A poll on the Catholic opposition to gayness

An interesting twist: this poll is trying to skew the Catholic church’s decision to withhold social services if Washington D.C. supports same sex marriage into a moral issue…with the church taking the high ground!

The D.C. Council is considering a law forbidding discrimination against those in gay marriages. The law would apply to all groups that have contracts with the District, including Catholic Charities, one of the city’s largest social services providers. The Archdiocese of Washington says that because of the Church’s opposition to same-sex marriage, it would have to suspend its social services to the poor, the homeless and others rather than provide employee benefits to same-sex married couples or allow them to adopt.

Should the city require the Church to follow a law it considers immoral?

Yes 18%
No 82%

Why should what the church considers immoral to be a relevant factor? I could consider the wearing of pants to be immoral, or even better, going to church to be immoral…but it doesn’t make it so.

IGERT2009: Sunday morning session

My little laptop is functional again, so at least I’ll be able to blog these Sunday morning IGERT sessions in real-time. I still have to transcribe my notes from yesterday; I’ll plan on getting that done on the plane this afternoon.

Kristi Montooth: Mitochondrial-nuclear epistasis for metabolic fitness in flies

How do physiological systems evolve to maintain metabolic fitness? This is a process that involves interactions between two genomes, the nuclear and mitochondrial. Energy metabolism is important and is the target of mutation, but the same players are found all across the tree of life, suggesting that there is also strong selective pressure to maintain a common system.

Montooth is looking at inducible gene expression: is there an energetic cost to switch genes off and on? She’s using respirometers that can measure the metabolic rate of single flies or larva. Flies are subjected to heat shock, which switches on HSP70. Flies normally have 6 copies of HSP70; they have mutants with 12, and they show a much greater rise in metabolic rate in response to heat shock.

Mitochondria are the source of the energy for this response. Mitochondria also have a high mutation rate and show strong linkage (no sexual recombination to cover for errors that arise). She’s arguing for selection for compensatory evolution in the nuclear genome, and the accumulation of intergenomic epistasis. To dissect the effects of coevolution of mitochondria and nuclear genomes, she transplanted mitochondria from different species into Drosophila melanogaster. These have between 18 and 100 amino acid substitutions from the Dmel sequence.

She plots mitochondrial genome in order of increasing divergence against measured fitness (she used a competition assay that she did not describe in detail). There is no correlation seen at all. Also, high fitness X/mtDNA genotypes in one sex can be low fitness genotypes in the other sex. Interactions between the X and mtDNA can maintain variation in both genomes. All of the fitness effects, with one exception, are subtle.

Some of the transgenomic effects have very strong effects on female fecundity, developmental rates, and locomotion. But adult metabolic rate shows no difference! The idea is that there are lots of homeostatic mechanisms that maintain metabolism very tightly, which then have secondary effects.

Johanna Schmitt: Adaptive evolution of Arabidopsis flowering pathways in different climates

Schmitt does ecological development, looking at the timing of plant development in different environments. How does phenology respond and adapt to climate variation? We expect evolution to adapt to variation in seasonal timing. The signaling pathways in Arabidopsis are well known; they respond to hormones, photoperiod, and ambient temperature by way of a fairly complicated set of pathways she showed us in a slide…sorry, no way I can reproduce it here!

Across its range, it shows a great deal of life history variation; one pattern in the Mediterranean, another in colder northern climes, and yet another in Northern Scandinavia, varying in how much time they spend in vegetative rosettes vs. bolting and flower production. Questions: are there are genetic variants associated with different life history patterns, can they identify the genes, and can they perturb them?

The experiments involved massive plantings in different sites in Europe with different climates, with different mutants. Is natural variation in candidate genes involved in variation in flowering time? They studied FRIGIDA, a gene that effects the vernalization pathway. When you lose FRIGIDA, you should see much more rapid flowering. Loss of function in this gene has evolved multiple times in northwestern Europe. The effect depends on the timing of planting and climate.

The effect of the mutant varies across geography, and they have a photothermal model of flowering time. The plants are tracking light and temperature, and the different mutants are counting up these inputs in slightly different ways. They can use this model to make predictions on the effects of FRIGIDA on flowering time with changes in germination timing, and then test these in the next year with plantings at different times and in their different geographical sites, and the model is working accurately.

They are also plugging in predicted future climate change from NOAA, and asking what we can expect to see 100 years from now; she showed maps of expected flowering times in 2100. They are also making predictions of the expected distributions of FRIGIDA alleles over time, and they hope to do the same for many other alleles in Arabidopsis.

Artyom Kopp: How the fly got its sexy legs – the origin and evolution of Drosophila sex combs

The sex comb is a male specific structure on the front legs which most Drosophila species lack — it’s a fairly recent innovation. How do you evolve a novel structure?

It’s limited to the melanogaster and obscura species groups, with quite a bit of diversity in different species, varying from 2-50 teeth, location, and arrangement. How do you go from sexually monomorphic state of a generically hairy leg to one with a specific bristle arrangement in males? The sex comb in males is homologous to a subset of bristles also found in females; in males, that patch of epidermis rotates 90° and the bristles enlarge. He showed a very pretty developmental series of this epithelium undergoing cell shape changes that move the bristles to a new location. Other species show similar morphological remodeling, but sometimes with some significant differences: D. kikkawai doesn’t do the rotation, but instead the bristle precursors arise in their final position. These modes do not cluster together phylogenetically, so these are examples of convergent evolution, generating similar structures with different mechanisms.

They are taking apart the genetics and regulatory inputs of sex comb development. Basically, it involves just about everything. It seems to arise by an interaction between Hox and sex determination genes. Spatial modulation of Sex combs reduced controls sex comb position. Scr in pupa; stages is only expressed in a limited domain in the leg, and ectopic expression of Scr produces multiple sex combs. Expression is also sexually dimorphic, with no upregulation of Scr in female legs. In D. ficusphila, which has enormous sex combs, Scr levels are elevated yet further to 7 times the levels found in D. willistoni.

The sex determination gene Double sex is also spatially patterned, and is refined and elevated to high levels in the area around the developing sex combs. Ectopic expression of Dsx induces ectopic sex combs.

How can a new developmental pathway evolve? In the ancestral condition, Scr is controlled by spatial cues to produce segmental patterns of bristles; in the sex-comb carrying species, Scr is coupled to Dsx. This explains the spatial pattern of gene expression, but it also needs to acquire new downstream targets to, for instance, regulate epidermal rotations.

Drosophila are old, and many of these species differences are millions of years old. They are now looking at more recently diverged species with differences in sex comb morphology, and are looking for correlations between Scr and species divergence.

And with that, I have to run for the airport shuttle. Good talks, and I unfortunately have to miss Rudy Raff’s wrap-up of the meeting.

Oooh, I think I may be feeling a bit poorly, dear…

John Wesley, the Methodist theologian, also advocated ‘natural’ cures for illness, so he was kind of a quack. However, this account of Wesley’s recommendations for treating the sick has one prescription I really like. No, not the one about holding a warm puppy against your tummy for stomach-ache (although that one is pretty good)…it’s a couple of paragraphs below that one.

I’ll let you figure it out.

NO! It’s not drinking beer for tuberculosis, either!

Dang #@$%& computer

I was going to blog along with the talks today, but my note-taking computer, a little netpc, decided to turn up dead on arrival when I sat down to start listening — I had to take notes on paper. It felt medieval. There were a bunch of good talks and I’ll transcribe them later when I get a chance.

For now, I just have a brief moment before I head off to the next event, so I’ll leave you with a couple of Immensely Difficult Questions for Evolution that were just sent to me.

Q1. If humans evolved from monkeys, why are there not any other intelligent
beings that have evolved from other animals? Should we not see more
“intelligent beings” evolving from other species?

Q2. After centuries, we have yet to reproduce any artificial system that
simulates the functioning of the brain. Is it possible for such an complex
organ to have evolved from simpler organisms? how could this have been
possible?

Q1 is just a trivial variant of the “if we evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys” nonsense. We haven’t evolved more intelligent species because a) intelligence seems to be an unlikely destination for an evolving species, b) there is no particular reason any particular species ought to evolve intelligence rather than, say, a better immune system or adapt to a new diet or acquire more efficient camouflage, and c) any intelligent monkey-men will be either enslaved or slaughtered by the species currently occupying the intelligent-tool-user niche, i.e., us.

Q2 is also just a variant of the “it’s too complex to have evolved” argument. The human brain exists. We have evidence of predecessors with smaller brains. We can see that the brain forms by natural processes. We can see advantages to individuals in our lineage that are smarter. We can readily infer from the available evidence in anatomy, comparative biology, paleontology, molecular biology, and neuroscience that the simplest explanation, the one that requires the least invocation of mysterious, unidentified forces, is that the brain evolved. Anyone who wants to argue otherwise should provide concrete examples of other processes that could have played a role…and no, scientifically-inclined intelligent monkey-men who evolved 2 million years ago and used advanced biotechnological engineering to inflate the brains of their primitive tailless relatives is not a concrete example, unless you have real evidence of such creatures’ existence.

Oh, and vaporous cosmic deities doing likewise don’t count either, for the same reason.

My visit to Purdue

Jen has the full account, complete with a video, of my talk. I was a rude boy.

Right now, I’m in Bloomington, at the “Current Frontiers in Evolution, Development and Genomics” conference. I gave the keynote last night — which means I am now free to sit back and simply enjoy the meeting without fretting over a silly talk any more. I think I’ll be able to get online in the auditorium, so you may be subject to more live-blogging of evo-devo over the course of the day.

I see we’ve got events scheduled all day long, up to 11pm. I might die.

A moral conundrum, resolved with scripture

I’d never realized what a useful tool the Bible is in infallibly resolving difficult moral problems until I read this detailed dissection of a difficult situation on Answers in Genesis.

Here’s the hypothetical situation: you know the whereabouts of a family of Jews hiding from the Nazis. A Nazi patrol comes up to you and asks where they are; you, a good God-fearing Christian, can either lie and say you don’t know (which would be bad, because, like, lying is a sin), or you could tell the truth, and the Nazis would zip off and search for and presumably execute the family. What do you do?

As a non-Bible believing amoral godless atheist, my first thought was that this is trivial: you lie your pants off. The ‘crime’ of telling a lie pales into insignificance against the crime of enabling the death of fellow human beings.

According to Bodie Hodge of AiG, though, I’m wrong. The good Christian should reject lies, Satan’s tools, in all circumstances, and should immediately ‘fess up the location of the Jews. He backs it up with Bible quotes, too.

If we love God, we should obey Him (John 14:15). To love God first means to obey Him first–before looking at our neighbor. So, is the greater good trusting God when He says not to lie or trusting in our fallible, sinful minds about the uncertain future?

Consider this carefully. In the situation of a Nazi beating on the door, we have assumed a lie would save a life, but really we don’t know. So, one would be opting to lie and disobey God without the certainty of saving a life–keeping in mind that all are ultimately condemned to die physically. Besides, whether one lied or not may not have stopped the Nazi solders from searching the house anyway.

As Christians, we need to keep in mind that Jesus Christ reigns. All authority has been given to Him (Matthew 28:18), and He sits on the throne of God at the right hand of the Father (Acts 2:33; Hebrews 8:1). Nothing can happen without His say. Even Satan could not touch Peter without Christ’s approval (Luke 22:31). Regardless, if one were to lie or not, Jesus Christ is in control of timing every person’s life and able to discern our motives. It is not for us to worry over what might become, but rather to place our faith and obedience in Christ and to let Him do the reigning. For we do not know the future, whereas God has been telling the end from the beginning (Isaiah 46:10).

Gosh. I never thought of it that way. So…all those Christians who sheltered Jews during WWII are actually burning in hell right now for their sinful wickedness? That is so counterintuitive, it must be true!

What’s the opposite of education?

Plans are afoot to build a creation “science” education center in Henning, Minnesota — about two hours north of Morris. They plan to push the simple-minded literalist creationist claim that the earth is 6,000 years old and peddle the same BS that the Creation “Museum” does — it’s stark raving mad. These quotes tell the whole story:

The aim, Schultz said, is to provide families and young people with information they can use to respectfully question differing points of view they may encounter, like at school.

“What we’re finding is, many kids are subject to ridicule, lower grades, being laughed at, just because they lay forth different arguments and different interpretations of the same information,” Schultz said.

The Rev. George Sagissor, who is working to help create the learning center, said he ran into similar reactions when he attended the University of Minnesota-Morris in the 1960s.

He recalled one lecture when he said he politely raised his hand to ask a question from a creation standpoint and was asked to leave the class.

“We don’t get a chance to let our point of view be heard because we’re put down and we’re asked to shut up,” Sagissor said.

I am pleased to see that my university has a long tradition of dealing with nonsense appropriately. I’m sure that creations was polite in his questions, but I’d like to know more about the instructor’s response: I’m sure whoever he or she was was equally polite, and addressed the question in a proper way…and if the student was actually asked to leave, it was because he was being disruptive and a distraction.

Students should be subject to lower grades when they give wrong answers. Schultz is wrong, because creationists do not deal with the same information — they are selective, ignore all of the evidence that contradicts their claims, and give very, very bad arguments for their position. They invite ridicule; stupid is as stupid does, after all.

The claim of persecution is typical, too. Here they are, free to express their uninformed opinion, and even able to muster the money to build little echo chambers where they can babble about Flood Geology to each other, and they mistake the fact that real scientists are also free to point and laugh at the goofy superstitions of these wackaloons as evidence of oppression.