One thing natural selection is powerless against is selecting for or against anything in an organism post-reproduction. Hence, our bodies are fairly impotent when it comes to fighting cancer (with many exceptions, of course). The mechanisms of evolution are simply blind to most cancers.
It is for this reason that I must delay today’s edition of the Carnival of Evolution. My grandfather “Papaw” finally and thankfully ended a long fight with lung cancer thirty minutes before midnight on New Year’s Eve. He had just received word that day that the cancer had spread pretty much all over and the prospects for ‘09 were not looking particularly pleasant.
So, in perfect characteristic fashion, Papaw proceeded to thumb his nose at the potential of an agonizing death by having a heart attack in his sleep.
He will be missed by many.
The next edition, which was due to be published today, will be published as soon as I return from the funeral next week. Much apologies to all contributors. Rest assured - you will all be included.
As some of you might have noticed, this site has been pretty inactive as of late. Blame that on the combination of a full-time research post-doc and a college teaching gig on top of it.
Well, now the stack of final exams are graded and it’s time once again for you to indulge your selective pressure pleasure in the next Carnival of Evolution. The current biweekly installment, CoE#7, is hosted by Peter Buckland over at Forms Most Beautiful (by far one of my favorite science blogs - partially because he has an amazingly witty way with words and partially because his blog is sprinkled with posts on Heavy Metal).
I was also derelict in posting a link to Carnival of Evolution #6, hosted by Christie Lynn over at Observations of a Nerd. If you haven’t read her blog yet, you must check it out. She’s both hilarious and talented, with keen insight on all things nerdy.
Odontochelys semitestacea
The next installment in two weeks will be hosted by me, Irradiatus, here at biochemicalsoul on January 1st. So get your brains and fingers writing about what you enjoy and let the joys and sorrows of another semester melt away. Submit your posts here.
Also, please consider hosting an upcoming edition. If you have already done so before, you can most certainly host again. Quite a few people have begun reading this Blog Carnival, and here’s hoping that the exposure will only grow. Just email me at irradiatus [at] biochemicalsoul [dot] com if you’d like to host. We have had quite an impressive list of article contributors (see the side bar to the right), so perhaps it’s time that you contributors hosted as well.
That’s the nicest word I can think of to define my feelings about the vote for California’s Proposition 8, which bans marriage between homosexual humans.
As has been discussed allover the digital tubes since last night’s election, the turn against gay marriage was largely funded by the hate and bigotry of the Mormons. I can’t say that this is particularly unexpected or surprising behavior.
And though also not unexpected, what I find most disturbing, most hypocritical, and most ironic about this amendment of a state constitution is that one of the main factors in the Proposition’s passage was the large turnout of African-American voters. About 70% of African-American’s voted for the ban, while 30% voted against.
Let’s restate that.
By coming out in droves, making a historic renunciation of discrimination based on the content of pigment molecules in one’s skin, the one group most discriminated against throughout American history is partially and disproportionately responsible for the codification of discrimination within the state’s constitution.
Prop 8 Votes
No, I am not solely blaming African-American’s for this legalized bigotry. Not at all. But their vote is by far the most hypocritical (though a similar argument could be made for the “judge not lest ye be judged” crowd).
We have known for many years now that the tone of one’s skin has no bearing on the intelligence, morality, skills, or inherent “value” of any individual (despite some who still argue for genetics-based racism). This election was an affirmation of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s iconic dream. Even if race was not the motivation for African-American votes, their votes and everyone else’s votes for Obama can certainly be seen as a vote against racial discrimination.
Yet here we have an infamously homophobic community codifying discrimination against another group of people, based solely on superficial biological differences.
Each year, the evidence piles higher that homosexuality is itself purely biological in nature, just as skin tone. I’m not gonna pour through the evidence, other than to note just the latest research from this past summer showing clear similarities between homosexual men’s and heterosexual women’s brains and between homosexual women’s and heterosexual men’s brains. No doubt there is still MUCH research to be done. However, it seems pretty clear from current research (and just by asking any gay person you know) that sexual attraction to the same gender is not a “lifestyle choice”1.
For you heterosexuals that don’t believe this, either because you are ignorant of the research, don’t actually know any homosexuals, or just can’t accept that God would create gay people, all I need to do is ask you one simple question (using the example of men, but the reciprocal can be used for women):
Was there a time in your life that you decided “You know, I think I’m gonna choose to find women hot” or “I’ve decided to find female breasts sexually arousing”?
No. There was no such decision. Sexuality is pure, hardwired instinct. I know from personal experience how strong that instinct is, as does any heterosexual man on his first encounter with the intriguing, mystifying, strangely compelling lump of flesh we know as the female breast.
What IS a choice is whether a homosexual person decides to live as the person they know that they are, enduring a lifetime of bigotry and discrimination, or to live a lie in order to fit into the world of bigotry. That is certainly no easy choice to make. I cannot even begin to imagine the pain and sadness.
Yes, homosexuality is biological in nature (whether arising through brain development or directly by genetics). In general, all humans are born with predetermined sexuality (which can actually range on the spectrum of pure heterosexuality to homosexuality). You can’t “catch” gayness from being raised by or around gays.
Thus I find it so utterly maddening that anyone in modern society can claim that discrimination based on superficial skin color is now gone or dying, while in the same breath tick a box to rewrite a constitution banning a loving couple from legally joining – all because the couple’s genitals happen to be of the same type.
You should be ashamed, and I am ashamed for you.
To be sure, we will one day have equality among all peoples, regardless of such traits as skin color and sexuality. It may take a few years or it may take a few generations. But it is coming.
I just find it sad that so many think they’re on the leading edge of progress, while in reality they are still holding us back, pointing at the splinters in the eyes of others and blinded by the logs in their own.
note: as with EVERYTHING in biology, there are bound to be some exceptions(↩)
Kevin Zelnio over at The Other 95% (and the Discovery Channel’s Deep Sea News) has put together another excellent edition of the Carnival of Evolution. This edition contains much deep delving into the science, both current and past, within the field of evolutionary biology, and it makes for a truly edifying read.
Summary of alterations in signal transduction pathways.
In a cool new study in PLoS Genetics, through artificial selection researchers have allowed fruit flies (Drosophila) to evolve tolerance to normally lethal low levels of Oxygen.
To many scientists, this type of research will not be seen as that impressive, as a general finding. Artificial selection has been occurring for millennia, and it is the method through which we have created every domesticated animal and crop on the planet. Scientists will however find the specific genetic changes and biological pathway changes involved in this microevolution fascinating indeed. But it serves one more example (among mountains of others) of evolution being witnessed and directed under laboratory conditions.
Personally, I think one of the most amazing aspects of this study was just how quickly these flies evolved to survive and develop perpetually in severely low oxygen conditions. In only 32 generations the flies were able to live in oxygen conditions completely lethal to normal flies.
After they generated the flies, they did whole genome analyses to figure out exactly which DNA sequences and enzymatic pathways had changed in sequence or expression to result in this tolerance, including (not surprisingly) cellular respiration enzymes, citric acid cycle enzymes, and major signaling pathways, such as EGF, Insulin, Notch and Toll/Imd pathways.
Their goal is to eventually apply this information to mammalian systems to understand our own reactions to low oxygen states such as the “reduction in oxygen delivery at high altitude or during certain disease states, such as myocardial infarction and stroke.”
Dan Zhou, Jin Xue, James C. K. Lai, Nicholas J. Schork, Kevin P. White, Gabriel G. Haddad, Eric Rulifson (2008). Mechanisms Underlying Hypoxia Tolerance in Drosophila melanogaster: hairy as a Metabolic Switch PLoS Genetics, 4 (10) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pgen.1000221
“I pushed her on the earth’s creation, whether it was really less than 7,000 years old and whether dinosaurs and humans walked the earth at the same time. And she said yes, she’d seen images somewhere of dinosaur fossils with human footprints in them.”
…enjoy the glory of Jesus on a T. rex. I have no idea where this came from - if you know the source, let me know.
In one of the single most maddening, ignorant, unfathomably idiotic statements (out of many) I have heard spew through Sarah Palin’s lips, the candidate for the second highest position in the free world uttered a single phrase today that could utterly destroy the progress of medicine and scientific understanding.
In her very first policy speech, Palin talked about autism and disabilities (video below). She urged that
“For many parents of children with disabilities, the most valuable thing of all is information. Early identification of a cognitive or other disorder, especially autism, can make a life-changing difference.”
This is very true. And where does this information and the ability for early identification come from? Scientific research. Unfortunately, she went on to say
“You’ve heard about some of these pet projects they really don’t make a whole lot of sense and sometimes these dollars go to projects that have little or nothing to do with the public good. Things like fruit fly research in Paris, France. I kid you not.”
When I heard this issue forth from my T.V. I literally could not believe what I had just heard. I had to rewind my TiVo just to make sure. I write now filled with more anger at the the current state of this union than I have felt in some time (albeit, anger cut with a good dose of hope).
Why the anger, you say? What’s wrong with her statement, you ask?
This statement of “public policy” exhibits an almost unbelievable level of the ignorance of Palin and those that support her – and on multiple levels.
Drosophila melanogaster
#1. The fruit fly (Drosophila) has probably been the single most important organism for the study of genetics for over a century now. Almost everything we know about genetics, development, cell biology, neuroscience, and every other field of biology has strong roots in previous and current work on Drosophila. The fruit fly is one of a small handful of “standard model organisms” used by thousands of scientists across the world to learn how our bodies, organs, genes, and proteins work. Most of what we know about how a single fertilized cell becomes the amazingly complex beings we are comes from studies initially done in Drosophila. Vast amounts of our understanding of the brain (and brain disorders, diseases, and defects) also come from initial studies in fruit flies.
In fact, recent research from my own graduate alma mater, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, on fruit fly brains has had an impact on the understanding of autism and has boosted autism research:
“[S]cientists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine have shown that a protein called neurexin is required for..nerve cell connections to form and function correctly. The discovery, made in Drosophila fruit flies may lead to advances in understanding autism spectrum disorders, as recently, human neurexins have been identified as a genetic risk factor for autism.”
To decry research in [condescending and amazed tone] “the fruit fly” is a testament to the true idiocy of this woman and to the failure of our public education system. In fact, her own father, Chuck Heath, was a biology teacher – obviously a complete failure of a biology teacher.
#2. The fact that she threw in “in Paris, France” represents yet another tactic to pander to the “patriotic,” French-hating (remember Freedom Fries?) Right. It also represents another misunderstanding of the nature of science in the modern world. You see, science knows no borders. It doesn’t matter where the research happens. The results all end up in the same place – in our collective database of scientific knowledge.
In my own research, both current and past, my work on heart and brain development has been based on, and done in collaboration with, other scientists all over the world. Some of my current research is based on results from a group in Korea. Other projects were based on studies from a consortium of scientists from Canada to China to Australia.
Regardless of where the research is done, it all contributes to the “public good” and it all feeds into the knowledge of our biological existence, into the state of our medical technology, and into our mental and body health.
I’ve been fuming ever since hearing her comments tonight. I am now happy to say that both Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow are currently covering this story quite well on MSNBC. To quote Richard Wolffe on Olbermann’s Countdown, this is one of her most “mindless, ignorant, uninformed, comments” yet. I hope I don’t need to spell out for you why having someone like this in the number 2 (or God forbid, number 1) position in the country will harm science and scientific undertanding in this country.
I imagine the science blogosphere will be alight with posts about this, hopefully from some actual Drosophila scientists, and I will update this post with their links as they come along (let me know if you want your blog post listed).
(Note: Please Digg this below, or use whatever bookmark sharing site you prefer - we need as many people to see this issue as possible).
Update 2: For those of you who understand that the details of the earmark (which I don’t think Palin even had a clue about) actually deals with a different species of fruit fly (Olive Fruit Fly), see the comments section. Yes I am very well aware of this, but it has no bearing on her comment, apparent ignorance, and flippant dismissal of research because it deals with silly-sounding fruit flies. More: PZ Myers at Pharyngula blasts the claim that she “wasn’t disparaging all research into fruit flies, but only one specific earmark for studying agricultural pests.”
An unimaginable number of synapses converge, combining their action potentials, sending the signal back to a central processor for analysis, sending it out for further clarification, and finally moving a new series of ions across membranes to terminate in the movement of fingers across a keyboard.
In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move. — Douglas Adams
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Carnival of Evolution #8 - Update 
