The Pianka situation is getting very, very ugly. I’ve been chatting with a member of the Texas Academy of Science, and people there are getting death threats over it. Here’s one example of the kind of email they’re getting:
Some fields of science are so wide open, such virgin swamps of unexplored territory, that it takes some radically divergent approaches to make any headway. There will always be opinionated, strong-minded investigators who charge in deeply and narrowly, committed to their pet theories, and there will also be others who consolidate information and try to synthesize the variety of approaches taken. There are dead ends and areas of solid progress, and there is much flailing about until the promising leads are discovered.
Origins of life research is such an unsettled frontier. I wouldn’t want to work there, but the uncertainty and the confusion and the various small victories and the romance of the work do make for a very good story. And now you can read that story in Robert Hazen’s Gen•e•sis: The Scientific Quest for Life’s Origins (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll).
Our speaker at Tuesday’s Café Scientifique, Nic McPhee, has a blog, and gives the speaker’s side of the event. He’s exactly right that our big problem out here is improving community involvement, and getting some interaction with the townie side is going to be one of my goals in setting up next year’s series.
The New England Journal of Medicine sometimes provides great stuff to read over breakfast, like this story of a man who returned from a trip to Hungary with his guts infested with worms, Enterobius vermicularis. OK, so it’s not much of a story…but the cool thing is that they provide a movie clip of his colonoscopy, and you can watch the worms writhe.
(via Over My Med Body)
You all may recall the memorable, late Tito the wonder dog. Hank Fox has done something thought-provoking: he has frozen away some of Tito’s cells, on the chance of cloning him.
At 325 degrees below zero, the essence of Tito sleeps.
I got a call today from Genetic Savings & Clone, the company that stores tissue samples of pets, and they told me the culturing of the samples I’d sent them was successful. I now have about 10 million cells waiting for the future moment — if ever — when the technology and the money coincide to allow me to clone him.
This is a personal decision, and I wouldn’t argue one way or the other about what Hank should do; it sounds like he’s wrestled over the issues already. All I can say is what I would do if I were in his sorrowful position.
I wouldn’t even try cloning.
I disagree with his first sentence up there: the essence of Tito isn’t reducible to a few million cells or a few billion nucleotides. While the genome is an influence and a constraint—a kind of broadly defined bottle to hold the essence of a dog—the stuff we care about, that makes an animal unique and special, is a product of its history. It’s the accumulation of events and experience and memory that generates the essentials of a personality and makes each of us unique.
Even if cloning were reliable and cheap, I wouldn’t go for it. It would produce an animal that looks like Tito, and would be good and worthy as an individual in its own right, but it wouldn’t be Tito.
Hank mentions that “Even we atheists grapple with mortality, and entertain hopes.” That’s true. But I think that what we have to do, the honest part of being an atheist, is to recognize that mortality is inevitable and that things end. Grief and loss are the terrible prices we pay for living in a world that changes, and that has produced us, so briefly. The dead are gone forever, never to return, and all we can do is fight as hard as we can to delay it, rage at our inevitable failures, and eventually, reconcile ourselves to the reality.
I think Hank is still fighting when the battle has already been lost. That’s a noble effort, I suppose, but Tito is not in that dewar of liquid nitrogen, I’m sorry to say.
We’re having another Café Scientifique here in Morris this evening—come on down! Nic McPhee of the Computer Science discipline (who also has a weblog, Unhindered by Talent) will be discussing “Privacy, security, and cryptography: What happens to your credit card number on-line, and is that e-mail really from your boss?“. It is open to everyone, of course, and is being held at the local coffeeshop, the Common Cup, from 6:00 to 8:00 this evening.
There is a most excellent online seminar on Mooney’s Republican War on Science going on over at Crooked Timber. The usual gang is reviewing it, with the addition of the inestimable Tim Lambert and Steve Fuller. Wait a minute…Steve Fuller? That Steve Fuller? Steve Fuller. Steve Fuller!
Jebus.
I saw some glimmers of some interesting ideas at the start of Fuller’s ultimately long-winded essay, but they expired even before he started defending the “positive programme behind intelligent design theory” and collapsed into tired pro-creationism mode. When he called George Gilder and Bruce Chapman “technoscience sophisticates”, two people who know no biology and are proud of it, yet rail against basic evolutionary biology, I gave up. I don’t know what a contemptible pseudoscientific poseur like Fuller is doing in there, actually—maybe they should have invited Tom Bethell or some similar anti-science crank in, to give even better balance.
Oh, well. You can skip over that one. The rest of the online seminar is much more sensible.
Here’s an excellent case: applying evolutionary principles to cancer improves diagnosis. You are a collection of (mostly) dividing cells, a population moving forward in time, and understanding that explains a great deal about how changes, like cancer, can occur.
As an exercise in futility, The Daily Transcript tries to categorize disciplines of the life sciences. Although there is a general air of truth to what he’s saying, the problem is that, unlike the members of the Tree of Life, academic disciplines are free to hybridize and accumulate and change, so instead of blurry but recognizable terminal branches, you end up with an anastomosing rete, and no one can sort out precisely who is what.
For instance, I’ve got training as a neurophysiologist (electrodes everywhere!), a cell biologist (painting organelles different colors and watching the glowing cells move), and a developmental biologist (which, contrary to Palazzo’s description, is actually the Most Important Discipline in Biology; he’s also wrong about killing fetuses, sometimes we just like to muck ’em up so they’re horribly deformed.) Oh, and I’ve had a smattering of genetics, but it was all developmental—real geneticists are kind of the mathematicians of biology, all very abstract and peculiar and mostly incomprehensible.
I also notice the bench biologist’s bias in his classification scheme. No ecologists? An article on taxonomy with no taxonomists?
Not all the email I get is from cranks and creationist loons. Sometimes I get sincere questions. In today’s edition of “Ask Mr Science Guy!”, Hank Fox asks,
I was thinking recently about the fact that wax collects in one’s ears, and suddenly thought to be amazed that some part of the HUMAN body produces actual WAX. Weird. Like having something like honeybee cells in your ear.
And then I started to think about what sorts of other … exudates the human exterior produces. Mucus, possibly several different types (does the nose itself produce more than one type?). Oils, possibly several different types. That something-or-other that hardens into your fingernails. Saliva, if you wanted to count our frequently-open mouth as sort-of exterior. What else?
Of course I know something about this subject, having taught physiology for a few years. My years of experience have also led me to notice that it is always the guys who ask about disgusting secretions. Why is that?
