Male pregnancy?

Yesterday’s discussion of future biological advances that will piss off the religious right had me thinking about other innovations that I expect will happen within a few decades that might just cause wingnuts to freak out. First thing to come to mind is that it will be something to do with reproduction, of course, and it will scramble gender roles and expectations…so, how about modifying men to bear children? It sounds feasible to me. Zygotes are aggressive little parasites that will implant just about anywhere in the coelom — it’s why ectopic pregnancies are a serious problem — so all we need to do there is culture a bit of highly vascularized tissue in the male abdomen that will serve as a secure home for a few months. We’ll have to play some endocrine games, too, which may effect his love life but will also prepare him to lactate post-partum. There’s the minor anatomical problem that the vagina is a unique tissue, and no, the urethra is not homologous or analogous (fortunately; we wouldn’t want to have to push an 8 pound baby through the penis, even if female hyenas can manage it) — but that’s what c-sections are for. Given money, time, and a few weird volunteers, it could be done.

The next question is, has it been done? Are there any other vertebrates that have males doing the hard work of pregnancy? There were the gastric brooding frogs, which one would think could have made the leap easily — the eggs were just swallowed and developed in the stomach — but only the mothers seemed to have done the job. They’re all extinct, anyway. Male frogs of the genus Rhinoderma brood their young in their mouths, but this is after external fertilization and development, so they’re actually simply holding larvae in a safe place — and they’re also endangered. The precedents aren’t promising.

There is an extremely interesting and successful example, though: the syngnathid fishes, sea horses and pipefish. In all 232 species, the female lays her eggs in a specialized male structure called the brood pouch, where they are fertilized and develop. It’s a true male pregnancy!

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My plan to become a household name continues apace!

It’s nice to see these casual references to PZ Myers, as if anyone would have heard of me:

The lab is at 101 Theory Drive, a developer’s idea of a scientific street name that Lynch found presumptuous.

It is a mark of the difficulty of life sciences — biology and its many descendants — that to call something a theory is to honor, not slight it. Theory, evolutionary biologist P.Z. Myers has written, is what scientists aspire to. Lynch, for all of his bombast, was respectful of the intellectual protocols of his science.

“I would have called it Hypothesis Drive,” he said.

The article is part of an interesting series on research into learning and memory, that is also unfortunately marred by some casual sexism on the part of its subject. See, Zuska, you just had to ruin it for me!

P.S. I think of myself as more of a developmental biologist than evolutionary biologist, but OK, I am very interested in evolutionary issues.

Cretaceous Eschatology

I’m a bit reluctant to post this, because … what if they actually start using this argument? Maybe mass extinctions are actually evidence of a prior Rapture.

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This would mean, of course, that the Tertiary corresponds to the Tribulation, and we should prepare for the return of Jesus Rex.

Greetings, fellow Slime-Snake-Monkey-Mutants!

There is this fellow, Robert Bowie Johnson Jr., who claims that the tales of the Bible are verified by ancient Greek art — ho-hum, the usual confirmation bias and failure to recognize that the existence of common motifs in Western mythology does not imply the reality of a supernatural interpretation — who has gone further and urges the use of shaming insults against “Darwinists”:

To shock the Darwinists out of their denial of the overwhelming evidence in Greek art for the reality of Genesis events, the author urges Creationists to refer to evolutionists as what they imagine they are–“Slime-Snake-Monkey-People.” Mr. Johnson, who holds a general science degree from West Point, also suggests that since Slime-Snake-Monkey-People insist they evolved over millions of years through a countless series of random mutations, Christians should also refer to them as “mutants.”

To which I have to reply … please do. We are mutants, every one of us; the replication of 3 billion base pairs is a process that, by pure chemical necessity, will have a number of errors. There’s no shame in that at all.

I’m also not at all embarrassed by recitations of my proud lineage, although I’d be a bit miffed at the inaccuracy of the characterization. There are no snakes in our ancestry, monkeys aren’t involved either (as a colloquial term for small primates, I might let it pass), although it might be fair to describe early protocells and bacteria as forming a kind of slime. I’m going to have to recommend Dawkins’ The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) to Mr Johnson. It’ll give him many more epithets that he can apply accurately to our ancestors, but he’ll still be surprised — we love our predecessors.

I hope somebody does call me a Slime-Snake-Monkey-Mutant. It’ll make me laugh.

Ominous Dean

I’m embarrassed to say that I haven’t been following the story of Hurricane Dean at all — it’s far away, and I’ve been busy traveling and trying to get my classes organized — but Chris Mooney has. In a short summary on his blog and a longer article on the Daily Green, he explains why I’m a bad person for failing to note the significance of this storm. It’s been a horrific decade for hurricanes.

Wait until the creationists try to wrap their little minds around artificial life … oops, too late

Here’s some exciting news: Artificial life likely in 3 to 10 years. It is exciting but not surprising at all — but of course we’re going to be able to assemble entirely artificial life forms soon. It’s just a particularly complicated kind of chemistry, and it’s more of a deep technical problem than anything else. I wouldn’t be quite so specific about the date — there are also all kinds of surprises that could pop up — but I’m optimistic, and I think the overall assertion is supported by the increasing rate of accomplishment in the field.

But of course, in addition to the usual suggestions from interested followers of science that I should mention this cool article on the blog, I’ve gotten a few from creationist complainers (Already! See what my email is like?) Expect to hear more outrage from the religious right as this story develops in the coming years, which might be a good thing … they’re going to have to spread themselves thin to fight all the interesting work coming out of biology, and evolution won’t be the only target anymore. Anyway, here’s one of my creationists, expressing his unhappiness in odd directions.

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