adaptivecomplexity's blog

Non-coding DNA Function... Surprising?

Michael White — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 21:51:12 +0000

The existence of functional, non-protein-coding DNA is all too frequently portrayed as a great surprise uncovered by genome sequencing projects, both in large media outlets and in scientific publications that should have better quality control in place. Eric Lander, writing a Human Genome Project 10th anniversary retrospective in Nature, explains the real surprise about non-coding DNA that was revealed by big omics projects.

Yep, This Should Get You Fired

Michael White — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 17:41:25 +0000

An Ohio 8th-grade creationist science teacher with a habit of branding crosses on his students' arms has been fired, after a long and tedious process and a lawsuit that cost the school district some big bucks.

The referee who evaluated the case for termination nicely summed up in one sentence (PDF) exactly what you can't do when you're a public school science teacher:

...He persisted in his attempts to make eighth grade science what he thought it should be - an examination of accepted scientific curriculum with the discerning eye of Christian Doctrine.

No, There Are No Alien Bar Codes In Our Genomes

Michael White — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 18:23:08 +0000

Even for a physicist, this is bad: Larry Moran, in preparation for the appropriate dose of ridicule that this situation deserves, quotes physicist and pop-science author Paul Davies:

Another physical object with enormous longevity is DNA. Our bodies contain some genes that have remained little changed in 100 million years. An alien expedition to Earth might have used biotechnology to assist with mineral processing, agriculture or environmental projects. If they modified the genomes of some terrestrial organisms for this purpose, or created their own micro-organisms from scratch, the legacy of this tampering might endure to this day, hidden in the biological record.

Politics Matters...

Michael White — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 20:18:52 +0000

... as depressing as that may be to hear. Some friends recently described their December trip to India, the first time they've visited in years. India's economy is on fire, unleashing some tremendous pent-up economic demand. What was striking, my friends related, was how strongly India's economic development is geared toward the future, towards not only catching up with wealthier, more developed nations, but also towards anticipating and meeting economic challenges that loom in the future. This is in stark contrast to the US, which seems, at best, focused on defending the status quo.

Scientific Method In Decline?

Michael White — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 19:03:00 +0000

Jonah Lehrer in The New Yorker about the slipperiness of the scientific method:

"The Truth Wears Off: Is There Something Wrong With The Scientific Method?"

The test of replicability, as it’s known, is the foundation of modern research. Replicability is how the community enforces itself. It’s a safeguard for the creep of subjectivity. Most of the time, scientists know what results they want, and that can influence the results they get. The premise of replicability is that the scientific community can correct for these flaws.

Airport Body Scanner Won't Give You Cancer

Michael White — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 15:50:54 +0000

With the big holidays just around the corner, thousands of folks are about to get their first taste of the TSA's new virtual strip search machines - X-ray body scanners. Privacy issues may be the main concern for most people, but the safety of these things has some people worried.

Apocalypse 1955: Growing Up Telepathic

Michael White — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 20:26:59 +0000

“What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate.”

The much-revered writers of the Golden Age of science fiction can be quite rough around the edges, even downright embarrassing on occasion. The writing is hurried, the plots of plot-driven books are disturbingly inconsistent, and the characters are primarily stock types and authorial mouthpieces. To top it off, many of these novels are ambitious, earnestly offered as novels of big ideas. These ideas are usually sympathetic (tolerance, freedom, racial equality, escape from religious tyranny), but generally reduced to platitudes expressed in long, somnolent sermons by the your standard pointy-headed philosopher-scientist.

Science Is Not Baseball - Almost Everyone's A Winner, Sort Of

Michael White — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 22:45:47 +0000

I like Nicholas Wade, and think that his latest NY Times piece on basic research is worth reading. However, I take issue with his overly simplistic characterization of how research works:

Basic research, the attempt to understand the fundamental principles of science, is so risky, in fact, that only the federal government is willing to keep pouring money into it. It is a venture that produces far fewer hits than misses....

Apocalypse 1958: The Tide Went Out

Michael White — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 17:03:08 +0000

A Nuclear Eco-Catastrophe

Apocalypse 1953: Homicidal Alien Blobs

Michael White — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 17:02:52 +0000

Arthur Clarke's Childhood's End was my main pick for 1953 in our survey of post-apocalyptic sci-fi, but John Wyndham's Kraken Wakes is another great apocalypse novel from the same year. (It was published as Out of the Deeps in the US. Apparently Americans weren't expected to know what Kraken means, until the second Pirates of the Caribbean movie, because now China Mieville can publish a novel just called Kraken and people purchase it.)

Why CNVs Explain My Kid's Grades

Michael White — Sun, 17 Oct 2010 03:17:51 +0000

'Copy Number Variants' (CNVs) are hot. A CNV is a sizeable chunk of DNA that's either missing from your genome or present in extra copies. Chunks of DNA get copied or deleted on a surprisingly frequent basis. We've all got CNVs, most cases they are probably benign, but CNVs are becoming an increasingly appreciated as a significant source of medically important genetic variation. 'Recently appreciated' because we now have the technology to detect CVNVs reliably.

Apocalypse 1957: On The Beach

Michael White — Sun, 17 Oct 2010 02:25:13 +0000

There will be no survivors

Exactly what nuclear world war would look like was a matter of diverse opinion in the nuclear apocalypse novels of the 1950‘s.

Many post-apocalyptic novels of this decade portrayed World War III as an essentially known if more extreme extension of the destructive experience of World War II, much the way that World War II was like World War I jacked up a notch.

60 Years Of End Of The World Sci-Fi: 1956

Michael White — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 11:04:32 +0000

Survivalism, British Style

John Christopher’s 1956 No Blade of Grass is an extremely compelling page turner that portrays our moral traditions and social glue as being so fragile that they can be swept away in a day. Compassion, mercy, and even friendliness are not as hard-wired as we would hope, and they quickly dissolve when the urgency of survival forces us to view all other people as competitors.

60 Years Of End Of The World Sci-Fi: 1955

Michael White — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 11:00:46 +0000

Post-apocalyptic Fundamentalism

Leigh Brackett's The Long Tomorrow is one of many post-apocalyptic novels that envision society returned to a 19th century agrarian state. The rural settings of these novels are commonly used to explore life in a society driven by fear, fear or technology, or change, or those who are different. A society based on fear of technology is what Leigh Brackett explores here.

60 Years Of End Of The World Sci-Fi: 1954

Michael White — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 11:00:46 +0000

Nature is never inexplicable

60 Years Of End Of The World Sci-Fi: 1953

Michael White — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 11:03:42 +0000

Alien Invasion and Evolutionary Succession

The possibility of human extinction in End of the World sci-fi is sometimes paired with a consideration of our next evolutionary step - a concept that is less scientific than it sounds (evolution shouldn't be considered in such linear terms), but one that does make an effective fictional tool for thinking about human impermanence.

Ending The World For 60 Years: More 1952

Michael White — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 15:48:12 +0000

Post-Holocaust Noble Savages

The $60,000 Man

Michael White — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 20:43:09 +0000

This is what your next doctor's visit will sound like after you get your genome sequenced:

60 Years Of End Of The World Sci-Fi: 1952

Michael White — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 17:53:08 +0000

Wilson Tucker’s 1952 The Long Loud Silence is The Road of the 1950’s.

It’s a pure survival story, one about the complete deterioration of society into a vicious, gritty state of no-holds-barred struggle after a nuclear and biological holocaust. Unlike many other post-apocalyptic novelists, Tucker doesn’t envision much society left at all after total destruction: there is no reversion to a pseudo-Native American tribal state, to early rural 19th century agrarianism, to feudalism, to a theocratic dystopia. A total Hobbesian (or Darwinian) state of nature prevails for decades after the catastrophe. Society does not rebuild.

60 Years Of End Of The World Sci-Fi: 1951

Michael White — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 04:13:28 +0000

For our 1951 pick, we have the work of one of the great British writers of sci-fi’s Golden Age. In The Day of the Triffids, John Wyndham presents a horror story of giant, ambulatory, flesh-eating plants that topple humans from their dominance of a world they thought they had tamed. The theme is common to other post-apocalyptic stories of the 1950’s: we may tame nature with our technological wizardry, but our undoing is our inability to tame ourselves. We take our dominance of the planet for granted - and it wouldn’t take much to find ourselves in a relentlessly hostile world where we have compete as a species with a new top dog.

60 Years Of End Of The World Sci-Fi: 1950

Michael White — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 00:50:16 +0000

Our 1950 pick is L. Sprague de Camp and P. Schuyler Miller's Genus Homo, a pulp adventure that takes place a million years in the future after after the genus Homo has destroyed itself, leaving the field wide open for other ape species to evolve higher intelligence, science, and technological war. Although Genus Homo was first published in book form in 1950, it was written for the pulp magazine Super Science Stories in 1941, and thus it really counts as a pre-Hiroshima novel. Nevertheless the book makes a clear reference to the possibility of humanity’s destruction by nuclear bombs, putting it firmly in the post-apocalyptic genre.

60 Years Of End Of The World Sci-Fi: 1949

Michael White — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 02:04:41 +0000

With 1949, we arrive at one of the big classics in the post-apocalyptic genre. George Stewart’s Earth Abides is epic in both scope and ambition, a bittersweet story that captures the immense scale on which nature operates, and which portrays the scientific achievements of human civilization as a minor ripple in nature’s broad course. It is a book focused on big themes: the reversibility of human history, the connection between technology and civilization, the impermanence of human achievements.

Citizen Science Isn't Enough Science For Citizens

Michael White — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 20:40:29 +0000

Via GenomeWeb's Daily Scan, some comments on the prospects for citizen science in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Only one of the three appears to be an actual research scientist, but they make good points about the role of citizen science in research. For example, Clifford A. Lynch, Director, Coalition for Networked information:

I'm not wild about the term "crowdsourcing" and I think it's actually important to disentangle the developments.

60 Years Of End Of The World Sci-Fi: 1948

Michael White — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 20:40:21 +0000

Written two years after the catastrophic destruction of World War II ended with the initiation of the nuclear age, Aldous Huxley's Ape and Essence is a graphically violent, sexually explicit, and surrealistic expression of Huxley’s bitter disappointment in humanity.

60 Years Of End Of The World Sci-Fi: 1947

Michael White — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 03:31:15 +0000

The End of the World as Farce

Our road to The Road begins in 1947, with Ward Moore's Greener Than You Think, an apocalyptic comic satire that just cries out for a movie adaptation by Trey Parker and Matt Stone.
The End of the World as Farce

60 Years Of Post-Apocalyptic Fiction: A Chronological Curriculum Of The Ultimate Catastrophe

Michael White — Sat, 29 May 2010 20:45:45 +0000

What does the Neanderthal genome have to with post-apocalyptic science fiction? It may seem like odd inspiration, but Neanderthals have aroused my interest in one of the most venerable genres of science fiction. Last summer I was awaiting the release of The Road movie, reading a piece of classic post-nuclear sci-fi (John Wyndham's 1955 The Chrysalids), and thinking about some recent news stories on the (then) forthcoming Neanderthal genome sequence.

I was struck by the thought that the last Neanderthals lived in what could be thought of as a post-apocalyptic world. They were going extinct. Did they notice? What kind of world did the last survivors live in?

Prospects For Understanding Complexity: A Final Rant

Michael White — Sun, 23 May 2010 03:58:44 +0000

In the final chapter of the book Complexity: A Guided Tour, Mitchell gets to the heart of the real issues that I've been griping about in this blog. She begins by citing a harsh, 1995 piece by John Horgan, “Is Complexity A Sham?”

The article contained two main criticisms. First, in Horgan’s view, it was unlikely that the field of complex systems would uncover any useful general principles, and second, he believed that the predominance of computer modeling made complexity a “fact-free science.”

Cell Phones, Cancer, Einstein

Michael White — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 16:10:35 +0000

I'm a big fan of arch-skeptic Bob Park, but his position on cell phones and cancer is just too simplistic:

Friction And Epistasis: You Can't Ignore 'em

Michael White — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 03:24:32 +0000

Personalized genetics is hot in the news right now, but in fact we're generally terrible at using genotypes to predict who is going to get a disease. One villain here is the phenomenon known as epistasis, which essentially means that the physiological effect of one genetic variant depends on what other genetic variants (in other genes) are hanging around in the same genome.

Eat Less, Abuse Science

Michael White — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 02:24:47 +0000

Eternity Soup, by Greg Critser

Harmony Books, 2010

Scientific Blogging's own Greg Critser has tackled the science and business of eternal youth in his latest book. It's an engaging and excellent read. Critser is a fine storyteller, mixing his discussion of science with the lively personalities of the people involved. The book covers the latest science behind aging, the people who have shaped their lifestyles around that science, and the businesses that are trying to capitalize prematurely on the science.