Back in the nineteenth century (i.e. more than one hundred years ago) there was a biologist named Louis Agassiz who didn't like Darwin's radical ideas about evolution. Agassiz, a very famous professor at Harvard, thought that there were major gaps n the fossil record and he lamented the apparent lack of transitional fossils. What he was looking for were fossils of direct ancestors of modern species and not their close cousins.
Stephen Meyer thinks this old debate is still relevant today so he writes it up in Darwin's Doubt as if nobody in the past one hundred years ever thought of an explanation. It fooled Denyse O'Leary (not hard) so she blogged about it today [Louis Agassiz: The selective incompleteness of the fossil record].
This reminds me of a famous photograph of the statue of Louis Agassiz embedded upside down in the courtyard in front of the zoology building at Stanford University. The statue tumbled from its place above the entrance during the San Francisco earthquake of 1906.
According to legend, a passing scientist remarked that,
Louis Agassiz was great in the abstract but not in the concrete.1
Actually, it would be even better to say that Agassiz looks better in the concrete than in the abstract [see Agassiz in the Concrete and Persecution of Religious Scientists]. By the 1920s (earlier in Europe) Agassiz's reputation had been severely damaged by his willingness to let religious convictions dictate his science.2
1. The story is apocryphal (a polite word for "false"). The quotation has been attributed to several men, including the President of Stanford, but all have denied it. Nevertheless, it's too good a story to abandon just because it happens to be untrue!
2. Stephen Jay Gould held the Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology Chair at Harvard from 1982 until his death in 2002. Alexander Agassiz was Louis Agassiz's son. Alexander served as President of the National Academy of Sciences.
November 22, 1963: President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
April 4, 1968: Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.
June 6, 1968: Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated.
July 21, 1969: Neil Armstrong walks on the moon.
You tell me that I need to forget these events as though they never happened?
You tell me that you don't care because you weren't born yet?
This post was prompted by something that Andrea Habura wrote on Facebook. She says that she is an "R&D Scientist at Next Advance, Inc." Here's what she wrote ...
The demographics of Camelot: As you will no doubt have heard by now, today is the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination. I've also been repeatedly informed that everyone is still shocked and saddened by it, and that "we" will never forget how we felt when we heard the news.
Dear newscasters: Most Americans were either not alive yet, or too young to notice. Only 25% of Americans are over 55 (http://www.indexmundi.com/united_states/demographics_profile.html), and some of them were living in other countries in 1963. To most of us, the shooting in Dallas was about like what happened in Ford's Theater, with the exception that our teachers seemed to feel *really* strongly about it. Let it go.
Just for the record, I understand how my parents felt on May 5, 1945 (VE Day) even though I wasn't born yet. I understand how they felt when Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed by atomic bombs. I think I know how they felt on March 29, 1945 when President Roosevelt died.
I understand what my parents and my grandparents went through on October 29, 1929 when the stock market crashed and life's saving were lost. I listened when they told me of the pain and suffering during the great depression. I never told them to "let it go."
I'd like to think I know how traumatic it must have been for Americans on April 15, 1865 even though I wasn't there.
Dear Andrea,
The world did not begin when you were born. Listen and learn from your elders. You will be a better person.
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. George Santayana
It was about 3pm and I was sitting in my geometry class at Nepean High School in Ottawa, Canada. This was my final year of high school. I liked this course and I liked my teacher (Mr. Pollack).
The loudspeaker crackled and I heard the Principle's voice. Mr. Callan said that President Kennedy had been shot and killed in Dallas.
Kennedy was not my President but it was still a great shock. It seemed like Camelot had been destroyed.1 I spent the next three days in front of the television set. Nobody knew what was going to happen to America.
You know how everyone says they know exactly where they were and what they were doing when major events happen? That's certainly true for me on the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated. It's one of only two days in my life that I remember so vividly.2 If it was traumatic for a young Canadian boy, I can't imagine what it must have felt like for Americans.
How many of you remember Nov. 22, 1963?
It looks very naive now but back in 1963 we really believed that Camelot and King Arthur could be real. Here's Richard Burton in the Broadway production. It seems like everybody had the album.
1. The musical, Camelot had been playing on Broadway since 1960 and everyone was familiar with the music from the LP (record album). The Kennedy family and the Kennedy administration were intimately associated with the idea of Camelot.
For some reason the title reminds me of "What Does the Fox Say." Oh well, PZ Myers is desperately interested in knowing which way Darwin walked when he took a stroll on the Sandwalk [An important historical question!].
has died [Frederick Sanger: Double Nobel Prize winner dies at 95]. Sanger is one of the few people to win two Nobel Prizes. His first was for sequencing insulin and his second was for developing a technique for sequencing DNA (Sanger sequencing).
Most people, even most scientists, have no idea how much he influenced molecular biology. Sanger worked at Cambridge (UK). When Francis Crick first arrived at Cambridge in 1947 he soon met a number of important scientists. Here's how Horace Freeland Judson describes Sanger in The Eight Day of Creation (pp. 88-89).
One of these in particular, the biochemist Frederick Sanger, came to have great intellectual importance in Crick's thinking and then to molecular biologists generally as the field developed. Sanger is temperamentally and in scientific style Crick's opposite. Where many scientists, Crick among them, flower at conferences and do a great deal of their science by talking, Singer is a quiet man—reticent, even shy, a man who worked with his hands, at the bench. He almost never talked to the press, never despite the editor's importuning wrote the big article for Scientific American. One might spot him bicycling to work on a spring morning, in a drab brown coat, in the rain. Once I stopped to talk with him in the corridor of the laboratory building, where he was waiting in the queue for his turn at the ultraviolet-light box, in order to illuminate the spots on a sheet of chromatography paper he was holding. Sanger is a Quaker by upbringing, and stayed at Cambridge through the second world war; holding only a junior fellowship in the biochemistry department, and even when the war dried up the usual sources of research funds, with family money he was able to keep going. In the course of nearly a decade, beginning in the mid-forties, Sanger settled upon the new techniques of chromatography to determine the amino-acid sequences of the two chains of the bovine insulin molecule. He proved that the sequences are unique and always the same, meaning that every molecule of insulin in every cow is exactly like every other. Yet the sequences show no general periodicities: they are not predictable from ordinary chemical rules.
Sanger published very rarely. His papers came to be red with heart in mouth by other scientists, for they are technically brilliant. Even as he worked, though, the news slowly spread and the implications sank in. For one thing, his department held a biochemistry tea club where perhaps once a month research that was relatively finished, though not yet submitted for publication, was presented. Brigitte Askonas, later an important figure in immunology in England, came to Sanger's lab as a doctoral student late in 1948, staying on into 1952. "Even then, Fred had only a minor fellowship—and some had wanted to kick him out," she told me once. "When one would ask him how his work was going, he would say very little. 'Oh, I've got another peptide.'" Then at a lab meeting he would bring a stack of cards showing overlapping short sequences, and slowly, diffidently, build up his latest segment of the molecule. "Crick always came to the tea club," Askonas said. "And he always asked awkward questions. Enfant terrible questions. And then he would explain, somewhat disingenuously, 'You see, I'm just learning.'" Sanger's general conclusion was forceful by 1949, when he went to the annual symposium on quantitative biology at Cold Spring Harbor (his only such visit). In a paper published on the first of June of that year—the earliest of his magisterial series of papers on insulin appearing every odd-numbered year until 1955—he was already able to say that "there appears to be no principle that defines the nature of the [amino-acid] residue" occupying any particular position in a protein. The conclusion was definitive by 1951. For this work and the methods of sequencing he invented to do it, Sanger was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1958. (He later turned to the more difficult problem of sequencing nucleic acids, which earned him a share of another Nobel Prize, in 1980. Crick, from his first arrival in Cambridge, new of Sanger's work step by step, months and even years before new steps were published.
Today is November 11th and the cannons started blasting at 11am in Queen's Park just across the street from the building where my office is located. It's a day when we should remember the horrors of war and the waste of lives, both civilian and military. It's a day when we should resolve never to let army generals run the world. It's a day to reflect on the many times that we failed to keep the peace and the terrible cost of those mistakes.
So how do we celebrate peace and remember the evils of armies, guns, and bombs? In Toronto we do it by a public display of soldiers dressed in their finest uniforms bedecked with medals. And the army brings its cannons. It's all very glorious.
I long for the day when we don't even have an army and all the cannons are rusting in some junk heap. That will be the day when we have truly learned about the evils of war and the purpose of November 11th.
Alfred Russel Wallace died1 on this day in 1913. That's exactly one hundred years ago.
Jerry Coyne has posted a guest article by Andrew Berry that should be required reading for everyone who admires Wallace but wonders why he didn't get much credit for natural selection [A guest post for Wallace Day].
Today is the 100th anniversary of the death of Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913), co-discoverer with Charles Darwin of the theory of evolution by natural selection.
If you follow us at all at ENV you'll already know that the scientific and scholarly communities have done a terrible disservice to Wallace's legacy by airbrushing out the fact that he broke with Darwin over what University of Alabama science historian Michael Flannery calls "intelligent evolution." That is, Wallace's steadily more certain and detailed view that an "overruling intelligence" guided the evolutionary process. He anticipated major elements of the modern theory of intelligent design. Oh, the irony! It burns! It burns!
Well, the massive effort by scientists, journalists, bloggers and others to defend Darwinian theory often proceeds by such airbrushing. You can fight back and counter the censors by passing along the historical truth to friends, students, and teachers, online and in person.
...
It's time everyone agreed to be honest about Wallace -- about the important historical truth that one of the two men to first spell out the modern theory of evolution came to reject that theory as an adequate explanation of life's development, in favor of proto-intelligent design. Toward that end, please join us in refuting the history deniers.
You just can't make this stuff up. Every time you think that the IDiots can't get any worse, along comes one of them to show you that you were being far too optimistic.
1. I refuse to use the stupid phrase "passed away."
On July 14, 1789 a bunch of French citizens stormed the Bastille and liberated a handful of political prisoners [Bastille Day]. It marks the beginning of the French Revolution.
One of Ms. Sandwalk's ancestors is William Playfair, inventor of pie charts and histograms [Bar Graphs, Pie Charts, and Darwin]. He's famous because he knew Erasmus Darwin. He's also famous because there are stories that he took part in the Storming of the Bastille while living in Paris.
One the other hand, there are plenty of things for which he is less than famous [William Playfair] and there's a a good reason why his children left England and migrated to Canada becoming farmers near Perth, Ontario.
Sixty years ago on this day, Nature published three back-to-back papers on the structure of DNA. It was a momentous day for science. Here's how Horace Judson describes it in The Eighth Day of Creations (pp. 154-155)...
The letter to Nature appeared in the April 25 issue. [It was submitted on April 2—LAM] To those of its readers who were close to the questions, and who had not already heard the news, the letter must come off like a string of depth charges in a column sea. "We wish to suggest a structure for the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid (D.N.A.). This structure has novel features which are of considerable biological interest," the letter began; at the end, "It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material." That last sentence has been called one of the most coy statements in the literature of science. According to Watson, Crick wrote it. Wilkins's paper followed, signed also by two of his associates at King's College, A. R. Stokes and H. R. Wilson. It was a restatement of helical diffraction theory, and sprang to life and significance only in the last paragraphs, where Wilkins briefly reported that his x-ray diffraction studies of intact sperm heads and bacteriophage—both, of course, containing a high proportion of DNA—gave patterns that suggested that DNA in living creatures has a helical structure similar to the model just proposed. The note by Franklin and Gosling came next. It was a revision and extension of their draft from the middle of March, in the light of the model. It presented the crucial diffraction photo structure B and analyze that and the other experimental evidence to show—with curt authority—that Franklin's data were compatible with Watson and Crick's structure.
"We wish to suggest a structure for the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid (D.N.A.). This structure has novel features which are of considerable biological interest."
"The biological significance of a two-chain nucleic acid unit has been noted (see preceding communication). The evidence that the helical structure discussed above does, in fact, exist in intact biological systems is briefly as follows: ..."
"Thus, while we do not attempt to offer a complete interpretation of the fibre-diagram of structure B, we may state the following conclusions. The structure is probably helical. The phosphate groups lie on the outside of the structural unit, on a helix of diameter about 20 Å. The structural unit probably consists of two co-axial molecules which are not equally spaced along the fiber axis, their mutual displacement being such as to account for the variation of observed intensities of the innermost maxima on the layer lines; if one molecule is displaced from the other by about three-eights of the fibre-axis period, this would account for the absence of the fourth layer line maxima and the weakness of the sixth. Thus, our general ideas are not inconsistent with the model proposed by Watson and crick in the preceding communication."
The Big Island (Hawaii) is one giant pile of lava from five different volcanoes. The large one, slightly below center in the photo, is Mauna Loa and it is still an active volcano. You can see streaks of old lava flows spreading out from the summit. Mauna Kea, the slightly higher volcano above center, is now dormant.1 The active volcano that tourist visit is Kilauea, below and to the right on Mauna Lao.
This is the dry side of the island and the surrounding area is very desert-like. As you can see from the photo I took (below), the resort area is not desert at all. That lush vegetation requires constant watering. (I don't know were the water comes from.) You can also see the parts of the lava flow that have not been transformed. It's very impressive to see it up close.
The photos are from the balcony of our apartment. When we woke up today there was snow on the top of the mountain. The temperature here is about 30°C (or 86°F for the only major country that isn't metric.2)
[Hat Tip: Ms. Sandwalk took the photos of snow-capped Mauna Loa with her telephoto lens.
1. That's where the Hawaiian observatories are located.
2. Liberia and Burma are the other two countries that aren't metric.
The USS Arizona (BB-39) is an American battleship built during World War I. It was modernized and upgraded in 1930.
The Arizona was hit by a Japanese bomb during the attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. The magazine in her forward turret exploded and the ship sank within minutes. The explosion killed 1,177 of her crew. The ship was not salvageable, unlike most of the other ships sunk on that day. The USS Arizona Memorial was built over the remains of the ship to honor the men who died in the attack. Here's an aerial view of the memorial.
We visited the USS Arizona Memorial on Thursday Feb. 14, 2013 and I've included some of my photos. Click to enlarge, especially the last two photos.
The USS Missouri is an American battleship commissioned in June 1944, toward the end of World War II. It served as the flagship of the American Third Fleet under Admiral William F. Halsey, Jr. In early August 1945, the Missouri was bombarding installations on the coast of Japan when the atomic bombs were dropped.
On September 2, 1945 the Missouri was docked in Tokyo harbor. Japanese representatives signed the surrender documents that formally ended World War II. The brass disk (below) is the site where the signing took place.
Biochemistry students have been learning this little bit of history for over fifty years. I discovered, quite by accident, that there's a video of Linus Pauling telling the story ...
Today is the Ides of March a famous day in European history because of Brutus, Cassius and a bunch of other Roman dudes.
Did you ever wonder what an "ide" was. Here's the explanation from Wikipedia [Ides of March].
The word Ides comes from the Latin word "Idus" and means "half division" especially in relation to a month. It is a word that was used widely in the Roman calendar indicating the approximate day that was the middle of the month. The term was used for the 15th day of the months of March, May, July, and October, and the 13th day of the other months.
I think you have to be more than 50 years old to appreciate this skit. You might have to be Canadian.1
1. Wayne & Shuster are graduates of the University of Toronto.
The United States has just honored two biochemists, an evolutionary biologist, and some other scientist by issuing stamps to commemorate their achievements [American Scientists (Forever)].
Melvin Calvin (1911-1997) is famous for working out an important pathway of carbon fixation known today as the Calvin cycle. This pathway is prominent in photosynthetic bacteria and in chloroplasts. It is often considered to be a fundamental part of photosynthesis, although some workers prefer to maintain the distinction. Calvin won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1961.
Severo Ochoa (1905-1993) received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1959 along with Arthur Kornberg. Ochoa demonstrated that RNA could be synthesized in vitro using purified RNA polymerase. Later on he helped create synthetic polynucleotides that helped crack the genetic code.
Asa Gray (1810-1888) is best known today as a friend of Charles Darwin and one of the early supporters of evolution in America. He was a botanist at Harvard for most of his career. The website says he "... became the principal American advocate of evolutionary theory in the mid-nineteenth century." I think it would be much more fair to say that Asa Gray was a strong supporter of evolution. He and Darwin had many discussions (by letter) on the mechanisms of evolution.
John Lennon died on Dec. 8, 1980 when he was shot four times in the back by Mark David Chapman. His ashes were scattered by Yoko Ono in Central Park in New York at the site of the Strawberry Fields Memorial.
That was thirty years ago today. A whole new generation has grown up since then and I fear we are in great danger of forgetting what Lennon and The Beatles did to help change our culture for the better.
Last night we watched the first two episodes of The Pillars of the Earth. They were fantastic. The story takes place in England during the time after the death of Henry I (1068-1135) and the civil war between Stephen and the Empress Matilda (Maud).1 This is near the end of my favorite period of history—the so-called dark ages.
Judging by the first two episodes, the show does a pretty good job of capturing the flavor of the era except that everyone looks far too healthy and beautiful. They all have good teeth.
Here's a brief history.
Henry I (1068-1135) is the King of England [Henry Beauclerc] who dies at the beginning of the series. He was the youngest son of William the Conqueror and took the throne of England (and the Duchy of Normandy) from his older brothers after much fighting.
Henry had two surviving legitimate children: Matilda (1102-1167) and his heir William Adelin (1103-1120). William died when he was only 17 years old when The White Ship sank on Nov. 25, 1120 during a voyage from France back to England. The sinking of the White Ship is the opening scene of the movie. (The ship set sail at night and smashed into a rock. Most of the crew and passengers were drunk. Everyone died of exposure.)
Matilda married Henry V, Holy Roman Emperor, when she was 13 years old and she became known as Empress Matilda at that point. She returned to England when her husband, Henry V, died in 1125. In the movie she is depicted as a young girl who is present when the King learns of his son's death on the White Ship. In fact, she was already 18 years old and married to the Holy Roman Emperor when the ship went down.
Empress Matilda, known as Maud in the movie, married Geoffrey Plantagenet, Count of Anjou in 1128. They had a son who eventually becomes Henry II of England and founds the Plantagenet dynasty. (Oops, I just gave away the ending! )
Henry I tried to ensure that his daughter Empress Matilda (Maud) would become Queen of England on his death but that didn't work out. The Norman aristocracy were not prepared to accept a woman as ruler and they helped install Stephen of Blois (1096-1154) as King of England in 1135. Stephen was the son of Adela of Normandy, daughter of William the Conqueror.
Henry I had about two dozen illegitimate children by many different women. Several of them drowned when the White Ship went down. His oldest "bastard" son was Robert, 1st Earl of Gloucester (1090-1147). Robert is depicted in the movie as a strong supporter of Maud right from the beginning but the real history is much more complicated. He initially supported Stephen but later on he was the most important leader of the civil war that became known as The Anarchy.
Elizabeth, Princess of England is another of Henry's illegitimate children. She married Fergus, Lord of Galloway, ancestors of the Stewarts of Scotland.2.
1. I love it when they make movies of my relatives! I am a descendant of Andrew Ward (1597-1659) of Fairfield Connecticut who traces his ancestry back to William de Longespee (1152-1206) the illegitimate son of Henry II of England (1133-1189). [My Family and Other Emperors]. Henry II is Maud's baby in the opening episodes of the movie. UPDATE: Turns out I am NOT related to Andrew Ward after all! But I do count Geoffrey Plantagenet and Matilda as ancestors through Henry II to my Scottish Stewart ancestors.
2. I am also a descendant, via the Stewarts of Perthshire, from Elizabeth.
On the drive back from Reims to Brussels we stopped for dinner in Bouillon. We had a wonderful meal in a restaurant on the bank of the river. Here's me and my three "girls."
Zoë and her grandmother (Mamère) went off in search of the prince. The "prince" is Godfrey of Bouillon (~1060-1100) one of the leaders of the First Crusade. He was the first ruler of the Kingdom of Jerusalem (1099). Bouillon was an important place in the Middle Ages. The ruins of the castle attest to its glory days.
Eustace I and Matilda are Zoë's direct ancestors via their other son Lambert II, Count of Lens (1025-1054). We descend from his daughter Judith of Lens whose mother (wife of Lambert II) was Adelaide of Normandy, sister of William the Conqueror.
The majority of people reading this blog are also descendants of these people. You just don't know it.
