At last, word of Phil’s secret media project has leaked out: he’s got a Discovery Channel show about how the universe is out to get him, called Bad Universe. It’s got debunkings of astronomical myths and bad movie tropes, and most importantly, it’s got explosions.
I’ll watch that.
(via Skepchick)
How about breast ironing? When I first read about it, I wondered how it would even do anything — but then you discover that they heat stones until they’re hot enough to cause pain, and press these instruments of torture to their chest daily for months. And who carries out this sadistic abuse? Their loving mothers. To make them unattractive to men, who might otherwise get them pregnant.
Don’t watch the video if the sight of scarred breasts bother you.
One in four girls in Cameroon are having this done. It seems to me that sex education and prophylactics would be the less destructive way to prevent pregnancies, and probably more effective, but…did you know that approximately 25% of the population of Cameroon are Catholic?
Westboro Baptist Church decided that they were going to picket Comic-Con, and Justin Kirchart sent me pictures. He also sent me a photo of the WBC picket — it’s a sad and pathetic 4 people standing and holding the usual “YOU HATE GOD” and “GOD HATES FAGS” signs, and it wasn’t very interesting, so I didn’t bother to upload it.
Here, though, are the forces of Comic-con madness across the street. They’re much more entertaining. Click to zoom in!
Justin liked “Jesus was nailed to a cross. Thor has a hammer.” I kind of liked “ODIN IS GOD. Read Mighty Thor #5”. Thor is always good for a laugh in these sorts of things.
CFI wants your help: they’re looking for video public service announcements that make a point about freedom of expression. You can do it! Although they do set the bar high with this example.
So there I was on strike, and this appalling news story flew by and I had to choke on my tongue. I’m late, but I have to say something.
The story, as you probably all know, is that Shirley Sherrod gave a talk on her work assisting poor farmers hang on to their land, in which she confessed to being less enthusiastic about helping poor white farmers early on. Andrew Breitbart, professional pseudojournalist and teabaggin’ hack, ran just that excerpt of her talk and made it sound as if she and her audience at the NAACP were flaming racist hatemongers who were chuckling over making Whitey pay.
He lied. He lied outrageously by editing out the context (or, as he claims, his source did the editing), and making it sound like racism when it was exactly the opposite, and Tom Vilsack, the Democrat at the Department of Agriculture rushed to appease Breitbart and had Sherrod fired.
Afterwards, the full video of the talk was revealed, and it’s discovered that Sherrod was making the point that her early biases were wrong, and that she learned that it was important to get over the false barriers of racism and realize that this is a problem of the poor of every color. Then the farmers who she’d been initially reluctant to help came forward to say that Sherrod had been a wonderful person who’d saved the family farm for them. It’s quite a story: it’s the complete annihilation of a right-wing lie, and the emergence of a real hero, Shirley Sherrod.
I’ve learned a couple of things.
Andrew Breitbart is beneath contempt. He’s not a journalist at all: he’s a partisan hack who will make up stories to fit his biases (he was also guilty of faking the ACORN scandal). I’m hoping the news media will recognize his name as purest poison from now on. I don’t have high hopes, though; people seem to be swallowing Breitbart’s excuses, lame as they are.
Our Democratic leadership is spineless. They fired this woman at the command of right-wing attack dogs? For shame. They didn’t even try to investigate and figure out if this was a genuine problem. Please learn: when the wingnuts bark, don’t jump, because they are little yappy dogs who never shut up. Fire Vilsack and put Sherrod in his place — she seems to have a moral compass.
Racism isn’t dead, and the Republican party seems to be its bastion. This was an effort by Breitbart to punish the NAACP because it had been accusing the teabaggers of racism; it has soundly backfired, because trying to damage an organization working to end racism is simply another manifestation of racism. Sherrod is fighting back, pointing out what the right-wing media is actually trying to do.
“They were looking for the result they got yesterday,” she said of Fox. “I am just a pawn. I was just here. They are after a bigger thing, they would love to take us back to where we were many years ago. Back to where black people were looking down, not looking white folks in the face, not being able to compete for a job out there and not be a whole person.”
The right-wing political base is truly vile. I looked at a few of their blogs, and despite the thoroughness of Breitbart’s credibility implosion and the way this story has blown up in their faces, they’re still trying to defend it. I’m not going to link to them, but instead, look at this brief and effective deconstruction of one such apologia by John Cole. Are the teaparty promoters racist? Hell, yes. Either that or they’re just brain-damaged idiots, I can’t tell.
There’s another minor lesson to be learned here, too. Glenn Greenwald said something of Breitbart, who is still refusing to explain how he got this dishonestly edited tape:
“Journalists” are supposed to expose their “sources” if they use the journalist to perpetrate a fraud.
Oh, yes?
The important lesson, though, is that this is about class politics and class warfare — not the phony kind the Republicans decry, which is all about the horrible way the obscenely rich are hindered from becoming pornographically rich, but the real one, the one fought in an America where children still go to bed hungry and everyone has to worry about the porous social safety net. This is a country where a middle-class person can be completely wiped out by a serious illness in the family, where the poor are kept paddling in place trying to make ends meet and never get an opportunity to advance themselves. Sherrod said that, too.
Sherrod delivered an address on race, class, and government that wove together reflections of the murder of her father at the hands of white man, her early-life misgivings about the American South, her work organizing the community in the face of violent racism, and her eventual recognition as a government official working with local farmers that class, not race, was the dominant matter. “It’s not just about black people, it’s about poor people,” Sherrod said. “We have to get to the point where race exists but it doesn’t matter.”
That should frighten Republicans more than their phony race-baiting story: when Americans wake up to their common cause despite Republican efforts to sow divisions by race, then we might have some progressive politics again (beyond the weak and unprincipled of Democratic Republican-lite politics, that is.)
But most of all, we’ve got to treat the Republican hate machine appropriately: Drudge-acolytes like Breitbart, phonies like Beck and Limbaugh — all are pariahs that our news media must stop treating respectfully.
I’m one of those dreadful animal-centric zoologically inclined biologists. Plants? What are those? Fungi? They’re related to metazoans somehow. Lichens? Not even on the radar. The first step in fixing a problem, though, is recognizing that you have one. So I confess to you, O Readers, that my name is PZ, and I am a metazoaphile. But I can get better.
My path to opening up to wider horizons is to focus on what I find most interesting about animals, and that is that they are networks of cells driven by networks of genes that generate patterned responses of expression by cell signaling, or communication. See? I’m already a little weird. Show me a baby bunny, and I don’t just see a cute little furry pal with an adorable twitchy nose, I see an organized and coherent array of differentiated tissues that arose by a temporal sequence of cell-cell interactions, and I just wanna open him up and play with his widdle epithelial sheets and dismantle his pwetty ducts and struts and fibers and fluids, oochy coo. And ultimately, I want to take apart each cell and ask why it has its particular assortment of genes switched off and on, and how its state affects its neighbors and the whole of the organism.
Which means, lately, that I’ve acquired a growing interest in bacteria. If I were 30 years younger, I could probably be seduced into a career in microbiology.
There are a couple of reasons why an animal-centric biologist would be interested in bacteria. One is the principle of it; the mechanisms that animal cells use to build complex arrangements of tissues were all first pioneered in single-celled organisms. We have elaborated and added details to gene- and cell-level phenomena, but it’s a collection of significant quantitative differences, with nothing known that is essentially new in metazoan cells. All the cool stuff was worked out by evolution in the 3-4billion years before the Cambrian, a potential that simply blossomed in the past half-billion years into big conglomerations of cells. Understanding how the building blocks of multicellularity work individually ought to be a prerequisite to understanding how the assemblages work.
But there’s another reason, too, a difference in perspective. It is our conceit to regard ourselves as individuals of Homo sapiens, a body of cells clonally derived from a single human cell. It’s not true. It turns out that each one of us is actually a whole population of species, linked by our evolutionary history and lumbering through the world as a team. Genus Homo is also genera Escherichi and Bacteroidetes and Firmicutes and many others.
Physiology
Let’s begin with the most widely known factor: we’re mostly bacterial in cell numbers, with about ten times as many bacterial cells as human cells. Most of these are nestled deep in our guts, where they are indispensible. In mammals, they help break down complex polysaccharides which we can then absorb through the wall of the digestive tract — these are compounds that would be simply lost without bacterial assistance. Even more dramatically, termite guts contain colonies of bacteria that produce enzymes to break down cellulose. Another insect, aphids, live in plant saps which have negligible protein components, and they rely on gut bacteria that can synthesize nine essential amino acids. One cool feature is that the bacteria can’t complete the synthesis of leucine; the last step is carried out by aphid enzymes. The synthetic pathway is split acros two different species!
Another weird twist is that gut bacteria can affect morphology (or vice versa; physiology influences which gut bacteria thrive). Mice with a genetic predisposition to obesity were found to have a different distribution of gut bacteria; fat mice are full of Firmicutes, while lean mice are loaded with Bacteroidetes. Something in the genetics of the obese mice seems to favor the proliferation of that one species. Cause and effect is not so easily separated, though, since doing a fecal transplant and inoculating the guts of germ free mice with the bacteria from obese mice vs. lean mice has a surprising effect: the mice given obese mouse fecal enemas subsequently increased their body fat by 60%. The bacteria promoted more fat storage in the host animal.
So what, you may be thinking, it’s mice. However, it turns out that obese humans tend to have reduced amounts of Bacteroidetes species in their guts than lean people, and weight loss is accompanied by an increase in Bacteroidetes. Fecal transplants are not recommended as a weight loss technique…at least not yet.
They have worked for some other problems. Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis are diseases that involve intestinal inflammation, and they’re also associated with imbalances in the species distribution of gut bacteria. Some promising treatments have involved collecting feces from healthy individuals, and using a nasogastric tube to inoculate the guts of Crohn’s patients with the stuff. Ick, I know, but it seems to have worked surprisingly well in a small number of patients.
Development
Bacteria are present in the gut from a very early age, and populate the digestive epithelia. There must be interactions going on, and it appears that the bacteria are actually regulating the growth of the gut lining.
Germ-free zebrafish lines have no gut bacteria, and they also have problems. The intestinal lining arrests its development and fails to fully differentiate; the lining also grows much more slowly. They also have difficulty absorbing some nutrients. Add bacteria, though, and growth and differentiation resume. This is a case where the developmental program and the bacterial influences are interdependent, and it makes sense — they’ve co-evolved.
It’s not just fish, either — these are conserved interactions across the vertebrates. Mice exhibit the same dependence on gut flora for development of the intestinal lining.
The very best example of a developmental dependence on bacteria, though, is in squid. The bobtail squid has a light-emitting organ that relies on colonization by a luminescent bacterium, Vibrio fischeri. The animal gleans the bacteria from the water with a special ciliated epithelium and secreted mucus that seems to be just the right flavor for Vibrio, and the bacteria migrate deep into the light-emitting organ. Once colonized, the squid dismantles the harvesting cilia and downregulates the secretion of mucus. If no bacteria of the right species are present, it maintains the cilia. If the bacteria in the organ die, resumes mucus production.
Evolution
If something affects development and physiology, it affects evolution, so evolutionary importance is simply rather unavoidable. However, there’s also one somewhat surprising observation (to me, at least — microbiologists probably expect it): different species of related organisms can have different microbial populations, even when raised in identical conditions. Different Hydra species in the lab under controlled conditions have recognizably different populations of bacteria living on their epithelia, and Hydra of the same species collected in the wild have similar distributions of species. The properties of each Hydra species uniquely favor different distributions of bacteria, and the bacteria are also preferentially colonizing particular species of Hydra.
Hydra are wonderful experimental animals in that one can ablate stem cells for a particular tissue type, and still get an animal that develops and lives; do the same thing to a vertebrate, for instance knocking out the mesodermal lineage in the embryo, and you get an aborted blob. In Hydra, you get a tissue that survives and is colonized by bacteria…but the kinds of bacteria populating it is different from the populations in the intact animal. The animal and the bacteria are swapping molecular signals that specify favored relationships. Again, these are coevolved populations that recognize molecular properties of the host and symbiont.
This is all getting very complicated. I’m used to thinking in terms of networks of genes: there are regulatory interactions between genes in a single cell that establish cell-type specific patterns of gene activity; all express a common core of genes, but different cell types, such as a neuron vs. a cell of the digestive epithelia, will also have their own unique special-purpose genes switched on. I’m also comfortable thinking of networks of cells: cells are in constant negotiations with their neighbors, mainting a common pattern of expression within a tissue, and defining interacting edges with other tissues. Cells are continually sending out messages about their state into the system and responding to local and global signals. All this is part of the normal process of thinking developmentally.
Now, though, there’s another layer: we have to think in terms of networks of species that cooperate in the development and physiology of individual multi-cellular organisms. Purity is compromised. My precious animalia — they’re inconceivable without bringing bacteria into the picture.
Fraune S, Bosch TCG (2010) Why bacteria matter in animal development and evolution. Bioessays 32:571-580.
Isn’t this just the perfect theme song for recent events?
The strike is over. We had a productive discussion with the Seed Overlords, and I think we’ve clarified issues, got some ideas for further progress, and will be working for a Better World in the Future. Don’t expect any sudden changes here, though — we’ve got a Plan, but it will take time to implement, and the most important thing is that we’re going to be holding certain people’s feet to the fire on a regular basis. We could still explode and send little fragments of Scienceblogs hurtling outward into the greater blogoverse…but we’ve also got ideas to keep it all together. Stay tuned.
People who have been concerned about the financial stability of Scienceblogs should rest easier, too. We talked with the CFO, and Sb has its own organizational structure and is largely independent of other enterprises within Seed Media Group, and we’re doing OK. We could be more profitable, but I think every CFO would say that.
We will be getting more tech support, starting next week. The only problem there is that we have a long list of stuff we want done, so it needs to be sorted and prioritized…but we should see steady progress on that front in the coming months.
Mainly, though, I’m just glad to have this nonsense over with. I’ve got things to do. That said, though, there will be a substantial slowdown in posting here for a while, not out of spite, but just because I’m going off to Seattle to hide in seclusion in my mother’s basement and finish the damned book. You can still expect regular updates of stuff to battle over, though, never fear.
Oh, also, I might like this version of the song up top, too.
Don’t panic, don’t go into withdrawal, progress is looking good. Adam Bly sounds enthusiastic about meeting my demands (which is easy, since they don’t hurt Seed at all), got in contact with us quickly, and we’re going to be having a conference call in the next day or so, whenever a reasonable number of us can make a simultaneous connection. And I have high hopes that we’ll get a better, more responsive Scienceblogs network out of this.
I expect the strike to be short-lived, which is good, because I have poor impulse control and my brain might explode if I have to keep it in check much longer.
ON STRIKE!
It’s come to this. We’ve been facing a steady erosion of talent here at Scienceblogs, with the loss of good people like Carl Zimmer and Ed Yong a while back, and with the very abrupt departure of 15 bloggers after the recent PepsiCo debacle — an event that damaged the reputation of this place. And now just yesterday we lost PalMD and Bora. Something is going rotten here. What could it be?
I don’t think it’s ultimately an ethical problem. I have every confidence that the management at Seed Media Group wants to do the right thing, and I think they have gotten many things exactly right: they’ve given us a platform and a lot of freedom to do what we want, and never once have they told us we can’t write this or we must write that. The lapses have been real mistakes, not part of a pattern of malfeasance. The economy has put a serious strain on the publishing industry, everyone is short-staffed, and there’s a constant struggle for advertising dollars to keep the lights on. Mistakes will happen. The test is whether the organization will act to correct them.
The key problem is one of communication. The bloggers here are almost entirely in the dark about what’s going on behind the scenes, and we get news indirectly and by rumor. We’ve had almost no technical support for over a year; when we do hear what changes are being made, it’s almost always trivial tweaks to support advertising. We report bugs, we get back silence. We see the ads that appear on site getting cheesier and cheesier. We don’t know what’s happening, and there is no mechanism and no effort made to enlighten us.
The problems go the other way, too. SMG doesn’t know much about what we’re thinking. The PepsiCo issue would have never happened if there’d been any discussion with the bloggers — we’d have pointed out that it was blurring the line between content and ads, and responsible changes would have been made before it went online. I can tell you that a lot of the bloggers here are very concerned about the departure of colleagues, and there has been much rightful concern about the future of this network, especially since Bora left. Yet management doesn’t seem at all worried, or at least is not telling us about their concerns, or is completely oblivious to the fact that many of their bloggers are talking about leaving for less fretful spaces. We have no idea what’s going on, and that makes the situation worse.
I’ve decided to light a fire under management and get some visible effort to resolve the problems. I don’t expect instant easy answers, but I do expect to see positive efforts under way. I could just pack up my bags and leave — another thing that Seed has done right is that they do not treat us as captives — but then I would just be hurting an already hurting organization, and I really do like Seed and Scienceblogs and all my fellow bloggers. They’ve been good to me. So, to add more incentive to getting some action, I’m going on strike.
ON STRIKE!
This is going to hurt. I like blogging; I do this for fun, and because I want to get my message out there. I also know what effect it will have on my traffic if I stop posting, because you’re all a sensible lot and you’re not going to waste time reading a site that has nothing new to say. I just checked, and I’m in the midst of a bit of a traffic surge, with almost 190,000 page views yesterday alone…and that’s going to decline precipitously. I get paid for that traffic, too, so it’s going to hurt my pocketbook. My wife has already given me one of her long-suffering looks when I told her what I had to do, but then, I get those from her all the time, as you might expect. Sorry, my check will be smaller this month, on top of the salary reductions my university has announced.
So this is my last post for a while. I don’t know how long; maybe SMG will contact me right away and surrender to my demands (which are pretty mild, so it’s entirely possible). Or maybe the pattern of silence will continue, and with regret and exasperation, I’ll have to find a new host somewhere else. Whatever happens, we can’t keep going as we have.
Oh, right. Demands. You can’t have a strike without some goal that will resolve it. Here’s what I want from Seed:
Immediate formation of a mechanism for communication between management and bloggers. We’re an unwieldy group, so setting up a small committee of bloggers with regular (monthly) conference calls, and the option for ad hoc calls when serious issues come up, such as the PepsiCo mess.
Prompt responses from management. When Bora left, that was a major event; there should have been a quick in-house response that would have involved scheduling a conversation within the week. No more long silences.
Regular updates on the status of tech support, and input from bloggers. We’ve got bugs, they get ignored, and the priorities are biased towards advertising opportunities. Ads are important, but who is going to want to advertise at a place that’s falling apart? Or has big signs saying “ON STRIKE” out front? Throw us a bone now and then.
Transparency. Bloggers need to be informed about any problems in the parent organization, and we’d also like to hear more good news, too. Fly new plans by us so you can get feedback before they go live and blow up.
More trust. This may be an odd one, but the bloggers are dependent on the financial health of Seed, too. It’s OK for management to suggest to us what they’d like to see more of on the blogs; I have no problem with suggestions, for instance, that we throw in more nutrition or food blogging this month, because we’ve got an advertising contract from PepsiCo, as long as our response is optional and as long as we’re also free to criticize.
See? Those demands shouldn’t be so hard to meet. Now the test is whether Seed can exhibit a little agility and respond to them expeditiously.
In the meantime, the comments are open, and I have some requests.
Make other suggestions for Scienceblogs. Assuming Seed actually does make an effort to repair the situation, what don’t you like here? What should the priorities be for improving your experience on Scienceblogs? Can it be fixed?
If they don’t, what next? People were already making suggestions in the previous thread: I need concrete information on setting up an independent server, technical assistance, getting ads to pay for the thing, etc. Seed has taken care of all of that painful work for me for so long, that it would be a bit of a shock to leave, and leaving is the least pleasant option for me. Hold my hand and tell me what to do.
Coffee and donuts on the picket line are also welcome.
ON STRIKE!
Just in the time it took me to write this up this morning, Superbug, Zuska, and Speakeasy Science have all announced their departures, and Casaubon’s Book is considering it. We really are having a serious crisis of confidence, and Seed has to wake up and take action.
I’m hoping more blogs don’t leave, but instead join in this strike. We need to publicize and organize and make Seed feel compelled to make changes, I’d rather not see it become a ghost town.
Add Mike Dunford to the list of departures.
