Feminism is undermining human evolution!

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Human X (left) and Y (right) chromosomes

Did the internet get stupider while I was away this past week? I mean, it’s gratifying to my ego to imagine the average IQ of the virtual collective plummeting when I take some time off, but I really can’t believe I personally have this much influence. Maybe the kooks crept out in my absence, or maybe it was just the accumulation of a week’s worth of insanity that I saw in one painful blort when I was catching up.

What triggers such cynicism is the combination of Deepak Chopra, Oliver Curry, and now,
William Tucker. Tucker wrote a remarkably silly piece in the American Spectator in which he drew deeply faulty conclusions from human genetics to support a thesis rife with misogyny and foolish chauvinism on human evolution. It was like a piece on evolutionary psychology written by someone who didn’t know any genetics at all.

Hang on to your hats—we’re going to see a factoid from one magazine article balloon up into a declaration of the superiority of the male species (I use “species” here both ironically and mockingly).

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Evo-devo is not the whole of biology

Sometimes a plan just comes together beautifully. I’m flying off to London tomorrow, and on the day I get back to Morris, I’m supposed to lead a class discussion on the final chapters of this book we’ve been reading, Endless Forms Most Beautiful. I will at that point have a skull full of jet-lagged, exhausted mush, and I just know it’s going to be a painful struggle. Now into my lap falls a wonderful gift.

There was a review in the NY Review of Books that said wonderful things about Carroll’s work, and in particular about the revolutionary nature of evo-devo. This prompted Jason Hodin, an evo-devo researcher himself (whose work I’ve mentioned before) to write a rebuttal and send it off to NYRB…which they chose not to publish. So he sent it to me, with permission to post it.

(If Pharyngula is going to be second choice to the NY Review of Books, I’m not going to complain.)

Anyway, I’m almost as guilty as Carroll of hawking the wares of the evo-devo bandwagon and traveling roadshow, so this is a welcome balancing corrective. The complete text is below the fold.

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Will this work?

The US has done wonderfully well in collecting Nobel prizes this year, but there’s no reason to be complacent. There’s a lot of momentum in our science establishment, the result of solid support for many years, but there are troubling signs that the engines of our advance, the young minds of the next generation, aren’t going to be propelling us as well. Take this report by science educators, for instance:

“We are the best in the world at what we do at the top end, and we are mediocre — or worse — at the bottom end,” said Jon Miller, of Michigan State University, who studies the role of science in American society.

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A genomic X Prize

Here’s a marvelous idea: a race to sequence 100 people’s genomes in 100 days, with a nominal prize of 10 million dollars. As a tool to motivate the discovery of new technologies and gain prestige, I approve. It’s unfortunate that it is so anthropocentric, though. A similar contest to sequence 100 species genomes in 100 days would be much cooler, and would contribute far more to our understanding.

They’ve also got a second 100 genomes to sequence that will be drawn from a pool of celebrities. I have reservations there; the ones named seem to be mainly people who happen to be filthy rich (i.e., likely to donate money to feed their vanity), rather than ones that have some biological interest. If you’ve got to pick a celebrity, go for ones with specific physical attributes that will generate potentially interesting comparisons: what about sports stars and chess champions?

Of course, what defeats the whole intent of this contest is that they ought to just hand the samples to that technician on CSI, and he’d whip out the whole shebang in a half-hour.

SciAm explains hothead

You may have heard about that odd hothead mutation in Arabidopsis that seemed to be violating a few principles of basic genetics—there was an unexpectedly high frequency of revertants that suggested there might be a reservoir of conserved genetic information outside the genome. Reed Cartwright proposed an alternative explanation, that gamete selection could skew the results. Now the latest reports suggest that the bias was an artifact of foreign pollenization (which I think is interesting in itself. Life is damned good at sneaking its genes in wherever it can.)

Anyway, if that’s all gobbledygook to you, Scientific American has put up a lucid summary of the hothead affair. It’s an example of good science, where the observations and hypotheses are hammered out and refined to get a best explanation.

Evolution of sensory signaling

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How we sense the world has, ultimately, a cellular and molecular basis. We have these big brains that do amazingly sophisticated processing to interpret the flood of sensory information pouring in through our eyes, our skin, our ears, our noses…but when it gets right down to it, the proximate cause is the arrival of some chemical or mechanical or energetic stimulus at a cell, which then transforms the impact of the external world into ionic and electrical and chemical changes. This is a process called sensory signaling, or sensory signal transduction.

While we have multiple sensory modalities, with thousands of different specificities, many of them have a common core. We detect both light and odor (and our cells also sense neurotransmitters) with similar proteins: they use a family of G-protein-linked receptors. What that means is that the sensory stimulus is received by a receptor molecule specific for that stimulus, which then actives a G-protein on the intracellular side of the cell membrane, which in turn activates an effector enzyme that modifies the concentration of second messenger molecules in the cell. Receptors vary—you have a different receptor for each molecule you can smell. The effector enzymes vary—it can be adenylate cyclase, which changes the levels of cyclic AMP, or it can be phospholipase C, which generates other signalling molecules, DAG and IP3. The G-protein that links receptor and effector is the common element that unites a whole battery of senses. The evolutionary roots of our ability to see light and taste sugar are all tied together.

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And the Nobel goes to…

Andrew Fire and Craig Mello, for the discovery of RNAi. Read Pure Pedantry for an explanation for why this is important.

I’ll also mention that Carl Zimmer presents his take on this award…and wouldn’t you know it, evolution has its greasy fingerprints all over it.

I must also promote an excellent comment from Andy Groves:

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again for the benefit of ID supporters out there – this is what a real scientific revolution looks like. Fire and Mello published their paper in 1998 (two years after “Darwin’s Black Box” came out, for those who are interested). Since then, the number of primary research papers on RNAi, siRNAs and miRNAs stands at 12399, using the search terms

(RNAi OR siRNA OR miRNA) NOT review

12400 papers in eight years. That’s 1550 a year, or just over four papers a day. Would Bill Dembski, the Isaac Newton of information theory, care to comment?

Hmmm?

Every science paper, every bit of recognition given to working scientists, seems to be a rather nasty rebuke to the promulgators of creationism.