Do you recall this incoherent tale of incest and racism I got a while back? Like almost 4 months ago? Well, the fellow seems to have just now discovered that we were laughing at him, and has sent me his rebuttal. It’s only fair that I post it for you now.
I am in awe — they did it without anyone noticing. They just infiltrated nations all around the planet, smuggling in individuals to form vast new colonies of billions, all loyal to the overlords back home. Of course, these are very, very short Argentinians, which made them harder to notice: they’re all ants.
In Europe, one vast colony of Argentine ants is thought to stretch for 6,000km (3,700 miles) along the Mediterranean coast, while another in the US, known as the ‘Californian large’, extends over 900km (560 miles) along the coast of California. A third huge colony exists on the west coast of Japan.
While ants are usually highly territorial, those living within each super-colony are tolerant of one another, even if they live tens or hundreds of kilometres apart. Each super-colony, however, was thought to be quite distinct.
But it now appears that billions of Argentine ants around the world all actually belong to one single global mega-colony.
You better start practicing your tango is you hope to get along with our new arthropod overlords.
This morning was a long session broken into two big chunks, and I’m afraid it was too much for me — my recent weird sleep patterns are catching up with me, which didn’t help at all in staying alert.
Robert Huber: Intracellular protein degradation and its control
This talk was a disaster. Not because it wasn’t good, because it was; lots of fine, detailed science on the regulation of proteases by various mechanisms, with a discussion of the structure and function of proteasomes, accompanied by beautiful mandalas of protein structure. No, the problem was that this listener’s jet lag has been causing some wild precession of my internal clocks, and a quarter of the way through this talk all systems were shutting down while announcing that it was the middle of the night, and I really couldn’t cope. I’m going to have to look up some of his papers when I get home, though.
Walter Kohn: An Earth Powered Predominantly by Solar and Wind Energy
Kohn has made a documentary to illustrate the power of solar energy. It was very basic, a bit silly — John Cleese narrates it — but might be useful in educating the pubic. He showed excerpts from it, and while it was nice, it didn’t fire me up.
Peter Agre: Canoeing in the Arctic, a Scientist´s Perspective
This was a bit strange. We’ve had all these science talks on global warming, so Agre decided to just show us what we stand to lose, and showed us photos of his vacations on canoeing trips in Canada and Alaska. They were gorgeous photos, but please don’t show me your photo album when I’m crashing hard.
I think my new and revised plan is to take a nap this afternoon and try to recharge a bit. I really must be alert for tomorrow’s session with Shimomura, Chalfie, and Tsien, which are the talks I was most anticipating. There’s also a curious talk by Werner Arber on something called Molecular Darwinism which has my skeptical genes tingling; I’ve got to see what kinds of evidence he provides for that. So brain must not melt down now.
I’m here for another long session of talks. Unfortunately, this is Big Chemistry day, and I’m struggling to keep up with the unfamiliar. I need more biology for it all to make sense!
Rudolph Marcus: From ‘On Water’ and enzyme caalysis to single molecules and quantum dots. Theory and experiment.
I was afraid of this. This Lindau conference has a primary focus on chemistry, and I am not a chemist…and I just knew there would be a talk or two at which I would be all at sea, and that was the case in Marcus’s talk, which was all hardcore chemistry. I got the general gist — he’s making an argument that you need both a solid grounding in theory in order to carry out computational chemistry, which seemed fairly obvious to me — but I confess that his discussion of the details of on-water catalysis, single molecule enzyme catalysis, and quantum dots lost me, through no fault of his. I don’t have the background to follow the context of the discussion.
Kurt Wüthrich: Structural genomics — exploring the protein universe
This was more of that tricky chemistry stuff, but at least it was related to biology. Wüthrich studies 3D protein structures, specializing in using NMR of proteins in solution. He fave a little background, and talked especially about his particular interest in hemoglobin, an interest that continues — he currently works at catching EPO doping in athletes. The more interesting part of the work is his current contributions to analyzing the structure of proteins in the genome. He made the point that there are currently over 6 million gene sequences tucked away in databases, but we know the the 3D structure of only about 50,000 of them. He’s part of a very large research consortium that is trying to fill in the gaps with high throughput, automated techniques.
Harold Kroto: Science, society and sustainability
If you’ve ever heard a Kroto talk, you know it is pretty much indescribable.
He did present all of chemistry in 30 seconds, but much of it was about about science education, science’s role in society, and how science is going to be necessary to save the world. There was a good strong bit of promotion of atheism (he’s one of us!), and an amusing tour of the Creation “Museum”, which he visited recently. All I can recommend is that you keep an eye on the Lindau site — they will make the lectures available online at some time.
The old fossil is Pat Buchanan, who has published a freakishly antiquated diatribe against Darwin. It’s extremely old school — he uses arguments straight out of 1960s era “scientific creationism”, trying to tar Darwin with guilt by association with Karl Marx and Adolf Hitler. He is apparently inspired by a “splendid little book,” The End of Darwinism: And How a Flawed and Disastrous Theory Was Stolen and Sold, by a creationist crank named Eugene G. Windchy. You can get an idea of Windchy’s level of scholarship by this quote:
That Darwinism has proven “disastrous theory” is indisputable.
“Karl Marx loved Darwinism,” writes Windchy. “To him, survival of the fittest as the source of progress justified violence in bringing about social and political change, in other words, the revolution.”
“Darwin suits my purpose,” Marx wrote.
John Lynch has rebutted this claim; I rather doubt that Marx could love someone as bourgeois as Darwin, a prosperous landowner and investor, a fellow who thought his greatest success in life was his talent as a businessman, and I can be fairly confident that any affection would not have been returned. And please, don’t even mention the false claim that Marx wanted to dedicate Das Kapital to Darwin.
It’s not enough to link Darwin to Marx; Windchy also has to turn Hitler into a committed Darwinist. You’d think he’d stop to marvel at the idea that Darwin could have inspired two such antagonistic philosophies, but Windchy and Buchanan aren’t quite that thoughtful.
Darwin suited Adolf Hitler’s purposes, too.
“Although born to a Catholic family Hitler become a hard-eyed Darwinist who saw life as a constant struggle between the strong and the weak. His Darwinism was so extreme that he thought it would have been better for the world if the Muslims had won the eighth century battle of Tours, which stopped the Arabs’ advance into France. Had the Christians lost, (Hitler) reasoned, Germanic people would have acquired a more warlike creed and, because of their natural superiority, would have become the leaders of an Islamic empire.”
Charles Darwin also suited the purpose of the eugenicists and Herbert Spencer, who preached a survival-of-the-fittest social Darwinism to robber baron industrialists exploiting 19th-century immigrants.
For being a “hard-eyed Darwinist”, Hitler certainly seems to have failed to make much use of the theory. Read Mein Kampf and you will find nothing about Darwin or evolution, but you will find much about God. And don’t his strange notions about an Aryan Islamic empire simply mark Hitler as a crazy crackpot, and say nothing at all about Darwin?
They do make some outrageous accusations against Darwin: he was a thief and a liar who stole his whole theory from Wallace.
Darwin, he demonstrates, stole his theory from Alfred Wallace, who had sent him a “completed formal paper on evolution by natural selection.”
“All my originality … will be smashed,” wailed Darwin when he got Wallace’s manuscript.
Unfortunately for their thesis, Darwin’s writings are preserved to an amazing degree — the history of his idea can be traced almost to the day. We know that he was putting together an outline of his theory within a few years of returning from the voyage of the Beagle; we have an early draft of his thesis written in 1842, well before the contact with Wallace; we have his correspondence where he bounced these ideas off his colleagues. He didn’t steal his theory at all, but had it well formulated before Wallace wrote his fateful letter, triggering him to finally publish.
You only have to read Wallace’s own gracious account of his interactions with Darwin to see how false Windchy’s claims are.
In conclusion I would Only wish to add, that my connection with Darwin and his great work has helped to secure for my own writings on the same questions a full recognition by the press and the public; while my share in the origination and establishment of the theory of Natural Selection has usually been exaggerated. The one great result which I claim for my paper of 1858 is that it compelled Darwin to write and publish his Origin of Species without further delay. The reception of that work, and its effect upon the whole scientific world, prove that it appeared at the right moment; and it is probable that its influence would have been less widespread had it been delayed several years, and had then appeared, as he intended, in several bulky volumes embodying the whole mass of facts he had collected in its support. Such a work would have appealed to the initiated few only, whereas the smaller volume actually written was read and understood by the educated classes throughout the civilised world.
There’s another case where Windchy/Buchanan accuse Darwin of lying.
Darwin also lied in “The Origin of Species” about believing in a Creator. By 1859, he was a confirmed agnostic and so admitted in his posthumous autobiography, which was censored by his family.
He doesn’t claim to believe in a Creator in the Origin. There is a brief mention of the possibility of a Creator initiating the universe in later editions of the book, but it’s more compatible with a deistic view than anything. He was an unbeliever in any specific religious doctrine, but that does not make him at all hypocritical to have considered the possibility of a creator beginning the whole process.
How much more can Buchanan get wrong? How about everything.
Darwin’s examples of natural selection — such as the giraffe acquiring its long neck to reach ever higher into the trees for the leaves upon which it fed to survive — have been debunked. Giraffes eat grass and bushes. And if, as Darwin claimed, inches meant life or death, how did female giraffes, two or three feet shorter, survive?
Like most animals, they’ll eat whatever is physiologically advantageous…but they prefer the leaves and shoots of acacia trees, where a long neck to reach the branches is advantageous. If you actually read the Origin, Darwin proposes several advantages of the long neck: for feeding, but also for observing predators, for combat, and as part of the defensive strategy of growing to large body size, and he uses the giraffe as an example of a general principle: “The preservation of each species can rarely be determined by any one advantage, but by the union of all, great and small.”
None of this has been debunked.
All Buchanan can do is a standard Gish Gallop, next bringing up canards like Piltdown Man, Nebraska Man, and a typically distorted version of punctuated equilibrium. It’s quite a performance, and it really takes a lot of work to distill stupid down to something quite as concentrated as what Buchanan presents.
This man actually ran for president? There are times I have to stand appalled at the lack of discrimination in our political process.
Ah, a solid science talk. It wasn’t bad, except that it was very basic—maybe if I were a real journalist instead of a fake journalist I would have appreciated it more, but as it was, it was a nice overview of some common ideas in neuroscience, with some discussion of pretty new tools on top.
He started with a little history to outline what we know, with Ramon Y Cajal showing that the brain is made up of network of neurons (which we now know to be approxiamately 1012 neurons large). He also predicted the direction of signal propagation, and was mostly right. Each neuron sends signals outwards through an axon, and receives input from thousands of other cells on its cell body and dendrites.
Signals move between neurons mostly by synaptic transmission, or the exocytosis of transmitter-loaded vesicles induced by changes in calcium concentration. That makes calcium a very interesting ion, and makes calcium concentration an extremely important parameter affecting physiological function, so we want to know more about it. Furthermore, it’s a parameter that is in constant flux, changing second by second in the cell. So how do we see an ion in real time or near real time?
The answer is to use fluorescent indicator dyes which are sensitive to changes in calcium concentration — these molecules fluoresce at different wavelenths or absorb light at different wavelengths depending on whether they are bound or not bound to calcium, making the concentration visible as changes in either the absorbed or emitted wavelength of light. There is a small battery of fluorescent compounds — Fura-2, fluo 3, indo-1 — that allow imaging of localized increases in calcium.
There’s another problem: resolution. Where the concentration of calcium matters most is in a tiny microdomain, a thin rind of the cytoplasm near the cell membrane called the cortex, which is where vesicles are lined up, ready to be triggered to fuse with the cell membrane by calcium, leading to the expulsion of their contents to the exterior. This microdomain is tiny, only 10-50nm thick, and is below the limit of resolution of your typical light microscope. If you’re interested in the calcium concentration at one thin, tiny spot, you’ve got a problem.
Most presynaptic terminals are very small and difficult to study; they can be visualized optically, but it’s hard to do simultaneous electrophysiology. One way Neher gets around this problem is to use unusually large synapses, the calyx of Held synapse, which is part of an auditory brainstem pathway. It’s an important pathway in sound localization, and the signals must be very precise. They have a pecial structure, a cup-like synapse that envelops the post-synaptic cell body — they’re spectacularly large, so large that one can insert recording electrodes both pre- and post-synaptically, and both compartments can be loaded with indicator dyes and caged compounds.
The question being addressed is the concentration of Ca2 at the microdomain of the cytoplasmic cortex, where vesicle fusion occurs. This is below the level of resolution of the light microscope, so just imaging a calcium indicator dye won’t work — they need an alternative solution. The one they came up with was to use caged molecules, in particular a reagent call Ca-DMN.
Caged molecules are cool, with one special property: when you flash UV light of just the right wavelength at them, they fall apart into a collection of inert (you hope) photoproducts, releasing the caged molecule, which is calcium in this case. So you can load up a cell with Ca-DMN, and then with one simple signal, you can trigger it to release all of its calcium, generating a uniform concentration at whatever level you desire across the entire cell. So instead of triggering an electrical potential in the synaptic terminal and asking what concentration of calcium appears at the vesicle fusion zone, they reversed the approach, generating a uniform calcium level and then asking how much transmitter was released, measured electrophysiologically at the post-synaptic cell. When they got a calcium level that produced an electrical signal mimicking the natural degree of transmitter release, they knew they’d found the right concentration.
Caged compounds don’t have to be just calcium ions: other useful probes are caged ATP, caged glutamate (a neurotransmitter), and even caged RNA. The power of the technique is that you can use light to manipulate the chemical composition of the cell at will, and observe how it responds. These are tools that can be used to modify cell states, to characterize excretory properties, or to generate extracellular signals, all with the relatively noninvasive probe of a brief focused light flash.
The Minnesota Supreme Court has ruled against him, and finally Norm Coleman has conceded the Minnesota state senate race to Al Franken. Hooray for Al, we have a new senator!
As mentioned previously, my interview on British Christian talk radio is now available — you can download the mp3 directly, and you can join in an online discussion, in which I am accused of “scientism”…which is rather pecuilar, given that in the interview I rather specifically said there were phenomena for which science is not the best tool for examination (although I would also say that there are no phenomena which require something beyond natural mechanisms).
The interviewer also thinks Plantinga’s arguments are good, which we didn’t talk about at all, but which would have triggered some on-air gagging noises if they had come up.
There is a cool program available in the UK only titled Inside Nature’s Giants, which is meant to be taken literally — they actually record the dissection of megafauna. The first episode is about delving into the guts of an elephant.
The bad news is that it isn’t available outside Channel 4’s broadcast area, so I can’t watch it at home or here in Germany. You lucky Brits can tune in right now, though. Maybe it will make its way to youtube soon.
The good news is that it is also not available in Smell-O-Vision.
There are a few people who will now appear on the blog who will be extremely peevish about Molina’s talk, because he simply clearly stated the scientific consensus. We are now living in the anthropocene, when so many people exist that that we are affecting the planet’s functions. CO2 and CH4 concentrations have been changing rapidly in recent decades, along with changes in temperature, and the fact of the matter is that the changes in the chemical composition of the atmosphere are causally connected to changes in temperature.
He showed long term records of 450,000 years of temperature and chemistry, which show regular changes in temperature and chemical composition, even of regular cycles of change. But recent changes are much larger, and the changes in the last century were not expected from known natural causes — they don’t fit the prior pattern. Only pseudoscientific (he was not at all mealy-mouthed: yes, he called the people who question anthropogenic change to be pseudoscientific) papers currently question the causal relationship of human activities to climate change.
There are some events that should give us pause. The glaciers feeding China’s rivers are shrinking, and the Tibetan plateau has important role in climate of China — what happens when China’s huge population faces major droughts? He mentioned specific events like Katrina, the exreme weather events. We can’t tell for certain that an individual event is climate change related, but statistics show a pattern of increasing events, such as wildfires and droughts. 400 million people are living under extreme drought conditions, and very dry land has increased worldwide in a short period of time: 15% of land was so classified in 1970, but it’s now up to 30% in 2002.
Trends show that greenhouse gases are increasing. What needs to be done? We need a revolution in the way society functions to prevent CO2 from rising abouve 350-450 ppm. Can it be done?
Molina is generally optimistic. He thinks that we can limit CO2 with existing technologies. His recipe is improved fuel economy, more efficient builidongs, improved power plant efficiency, substituting natural gas for coal, using carbon capture and storage, developing alternative power sources (nuclear, wind, solar, biofuels), and forest management. We need to do ALL, there will not be a single magic bullet that solves the problem.
He argues that we are not running out of fossil fuels (there is lots of coal), but we are running out of oil. However, we will run out of atmospheric capacity to cope with emissions before we run out of oil.
We are playing a game, like roulette. We are gambling: to win, a policy should result in a temp increase of less than 2° C. What policy does is shift the probabilities of winning — we are paying to move from one roulette wheel with bad odds to another with lower risk. We want to buy stabilization of probabilities and reduce uncertainty, and it’s not that expensive. An investment of a few percent of GDP produces a big improvement of our odds. He compared it to a hypothetical airplane trip. If you were told you could board a plane right now that has a 10% chance of both engines failing, or you could wait a few hours to take a different plane that cost 10% more but had a negligible chance of engine failure, which would you do? For most of us, the choice is simple, since the first plane has a good chance of catastrophic failure, and we’d rather avoid that sort of thing.
Less optimistically, he brought up the possibility of tipping points and the instability of the system. It is a big worry that we have a risk of entering practically irreversible modes: he gave the example of melting of arctic summer ice, since once the ice cap is gone, it is not trivial to restore it. Some tipping points may occur relatively soon. We are at risk of catastrophic climate change.
He ended with simple actions we should take now:
Put a price on carbon emissions.
Increase investment in energy tech research
Expand international cooperation
Emphasize win-win solutions
The big problem is that right now 3/4ths of the planet is striving to reach the ecoonomic standards of the developed countries — they should, and they have every right to aspire to it, but it is physically impossible for them to do it with the same wasteful strategies of the developed nations.
