The good news is that atheists are no longer in last place! The bad news is that we have a long way to go to catch up with the Methodists.
[Hat Tip: Framing Science]
[Hat Tip: Framing Science]
It’s a couple of days off schedule but Gene Genie has arrived. I’d like to thank Berci for the opportunity once again. That said, here goes the juicy genetic content.The beautiful logo was created by Ricardo at My Biotech Life.
[Photo Credit: AAPPL]
Gregory, T.R. (2008) Understanding evolutionary trees. Evolution: Education and Outreach 1: 121-137. [doi:10.1007/s12052-008-0035-x] [PDF]
For five of the eight weeks that Tim Hortons ran the promotion, CBC host Stuart McLean and his 12-member tour bus drove from Fort St. John, B.C., to Fargo, N.D., perhaps braking for more Hortons outlets than any other vehicle on the road during that period.This is getting serious. Tim Hortons should not be making Stuart McLean upset [The Vinyl Cafe]. Before you know it, there will be a story about Dave and Morely at Tim Hortons and it won't be pretty watching two Canadian icons duke it out.
“We had logged about 8,000 kilometres on the Vinyl Cafe tour bus,” Mr. McLean, who doesn't drink coffee, later reflected on his show. “[We] made some new friends and rolled up enough rims to make you wonder if anyone ever wins anything.”
[Hat Tip: Jane]
There is no question that Al Gore’s 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth is a powerful example of how scientific knowledge can be communicated to a lay audience. What is up for debate is whether it accurately presents the scientific argument that global warming is caused by human activities. Climate change experts express their opinions on the scientific validity of the film’s claims in articles just published online in Springer’s journal, GeoJournal.I guess they didn't get the message from Mooney and Nisbet. You see, when you develop a spin on climate change every scientist is supposed to stick to the script. You can't have freelancers running off and criticizing the frame.
Humans are almost unimaginably complex, with trillions of cells organized into hundreds of different tissues. But we have scarcely more genes than a fruitfly or a worm, and only about four or five times as many as brewers' yeast or some bacteria. Surprising then that the human genome is 250 times larger than the yeast's. It comprises about 99% 'junk DNA' — genetic code that is not used to make the protein building blocks of life.You know what's coming next, don't you? We're going to hear about one of the seven silly excuses for why we don't really have junk DNA (see The Deflated Ego Problem). Here's how Martin Pagel sets up his choice of excuse.
Junk DNA gives every appearance of fulfilling the metaphor of the selfish gene. It accumulates in organisms' genomes simply because it is good at accumulating; it can even be harmful. Why we put up with it has long been a mystery.Astute readers will see where this is going—he's going to use the "regulatory DNA" excuse. All this will accomplish is to demonstrate; (a) Martin Pagel's inability to reason like a scientist by considering evidence that has been accumulated over four decades, and (b) Nature's inability to recognize good science from bad science.
Increasingly, it seems that the genes that do code for proteins may recruit some or all of this junk DNA to regulate when, where and how much they are expressed. Because nearly every cell in the body carries a complete copy of the genome, something has to tell the genes that make eyes not to switch on in the back of the head, or genes for teeth to stay silent in our toes. Something has to instruct genes to team up to produce complex structures such as hearts and kidneys, or the chemical networks that create our metabolism and physiology.
Genes, in effect, use regulation to promote their interests within the bodily phenotype: it is how they vary their exposure to the outside world. Regulation is how we can have over 98.5% similarity to chimpanzees in the sequences of our coding genes, yet differ so utterly from them.This is, of course, complete nonsense. We know for a fact that large amounts of the human genome are really junk. We know for a fact that you can have complex regulation by using only a small percentage of the genome (1000 bp per gene, or less than 1% of the genome, per gene is more than sufficent [Junk in Your Genome: Protein-Encoding Genes]. We know for a fact that some single-celled species (amoeba) have huge amounts of junk DNA and some some complex multicellular species have genomes that are much smaller than mammalian genomes (Drosohila melanogaster.
Indeed, the huge quantity of junk DNA in the genomes of most complex organisms may act as a vast digital regulatory mechanism. Until recently many common machines, such as aeroplanes, clocks, and even computers were analogue devices, regulated by levers, springs, heat or pressure. Aeroplanes were flown with a stick, springs drove clocks. Digital regulation — instructions encoded in strings of binary numbers arbitrarily long, and hence precise — enabled complexity to increase. Stealth fighters and space shuttles are so complex that they can be flown only by digital computers, not (analogue) human pilots.
Similarly, the emergence of digital regulation derived from unused stretches of junk DNA may have precipitated the transition from single cells to complex multicellular organisms. Long runs of the four chemical bases that make up DNA can easily act like binary strings. How these stretches bind to a gene can regulate exquisitely the degree and timing of that gene's expression. Tellingly, bacteria and some other single-celled organisms have negligible amounts of junk DNA. They rely far more on analogue systems of gene regulation that are protein-based and less precise.
I do think there's a problem in making science appear frightening and linked to a laboratory activity. As comments you've already heard suggest, science really is a process. A process by which you have ideas, you test them out, you look at evidence, you measure things, and you draw conclusions. And that's a process that applies to almost any phase of life.Science is a process. It's a way of knowing. That's what we should be teaching.