Author: Mike White

Genomes, Books, and Science Fiction

Gene Networks and Natural Selection

This was originally posted at Adaptive Complexity, but it might be of interest to our patrons here at The Finch and Pea.

Life can be brutal for yeast in the wild. You don’t know where your next meal is coming from or what form it’s going to take. The key to being a successful yeast is to be metabolically agile, able to switch your metabolic state quickly based on the food source that’s currently available on the bark of an oak tree or in the leaf litter of a forest floor.

So yeast, especially the set of species related to baker’s yeast, have various networks of genes that specialize in making a meal out of different sugars. A yeast has to detect, pump in, and break down various sugars like sucrose, galactose, maltose, and glucose. Each of these sugars has different chemical properties, and therefore yeast requires different sensors, transporters, and enzymes to use each as a food source. Continue reading “Gene Networks and Natural Selection”

Scientists scooped by evolution

It turns out that your classic experimental trick to mimic protein phosphorylation by mutating serines and threonines to aspartate or glutamate at phosphorylation sites was not first discovered by humans. Pearlman, Serber and Ferrell argue that many phosphorylation sites in proteins evolved from negatively charged amino acid residues, which means that phosphorylation evolved to mimic the effects of glutamate and aspartate. This, of course, occurred long before human scientists discovered in 1987 that you could replace phosphorlated serines and threonines with negatively charged amino acids and still get a functional protein.

“A Mechanism for the Evolution of Phosphorylation Sites”, Samuel M. Pearlman, Zach Serber, James E. Ferrell Jr., Cell Volume 147, Issue 4, 11 November 2011, Pages 934–946 Continue reading “Scientists scooped by evolution”

Blueprints of the Afterlife in the NY Times

About a quarter of the way through the book I’m finding this to be a great mix of Snow Crash-type characters in a world that would give Philip Dick a run for his money, with hints of Oryx and Crake and Against the Day. My intent is not deny Boudinot’s originality – it’s to get you to read the book.

At the NY Times: All Sorts of Strange Stuff Happens When You Destroy the World: Ryan Boudinot’s Novel ‘Blueprints of the Afterlife’, by JOHN SCHWARTZ

This novel is, in a word, freaky. Woo-jin, the dishwasher, finds a young woman’s body. It is taken away by the police, and he finds it again. But the first body is still in the morgue. Continue reading “Blueprints of the Afterlife in the NY Times”

The latest evolutionary developments have passed me by

“Geolocating Tweets”:

As the rising generation replaces us, with their seemingly inborn familiarity with all things IT, does this make them in effect a new species? A species possessing the solution to the riddle of existence, the answers to all the questions which have plagued us — the old Hominids — for the last two million years? Continue reading “The latest evolutionary developments have passed me by”

More evidence that opposition to evolutionary biology is about religion, not science

Intelligent design and the oxymoronically titled creation science, despite their pretensions to being a scientifically principled opposition to one of the our most well-established scientific theories, have never been anything more than attempts to dress religion as science.

From the National Center for Science Education:

INDIANA CREATIONISM BILL PASSES THE SENATE

On January 31, 2012, the Indiana Senate voted 28-22 in favor of Senate Bill 89. As originally submitted, SB 89 provided, “The governing body of a school corporation may require the teaching of various theories concerning the origin of life, including creation science, within the school corporation.” On January 30, 2012, however, it was amended in the Senate to provide instead, “The governing body of a school corporation may offer instruction on various theories of the origin of life. The curriculum for the course must include theories from
multiple religions, which may include, but is not limited to, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Scientology.”

Unfortunately for the Indiana senate, this kind of non-stealth creationism legislation has a long, perfect record of complete and expensive failure in court.