Author: Mike White

Genomes, Books, and Science Fiction

Missouri legislative session is off to a solid creationist start

It’s creationism season in my back yard again. The National Center for Science Education has the goods as usual:

First, your typical equal time time bill, complete with inept politicians’ definitions of scientific terms – in defective alphabetical order, no less:

House Bill 1227, introduced in the Missouri House of Representatives on January 10, 2012, would, if enacted, require “the equal treatment of science instruction regarding evolution and intelligent design,” according to the legislature’s summary of the bill. The equal treatment provision would apply to both public elementary and secondary schools and to “any introductory science course taught at any public institution of higher education” in Missouri. Continue reading “Missouri legislative session is off to a solid creationist start”

The genome is a huge haystack. How do you find the needle?

The complexity of the machinery by which our cells run is so extreme that one of the key questions in biological research is, why doesn’t the whole thing just collapse like a house of cards in a tornado? Another way of phrasing this question is to ask, where does the information come from to keep everything running smoothly?

Consider this: the crucial task of gene regulation is carried out in large part by transcription factors, regulatory proteins that recognize and bind to very short, degenerate DNA sequences located somewhere in the rough (sometimes very rough) vicinity of genes. Once they bind, transcription factors recruit the machinery that activates their target genes. (You can also have transcription factors that repress target genes.) This is all good, until you consider the fact that a human transcription factor has to find its target sequences from among the 3 billion base pairs in the human genome. Some plant and fish transcription factors have to search through genomes with more than 100 billions base pairs. So the question is, why don’t transcription factors get lost? Where are they asking for directions?

On finding needles in the genomic haystack Continue reading “The genome is a huge haystack. How do you find the needle?”

Sometimes it is a good idea to browse through my TOC emails

… because I find stuff like this:

Hunter–gatherers and other primates as prey, predators, and competitors of snakes:

Relationships between primates and snakes are of widespread interest from anthropological, psychological, and evolutionary perspectives, but surprisingly, little is known about the dangers that serpents have posed to people with prehistoric lifestyles and nonhuman primates. Here, we report ethnographic observations of 120 Philippine Agta Negritos when they were still preliterate hunter–gatherers, among whom 26% of adult males had survived predation attempts by reticulated pythons. Six fatal attacks occurred between 1934 and 1973. Agta ate pythons as well as deer, wild pigs, and monkeys, which are also eaten by pythons, and therefore, the two species were reciprocally prey, predators, and potential competitors. Natural history data document snake predation on tree shrews and 26 species of nonhuman primates as well as many species of primates approaching, mobbing, killing, and sometimes eating snakes. These findings, interpreted within the context of snake and primate phylogenies, corroborate the hypothesis that complex ecological interactions have long characterized our shared evolutionary history.

Hating snakes is deeply ingrained in our evolutionary past. I feel validated.

The literature of the 21st century is science fiction?

Recently I’ve been engaged in a little reading project – reading post-Hiroshima End of the World science fiction side by side with the best mainstream literature of the 1950’s. What I see is that 1950’s sci-fi at the time ignored the last 100 years of development in literature, while the mainstream literature of the time ignored the last 100 years of technological development. Very slowly, this has changed over the last 60 years, and we’ve reached the point where things are getting really exciting…

Guardian columnist Damien Walter on “Why Science Fiction is the Literature of Change: Continue reading “The literature of the 21st century is science fiction?”

John Philip Sousa: recordings will kill music

From Ars Technica, here’s composer John Phillip Sousa coming out against the Gramophone in 1906:

“From the days when the mathematical and mechanical were paramount in music, the struggle has been bitter and incessant for the sway of the emotional and the soulful,” he wrote. “And now in this the twentieth century come these talking and playing machines and offer again to reduce the expression of music to a mathematical system of megaphones, wheels, cogs, disks, cylinders, and all manner of revolving things which are as like real art as the marble statue of Eve is like her beautiful living breathing daughters.”

His piece concluded, “Do they not realize that if the accredited composers who have come into vogue by reason of merit and labor are refused a just reward for their efforts a condition is almost sure to arise where all incentive to further creative work is lacking and compositions will no longer flow from their pens or where they will be compelled to refrain from publishing their compositions at all and control them in manuscript? What, then, of the playing and talking machines?”