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Phil is an excitable guy but you've rarely seen him this excited in a video.
He has good reason ...
[Image Credits: The figures are from Alberts et al. (2002) Figure 3-33.]
Alberts, B., Johnson, A., Lewis, J., Raff, M., Roberts, K. and Walter, P. (2002) The Molecular Biology of the Cell 4th ed., Garland Science, New York (USA)
To simplify matters, Dow picked a defining trait of religion: the desire to proclaim religious information to others, such as a belief in the afterlife. He assumed that this trait was genetic.Make no mistake. This is bad science. It does not meet any of the criteria of good science.
The model assumes, in other words, that a small number of people have a genetic predisposition to communicate unverifiable information to others. They passed on that trait to their children, but they also interacted with people who didn't spread unreal information.
The model looks at the reproductive success of the two sorts of people – those who pass on real information, and those who pass on unreal information.
Under most scenarios, "believers in the unreal" went extinct. But when Dow included the assumption that non-believers would be attracted to religious people because of some clear, but arbitrary, signal, religion flourished.
"Somehow the communicators of unreal information are attracting others to communicate real information to them," Dow says, speculating that perhaps the non-believers are touched by the faith of the religious.
Religious people talk about things that cannot be seen, stories that cannot be verified, and beings and forces beyond the ordinary. Perhaps their gods are truly at work, or perhaps in human nature there is an impulse to proclaim religious knowledge. If so, it would have to have arisen by natural selection. It is hard to imagine how natural selection could have produced such an impulse. There is a debate among evolutionary scientists about whether or not there is any adaptive advantage to religion at all (Bulbulia 2004a; Atran and Norenzayan 2004). Some believe that it has no adaptive value itself and that it is just a hodge podge of of behaviors that have evolved because they are adaptive in other non-religious contexts. The agent-based simulation described in this article shows that a central unifying feature of religion, a belief in an unverifiable world, could have evolved along side of verifiable knowledge. The simulation makes use of an agent-based communication model with two types of information: verifiable information (real information) about a real world and unverifiable information (unreal information) about about an imaginary world. It examines the conditions necessary for the communication of unreal information to have evolved along side the communication of real information. It offers support for the theory that religion is an adaptive complex and it disputes the theory that religion is a byproduct of unrelated adaptive processes.How many of you think that this work supports the just-so story and refutes other possibilities?
[Image Credits: The drawing of a centromere is from Alberts et al. (2002) Figure 4-50. The photograph of chromosomes is from Hunt Willard (Schueler et al. (2001)]
Alberts, B., Johnson, A., Lewis, J., Raff, M., Roberts, K. and Walter, P. (2002) The Molecular Biology of the Cell 4th ed., Garland Science, New York (USA)
Alkan, C., Ventura, M., Archidiacono, N., Rocchi, M., Sahinalp, S.C., et al. (2007) Organization and Evolution of Primate Centromeric DNA from Whole-Genome Shotgun Sequence Data. PLoS Comput Biol 3: e181. [doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.0030181]
Cheeseman, I.M. and Desai, A. (2008) Molecular architecture of the kinetochore–microtubule interface. Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology 9:33-46. [doi:10.1038/nrm2310]
Cleveland, D.W., Mao, Y., and Sullivan, K.S. (2003) Centromeres and Kinetochores From Epigenetics to Mitotic Checkpoint Signaling. Cell 112:407-421. [doi:10.1016/S0092-8674(03)00115-6 ]
Schueler, M.G., Higgins, A.W., Rudd, M.K., Gustashaw, K. & Willard, H.F. (2001) Genomic and genetic definition of a functional human centromere. Science 294:109-115.
Stanyon, R., Rocchi, M., Capozzi, O., Roberto, R., Misceo, D., Ventura, M., Cardone, M.F., Bigoni, F., and Archidiacono, N. (2008) Primate chromosome evolution: Ancestral karyotypes, marker order and neocentromeres. Chromosome Research 16:17-39. [doi: 10:1007/s10577-007-1209-z]
1. Especially the part about the botched attempt to save a native American species, Spartina foliosa.
Any connection between a recent Sandwalk post, the fact that Smith is Canadian and that this article is biochemical in bent is purely coincidental.I think we can all appreciate that this is just a coincidence. We expect you to recognize all outstanding Canadian biochemists on the grounds that they are truly excellent scientists and not just because you are pandering to your neighbors up north.1
1. Although a little pandering never hurt anyone. You never know when you might have to emigrate.![]()
Welcome to the 32nd edition of Gene Genie, a blog carnival devoted to genes and genetic conditions. This edition includes some excellent articles on genes and gene-related diseases, genetics, genomics and personalized genetics.The beautiful logo was created by Ricardo at My Biotech Life.
Google Health launched publicly this week and to recognize the event, the last section of the carnival is devoted to articles specifically about the service. Google, financial backer of 23andMe, also funds the Personal Genome Project, which plans to unlock the secrets of common diseases by decoding the DNA of 100,000 people in the world’s biggest gene sequencing project [1]. With the vast number of genetic data points collected for each genome sequenced, a digital system for the movement and storage of personal health information is critical for the widespread use of individualized healthcare. Google’s entrance into the online personal health records market may thus help to accelerate the era of personalized medicine.
With these thoughts in mind, let’s get to to this month’s edition of the Genie.
[Hat Tip: John Wilkins]
Dear Larry Moran,Sandwalk ranks 190th out of 822 science blogs. The top blog is Centauri Dreams an astronomy blog with a 9.8 rating. Bad Astronomy ranks 94th with an 8.9 rating.
Our editors recently reviewed your blog and have given it an 8.0 score out of (10) in the Education/Science category of Blogged.com.
This is quite an achievement!
Blogged.com: Science
We evaluated your blog based on the following criteria: Frequency of Updates, Relevance of Content, Site Design, and Writing Style.
After carefully reviewing each of these criteria, your site was given its 8.0 score.
... Please accept my congratulations on a blog well-done!!
The idea of humankind as a paragon of design is called into question by the puffer fish genome—the smallest, tidiest vertebrate genome of all.The genome of the puffer fish (Takifugu rubripes or Fugu rubripes) has about the same number of genes as other vertebrates (20,000) but its genome is only 400 Mb in size [Fugu Genome Project]. This is about 12.5% of the size of mammalian genomes.
In the world of genomic housekeeping, the puffer fish is a neatnik who keeps the trash under control, while the rest of us are pack rats hoarding junk DNA.Well said PZ!!1
There's a lot of thought these days going into trying to figure out some adaptive reason for such a sorry state of affairs. None of it is particularly convincing. We'd be better off reconciling ourselves to the notion that much of evolution is random, and that nothing prevents nonfunctional complexity from simply accumulating.
1. I used to know someone named Paul Myers who would never had said such a thing on talk.origins. Any relation?
[Image Credit: The junk DNA icon is from the creationist website Evolution News & Views.]
While the implementation of OpenCourseWare asks for extra work from its faculty in preparing high-quality, legally distributable course materials, this works as an incentive to produce better teaching materials. As a result, making course materials available online can not only raise an institution's visibility but also its quality.I don't believe this for a minute. The quality of lecture material on the web is highly variable and the fact that it's freely available does not to seem to have much effect on quality. If the argument holds, we would expect the biochemistry lectures at MIT to be outstanding examples of high quality lectures.
OK. So we’re going to continue with the discussion about biochemistry, and specifically focus on enzymes today. Professor Sive introduced those to you briefly in her last lecture. I’m actually covering for her today. This is one of her lectures but she has given me her material, so hopefully it will go fine. She wanted me to remind you a little bit about energetics, specifically that a negative Delta G in a reaction implies that the reaction can occur spontaneously, that is if the products have lower energy than the reactants. And so given enough time this will happen in that direction.It's pretty much downhill from then on.