Last week I posted a video of Dan Telfer arguing with his audience over who is the best dinosaur. Well, The Black Keys, a blues band from Akron, Ohio came up with the best dinosaur. His name is Frank, and he is a Funkasaurus rex. See and, more importantly, listen for yourselves. Epic dino-slide is epic. Tighten Up!
Update: the video embedding has been disabled. You can still watch it on YouTube.
Arcade Fire’s new album, The Suburbs is officially available today. Unofficially, there is already a fan video. Pretty cool. You can also listen to a stream of the entire album from NPR.
Got back recently from the ISMB 2010 meeting in Boston. Five days amongst great science and scientists. I microblogged some of the talks on my FriendFeed channel, but definitely not all I attended. All the keynotes were microblogged by many of the attendees on the ISMB 2010 feed.
An a conference is not just about the talks, but food and drink too: Newbury street is filled with great restaurants. And seeing people you have not seen in a while. And goodies at the booths. My favorite was a Dengue virus fold-your-own kit at the PDB booth.
And here are the Dropkick Murphys, a Boston-based Celtic punk band singing “I’m Shipping up to Boston”. Yes, it’s “that song” from The Departed.
Just saw Flash Gordon (1980 movie) with my kids. I was about the same age when I saw it first. Being a child lacking any humor, and professing myself to be an avid and serious science fiction fan, I considered watching this campy over-the-top self-parodying science fiction movie a complete waste of time. OhOne and OhToo have a much better sense of irony, and they totally got it, as did I (this time around). Awesome soundtrack by Queen. No one could have done it better.
A pheromone in the male mouse’s tears causes a positive sexual response in female mice who smell it. The neural pathway was meticulously mapped in a study published today in Nature. Females ready to copulate arch their back and pose their behind when the pheromone, ESP1 is secreted. Females not ready to copulate usually just run away.
Pheromones in tears may have evolved because tear fluid lingers in the fur, and female mice often groom the faces of other mice. Crying for sex does not work in humans though, as quite a few of us know. Anyhow, this study of tear-induced sex reminded me of this masterpiece by Prince, before he was the Artist Formerly Known as Prince.
This Cincinnati group played a concert today (Thursday) at the uptown park at Oxford Ohio. A trio with Sonny on guitar, Dennis “Willy D” Williams – bass & vocals, and Dave Fair- drums & vocals. They played powerful electric blues-rock, with great covers of Blind Willie McTell, Robert Johnson and many originals. Sonny played a variety of guitars, switching between a slide lap guitar, a Debro and a Gibson Flying V. At one time he stepped off stage playing his lap guitar and let the children in the audience walk up to him and see him play. Strong blues played by a friendly band on a beautiful summer night. A great way to end the week.
Sonny showing his pickings to the younger audience at uptown Oxford, OH
Playing Crossroads Motel. Not sure where or when this was recorded:
Once again, Black Cat Zoot, whose walkin’ is always swingin’:
In case you have been vacationing in a parallel universe in the past two days, you should have heard about the new synthetic bacterium created at the J Craig Venter Institute. In a nutshell, the scientific team synthesized an artificial chromosome of the bacterium Mycoplasma mycoides and transferred it to another bacterium, Mycoplasma capricolum. The capricolum cells with the mycoides genome proved viable, and were named Mycoplasma mycoides JCVI-syn1.0. Even more briefly they synthesized Bug A’s DNA from scratch, put it in bug B, turning B into A.
I wanted to write a blog post about it. I really did. Something original, inspiring, funny, critical and deep. But so many others beat me to it, so no matter what angle I took, it’s already been covered in the last 24 hours. Informative? Yes. Debateable achievement? Yes yes, and yes. Thoughts from bigshots? Yes. Funny? totally. Religiously suspect? Verily. Government weighing in? Naturally. Reddit? Yes, even Reddit! (Thanks Shirley!)
So here’s the interview Science journal conducted with Craig Venter:
Or, if you’d rather, the Scorpions’ comment:
And the paper in Science. I’m done.
This has been going around the intertubes for a while now. Still very cool.
If the title of this post makes you cringe, then you belong to a minority of people who realize why the phrase “highly evolved” is so wrong. Unfortunately, “highly evolved” (as an absolute term) and “more evolved” (as a comparative term) seem to be used all-too frequently. They are uttered not only by non-scientists and non-biologists but even by scientists who should know better. Even when they catch themselves after blurting out “highly evolved” in a conversation (or, more embarrassingly, in a lecture), the damage is done. Yet another Freudian (Darwinian?) slip that tells of a fundamentally bad grasp on evolution. And, yes, I know, this topic has been written about by many of my betters, who are vastly more evolved better writers than I, with much better breadth and depth of knowledge of evolution, and a reach to a much wider audience.
More evolved? Source: Wikimedia commons, public domain.
So why am I writing about it? Well, this is my blog and ranting in it is my prerogative. And despite the Richard Dawkinses and Steven Jay Goulds of this world, the use of this phrase still persists. So it is up to us foot soldiers of the blogging community to do our own modest bit. If I prevent any of my six readers from being tempted to utter this phrase the next time it is (wrongly) deemed appropriate, then I have done my bit.
Why is this “highly evolved” used so much? And why is it wrong?
Consider the sponge, and then consider Albert Einstein. There are certain traits that Einstein had, that a sponge does not. We deem these traits to be of merit. Einstein developed a fundamental theory in physics. He played the violin. He ate with a knife and fork, had binocular color vision, opposable thumbs and he cultivated his facial hair in the form of a mustache.
A sponge… well, to be brief, does not have all those qualities we hold in such high merit. It kinda sits there at the bottom of the shallow ocean, flopping about, filter feeding, pooping and apparently not much else. Clearly, there are qualities to Einstein that make him more interesting than the sponge.
Less evolved? Source: Wikimedia Commons
Einstein seems, intuitively, to be more complex than a sponge, and that complexity can be quantified directly, in many ways. Actually, this is a pretty contentious point by itself: can we speak of organism complexity? Can we quantify the complexity of an organism and compare between different species? And what exactly would the complexity metric we choose tell us?
But let us assume, for argument’s sake, that our intuition that Einstein is more complex than a sponge is correct. For example, we can imagine a measure derived from the diversity and number of cells. Obviously there are more cell types in Einstein than in a sponge. Does that mean he is also more evolved? Are humans a more evolved than sponges? Chimps? After all, did life not start 3.85 billion years ago as simple and over time became more complex? Progressing, as it were from simple unicellular bacteria through more complex sponges all the way to the crowning achievement of humans? Had humans not, in a sort of (alas, Pyrrhic) victory, mastered the Earth and competed with many of earth’s species to the latter’s extinction? Isn’t competition what evolution is all about? And isn’t human victory a direct result of human complexity making humans “more evolved”? So isn’t “complexity” an end product of evolution, the more complex you are the more successful you are, and the more evolved you are?
No, no, no, no, no, and no.
The reason for this series of compounding errors is the mistaken notion that evolution by natural selection is a progression resulting in a production of increasingly complex life. Evolution is not goal oriented, and there is no teleology involved. The increasing complexity of organisms along time may seem to involve a progressive process, but there is none. It is a “statistical illusion”. What do I mean by that? Well, life did start out in less complex forms, that became more complex. But the less complex forms remained as well. Thus the distribution of complexity increased over time, but there is no directionality towards progress: the less complex life remained around as well. But over 3.85B years, complexity has had a chance to manifest itself in life, as natural selection favored some initial complexities, and those extended to become even more complex. Yes, we can trace a direct route from the first multicellular organisms, through sponges, invertebrates, vertebrates. But humans, chimps, sponges and bacteria living on Earth today are the result of exactly the same selective forces that have shaped life since it crawled out of an underwater volcano, or wherever. Complexity emerged over time, and is still emerging. But complex organisms are being added to the pool of life, rather than replacing the simple organisms. The result is an increase of a distribution of complexity levels, not the moving of an entire curve of complexity rightwards.
Apparent progress due to a to a 'wall' restricting where random change can take things. Adapted from SJ Gould. Reproduced under CC from talkorigins.org
The point I am trying to make is that humans may be more complex than sponges, but we are not “more evolved” nor are we “highly evolved”. There is no progressive process, and all of life on earth is the result of the same 3.85B years of selective pressures.
For a really good historical overview of teleological, or purpose-driven, thought in evolution, look to talkorigins.org.
Few know that Einstein was teaching evolution at Princeton. Physics was just a cover.
All of this does not mean that Highly Evolved by The Vines is not a kick-ass song. Listening to it is also a good way to get the rage from hearing “highly evolved” out of your system. Note the low complexity of the video:
Celebrate with a peanut butter and banana sandwich, while listening to The King.
Speaking of sampling bacteria, this ties in well with the previous post about GEBA. And by “well” I mean “in an alternate-universe/ altered-consciousness manner”.
The voices in the song are sampled from this KFC employee training tape. The video won a prize in machinima.com. So if you like World of Warcraft, bacteria, KFC, sampled music, or any combination of the above, you’re gonna love this.
Google flew the green-starred flag of hope yesterday, in celebration of the 150th birthday of a man who constructed a whole language based upon hope. He called himself Doctor Hopeful, and he wanted that the language he created would help break down national barriers. He made it easy to learn, so that people would be motivated to learn it as their second language. They would then speak the Language of Hope, understand each other, and not be so insular. As isolation breed suspicion, and suspicion breeds hostility and ultimately violence.
Unfortunately, neither his language nor his vision of a more understanding and tolerant mankind caught on. One hundred and fifty years after his birth, and 122 after the publication of his book, the world is no friendlier nor tolerant than it was when Ludwig Zamenhof set to correct it by publishing his book International Language: Foreword And Complete Textbook under the pseudonym of Doktoro Esperanto.
English has become the second language of choice for many. The increasing dominance of English speaking powers throughout the last 200 years resulting in English as the lingua franca is interpreted by many that English was adopted as an imposition from above. English is perceived by many who wish to preserve their non-Anglo cultures as overwhelming, a threat to their local culture, which would be diluted to extinction through constant bombardment by English speaking movies, TV shows, and Internet provided content. Zamenhof would not have liked that, as Esperanto was intended to be an adoption of choice, without carrying any threatening cultural baggage.
The Internet itself is hailed by many as a medium to strike down barriers to knowledge and help communications. But national firewalls, traffic monitoring, crackdowns on content sharing, criminal abuse and vilification in the popular media cause many to see it more as a threat to their own society, rather than a promise for all societies. And let us not forget that it is still mostly a developed world’s medium, with most of the content and cultural narrative originating from rich countries.
Neither a world-wide communication technology nor a globally dominant language seem to have brought us closer to the peaceful, understanding and egalitarian world that Zamenhof envisioned. We should be mindful of that, and of Esperanto. The Esperanto language is viewed as a curiosity at best. Esperantists as people with a quaint hobby. Happily, Esperantists do not view themselves as such. They are continuing the mission of Zamenhof for a more understanding humankind. Esperanto is kept alive by the two million who speak it, by national and international organizations, by books, magazines, and even music. Happy Birthday Doctor Hopeful.
Martin Weise of the Swedish Esperanto-singing Band Persone. from his Solo Album “more than nothing” Pli ol nenio.
I am preparing an introduction-to-fungi class. Found this cool Aspergillus-related animation:
Life on Earth never fails:
Not sure what this is:
Of course, there are the zombie ants I have written about before:
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