Evolutionary Psychologists in Action

 
Alan S. Miller and Satoshi Kanazawa are evolutionary psychologists. They have written an article for Psychology Today that goes a long way toward explaining why this discipline is in such bad shape [Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature]. Miller is a professor of social psychology in the Department of Behavioral Science at Hokkaido University, Japan. Kanazawa is a Reader in Management and Research Methodology at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Did you know that all men prefer women with large breasts? I didn't. If true there must be a lot of very frustrated men in Asia and a lot of small-breasted spinsters wandering around somewhere. Anyway, Miller and Kanazawa have figured out why young American teenagers men like women with large breasts.

Until very recently, it was a mystery to evolutionary psychology why men prefer women with large breasts, since the size of a woman's breasts has no relationship to her ability to lactate. But Harvard anthropologist Frank Marlowe contends that larger, and hence heavier, breasts sag more conspicuously with age than do smaller breasts. Thus they make it easier for men to judge a woman's age (and her reproductive value) by sight—suggesting why men find women with large breasts more attractive.

Boy, you learn something every day from these evolutionary psychologists, don't you?

Now here's a useful bit of information. Do you know why young Muslim men are more violent and prone to suicide missions? The evolutionary psychologists have the answer,

Suicide missions are not always religiously motivated, but according to Oxford University sociologist Diego Gambetta, editor of Making Sense of Suicide Missions, when religion is involved, the attackers are always Muslim. Why? The surprising answer is that Muslim suicide bombing has nothing to do with Islam or the Quran (except for two lines). It has a lot to do with sex, or, in this case, the absence of sex.

What distinguishes Islam from other major religions is that it tolerates polygyny. By allowing some men to monopolize all women and altogether excluding many men from reproductive opportunities, polygyny creates shortages of available women. If 50 percent of men have two wives each, then the other 50 percent don't get any wives at all.

So polygyny increases competitive pressure on men, especially young men of low status. It therefore increases the likelihood that young men resort to violent means to gain access to mates. By doing so, they have little to lose and much to gain compared with men who already have wives. Across all societies, polygyny makes men violent, increasing crimes such as murder and rape, even after controlling for such obvious factors as economic development, economic inequality, population density, the level of democracy, and political factors in the region.

This is useful information. It means that we can settle all of the problems in the Middle East by withdrawing our troops and simply banning polygyny. Did somebody tell Dick Cheney?

There's lots more where this came from. Did you know that rich people have more sons than daughters? Neither did I, but lets not allow facts to interfere with a good just-so story. Here's the evolutionary explanation,

It is commonly believed that whether parents conceive a boy or a girl is up to random chance. Close, but not quite; it is largely up to chance. The normal sex ratio at birth is 105 boys for every 100 girls. But the sex ratio varies slightly in different circumstances and for different families. There are factors that subtly influence the sex of an offspring.

One of the most celebrated principles in evolutionary biology, the Trivers-Willard hypothesis, states that wealthy parents of high status have more sons, while poor parents of low status have more daughters. This is because children generally inherit the wealth and social status of their parents. Throughout history, sons from wealthy families who would themselves become wealthy could expect to have a large number of wives, mistresses and concubines, and produce dozens or hundreds of children, whereas their equally wealthy sisters can have only so many children. So natural selection designs parents to have biased sex ratio at birth depending upon their economic circumstances—more boys if they are wealthy, more girls if they are poor. (The biological mechanism by which this occurs is not yet understood.)

This hypothesis has been documented around the globe. American presidents, vice presidents, and cabinet secretaries have more sons than daughters. Poor Mukogodo herders in East Africa have more daughters than sons. Church parish records from the 17th and 18th centuries show that wealthy landowners in Leezen, Germany, had more sons than daughters, while farm laborers and tradesmen without property had more daughters than sons. In a survey of respondents from 46 nations, wealthy individuals are more likely to indicate a preference for sons if they could only have one child, whereas less wealthy individuals are more likely to indicate a preference for daughters.

If you believe this garbage then please send me an email message expressing your confidence in evolutionary psychology (and adaptationism). I'd like to talk to you about some swampland that I own in Florida. It will make a terrific vacation property.

[Hat Tip: RichardDawkins.net]

What Is Darwinism?

Over on the thread Close, but no cigar we're having a little discussion about the meaning of the term "Darwinian." I explained it as "evolution by natural selection."

Pete Dunkelberg is one of those people who emphasize natural selection in their discussion of evolution and he didn't like my description of Darwinian evolution. Pete said,

Misbegotten terminology. "darwinian processes" is creationist coinage with no meaning.

Talking of "darwinism" in biology is akin to talking of "newtonism" in physics: a bad idea. Aren't you glad physicists don't use terms like that to make polemics against each other?

wolfwalker asks: Larry, what do people mean by [these unneeded terms]? Larry tells him what Larry means. But the terms have no standard meaning. Larry's official ruling is that Darwin never heard of variable rates of morphological evolution and also thought selection was all.

It is patently untrue that the term "Darwinian" has no meaning in biology. Pete's position is that "Darwinist" refers to evolutionary biologists who no longer exist. He seems to think that everyone has become a pluralist these days. I beg to differ.

Core Darwinism, I shall suggest, is the minimal theory that evolution is guided in adaptively nonrandom directions by the nonrandom survival of small hereditary changes.... Adaptive does not imply that all evolution is adaptive, only that core Darwinism's concern is limited to the part of evolution that is.

Dawkins, R. (2003) The Devil's Chaplain p. 81 In physics, everyone knows that Newtonian physics has been extended in the twentieth century so that it's no longer accurate to refer to oneself as a Newtonian physicist since it implies ignorance of relativity. But this is a bad analogy since there are a great many evolutionary biologists (and even more of the other kinds of biologists) who are proud to call themselves Darwinists. Modern Darwinists place a great deal of emphasis on adaptation and natural selection as the main mechanisms of evolution.

Pete is dead wrong when he claims that, "Larry's official ruling is that Darwin never heard of variable rates of morphological evolution and also thought selection was all." I never said any such thing. I'm well aware of the fact that Darwin considered variable rates of natural selection and I'm well aware of the fact that he accepted other mechanisms of evolution, such as a watered down version of Lamarckism. The problem here seems to be that Pete doesn't understand the meaning of gradualism and he doesn't understand that modern Darwinists do not attribute everything in biology to selection.

As for the standard meaning of "Darwinism," Pete is correct to say that there is no universally accepted definition but that shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. There's hardly anything that all biologists can agree on.

However, there is a considerable group of evolutionary biologists who agree with Ernst Mayr when he says ...

After 1859, that is, during the first Darwinian revolution, Darwinism for almost everybody meant explaining the living world by natural processes. As we will see, during and after the evolutionary synthesis the term "Darwinism" unanimously meant adaptive evolutionary change under the influence of natural selection, and variational instead of transformational evolution. These are the only two meaningful concepts of Darwinism, the one ruling in the nineteenth century (and up to about 1930) and the other ruling in the twentieth century (a consensus having been reached during the evolutionary synthesis). Any other use of the term Darwinism by a moder author is bound to be misleading.

Mayr, E. (1991) What Is Darwinism? in One Long Argument p. 107.

See Why I'm Not a Darwinist for an earlier use of this quotation. The point is that the modern meaning of Darwinism is usually taken to mean an emphasis on natural selection.

Mayr explains the standard adaptationist view of random genetic drift by equating it with Neutral Theory and mischaracterizing the entire controversy. (This seems to be a very common trait among the defenders of strict Darwinism.)

The neutralists are reductionists, and for them the gene—more precisely the base pair—is the target of selection. Hence, any fixation of a "neutral" base pair is a case of neutral evolution. For the Darwinian evolutionists, the individual as a whole is the target of selection, and evolution takes place only if the properties of the individual change. A replacement of neutral genes is considered merely evolutionary noise and irrelevant for phenotypic evolution. (ibid p. 152)

I'm not making this up. I'm trying to do my best to represent the standard—but not universal—description of the adaptationist position. It's quite wrong for Pete Dunkelberg to pretend that the definition of Darwinism and the adaptationists is something that I created. (BTW, most pluralists treat the individual as the unit of evolution. They just believe that populations can fix alleles, even alleles with visible phenotypes, by random genetic drift as well as natural selection.)

Mayr continues,

The Darwinian wonders to what extent it is legitimate to designate as evoluton the changes in gene frequencies caused by nonselected random fixation. In some of the older (particularly nineteenth century) literature on evolution, one finds discussions on how to discriminate between evolution and mere change. There it was pointed out that the continuing changes in weather and climate, the sequences of the seasons of the year, the geomorphological changes of an eroding mountain range or a shifting river bed, and similar changes do not qualify as evolution. Interestingly, the changes in nonselected base pairs and genes are more like those nonevolutionary changes than they are like evolution. Perhaps one should not refer to non-Darwinian evolution but rather to non-Darwinian changes during evolution. (ibid p. 153)

While this position may seem extreme by 2007 standards, I believe that there are many evolutionary biologists who tend to dismiss all nonselected evolutionary change as uninteresting and unimportant. They are Darwinists. The extremists among this group attribute all kinds of things to adaptation, including most animal behavior. They are the ultra-Darwinians.

Many books have been written about the controversy in evolutionary biology between the adaptationists and the pluralists. Michael Ruse, for example, tried to explain it all last year (2006) in Darwinism and Its Discontents. Ruse is a firm believer in Darwinism, which he defines as "natural selection as the chief causal process behind all organisms." This is a common definition as explained above. However, one must read between the lines to see how Darwinists interpret that definition. A key point is what they think about random genetic drift. Here's how the Darwinist Ruse treats Sewall Wright's concept of random genetic drift.

Wright's theory is not very Darwinian. Natural selection does not play an overwhelming role. Genetic drift is a key player in Wright's world. However, although many of these ideas were taken up by later thinkers, especially by Theodosius Dobzhansky in the first edition of his influential Genetics and the Origin of Species, drift soon fell right out of fashion, thanks to discoveries that showed that many features formerly considered just random are in fact under tight control of selection (Lewontin, 1981). Today no one would want to say that drift (at the physical level) is a major direct player, although, in America particularly, there has always been a lingering fondness for it.

Michael Ruse is not an evolutionary biologist but he represents the views of Dawkins and, to a lesser extent, E.O. Wilson. They have no use for drift especially when it comes to visible characteristics. That's the hallmark of modern Darwinism.

So, is it true that no evolutionary biologist would want to say that drift is a major player in evolution? Of course not. There are lots of them who say exactly that in spite of what Michale Ruse would have you believe. Does Ruse have an answer to these "discontents?" Yes, he does ...

At the risk of damning myself in the eyes of both scholarship and God, let me be categorical. All of the critics of Darwinism are deeply mistaken,

To which I reply, you took the risk and your scholarship has been discredited. I can't speak for God.

Monday's Molecule #34

 
Today's molecule is very simple. It is well-known to all biochemistry undergraduates—or at least it was well-known at the time they wrote the exam. Let's see how many of you remember it today.

Today we need the formal IUPAC name in order to win the prize. There's an extremely obvious connection between this Monday's Molecule and Wednesday's Nobel Laureate. You will owe me a lunch if you guess the molecule correctly but can't figure out who the Nobel Prizewinner(s) is/are.

The reward (free lunch) goes to the person who correctly identifies the molecule and the Nobel Laureate(s). Previous free lunch winners are ineligible for one month from the time they first collected the prize. There are no ineligible candidates for this Wednesday's reward since many recent winners haven't collected their prize. The prize is a free lunch at the Faculty Club.

Comments will be blocked for 24 hours. Comments are now open.

Stop the Press!!! ... Genes Have Regulatory Sequences!

Ira Flatow interviews John Greally (see photo) on Science Friday. Greally talks about the ENCODE project and junk DNA. You might be surprised to learn that the expression of genes is controlled by ... wait for it ... REGULATORY SEQUENCES! According to Greally the discovery of these regulatory sequences reveals that junk DNA isn't junk at all. Greally says,

It would be a very brave person who would call it junk at this stage.

Count me as a very brave person. I claim that most of the human genome is junk and I'm not alone.

This is just one more example of the hype surrounding the ENCODE project. Read Ryan Gregory's summary at More about ENCODE from Scientific American for a good summary of what the study really says about junk DNA. The study does not say that all junk DNA has a function in spite of what you might gather from the podcast (below). The study does not say that the discovery of regulatory sequences in noncoding DNA is a breakthrough in our understanding of how genes work. In fact, as almost all of you know, the existence of regulatory sequences that control gene expression has been known for four decades. John Greally misses a good opportunity to educate the public about science and instead uses inappropriate framing to hype his own interest in gene expression. Shame.


powered by ODEO

John Greely is the author of the News & Views article that described the original ENCODE work published in the June 14th issue of Nature. In that review he mentioned the role of regulatory sequences but focused much of his attention on the fact that large parts of the genome were transcribed. He expressed some appropriate skepticism of the results in the Nature piece but not when being interviewed on the radio. Is this appropriate? Is it what Nisbet and Mooney are talking about when they say that scientists should do a better job of framing?

[Hat Tip: Eye on DNA]

Mendel's Garden #16

 
The 16th version of Mendel's Garden has just been posted on Eye on DNA [Mendel’s Garden Genetics Blog Carnival #16M].

Socialized Medicine Will Make America Vulnerable to Terrorists

 
Americans are probably confused about socialized medicine after seeing Michael Moore's Sicko. Don't worry. Fox News explains why highly efficient, profit-based. corporate health care will protect America from those Jihadist Muslim doctors who are taking over the anonymous, highly bureaucratic systems in Europe.

Listen for the part about your family doctor. In America you can't have doctors who believe in stupid things because they'll be exposed by their patients and their colleagues. Apparently in socialist countries you don't have family doctors (news to me) so patients never find out what their doctors are really thinking. That's why jihadist doctors can hide out in Europe.

Why isn't there more outrage when idiotic things like this are broadcast on network television?



[Hat Tip: Canadian Cynic]

Close, but no cigar.

 
Over on Post-Darwinist Denyse O'Leary is whining about the fact that so many scientists are non-believers. She quotes from a poll of evolutionists showing that 78% don't believe in God. Having been sensitized to misuse of the word "evolutionist" she adds this at the end of her blog.

(Note for the record: "Evolutionists" here means scientists who believe that gradual Darwinian processes completely account for every aspect of life and that no design whatever is required. It does not mean scientists who merely accept that evolution occurs or that Earth is billions of years old.)

Denyse, it's the word "Darwinian" that's being misused. I'm an evolutionist but I do not believe that "gradual Darwinian processes completely account for every aspect of life." Instead I believe that evolution accounts for life and this evolution includes strict Darwinian processes as well as non-Darwinian processes.

Why do you find this so hard to understand?

I'm a Skeptic

 
I'm a Skeptic and a member of the Board of Consultants of Skeptics Canada. But it's nice to have confirmation ...

You Are Very Skeptical

Your personal motto is: "Prove it." While some ideas, like life after death, may seem nice... You aren't going to believe them simply because it feels good. You let science and facts be your guide... Even if it means you don't share the beliefs of those around you.

How Skeptical Are You?

[Hat Tip: GrrlScientist]

Mutation Rates

Each of us was born with at least 350 new mutations that make our DNA different from that of our parents.

Douglas Futuyma (2005) p. 162Let’s think about the number of mutations that could accumulate in a population over time. A few pages ago we looked at the origin of antibiotic resistance in bacteria in order to prove that mutations occur randomly. Now we’ll consider just how frequency those mutations could arise in bacteria. Then we’ll ask how frequently mutations occur in humans.

Our model bacterium is Esherichia coli the common, and mostly benign, intestinal bacterium. The entire genome was sequenced in 1997 (Blattner et al., 1997) and its size is 4,200,000 base pairs (4.2 × 10⁶ bp). Every time a bacterium divides this amount of DNA has to be replicated; that’s 8,400,000 nucleotides (8.4 × 10⁶).

The most common source of mutation is due to mistakes made during DNA replication when an incorrect nucleotide is incorporated into newly synthesized DNA. The mutation rate due to errors made by the DNA polymerase III replisome is one error for every one hundred million bases (nucleotides) that are incorporated into DNA. This is an error rate of 1/100,000,000, commonly written as 10^-8 in exponential notation. Technically, these aren't mutations; they count as DNA damage until the problem with mismatched bases in the double-stranded DNA has been resolved. The DNA repair mechanism fixes 99% of this damage but 1% escapes repair and becomes a mutation. The error rate of repair is 10^-2 so the overall error rate during DNA replication is 10^-10 nucleotides per replication (10^-8 × 10^-2) (Tago et al., 2005).

Since the overall mutation rate is lower than the size of the E. coli genome, on average there won’t be any mistakes made when the cell divides into two daughter cells. That is, the DNA will usually be replicated error free.

However, one error will occur for every 10 billion nucleotides (10^-10) that are incorporated into DNA. This means one mutation, on average, every 1200 replications (8.4 × 10⁶ × 1200 is about ten billion). This may not seem like much even if the average generation time of E. coli is 24 hours. It would seem to take four months for each mutation. But bacteria divide exponentially so the actual rate of mutation in a growing culture is much faster. Each cell produces two daughter cells so that after two generations there are four cells and after three generations there are eight cells. It takes only eleven generations to get 2048 cells (2¹¹ = 2048). At that point you have 2048 cells dividing and the amount of DNA that is replication in the entire population is enough to ensure at least one error every generation.

In the laboratory experiment the bacteria divided every half hour so after only a few hours the culture was accumulating mutations every time the bacteria divided. This is an unrealistic rate of growth in the real world but even if bacteria only divide every 24 hours there are still so many of them that mutations are abundant. For example, in your intestine there are billions and billions of bacteria. This means that every day these bacteria accumulate millions of mutations. That’s why there’s a great danger of developing drug resistance in a very short time.

Calculating the rate of evolution in terms of nucleotide substitutions seems to give a value so high that many of the mutations must be neutral ones.

Motoo Kimura (1968)I based my estimate of mutation rate on what we know about the properties of the replisome and repair enzymes. Independent measures of mutation rates in bacteria are consistent with this estimate. For example, the measured value for E. coli is 5.4 × 10^-10 per nucleotide per replication (Drake et al., 1998). Many of these mutations are expected to be neutral. The rate of fixation of neutral mutations is equal to the mutation rate so by measuring the accumulation of neutral mutations in various lineages of bacteria you can estimate the mutation rate provided you know the time of divergence and the generation time. (Ochman et al., 1999) have estimated that the mutation rate in bacteria is close to 10^-10 assuming that bacteria divide infrequently.

The mutation rate in eukaryotes should be about the same since the properties of the DNA replication machinery are similar to those in eukaryotes. Measured values of mutation rates in yeast, Caenorhabditis elegans, Drosophila melanogaster, mouse and humans are all close to 10^-10 (Drake et al., 1998).

The haploid human genome is about 3 × 10⁹ base pairs in size. Every time this genome is replicated about 0.3 mutations, on average, will be passed on to one of the daughter cells. We are interested in knowing how many mutations are passed on to the fertilized egg (zygote) from its parents. In order to calculate this number we need to know how many DNA replications there are between the time that one parental zygote was formed and the time that the egg or sperm cell that unite to form the progeny zygote are produced.

In the case of females, this number is about 30, which means that each female egg is the product of 30 cell divisions from the time the zygote was formed (Vogel and Rathenberg, 1975). Human females have about 500 eggs. In males, the number of cell divisions leading to mature sperm in a 30 year old male is about 400 (Vogel and Motulsky, 1997). This means that about 9 mutations (0.3 × 30) accumulate in the egg and about 120 mutations (0.3 × 400) accumulate in a sperm cell. Thus, each newly formed human zygote has approximately 129 new spontaneous mutations. This value is somewhat less than the number in most textbooks where it's common to see 300-350 mutations per genome. The updated value reflects a better estimate of the overall rate of mutation during DNA replication and a better estimate of the number of cell divisions during gametogenesis.

With a population of 6 billion individuals on the planet, there will be 120 × 6 × 10⁹ = 7.2 × 10¹¹ new mutations in the population every generation. This means that every single nucleotide in our genome will be mutated in the human population every 20 years or so.

---

Blattner,F.R., Plunkett,G., Bloch,C.A., Perna,N.T., Burland,V., Riley,M., ColladoVides,J., Glasner,J.D., Rode,C.K., Mayhew,G.F., Gregor,J., Davis,N.W., Kirkpatrick,H.A., Goeden,M.A., Rose,D.J., Mau,B., and Shao,Y. (1997) The complete genome sequence of Escherichia coli K-12. Science 277:1453-1474.

Drake,J.W., Charlesworth,B., Charlesworth,D., and Crow,J.F. (1998) Rates of spontaneous mutation. Genetics 148:1667-1686.

Ochman,H., Elwyn,S., and Moran,N.A. (1999) Calibrating bacterial evolution. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. (USA) 96:12638-12643.

Tago,Y., Imai,M., Ihara,M., Atofuji,H., Nagata,Y., and Yamamoto,K. (2005) Escherichia coli mutator Delta polA is defective in base mismatch correction: The nature of in vivo DNA replication errors. J. Mol. Biol. 351:299-308.

Vogel,F. and Motulsky,A. (1997) Human Genetics: Problems and Approaches. (Berlin, New York: Springer-Verlag).

Vogel,F. and Rathenberg,R. (1975) Spontaneous Mutation in Man. Adv. Hum. Genet. 5:223-318.

©Laurence A. Moran (2007)

The Evils of Darwinism in America

 
Over on the Discovery Institute website there's an important announcement [John West's Forthcoming Book] ...

Next Fall ISI Books will release CSC associate director Dr. John West's important book, Darwin Day in America: How Our Politics and Culture Have Been Dehumanized in the Name of Science.

Darwin Day in America tells the disturbing story of scientific expertise run amuck, exposing how an ideological interpretation of Darwinian biology and reductionist science have been used to degrade American culture over the past century through their impact on criminal justice, welfare, business, education, and bioethics.

Fascinating. Given that "Darwinism" has been so fiercely resisted in America its success in degrading American culture is all that more remarkable.

I look forward to Dr. West's exposé of European culture where rationalism has been even more successful than in America. I wonder what he thinks of France?

Richard Dawkins on Visible Changes and Adaptationism

On another thread [Visible Mutations and Evolution by Natural Selection] we are discussing a common adaptationist claim that once a mutation has a visible phenotype it is almost certainly subject to selection. Some people have questioned whether there is anyone who actually believes in such a thing. Here's Richard Dawkins writing in The Extended Phenotype (1982).

The biochemical controversy over neutralism is concerned with the interesting and important question of whether all gene substitutions have phenotypic effects. The adaptationism controversy is quite different. It is concerned with whether, given that we are dealing with a phenotypic effect big enough to see and ask questions about, we should assume that it is the product of natural selection. The biochemist's 'neutral mutations' are more than neutral. As far as those of us who look at gross morphology, physiology and behaviour are concerned, they are not mutations at all. It was in this spirit that Maynard Smith (1976b) wrote: "I interpret 'rate of evolution' as a rate of adaptive change. In this sense, the substitution of a neutral allele would not constitute evolution ..." If a whole-organism biologist sees a genetically determined difference among phenotypes, he already knows he cannot be dealing with neutrality in the sense of the modern controversy among biochemical geneticists.

In 2007 Dawkins would probably admit to some neutral examples of "genetically determined differences among phenotypes" but his position hasn't changed very much from 1982. For example, in The Ancestor's Tale (2005) he writes,

Contrary to my rather ludicrous reputation as an "ultra-Darwinist" (a slander I would protest more vigorously if the name sounded less of a compliment than it does), I do not think that the majority of evolutionary change at the molecular level is favoured by natural selection. On the contrary, I have always had a lot of time for the so-called neutral theory associated with the great Japanese geneticist Motoo Kimura, or its extension, the "nearly neutral" theory of his collaborator Tomoko Ohta. The real world has no interest in human tastes, of course, but as it happens I positively want such theories to be true. This is because they give us a separate, independent chronicle of evolution, unlinked to the visible features of the creatures around us., and they hold out the hope that some kind of molecular clock might really work.

Just in case the point is misunderstood, I must emphasize that the neutral theory does not in any way denigrate the importance of selection in nature. Natural selection is all-powerful with respect to those visible changes that affect survival and reproduction. Natural selection is the only explanation we know for the functional beauty and apparently "designed" complexity of living things. But if there are any changes that have no visible effect—changes that pass right under natural selection's radar—they can accumulate in the gene pool with impunity and may supply just what we need for an evolutionary clock.

Pluralists believe that all kinds of alleles are neutral or nearly neutral and are fixed in a population by random genetic drift. This includes alleles that produce a visible phenotype. Pluralists do not believe that there is a major distinction between the mechanisms of evolution at the molecular level and the mechanisms at the morphological level.

Contrary to Dawkins, I believe that Neutral Theory has reduced the importance of selection in nature. Prior to 1968 it was common to attribute almost all changes to natural selection and it was common to advocate that the presence of variation in a population was due to balancing selection. Today, one has to consider the evidence for adaptation; you can no longer just assume that it is the only game in town.

Of course it's true that natural selection is the only mechanism that affects allele frequencies once you can demonstrate that a visible change affects survival and reproduction. But Dawkins goes farther than that. He strongly implies that all visible phenotypes are subject to selection and neutral alleles are confined to the molecular level.

Nobel Laureate: Adolf Windaus

 
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1928.

"for the services rendered through his research into the constitution of the sterols and their connection with the vitamins"


Adolf Otto Reinhold Windaus (1876-1959) won the Nobel Prize in 1928 for his work on the structure of sterols and their functions. One of the most common sterols is cholesterol and Windaus was able to show that it is synthesized in many different species although he was not able to determine its function. (We now know that it is an important component of membranes.)

Windaus also worked out the synthesis of vitamin D from the plant sterol ergosterol [Monday's Molecule #33]. The Presentation Speech was given by Professor H.G. Söderbaum of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on December 10, 1928. The speech may seem confusing since it talks about two Nobel Laureates, Wieland and Windaus, but Windaus was the sole recipient of the 1928 Nobel Prize. It turns out that the 1927 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Heinrich Otto Wieland at the same time as the 1928 Nobel Prize.

Your Majesty, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen.

We hear continually that today science, in particular natural science, is becoming increasingly more specialized, that scientists are delving deeper and deeper into specialized studies difficult to survey, that the deep stream of research is turning into ever-shallower brooks and channels, and that in this way the unity that exists between the different branches of science is in danger of being destroyed. Indeed, most people have wondered with some disquiet where this apparently unrestricted specialization will eventually lead. The answer to this question is that, while the question itself is completely justified, the disquiet is in most cases unjustified or at least unduly great.

A stage is reached sooner or later in the development of every natural science, when research, after dealing with problems of more general importance, has of necessity to apply itself to problems of detail of apparently more limited interest. It is simply that the continuous increase in scientific knowledge necessitates a corresponding continuous increase in the division of work. Many fields of science which could once be handled by a few or even one investigator, may only one generation later provide enough or more than enough work for whole hosts of students and their attendants. However, specialization is, or should be, not an end but a means. Even at the stage of the division of work, for the true investigator the end is, and will remain, that of determining the inner connection between the changing phenomena, and, depending on the extent to which this end is achieved, the special researches will gradually merge into greater units; the detail then ceases to be an isolated thing, more or less unimportant as regards the whole, but becomes a necessary link in a connected chain of knowledge.

The work which has been awarded Alfred Nobel's Chemistry Prizes this year by the Academy of Sciences, provides an instructive example of this process.

We are dealing here with several fields of work, which are separate from the start.

First we have biles. As is well-known, biles and hence their specific constituents, bile acids, are of major importance in the digestion process. Now these bile acids have been for almost a hundred years the object of active study by a large number of prominent investigators. In this way a large amount of material was accumulated from observations, but despite this, little was known concerning the connection between the various bile acids, and almost nothing concerning the details of their structure, when Wieland began his work in this field.

Then we have the cardiac poisons. Of animal cardiac poisons chemists were acquainted in particular with so-called bufotalin, which is present in the skin secretion of certain species of the toad genus Bufo. In therapeutics, on the other hand, vegetable cardiac poisons have long been used, especially those belonging to the glucoside group and obtained from species of the plant genera Digitalis and Strophantus. But the production of these substances in the pure state and the determination of the chemical relationships between them had long remained an unresolved problem.

The so-called sterols are also an extremely interesting group from the physiological viewpoint. They too occur both in vegetation and in animals. Most numerous are the vegetable sterols, the so-called phytosterols, but the best-known is certainly cholesterol, which occurs in the animal organism, and which was first found about 150 years ago in gall stones. This substance occurs not only in bile but also in the brain, in nerve substance, in the egg, in blood, and presumably in all cells. Thus we can conclude that it plays an extremely important part in the life process of man and the animals, just as the phytosterols play an extremely important part in the life process of plants. These sterols were however an isolated group for a long time. The difficulties associated with investigation of their chemical constitution were so great that it is only during the last few decades, above all through Windaus's investigations, that a clearer picture has been obtained thereof.

Finally, we come to a group of compounds which have only been known for a relatively short time, but which during this short time have attracted very considerable attention, both from chemists and from the public at large. Who today is unacquainted with vitamins, these mysterious substances which are of such immense significance for life, vita, itself and which have thus justifiably taken their name from it? But compared with those mentioned above, the difficulties which here confronted the investigator were far greater, and in most cases it had to be regarded as sufficient to characterize these substances on the basis of their physiological effects.

Thanks to the work which this year has been found before others worthy of recognition through the award of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, the inner connection between all these apparently isolated fields of research has been very strikingly demonstrated. Of course the way in which this took place can only be described very briefly here.

Wieland succeeded in producing from bile a saturated acid which can be regarded as the mother substance or parent acid of the bile acids, and which he studied and characterized in detail. When Windaus then produced this same parent acid, cholanic acid, from cholesterol by means of a complicated and very ingenious series of experiments, this indicated very clearly the close relationship between cholesterol and the bile acids. It should be pointed out in this connection that Wieland's investigations into bile acids themselves gave a deeper insight of the mechanism of the action of the bile in the resorption of food in the intestines.

But this is not all. As a result of patient and skilful work, Windaus succeeded in producing several of the digitalis glucosides and their components in the pure state. In this way it was shown that these vegetable cardiac poisons are directly related on the one hand to cholesterol and the bile acids, and on the other hand to the animal cardiac poison bufotoxin, which Wieland studied with great success.

Another sterol which Windaus has studied in detail, is ergosterol, which occurs partly in ergot and partly in yeast. The research carried out in recent years, in which Windaus himself has also played a leading part, has revealed the very important fact that, on being irradiated with ultraviolet light, this ergosterol assumes exactly the same properties as the antirachitic vitamin, "vitamin D", i.e. it will cure rachitis (rickets). For example, it has been found that 5 mg of irradiated ergosterol has the same action in this respect as 1 litre of good cod-liver oil. It can be considered proved, therefore, that ergosterol, or possibly a sterol, the physiological effects of which correspond completely with those of ergosterol, constitutes the antirachitic provitamin, i.e. the mother substance of vitamin D.

All the investigations which we have had to summarize so briefly here, have one thing in common with each other. They were all designed to explain the internal structure of organic materials, their relationships with one another and their transitions into each other. For this reason they are of fundamental importance for our knowledge of a number of processes occurring both in the healthy and in the diseased organism, and therefore of greatest significance not only for chemistry as such, but also for its sister sciences, physiology and medicine. But in order to reach this vantage point of knowledge, where the dividing walls separating the various special researches no longer obstruct vision, where the connection between extensive parts of organic chemistry can be surveyed and where in fact the fields of three main disciplines appear to connect and merge with each other - all this has taken years of hard, diligent, and resourceful work in the deep mines of detailed research. These are the researches which are to be rewarded here.



Professor Wieland. The decision of the Royal Academy of Sciences to award you the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for your work on bile acids and related substances, is only a just recognition of the solution of a problem which is without doubt one of the most difficult which organic chemistry has had to tackle.

The complex composition of the compounds investigated, the large number of atoms contained in the molecules of these compounds, the fact that the material was often very difficult to produce, even in small quantities, these were obstacles which could only be overcome with such striking success through a remarkable skill in experimentation and a rare capacity for finding new ways and means.

In gratitude for what you have achieved for science in this connection, and with hearty congratulations on your well-deserved distinction, the Academy asks you to accept the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the year 1927 from the hands of his Majesty the King.



Professor Windaus. If the Royal Academy of Sciences had had only one Nobel Prize in Chemistry to award on this occasion, and had had to present it to one person, it would have been in a very difficult position.

For there is no doubt that your work on sterols, vegetable cardiac poisons and other closely related substances merits in the same high degree such an award as the work which we have just recognized.

Moreover, it is clear that your work and that of your colleague in Munich are so interrelated and supplement each other in such a way that it would have been extremely difficult to award the Prize to the one while passing over the other.

In addition, both researches display the same assiduity, the same remarkable capacity for overcoming even the greatest experimental difficulties, and the same lucidity in interpreting the results obtained, that it would obviously have been impossible to give precedence to one investigator over the other.

The fact that two Prizes were available for award this year, has fortunately freed the Academy from this quandary. For this the Academy congratulates itself no less than you, and asks you now to take the last few steps which separate you from the external symbols of the Prize.

And the Winner Is .......

 
Posted by Sam Chen on Uncommon Descent [IDURC Announces 2007 Casey Luskin Graduate Award].

The Intelligent Design Undergraduate Research Center (IDURC) is proud to present the 2007 Casey Luskin Graduate Award, presented annually to a deserving college graduate for excellence in student advocacy of intelligent design.

The recipient of the 2007 Casey Luskin Graduate Award will remain anonymous for the protection of the recipient.

I wonder if the winner will list the prestigious award on his/her CV?

Bacteria, Bloggers, and Toronto

 
Chris Condayan is the Manager for Public Outreach at the American Society for Microbiology (ASM). At the recent ASM meeting in Toronto he videotaped a number of bloggers and created a podcast that's posted on the MicrobeWorld website. Here's your chance to see some real live bloggers including; John Logsdon [Sex, Genes & Evolution], Jonathan Badger [T. taxus], Yersinia [Yersinia], Moselio Schaechter [Small Things Considered], Tara Smith [Aetiology], and me [Sandwalk].

Who Owns Your Lab Notebooks?

 
When post-docs and graduate students finish their projects in a research laboratory they leave their notebooks behind. Those belong to the principal investigator who runs the lab. Graduate students often have a hard time understanding this policy so Janet Stemwedel explains it on Adventures in Ethics and Science.

The original article is Lab notebooks and graduate research: what should the policy be? and the followup is Kept all my notebooks; what good are notebooks?.

This is a good example of an ethical problem in science.