced.
I hope the editors of various scientific web sites that allow open submissions will take a look at their collections, and purge them of anything from Harun Yahya. He is not a scientific source, he has absolutely no background in the sciences, and he mangles the information to serve his ideological goals. What he’s doing here is using repetition to make his name widely known, and parasitizing on the good name of some websites to falsely elevate his reputation. There’s a hobo on the train, people, and he’s pretending he’s a railroad executive.
Just in case you are wondering about those lobster eyes, they actually are extremely interesting, using reflecting mirrors instead of refracting lenses to focus light on photoreceptors. It’s not hard to see how they would work: to focus incoming light on a photoreceptor surface, we need to bend light to a target, and refraction or reflection can do the job.
Here’s Mike Land’s summary diagram of the process (and, incidentally, Animal Eyes is an excellent survey of the diversity of biological optics):
I don’t see how you can argue that the one on the right is evidence of creation, any more than the one on the left. Both take advantage of ordinary physical properties to focus an image on a retina.
The interesting phenomenon is the transition: the eye on the left is almost certainly the ancestral state, since some crustaceans have both kinds of eyes, and also they may have the refracting eye on the left in the early stages of development, and it then transforms into the mirrored eye…and we don’t have good evolutionary examples of the historical transition. That the eye can switch between two forms during development at least implies that no magic is necessary, though, so this may be an open question but it is not a question that requires the invention of a supernatural designer to answer.
Stephen Hawking was on Larry King Friday night, and here’s a little video of the event. Through no fault of his own, Hawking isn’t exactly a dynamic stage presence — he’s a bag of bones in a wheelchair with a computer voice speaking for him — and Larry King is…well, King is a genuinely dumb interviewer whose weak-minded talents are better suited to celebrity airheads.
That isn’t the whole thing. There’s also part 2 and part 3, which includes Leonard Mlodinow (who’s good, but sucks up too much to the other panelists), and a couple of people whose intelligence is a better match to King’s: Deepak Chopra, who is so far out of his depth in a discussion of physics that he feels the need to overcompensate by babbling buzzwords, and Robert Spitzer. Spitzer? Who? He’s a Catholic apologist, and even more annoying than Chopra.
This is the gist of his argument: it’s the tiresome old first cause claim.
Father Robert J. Spitzer, president and founder of the Magis Center of Reason and Faith in Irvine, says he believes that both physics and philosophy offer proofs of the existence of God.
“No metaphysician I know of believes that nothing can give rise to something,” Spitzer, a philosophical metaphysician and a Jesuit priest, said in an interview Thursday. “Nothing can only come from nothing. If it was nothing, it didn’t bring itself out of nothing.”
He hasn’t been following along, apparently. Something does emerge out of nothing all the time, and even if you did need some specific causal event, it is neither necessary nor sensible to invoke a supernatural intelligence. Hawking’s whole point seems to be that natural causes, all that stuff physics is good at examining, seems to be sufficient for all.
I think I’ll trust a physicist over a Jesuit any day, especially when the subject is physics.
I’ve never been a fan of SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. It’s like playing the lottery obsessively, throwing down lots of money in hopes of a big payoff, and I don’t play the lottery, either.
I’d really like to know if Seth Shostak is innumerate enough to play the lottery, though, because his recent claim that we stand a good chance of discovering extraterrrestrial intelligence within 25 years. All right, bring it: let’s see your evidence for such a claim.
“I actually think the chances that we’ll find ET are pretty good,” said Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute in Mountain View, Calif., here at the SETIcon convention. “Young people in the audience, I think there’s a really good chance you’re going to see this happen.”
Shostak bases this estimation on the Drake Equation, a formula conceived by SETI pioneer Frank Drake to calculate the number (N) of alien civilizations with whom we might be able to communicate. That equation takes into account a variety of factors, including the rate of star formation in the galaxy, the fraction of stars that have planets, the fraction of planets that are habitable, the percent of those that actually develop life, the percent of those that develop intelligent life, the fraction of civilizations that have a technology that can broadcast their presence into space, and the length of time those signals would be broadcasted.
Reliable figures for many of those factors are not known, but some of the leaders in the field of SETI have put together their best guesses. Late great astronomer Carl Sagan, another SETI pioneer, estimated that the Drake Equation amounted to N = 1 million. Scientist and science fiction writer Isaac Asimov calculated 670,000. Drake himself estimates a more conservative 10,000.
The Drake Equation? That’s it? I hate the Drake Equation. It’s seven arbitrary parameters plugged into a simple formula, of which we have reasonable estimates of one (the rate of star formation), growing evidence of values for another (the number of planets around each star), and the other five are complete wild-ass guesses, most of them dealing with biology and culture, and we’ve got astronomers who know next to nothing of either inserting optimistic values. When biologists amend the values to something more reasonable, the likelihood of intelligent life plummets. Not that their wild-ass guesses are necessarily more accurate (although they are based on the history of life on this one planet), but it does say something that the equation can yield results that vary by six orders of magnitude, depending on who does the calculation.
It’s a useless formula. You can’t calculate anything from a formula in which almost all of the variables are complete unknowns, and it’s also meaningless in that no matter what result we acquire from empirical evidence, it can all be retrofitted to the magic formula. I really don’t understand the appeal of the Drake Equation, except that it turns our ignorance into a pseudo-sciencey string of fake math…but smart people ought to be able to recognize garbage.
I can’t really make a prediction here, unlike Shostak, who seems willing to gamble everything on promises he doesn’t have to worry about fulfilling. He could win the lottery. But I’m not going to place any bets on it.
