Am I creepy? Kooky? Altogether ooky?

There may be something wrong with me. I just spent a happy hour and twenty minutes watching a video about brown recluse spiders, and my only regret was that we don’t have any Loxosceles living anywhere near me. We don’t have any medically significant venomous spiders in this region — it’s one of my only regrets about living in west central Minnesota.

See? Fascinating. Good bit on horizontal gene transfer of the sphingomyelin toxin, lots of practical advice on brown recluse bites, and the spiders are all gentle and generally kind. It tickles my brain in all the right spots. Is that weird?

And then, the best essay I’ve read this week is all about bats and white-nose syndrome. You too can grieve for all the beautiful animals, and you should find them beautiful, that are succumbing to this terrible epidemic.

If you know where and when to look, you can find bats all over the midwest. We’ve got a bunch nesting over our garage, and we put up a bat house near our deck — we’d be thrilled to have even more.

Bats and spiders, and more generally any invertebrate that has a freaky number of legs or eyes — I’m beginning to wonder if maybe I’ve got some kind of exotic disease…a Halloween infection, or Addams syndrome, or something similarly diagnosable.

Of course, one of they symptoms of this syndrome is that I don’t want to be cured. Give me more.

(By the way, I’m teaching a course in science essay writing in the Fall, and am collecting samples. That bat article is going right into the folder. I might be planning to infect impressionable young students with my disease.)

Today is climate change day in the classroom

As I’ve mentioned before, one of the things I’m doing in my Eco Devo class is to throw more of the burden of learning on the students. It would be too easy for me to just get up and lecture, telling them what they should know, and it is often hard for me to just shut up and let the students talk. I’ve split up the course so that Monday is when I start talking and dominate the classroom, Wednesday I ask the students to answer questions about Monday’s lecture and the book chapter, and on Fridays they’re given a paper to analyze.

This week’s paper is Morphological plasticity of the coral skeleton under CO2-driven seawater acidification by Tambutté and others. The context is that we’ve been talking about cellular physiology and development, and responses to environmental stresses, so I figured a primary research article about the effect of rising CO2 levels would be appropriate.

(Answer: more CO2 is not good for corals. Decreasing pH leads to a cnidarian version of osteoporosis.)

(a) Representative longitudinal sections; (b) transverse sections. pH treatment is indicated in the top left corner of each image. Scale bar, 1 mm.

It’s symbiosis week!

Yesterday’s lecture began with a dilemma. The topic this week is all about symbiosis, so of course I had to talk about Lynn Margulis, a very complicated person. I have a lot of respect for her contributions to the field, but also had to mention some of her wrong ideas, like that 9/11 was a false flag operation, and that AIDS was caused by a spirochete. It was also a dilemma back in 2007, when Margulis was a guest on this blog and also on our IRC channel. Whew, that was awkward. There might be a few old timers here who remember that.

Also awkward: most of the students had never heard of Margulis until now (they also had no idea what IRC was). At least I got to expose them to a little significant scientific history, which is my job, even when Margulis expressed the opinion that “I believe at all zoologists are intrinsically poorly educated in biology and that medical people are misinformed.” Ouch. There’s a grain of truth there, but mainly my students got to learn that some famous scientists can be colossal dicks. I did tell my students that if she were alive today she’d be a popular guest on Joe Rogan’s awful show.

Anyway, duty done, I lectured on mycorrhizae and gut microbiomes and a lot on Wolbachia. The paper of the week that the students will be telling me all about on Friday is “Eco-Evo-Devo: developmental symbiosis and developmental plasticity as evolutionary agents” by Gilbert, Bosch, and Ledón-Rettig, which you can read if you want to catch up on the course.

So that’s how things work at Frontiers journals, eh?

That ghastly article with the AI-generated rat testicles has been fully and completely retracted.

Following publication, concerns were raised regarding the nature of its AI-generated figures. The article does not meet the standards of editorial and scientific rigor for Frontiers in Cell and Development Biology; therefore, the article has been retracted.

This retraction was approved by the Chief Executive Editor of Frontiers. Frontiers would like to thank the concerned readers who contacted us regarding the published article.

I would like to know where those “standards of editorial and scientific rigor” were when the article was reviewed and accepted by the editors, because that paper was so blatantly, glaringly, obviously bad that it’s clear that no one actually read the damned thing before stamping it with an “approved” label. I think we’ve just gotten a peek at the process at Frontiers in Cell and Development Biology, and it’s cheap and lazy.

Notice also that no responsibility was taken.

How love can last a lifetime

In today’s eco-devo class, we’re going to be talking about a general phenomenon: the physical reality of your feelings, as witnessed by changes in gene expression. Seems appropriate for Valentine’s Day, right? On Monday I lectured on a few principles of gene regulation, and how environmental factors are transduced into patterns of epigenetic activity. Today, the students are going to answer questions and give explanations on the mechanics of all that, and then on Friday, they’ll discuss this paper: “Maternal care as a model for experience-dependent chromatin plasticity?” by Meaney and Szyf. Here’s part of true love:

The students are going to explain it all to me later this week, so I don’t want to spill all the beans, but in short, these are the results of studies in mice. Happy baby mice are licked and groomed by their mothers, while less happy mice are neglected and stressed. Being groomed increased serotonin levels, which activates adenylate cyclase, which increases cytoplasmic cyclic AMP levels, which activates a serine-threonine kinase called PKA, which activates a DNA binding protein that demethylates specific DNA sequences. Some of these sequences regulate stress responses in the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, so those loving mommy-snuggles are changing how baby mice respond to stressful situations, and those responses persist long into adulthood.

So maternal care, or lack of care, is drilling right down to the structure of DNA and making lifelong modifications to your feelings. At least, if you’re a mouse, and humans almost certainly have the same biochemical arrangement. And a scientist can rip out some of your DNA and find a different pattern of epigenetic marks in individuals who had a loving relationship with Mom versus those who were neglected. It’s written in your semi-permanent epigenetic record.

Of course, this is just one pathway, and there are multiple regulatory pathways modulating stress responses, so all is not lost if you have one bad mother. These individual effects are sort of permanent, though, and would require alternative compensatory mechanisms to be overcome. Also, keep in mind that bad mothers could be a product of bad grandmothers, and that these epigenetic modifications can ripple across multiple generations.

Indeed, maternal effects could result in the transmission of adaptive responses across generations. In humans, such effects might contribute to the familial transmission of risk and resilience. Finally, it is interesting to consider the possibility that epigenetic changes could be an intermediate process that imprints dynamic environmental experiences on the fixed genome, resulting in stable alterations in phenotype – a process of environment-dependent chromatin plasticity.

I hope you all have an opportunity to stimulate some environment-dependent chromatin plasticity today. If you don’t have a date, you can at least call your mom, or be kind to a child. Modify someone’s DNA with a hug!

A conversation about orthodontia today

It’s Friday, and that means that today I make all the students in my eco-devo class do all the work, while I sit back and observe. It’s too bad I can’t do this every day of the week, but I guess I have to do something now and then to earn my gigantic paycheck. Anyway, on Fridays I pick a paper relevant to the subject of the course, throw it to two student volunteers, and tell them to lead a discussion.

This week the paper is The Jaw Epidemic: Recognition, Origins, Cures, and Prevention by Sandra Kahn, Paul Ehrlich, Marcus Feldman, Robert Sapolsky, and Simon Wong. It’s about the fact that our jaws have been shrinking rapidly in some cultures, and speculating about why. The answer the paper gives is that it’s an epigenetic response to environmental factors, specifically diet but also respiratory phenomena. You might be able to see why this is of interest in an eco-devo class.

Some scholars, although they accept all or some of our narrative, still assert that part of the problem must be genetic or hereditary. They apparently do not realize that, because every attribute of all living organisms must to some degree be traceable to their DNA (or RNA), the statement is nonsensical. Nonetheless, some scientists continue to push partial blame for the epidemic toward genetic evolution while ignoring the etiology of jaw shrinkage and distortion. The success of some clinical techniques to normalize jaw growth in young children and abundant evidence that jaw shrinkage is a factor in both obstructive sleep apnea and the advancement of maxilla and mandible are key treatments, in addition to other surgical techniques. This further makes clear the largely environmental cause of the epidemic.

This confusion over etiology is a possible result of the genetic determinism that is characteristic of much of popular science. For instance, recent genome-wide association studies (GWAS) studies aimed at orofacial issues have been focused on possible genetic factors involved in the variation in the eruption of third molars (wisdom teeth). But they in no way suggest that selection and widespread genomic evolution explain the rarity of impacted third molars in hunter-gatherers compared with their common occurrence in settled or industrialized human populations). Similar problems occur when “racial” differences in the occurrence of jaw-related disease are discussed. For instance, Weinstock and colleagues (2014) found that African-American children were about 20% more susceptible to pediatric obstructive sleep apnea than children of other ethnic groups. But, unhappily, possible key environmental variables such as allergen concentrations at home or the length of nursing were ignored, as were different head shapes in different human groups that could make some more susceptible to the impacts of environmental change. In short, despite the great attention paid to a possible genetic evolutionary cause of the jaw epidemic, precious little evidence of genomic change being a significant factor has been uncovered.

I hope this sparks some good conversation. It’s a bit over-the-top to call it an “epidemic” of jaw shrinkage, but the hyperbole might trigger some arguments.

P.S. Their instructor is no gigachad. I grew up with a horribly crowded mouth with crooked teeth every which way that was treated crudely, by just yanking out a half dozen teeth to make room — we couldn’t afford braces or any finesse. Also, I had painfully impacted wisdom teeth that required an oral surgeon to take a hammer and chisel to my face.

Self-assessment time!

We’ve finished the third week of classes, I need to pause and think about my eco-devo class. You know, teachers do this: a class isn’t a set of railroad tracks taking us to a destination, and sometimes it’s worthwhile to reassess.

My goals with the course are clear. We’re studying a fairly new interdisciplinary science, we’ve got a good solid textbook, I’ve got a dozen smart students, let’s explore. I explicitly want to avoid turning it into a lecture course, where I just stand up and tell them what they need to know, so I constrained myself with some serious guardrails. I only lecture once a week, on Monday, and I don’t just tell them the answers, but give them a lot of questions that they have to answer as a group on Wednesday. I also give them a primary research paper to take apart on Friday.

Does it all work? Yes, mostly.

It wrecks my weekend, though. My Monday lectures have to cover some complex material while focusing the students on relevant questions. I can’t sink comfortably into a flurry of detail, as would be easy to do, I have to bring out the broader issues while simultaneously fleshing out examples with an appropriate amount of detail. This week we’re discussing developmental plasticity, for instance, and while the textbook sings a siren song of numerous examples that I could just recite, I have to provide context and ideas and questions that will motivate discussion on Wednesdays. I think this part of the class is going OK.

I think the students are doing the actual learning part of the course on Wednesdays. This is the day I do things like put them into groups, put stuff on the whiteboards, show that they are actually engaging with the material they’re being exposed to. It’s all on the students, and these are all smart students, so I’d really have to be bad at my job to screw this part up. I prime them with a few ideas that they get at the start of the week, and then let them go.

Fridays…I’ve got to work on my Friday class. I’ve got two problems here. One is that I appoint two students to lead the discussion of a research paper, which is fine, except that these danged ambitious students charge in to do all the work. I tell them to split it up, delegate, and put the rest of the class to work figuring out what is going on in the paper, but no, they try to do it all, and then the whole class sits quietly listening along. I may have to change how I organize those days.

The second problem is me. For instance, last week the theme was about the importance of integrating multiple perspectives to answer complex question, going beyond reductionism. And then I picked what I thought was a good paper that did exactly that, trying to identify the ecological factors behind snake evolution. It was too much. It started with a phylogenetic analysis, then applied a principal component analysis to skull morphology (uh-oh, bio students don’t get much experience with PCA here), added a bit of development/heterochrony work, and then tied all of those approaches together in a nice bit of synthesis. Cool, but too much for some undergrads to handle all at once. I am challenging them, at least, but I think I’d better take next week’s paper down a notch. While my goal was to make them read primary research, maybe I’ll have to ease them in with some review papers for a while, and give their brains a chance to release some pressure.

When I say it all mostly works, that’s entirely from my perspective. Maybe the students hate it, but because they’re all polite Midwestern people, they’re too nice to say it. I’m going to have to put together some kind of student evaluation form to hand out next week so I can find out if I’ve gone off the rails.

This is where I’m at on a Saturday morning at the end of the third week of classes, and now it’s time to immerse myself in background reading and lecture prep. One source I’m finding extremely useful for this course is Mary Jane West-Eberhard’s Developmental Plasticity and Evolution, which is a wonderfully rich source of ideas…but also would have undergraduate brains melting out their ears if I tried making this their textbook. One of my aspirations for this course is that they should be able to emerge from it at the end of the semester and be prepared to read West-Eberhard’s book without having a nervous breakdown.

That would be a fun graduate-level class to teach. Also about ten times more work than this one.

Oh no! It’s Monday!

It happened again. Monday rolled around. When will Science master the ability to predict these cataclysmic disasters? Surely there is some cause that we can treat. Vaccinations, maybe? Monday shelters, buried deep underground? Is there a pesticide that will selectively kill off all Mondays?

Once again, I’ve done it to myself: I set up all the material for my classes for the students on Monday, which effectively means my weekends are shot. This week we’re finishing up The Triple Helix with a conversation about the limitations of reductionism, Wednesday we discuss strategies for answering thorny research problems, and Friday we’re reading a paper about snake ecology, development, and evolution that takes a multidisciplinary approach. I’ve got it all queued up, almost as if I have a plan and know what I’m doing. I’m also tired, bleary-eyed, and I have a headache.

It is all my fault. The easy thing to have done would be to trundle through a series of lectures in which the students sit back with glazed eyes and absorb my wisdom, but instead I’m setting up frameworks and making the students do most of the work, at least two out of three classes. It turns out that’s far more work than just telling them what they need to know, so Mondays are going to be my days of pain.

The rest of the week, though, is cake. Mostly. Then this weekend I have to prep for next week, when we dive into the first chapter of our eco-devo textbook. Plasticity. Plasticity, plasticity, plasticity. That’ll keep us busy for a while.

Also, every day is grading day, and Tuesdays and Friday mornings are my spider days. I’ll recover tomorrow.