Hey, if you’ve been wondering what the sex symbols of science blogging look like, here’s your chance: a video of some bloggin’ microbiologists hanging out in Toronto.
Although, that title … it’s hard to imagine an uglier word than “blog,” but they managed to coin one.
Peggy has an excellent discusion of the peculiar attitudes towards biology held by physicists and engineers, which includes this wonderful complaint by Jack Cohen:
In summer 2002, I was at the Cheltenham Festival of Science. Lots of biologists presenting, for sure. But… one very popular event was a presentation by three famous astronomers: ‘Is There Life Out There?’ I prefaced my first question to them by a little imaginative scenario: three biologists discussing the properties of the black hole in the middle of our galaxy. It was very clear that the astronomers really believed that they could discuss ‘life’ professionally, whereas everyone saw biologists talking about black holes as absurd.
Oh, and let’s get started on how SF treats biology…
The NY Times has pulled out all the stops today and has dedicated their entire science section to the subject of evolution. They’ve got pieces by some of the best science journalists around, like Carl Zimmer, Cornelia Dean (although in this case, it’s a lot of nattering on about how the soul fits into evolution—not recommended), and Natalie Angier, and they’ve also drafted a few scientists. There’s a video of Sean Carroll summarizing evo-devo, and perhaps the most interesting article of them all is by Douglas Erwin, in which he speculates about whether the new ideas percolating throughout the science community (especially by those noisy developmental biologists) are precursors to a new revolution in our thinking about evolution. He’s non-committal so far, which is fair.
Does all this add up to a new modern synthesis? There is certainly no consensus among evolutionary biologists, but development, ecology, genetics and paleontology all provide new perspectives on how evolution operates, and how we should study it. None of these concerns provide a scintilla of hope for creationists, as scientific investigations are already providing new insights into these issues. The foundations for a paradigm shift may be in place, but it may be some time before we see whether a truly novel perspective develops or these tensions are accommodated within an expanded modern synthesis.
Or both! I expect that what will happen is that the deficiencies in the neo-Darwinian synthesis (which lacks any explanation for the evolution of form and pattern, for instance) will be gradually filled in with clear linkages to the evolution of genes, and despite the fact that it will be a bigger, bolder, stronger synthesis, everyone will say we knew it all along anyway. There will not be a threshold moment where everyone says “Wow! I am suddenly enlightened!” — there will just come a time when everyone acknowledges that all those papers from 40 years ago were pretty darned important, after all.
Dr. R. Albert Mohler, Jr., president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, is worried. He’s afraid we’re going to put a human brain in a rodent’s head. No, really — it’s not just a joke in a cartoon. He seriously wants to suppress research in transgenic and chimeric animals “before a mouse really does come up and ask for a cookie.” Now, seriously, his worry isn’t that mice will be smarter than he is and eat all his cookies. No, he has better reasons.
The scariest part of this research is directed at work done in hope of curing or treating diseases of the human brain.
They might cure debilitating neurological diseases like Alzheimer’s or cerebral palsy or schizophrenia! Those horrible, horrible scientists—how dare they cure our god-given afflictions. We deserve them!
The general pattern of developing positional information in Drosophila starts out relatively simply and gets increasingly complicated as time goes by. Initially, there is a very broad distribution of a gradient of a maternal morphogen. That morphogen then triggers the expression of narrower (but still fairly broad) bands of aperiodic gap genes. The next step in this process is to turn on sets of genes in narrow, periodic bands that correspond to body segments. This next set of genes are called the pair-rule genes, because they do something surprising and rather neat: they are turned on in precisely alternating bands. In the picture above, for instance, one pair-rule gene, even-skipped, has been stained blue, and it is expressed in parasegment* 1, 3, 5, 7, etc. Another, fushi tarazu, has been stained brown, and this gene is turned on in parasegments 2, 4, 6, 8, etc.
Mark Morford is wonderfully excited about the prospects for biological research, and I don’t blame him. Consider what the world was like in 1900 and how physics and engineering changed it by 2000; from horse-and-buggy and steam locomotive to interstates and jet planes, from telegraph to world-wide communication networks. We’re going to see a revolution of that magnitude in the coming century, too, and you can expect biology and medicine to be at the forefront. Well, maybe. As Morford writes, the alternative is to
…hold tight to the leaky life raft of inflexible ideology (hello, organized religion), to rules and laws and codes of conduct written by the fearful, for the fearful, to live in constant low-level dread of all the extraordinary changes and radical rethinkings of what it means to be human or animal or male or female or hetero or homo or any other swell little label you thought was solid and trustworthy but which is increasingly proven to be blurry and unpredictable and just a little dangerous.
We know which side GW Bush and the Republican party are on: with the knuckle-draggers and antique hierarchies of organized religion. Our president has vetoed a bill to support stem cell research. This is remarkable: he has only vetoed three bills in his entire presidency, and two of them have been with the intent of killing stem cell research. Just as remarkably, our representatives in congress haven’t been able to muster the numbers to override that veto. Imagine if the American government had voted to censure the Wright brothers and to outlaw the internal combustion engine at the turn of the last century, or if they’d decided to condemn the kinds of radical and dangerous physics being pursued at places like Princeton and Chicago. It wouldn’t have changed a thing about the natural world, or the discoveries that were made; it might have slowed the pace a bit, but the changes would still have come from England and France and Germany and Japan and the Soviet Union … the biggest difference would be that the United States would be an irrelevant backwater.
That’s what the Republicans are doing to this country right now: damning us to a future as a backward, corrupt mess, a big, blundering headache for the world. In 2100, will the rest of the planet see us in the same way Turkey was seen in 1900?
Wish I could be there.
It’s a day of writing, of car repair, of trips to the airport (we’re shipping Skatje off to a work camp…shhhh, don’t tell her, she thinks she’s going ‘camping’), and little low level aggravations, like being locked out of my office because they’re waxing the floors. So, sure, I wouldn’t mind a little African geology trip right now.
Hank Fox has brought a significant problem to my attention, one that I’ve addressed before: one of the consequences of growing American cowardice and these trumped-up Wars on Terror and Drugs (let’s call them what they are: a War on Civil Liberties) is that science and science education are collateral damage. Memepunks has an excellent post on this subject:
In an attempt to curb the production of crystal meth, more than 30 states have now outlawed or require registration for common lab equipment. In Texas, you need to register the purchase of Erlenmeyer flasks or three-necked beakers. The same state where I do not have to register a handgun, forces me to register a glass beaker. In Portland, Oregon, even pH strips are suspect. Modern off the shelf “chemistry” sets are sold without any of the questionable chemicals or equipment. For example, when a current company tried re releasing a kit based on the one marketed by Mr. Wizard himself back in the 1950s, they found that they could only include five of the original chemicals in the set. The rest of the items were replaced with inane things like super balls and balloons. Even a non neutered modern chemistry set like the C3000 from Thames and Kosmos is forced to ship without many key chemicals, suggesting to their customers that they acquire the missing ingredients elsewhere.
In the name of child safety, in order to inhibit drug peddlers, because we don’t want to make things easy for terrorists, we have put up bureaucratic barriers to the purchase of laboratory glassware — while encouraging unimpaired, unchecked access to guns.
Is this a screwed-up country, or what?
The memepunks site has some suggestions for getting around the restrictions.
But there are some lights shinning in the darkness of this situation. Companies like United Nuclear, which continue to sell chemicals and lab equipment despite legal problems, and websites that support chemistry hobbyists. Like Readily Available Chemicals, which maintains a list of places where one can make an end run around the restrictions and purchase chemicals or lab ware. Or The Nitrogen Order, who provides a how to on building your own chemistry set, and provides lessons and experiments. And Science Madness who’s forums give hobbyists a place to meet, compare notes, and exchange secrets of the trade anonymously. One of my favorites is the Society for Amateur Scientists, which just began a LABRats program, to match up youngsters that are interested in science with mentors that are practicing scientists.
That’s right, people, this is what it is coming down to: you need to break the law to do science. We’re criminalizing nerds.
At least making science dangerous and illicit and illegal ought to make us romantic outlaws look cool.
Since I asked for it, and since so many were promptly forthcoming with a copy, I’d better give you a quick summary. Kubodera et al. have formally published their observations of the eight-armed deep sea squid, Taningia danae, that were in the news last February. There isn’t much new information in the papers; it’s all based on a handful of video observations of hunting squid in their native habitat, so it’s more on the side of anecdote than anything else right now. It’s still just plain cool.
That photo is of their video gear. It’s a platform with lights and cameras that’s lowered on a cable to almost a thousand meters. What I thought was cute, though, was that object jutting off at about 45°—that’s a fiberglas fishing pole with a short length of monofilament line dangling the bait in front of the cameras. It’s so jaunty to strap a pole to your robot and send it off to go fishing.
No, actually they don’t — but they do have some proteins that are essential components of synapses, and it tells us something important about the evolution of the nervous system. A new paper by Sakarya et al. really isn’t particularly revolutionary, but it is very interesting, and it does confirm something many of us suspected.
