thinkevolution.net

The cell phone camera photo of a security camera image taken in a hospital hallway in September 2008.

Fourteen-year-old Chelsea Banton was near death, hospitalized for pneumonia. She was removed from life support, and—could it be a miracle?—slowly began to improve. At the same time, a mysterious angelic form was seen hovering outside her hospital room. Her mother Colleen credits her daughter’s recovery to the angel. “It’s a miracle,” she said. Ann Curry opened this “news” piece on the Today show by suggesting that even skeptics might reconsider their cynicism after viewing the late-breaking evidence. Sixty-eight percent of Americans believe in angels (that’s 19% more than believe in evolution) already. But this is not an especially awesome example of supernatural shenanigans (the angel totally looks like a glare). And it’s not even a Christmas coincidence: this all took place months ago. I guess the news is all relative.

Illustration by Beto Alvarez, Inquirer Staff Artist

Yesterday the Philadelphia Inquirer profiled an article just published by my lab, which demonstrates the role of a gene called couch potato in determining reproductive diapause in fruit flies. Genes in flies are named after their mutant phenotype; when this gene is disrupted, the animals lie around like lazy couch potatoes.

The nifty thing about this new work is that it demonstrates how a single gene—and more specifically, a single nucleotide site within that gene—affects a major phenotype under strong selection in natural populations. Diapause is a physiological state which permits flies to withstand long periods of stress. Flies are more likely to survive winter if they are in diapause, but not all flies are capable of entering diapause. This paper demonstrates that a single nucleotide polymorphism, which is located within the couch potato gene, determines whether flies are diapause-capable or not. From Florida to Maine, natural populations of fruit flies have gradually increasing frequencies of the nucleotide that confers diapause capability—almost all Maine flies, which must survive long winters, carry the diapause allele. Evidence suggests that this polymorphism affects other traits, like lifespan and reproduction, as well. So it’s likely that this single mutation has significant effects on the evolution of many traits. A tidy example of evolution at work (for those keeping track).

The article was published yesterday in PNAS.

Odile Crick in 2003, at a dinner celebrating the 50th anniversary of the historical discovery, and her sketch that appeared in the 1953 paper. Images from the New York Times.

Odile Crick, who drew the double helix diagram in the 1953 Nature paper that announced the structure of DNA, died this month at 86. She was the wife of Francis Crick, the co-author of the paper with James Watson. They asked her to draw the image because “Francis can’t draw, and I can’t draw, and we need something done quick,” said James Watson. Her sketch, which was a “purely diagrammatic” representation of the 3-D structure of DNA, became iconic. The New York Times article that reported her death reveals Crick to have been a pretty extraordinary lady. She relocated to Britain in 1938 when the Nazis occupied Austria, where she was an art student in Vienna. She joined the Women’s Royal Naval Service and because she was fluent in German, became a code-breaker and translater of secret documents during the war.

“He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke.”

Darwin wrote this in 1838, reflecting on the power of our close animal relatives to illuminate human dynamics. Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth of UPenn have just published a book about baboon social behavior, Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind. Marty Moss-Coane, my personal idol, interviewed Robert Seyfarth this morning on her radio show, Radio Times. It’s a great interview: Dr. Seyfarth describes how he and collaborating animal behaviorists draw their conclusions using field observations and experimental manipulations, providing a glimpse into how basic science research (in an extra-interesting field) is conducted. Definitely worth listening to the show to the very end, when he gives a positively extraordinary account of baboons goat-herding in Namibia.

Radio Times is broadcast every weekday from the Philadelphia NPR station WHYY, 90.9 FM. You can listen to this particular show from the Radio Times archive.

Today The Chronicle of Higher Education published an article about astronomy professor and intelligent design advocate Guillermo Gonzalez’s tenure rejection at Iowa State University. Opening line of the article:

At first glance, it seems like a clear-cut case of discrimination.

I’m surprised by this position and the word “discrimination” is inflammatory. Legally, of course, discrimination is unlawful. Candidates for tenure can’t be denied based on race or gender, for example, under federal law. Iowa State’s own faculty handbook makes it clear that it doesn’t discriminate based on race, color, age, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, sex, marital status, disability, or status as a U.S. Vietnam Era Veteran. But can someone be denied tenure based on advocacy for intelligent design? Is that discrimination against religion, or discrimination against ideas that fall outside the merits under review?

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The Encyclopedia of Life project, which intends to eventually “serve as an online reference source and database for every one of the 1.8 million species that are named and known on this planet,” was officially launched this month. The project is a collaboration between multiple institutions, including the Field Museum of Natural History, Harvard University, the Marine Biological Laboratory, the Smithsonian, and the Biodiversity Heritage Library. It’s also impressively funded with $10 million from the MacArthur Foundation and $2.5 million from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

There’s not much up on the site yet, but here’s a screenshot of one of their demonstration pages:

Biologists Daniel Janzen (University of Pennsylvania) and E.O. Wilson (Harvard University) are credited with conceiving this project. I’ll try to talk to Dan Janzen this week because I’d love to get more deets on it.

BBC News reports that the Darwin Correspondence project will make nearly 5,000 letters in their collection accessible online tomorrow. Based at the University of Cambridge, the project has been collecting and publishing letters to and from Charles Darwin since 1974. They’ve published 15 volumes of Darwin’s letters as books, and an agreement with the publisher will allow online access to digital copies of the correspondence four years after hard copy publication.

This project complements Darwin Online, an independent project also based at the University of Cambridge. Darwin Online has made writings by and about Charles Darwin available since 2002, and also includes downloadable audio files and 45,000 images.

In an article in Friday’s New York Times, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney “clarifies” his position—which really must be rather uncomfortable—on evolution, which had been reported last week as straddling the precipitous gulf between creationism and science. “Governor Romney believes both science and faith can help inform us about the origins of life in this world,” his campaign announced after Romney did not raise his hand in answer to a May 3 debate question on whether the candidates did not believe in evolution.

But the Times article clears all this ambiguity up:

“I believe that God designed the universe and created the universe,” Mr. Romney said in an interview this week. “And I believe evolution is most likely the process he used to create the human body.”

He was asked: Is that intelligent design?

“I’m not exactly sure what is meant by intelligent design,” he said. “But I believe God is intelligent and I believe he designed the creation. And I believe he used the process of evolution to create the human body.”

Nice to see that Romney is terrified of ID; perhaps the wedge strategy has been sufficiently dulled. I don’t care much for politicians who won’t defend a clear position, though, and I don’t think creationists should either.

But most infuriating of all was the egregious error by Times journalist Michael Luo, who described evolution as comprised of “utterly random, naturalistic processes.” Fact: natural selection, the evolutionary process responsible for adaptation, is a deterministic process, the utter opposite of a random one. This type of error is unacceptable. Better science education in schools!

I just learned from a post on PACFS that the Randy Olson documentary Flock of Dodos: the Evolution-Intelligent Design Circus will be shown on Showtime on May 17 at 8:30 PM EST.

Randy Olson received a PhD in Biology from Harvard University in 1984, contributed a well-respected body of research to the fields of ecology, evolution and marine biology, and received tenure in 1992 at the University of New Hampshire. But then he realized he liked making films more, and so while on leave at UNH, Olson enrolled in film school at the University of Southern California.

He has since made a number of films that explore the interface between science and the public, all with humor and, as many reviewers point out, a fair amount of “irreverence.” Read more about Randy Olson in this New York Times article published a year ago today.

The New York Times published an article on May 5 discussing whether Darwinism bolsters or undermines the conservative political agenda. The article follows a show-of-hands moment in the May 3 GOP debate, in which the ten Republican candidates were asked if they did not believe in evolution. Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas, former governor of Arkansas Mike Huckabee and Representative Tom Tancredo of Colorado raised their hands.

The traditional (ultra-) conservative perspective has been that evolution is Godless, hence immoral, hence a satantic motivator towards ubiquitous abortions and an eventual global armageddon. However, this article picks up on a trend in conservative politics to promote evolution as an argument for conventionally conservatives ideas, like “traditional social roles for men and women, free-market capitalism and governmental checks and balances.” Yikes. (Interesting: a similar argument for evolutionary conservatism by David Brooks and an observation by Michael Shermer about liberal-vs-conservative attitudes towards the biology of sexual orientation neatly fold into this trend.)

Of course, misguided interpretation of evolution—just like misguided interpretation of, say, anything—is dangerous, not to mention exhausting and frustrating. Naturally, it’s not only the pro-evolution politicos who are misinterpreting Darwin’s contribution to our world-view; that position is still securely defended by the anti-evolution crowd. For example: George Gilder, who is associated with the Discovery Institute, criticized the alliance of conservative ideals with evolutionary theory by pointing out that “both Nazism and communism were inspired by Darwinism. Why conservatives should toady to these storm troopers is beyond me.” Double yikes. Can’t we all just agree that “nature is morally neutral” and that it’s the commodification of empirical research for political agendas that’s unethical?