Nobel Laureate: Peter Agre

 

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2003.

"for the discovery of water channels"


Peter Agre (1949 - ) received the 2003 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discovering the water channel protein known as aquaporin (AQP1).

Aquaporin is a membrane protein that forms a channel in the membrane. The channel specifically allows water molecule to diffuse across the membrane. No other ions or molecules can pass through the channel. Aquaporin is important in kidney cells where it plays a role in taking up water from the urine. Homologous channel proteins are found in other eukaryotes and in bacteria.

The discovery of aquaporin is related in Peter Agre's Nobel Lecture. It's an example of serendipity coupled with the fortune that favors a prepared mind. Peter Arge is a hematologist who was studying red blood cell antigens. Although aquaporin is a major component of red blood cell membranes its existence was not suspected until the late 1980s because it does not stain with the standard protein stains used to detect proteins on SDS polyacrylamide gels.

The prize was shared with Roderick MacKinnon.

The presentation speech was delivered by Professor Gunnar von Heijne of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on December 10, 2003.

Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen,

In the days of Alfred Nobel, the learned academies used to entertain and educate the public by holding open demonstrations explaining the latest scientific advances. This tradition has been largely – and perhaps unfortunately – forgotten. So let us try to revive the public demonstration of science, if only for a brief moment.

The demonstration I have in mind is a simple one, and only requires that you do something that is in any case particularly fitting for a Nobel Prize ceremony: to think. But only for exactly 5 seconds!

So, please start thinking, for 5 seconds ... Thank you!

Let us now reflect briefly on what has just happened, in each and every one of us. First, a sudden increase in the activity of the brain when you started to wonder what this is all about – should I really think at this point in the ceremony? – then, cascades of nerve signals when you were actually thinking, and finally a return to the normal resting state. And all this thinking ultimately relied on one of the simplest chemical compounds you can imagine: ordinary salt – sodium, potassium and chloride ions – streaming back and forth across the walls of your nerve cells, thereby generating the signals that activated your mind. And not even very much salt – a rough estimate is that the total amount of salt spent during these five seconds in each one of us was no more than a few grains. Only a fistful of salt to set a whole Concert Hall thinking!

And while all this brain activity was occupying our minds, our kidneys worked on quietly, as they always do, reabsorbing water from the urine to the blood. But in this case, the volumes of water transported are too big, even during five seconds, to be suitable for a demonstration from the podium.

This year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry is all about salt water, and the biochemical mechanisms that control where, when, and how often ions and water are let into or out of the cells in our body. Mechanisms that the two Laureates – Peter Agre and Roderick MacKinnon – have elucidated down to the atomic level.

Agre's was a "serendipity discovery": while working on a completely different problem, he stumbled across a protein in red blood cells that he could soon show was the water channel researchers had been looking for in vain for well over a century. His unexpected discovery opened a whole new field of study.

MacKinnon, on the other hand, decided at an early stage that he should try to do what was then thought impossible: to determine the three-dimensional structure of ion channels at atomic resolution. He bet his career on this vision – and succeeded to an extent that probably surprised even himself.

THEME: Nobel Laureates
There is a lesson here, I believe: There is no one way to do science, and our support system must be sufficiently well funded and versatile to prepare the ground for both unexpected serendipity and focused, often risky, attacks on central scientific problems.

Peter Agre and Roderick MacKinnon stand for decisive contributions to the biochemistry of cell membranes, but their discoveries also have an almost tangible aesthetic component. Their work has uncovered an amazing "economy of design" in the atomic structures of the water and ion channels that is breathtaking in its simplicity and perfection. Indeed, after seeing these molecular machines, you find yourself thinking, "Of course, this is how it must be, this is how it must work!" What more could we ask of science?

Professor Agre, Professor MacKinnon, your fundamental discoveries concerning water and ion channels are singular achievements that have made it possible for us to see these exquisitely designed molecular machines in action at the atomic level. The biochemical basis for the transport of water – the most abundant and primordial substance of life – and ions – these tiny, mundane and yet absolutely essential constituents of the living world – can now be understood in unparalleled detail. On behalf of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, I wish to convey to you our warmest congratulations, and I now ask you to step forward to receive the Nobel Prize in Chemistry from the hands of His Majesty the King.

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The Three Fatal Flaws in the Theory of Evolution

Thanks to PZ Myers for finding an important new website called Darwin Conspiracy. It highlights the three faltal flaws in the Theory of evolution.

You have never read about any of these fatal flaws before. Evolution scientists know about these flaws, but they have successfully covered them up with the help of a worldwide Darwin Conspiracy that actively suppresses the fact that Darwinism is not scientific but just an atheist doctrine.

We have discussed the three fatal evolution flaws with scientists and doctors we know and they have all agreed we have found real flaws in the Theory of Evolution.

Each of the three fatal flaws revealed on this website proves that Darwin was wrong.

Wow! Scientists and doctors agree. I'll have to change my position on evolution after reading about these three fatal flaws.

Here they are ...

Evolution is Missing a Mathematical Formula

Mathematical formulae make up the VERIFICATION LANGUAGE of science. Formulae are the only reliable way to test a theory. Every scientific theory has a formula, except the Theory of Evolution. Darwinists have never been able to derive a working Evolution Formula because Evolution theory does not work.

There is No Genetic Mechanism for Darwinian Evolution

Darwinists claim we evolved from the simplest form of bacterial life to ever more complex forms of life. The most basic bacteria had less than 500 genes; man has over 22 thousand. In order for bacteria to evolve into man, organisms would have to be able to add genes. But there is no genetic mechanism that adds a gene. (Mutations change an existing gene but never add a gene.) This means there is no mechanism for Darwinian Evolution and this is a fatal flaw in the Theory of Evolution.

Every Helpless Baby Born Proves Darwin Was Wrong

The Theory of Evolution in a nutshell is "Survival of the fittest." But most mammals and birds give birth to helpless babies - instead of strong and fit ones. Neither Darwinism nor Neo-Darwinism can explain infantile helplessness. Every baby that is born contradicts Evolution Theory and this is a fatal flaw.

Sometimes I think the term "IDiot" is being too kind.

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Good Science Writers: Steven Vogel

 
Steven Vogel is a Professor in the Biology Department at Duke University (N.C., USA). His main research interest is comparative biomechanics. He studies things like the design of fly wings and how organisms adapt to fluids (air and water). His secondary interest is science writing and he has published four books: Life's Devices: The Physical World of Animals and Plants (1988); Cats' Paws and Catapults: Mechanical Worlds of Nature and People (1999); Prime Mover: A Natural History of Muscle (2001); Comparative Biomechanics: Life's Physical World (2003).

The excerpt is from Life's Devises. Here, Steven Vogel gives as balanced a description of the use of "design" and "adaptation" as I've seen anywhere.

This book is mainly about organisms, so we will be concerned with a level of biological organization upon which the invisible hand of the selective process should incur fairly immediate consequences. It is the immediacy of operation of that unseen hand that makes organisms appear well designed—as a colleague of mine put it, "The good designs literally eat the bad designs." But it must be emphasized that we mean "design" in a somewhat unusual sense, implying only a functionally competent arrangement of parts resulting from natural selection. In its more common sense, implying anticipation, "design" is a misnomer—it connotes the teleological heresy of goal or purpose. Still, verbal simplicity is obtained by talking teleologically—teeth are for biting and ears for hearing. And the attribution of purpose isn't a bad guide to investigation—biting isn't just an amusing activity incidental to the possession of teeth. If an organism is arranged in a way that seems functionally inappropriate, the most likely explanation (by the test of experience) is that one's view of its functioning is faulty. As the late Frits Went said, "Teleology is a great mistress, but no one you'd like to be seen with in public."

We functional, organismic biologists are sometimes accused of assuming a kind of perfection in the the living world—"adaptationism" has become the pejorative term—largely because we find the presumption of a decent fit between organims and habitat a useful working hypothesis. But the designs of nature are certainly imperfect. At the very least, perfection would require an infinite number of generations in an unchanging world, and a fixed world entails not only a stable physical environment but the preposterous notion that no competing species undergoes evolutionary change. Furthermore, we're dealing with an incremental process of trial and error. In such a scheme, major innovation is not a simple matter—features that will ultimately prove useful are most unlikely to persist through stages in which they are deleterious or neutral. So-called hopeful monsters are not in good odor. Many good designs are simply not available on the evolutionary landscape because they involve unbridgeable functional discontinuities. Instead, obviously jury-rigged arrangements occur because they entail milder transitions. In addition, the constraints on what evolution can come up with must be greater in more multifunctional structures. Finally a fundamentally poorer, but established and thus well-tuned, design, may win in competition with one that is bascially better but still flawed.

I make these points with some sense of urgency since this book is incorrigibly adaptationist in its outlook and teleological in its verbiage. The limitations of this viewpoint will not insistently be repeated, so the requisite grain of salt should be in the mind of the reader as well as the author. Incidentally, the ad hoc character of many features of organisms are recounted with grace and wit in some of the essays of Stephen Jay Gould, not just as an argument against extreme adaptationism but as evidence for the blindly mechanical and thus somewhat blundering process of evolution. His collection entitled The Panda's Thumb (1980) is particularly appropriate here.

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Evolution Education

Last year the McGill Journal of Education published a special issue on teaching evolution. One of the most interesting articles was by Craig Nelson on TEACHING EVOLUTION EFFECTIVELY: A CENTRAL DILEMMA AND ALTERNATIVE STRATEGIES.

Nelson points out that much of the blame for the evolution/creation controversy stems from poor teaching of evolution in the high schools. The two most obvious failed strategies are:

TEACH THE SCIENCE AND IGNORE STUDENTS’ PRIOR BELIEFS

This is the most common approach to teaching evolution. Students are exposed to the factual material on evolution from a strictly scientific perspective. The fact that most students may have conflicting religious beliefs is not taken into consideration and no time is spent discussing possible conflicts between religion and science. Nelson points out that this strategy is ineffective at getting students to change their minds about evolution. He adds, "However, when students make direct comparisons of their naïve misconceptions with scientifically better-founded schemes, change is frequent. These approaches can lead to greater acceptance of evolution (e.g., Ingram & Nelson, 2005; Scharmann, 2005; Scharmann et al., 2005; Verhey, 2005; Wilson, 2005, 2007; Alters, 2005 reviews earlier work). Thus, naïve views predominate publicly with regard to evolution, perhaps even more than elsewhere in science, at least partly as a predictable consequence of post-secondary pedagogical choices that ignore naïve views and are otherwise sub-optimal."

He's saying that it's better to confront creationism and intelligent design than to ignore it.

AVOIDING AN EVEN WORSE APPROACH: TWO EQUAL MODELS

One alternative is to teach both evolution creationism but to treat them as equivalent theories of origins. This is not appropriate.

Nelson advocates the teaching of creationism and intelligent design in school, but not as science. Instead, they should be used as examples of what science is not. It would be an excellent way of confronting the misconceptions of students head-on to show them why these false ideas are wrong. He echoes a similar call by Bruce Alberts writing in Cell [A Wakeup Call for Science Faculty].

For all those who teach college biology, the current challenge posed by the intelligent design movement presents an ideal “teachable moment.” I believe that intelligent design should be taught in college science classes but not as the alternative to Darwinism that its advocates demand. It is through the careful analysis of why intelligent design is not science that students can perhaps best come to appreciate the nature of science itself.

Alberts is talking about college courses but Nelson wants to use these "teachable moments" in high school. He suggests three possible strategies.

• Discuss common misconceptions, like the second law of thermodynamics or missing links, without explicitly mentioning creationism or religion.
• Make the nature of science a central theme and use evolution as the prime example of how science is supposed to be done. Countering creationist claims would be used as examples of non-scientific arguments.
• Discuss creationism and intelligent design directly in order to make it clear that creationist arguments fail when considered from a scientific perspective.

I agree with Nelson. He is talking about American schools but I think it would be much easier to implement a "teach the controversy" strategy in Canada. If the goal is to teach critical thinking then this is the way to go.

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"Rational" Arguments for the Existence of God

 
The current issue of Christianity Today contains an article by William Lane Craig entitled God Is Not Dead Yet: How current philosophers argue for his existence. Craig is a Professor of Philosophy at the Talbot School of Theology of Biola University, an evangelical Christian college near Los Angeles. His website is Reasonable Faith.

The article is a defense of theology in the face of attacks by "New Atheists."

You might think from the recent spate of atheist best-sellers that belief in God has become intellectually indefensible for thinking people today. But a look at these books by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens, among others, quickly reveals that the so-called New Atheism lacks intellectual muscle. It is blissfully ignorant of the revolution that has taken place in Anglo-American philosophy. It reflects the scientism of a bygone generation rather than the contemporary intellectual scene.

Craig defends the idea that there are rational arguments for the existence of God. In other words, believers do not need to fall back on revelation as their only defense of superstitious beliefs.

The renaissance of Christian philosophy has been accompanied by a resurgence of interest in natural theology, that branch of theology that seeks to prove God's existence apart from divine revelation. The goal of natural theology is to justify a broadly theistic worldview, one that is common among Christians, Jews, Muslims, and deists. While few would call them compelling proofs, all of the traditional arguments for God's existence, not to mention some creative new arguments, find articulate defenders today.

What's interesting about this claim is that the arguments (see below) are the very ones that Dawkins discusses in The God Delusion. You might recall that there are many theists who argue that there are much better, more sophisticated, arguments that Dawkins ignores.¹ I thought it would be fun to list the arguments here so we can see how the modern theist justifies belief in God. You'll have to read the article to see how Craig deals with objections to each one.

The cosmological argument

1. Everything that exists has an explanation of its existence, either in the necessity of its own nature or in an external cause.
2. If the universe has an explanation of its existence, that explanation is God.
3. The universe exists.
4. Therefore, the explanation of the universe's existence is God.

The kalam cosmological argument

1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause.

The teleological argument

1. The fine-tuning of the universe is due either to physical necessity, chance, or design.
2. It is not due to physical necessity or chance.
3. Therefore, it is due to design.

The moral argument

1. If God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist.
2. Objective moral values and duties do exist.
3. Therefore, God exists.

The ontological argument

1. It is possible that a maximally great being (God) exists.
2. If it is possible that a maximally great being exists, then a maximally great being exists in some possible world.
3. If a maximally great being exists in some possible world, then it exists in every possible world.
4. If a maximally great being exists in every possible world, then it exists in the actual world.
5. Therefore, a maximally great being exists in the actual world.
6. Therefore, a maximally great being exists.
7. Therefore, God exists.

There you have it. These are the rational arguments for the existence of God from a Professor of Philosophy at a Christian college. Read 'em and weep, all you heathen atheists!

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1. We are never told what these arguments are, only that they exist somewhere.

[Hat Tip: Jason Rosenhouse]

Monday's Molecule #79

 
What is this protein doing and what is its name? You don't need to identify the species.

There's a direct connection between today's molecule and a Nobel Prize. The prize was awarded for discovering this molecule and recognizing that its function was exactly what had been long predicted.

The first person to correctly identify the molecule and name the Nobel Laureate(s), wins a free lunch at the Faculty Club. Previous winners are ineligible for one month from the time they first collected the prize. There are three ineligible candidates for this week's reward. You know who you are.


THEME:

Nobel Laureates
Send your guess to Sandwalk (sandwalk (at) bioinfo.med.utoronto.ca) and I'll pick the first email message that correctly identifies the molecule and names the Nobel Laureate(s). Note that I'm not going to repeat Nobel Laureate(s) so you might want to check the list of previous Sandwalk postings by clicking on the link in the theme box.

Correct responses will be posted tomorrow. I may select multiple winners if several people get it right.

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

UPDATE: The protein is aquaporin, a transporter that moves water molecules from outside the membrane to inside. The Nobel Laureate is Peter Agre. This week's winner is Maria Altshuler of the University of Toronto. Honorable mention to Michael Fraser who answered before Maria but gave the Nobel Laureates and MacKinnon and Agre. We've already done Roderick MacKinnon.

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[Image Credit: Kozono D, Yasui M, King LS, Agre P. (2002)Aquaporin water channels: atomic structure molecular dynamics meet clinical medicine. J Clin Invest. 2002 Jun;109(11):1395-9. [comlete article]]

The Evolution of Flowering Plants

 
A lot more is known about the evolution of flowering plants than most people realize. Christopher Taylor over at Catalogue of Organisms¹ has done the homework and posts a must-read article on the subject [The Origins of Flowers].

He begins by asking the questions, "... what exactly makes flowering plants so distinct? What do they have that no other plant has?" Think of the answers, then get on over to his blog to find out why you are wrong!

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1. One of the top ten biological science blogs, in my humble opinion.

Good Science Writers: Richard Lewontin

 
Richard "Dick" Lewontin (1929 - ) is Alexander Agassiz Research Professor at Harvard University (Boston, USA). He is a well-known geneticist and the discoverer of extensive variation in organisms at the molecular level, with John Hubby [Citation Classic]. (See The Cause of Variation in a Population.)

Lewontin is also one of the authors of the textbook Modern Genetic Analysis. It's impossible to tell who wrote what in that textbook but I strongly suspect that Lewontin is responsible for the material on Random Genetic Drift and Population Size that I quoted last year.

He is the co-author (with Stephen Jay Gould) of The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian paradigm: a critique of the adaptationist program, one of the most important papers in evolutionary biology [Citation Classic]. If you haven't carefully read that paper then you should do so right now.

In addition to his genetics textbook, Lewontin has also written books on The genetic basis of evolutionary change (1974), Human diversity (1995) and The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism, and Environment (2000). He is probably best known for his crusade against genetic determinism as described in Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology and Human Nature (with Steven Rose and Leon Kamin) as well as other books. Like several of his colleagues, Lewontin is a frequent contributer to the New York Review of Books and some of his best work has been republished in It Ain't Necessarily So: The Dream of the Human Genome and Other Illusions (2000).

Richard Dawkins did not choose anything from Richard Lewontin for The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing. I can't imagine why.

The first selection is from Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA (1991) based on a series of lectures he gave at the University of Toronto in 1990. I was there.

The subject is sociobiology and genetic determinism. He has just finished explaining why there's no such thing as universal human nature—at least not the sort that is postulated by evolutionary psychologists and sociobiologists.

The final step in the sociobiological argument is to say that the genes we possess for universal human nature have been established in us through evolution by natural selection. That is, once upon a time human beings varied genetically in the degree to which they were aggressive, xenophobic, indoctrinable, male dominant, and so on, but those individuals who were most aggressive or most male dominant left more offspring, so the genes that were eventually left in us as a species were the ones that now determine those traits. The argument of natural selection seems a fairly simple and straightforward one for some kinds of traits. For example, it is argued, the more aggressive of our ancestors would leave more offspring because they would swoop down on the less aggressive and eliminate them. The more entrepreneurial would have appropriated more resources in short supply and starved out the wimps. In each of these cases, it is easy to make up a plausible story that would explain the superior reproductive abilities of one type over another.

There are, however, some traits that are said to be universal and that do not lend themselves so easily to this story of individual reproductive advantage. An example, and one that is discussed a great deal by sociobiologists, is altruistic behavior. Why should we be cooperative under some circumstances, and why should we sometimes give up what appear to be immediate advantage for the benefit of others? To explain altruism, sociobiologists advance the theory of kin selection. Natural selection for a trait does not require that individuals possessing it leave more offspring but only that the genes coding the trait be represented in larger numbers in future generations.

There are two ways to increase the representation of one's genes in future generations. One is to leave more offspring. The other is to arrange that even if one does not leave more offspring, one's relative's do so, since close relatives share genes. So, a person could sacrifice his reproduction completely, provided his brothers and sisters left many more children. Thus, his kind of genes would increase indirectly through his relatives and, in this indirect way, he would leave more offspring. An example of this phenomenon is the occurrence of "helpers at the nest" in birds, in which it is said that nonreproductive birds help out their close relatives, who are then able to raise more than the ordinary number of offspring and in the end more family genes are left. To make kin selection work, a sufficient number of excess offspring must be left by relatives. For example, if an individual gives up its own reproduction, its brothers and sisters must have twice as many offspring as ordinarily, but one can at least tell a story that might make this plausible.

We are then left with those traits that do not even benefit relatives differentially, for example, a general altruism toward all members of the species. Why are we good to strangers? For this phenomenon, the sociobiologist provides the theory of "reciprocal altruism." The argument is that even if we are unrelated, if I do you a favor that costs me something, you will remember that favor and reciprocate in the future, and by this indirect path I will succeed in advancing my own reproduction. An example often given is that of a drowning person. You see someone drowning and jump in to save that person even at the risk of your own life. In the future, when you are drowning, the person whose life you have saved will remember, and save you in gratitude. By this indirect path you will increase your own probability of survival and reproduction over the long run. The problem with this story is, of course, that the last person you would want to depend on to save you when you are drowning is someone whom you had to save in the past, since he or she is not likely to be a strong swimmer.

The real difficulty with the process of explanation that allows direct advantage, or kin selection, or reciprocal altruism when one or the other is useful in the explanation, is that a story can be invented that will explain the natural selective advantage of any trait imaginable. When we combine individual selective advantage with the possibility of kin selection and reciprocal altruism, it is hard to imagine any human trait for which a plausible scenario for its selective advantage could not be invented. The real problem is to find out whether any of these stories is true. One must distinguish between plausible stories, things that might be true, and true stories, things that actually have happened. How do we know that human altruism arose because of kin selection or reciprocal altruistic selection? At the very minimum, we might ask whether there is any evidence that such selective processes are going on at the present, but in fact no one has ever measured in any human population the actual reproductive advantage or disadvantage of any human behavior. All of the sociobiological explanations of the evolution of human behavior are like Rudyard Kipling's Just So stories of how the camel got his hump and how the elephant got its trunk. They are just stories. Science has turned into a game.

The second example is from a review of Darwinism Defended: A Guide to the Evolution Controversies by Michael Ruse. It was first published in The New York Review of Books on June 16, 1983 and reprinted in It Ain't Necessarily So: The Dream of the Human Genome and Other Illusions.

If Darwin's revolution was not in proclaiming evolution as a fact, then it must have been in his theory of its mechanism. And what was that theory? Why, "natural selection," of course, which then makes the theory of natural selection the very essence of Darwinism and any doubt about the universal efficacy of natural selection anti-Darwinian. There is a form of vulgar Darwinism, characteristic of the late nineteenth century and rejuvenated in the last ten years, which sees all aspects of shape, function, and behavior of all organisms as having been molded in exquisite detail by natural selection—the greater survival and reproduction of those organisms whose traits make them "adapted" for the struggle for existence. This Panglossian view is held largely by functional anatomists and comparative physiologists who, after all, make a living by explaining what everything is good for, and by sociologists who are self-consciously trying to win immortality by making their own small revolution. Evolutionary geneticists, on the other hand, who have spent the last sixty years in detailed experimental and theoretical analysis of the actual process of evolutionary change, and most epistemologists take a more pluralistic view of the forces driving evolution.

An occasional philosopher has allied himself or herself with the "adaptationists," who give exclusive emphasis to natural selection., and one such, Michael Ruse, makes a characteristic presentation in Darwinism Defended. Darwinism, the representative of objective modern science, is under ideologically motivated attack. Professor Ruse is alarmed: "'Darwinism,' as I shall refer to Darwin-inspired evolutionary thought, is threatened from almost every quarter." Well, not from every quarter, just the right and left flanks, it seems. First, the fundamentalists, supported by Ronald Regan, make a know-nothing assault from the right. No sooner have real evolutionists wheeled to face this attack than they are fallen upon by subversive elements from the left, "biologists with Marxist sympathies" and their "fellow travelers" among philosophers who argue "that any evolutionary theory based on Darwinian principles—particularly any theory that sees natural selection as the key to evolutionary change—is misleadingly incomplete."

Onto the field, mounted upon his charger perfectly adapted for the purpose, with weapons carefully shaped by selection to spread maximum confusion among the enemy, not to mention innocent civilians, comes Professor Ruse, "trying to rescue ... from the morass into which so many seem determined to drag them," "Darwin's life and achievements." In all fairness to Professor Ruse, he did not invent this version of events. The theory that evolutionary science is being brutally beaten and cut with crosses, hammers, and sickles made its first appearance in E.O. Wilson's On Human Nature as the only plausible explanation he could imagine for the failure of sociobiology to achieve instant, universal, and lasting adherence. The situation of evolutionary theory, however, is rather more complex and more interesting than Professor Ruse's Manichaean analysis suggests....

What vulgar Darwinists fail to understand, however, is that there is an asymmetry in Darwin's scheme. When adaptation is observed, it can be explained by the differential survival and reproduction of variant types being guided and biased by their differential efficiency or resistance to environmental stresses and dangers. But any cause of differential survival and reproduction, even when it has nothing to do with the struggle for existence, will result in some evolution, just not adaptive evolution.

The Panglossians have confused Darwin's discovery that all adaptation is a consequence of variational evolution with the claim that all variation evolution leads to adaptation. Even if biologists cannot, philosophers are supposed to distinguish between the assertion that "all x is y" and the assertion that "all y is x," and most have. This is not simply a logical question but an empirical one. What evolutionary geneticists and developmental biologists have been doing for the last sixty years is to accumulate a knowledge of a variety of forces that cause the frequency of variant types to change, and that do not fall under the rubric of adaptation by natural selection. These include, to name a few: random fixation of nonadaptive or even maladaptive traits because of limitations of population size and the colonization of new areas by small numbers of founders; the acquisition of traits because the genes influencing them are dragged along on the same chromosome as some totally unrelated gene that is being selected; and developmental side effects of genes that have been selected for some quite different reason.

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[Photo credit: The photograph of Richard Lewontin is from (Photographs of Participants in the Molecular Evolution Workshop)]

Cuss Level

 
Canadian Cynic scored 19.5% on the Cuss-O-Meter [It's all fucking relative, isn't it?]. This isn't a big surprise, although in person (s)he doesn't swear nearly as much as on the blog.

I couldn't resist entering Sandwalk to see how I do.

Hmmm ... 5.2% of my pages have "cuss" words. I wonder what they are? Does "IDiot" count?

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Good Science Writers: Niles Eldredge

 
Niles Eldredge ranks as one of the best science writers among professional scientists, in my opinion.¹ What I like about Eldredge is that he does not disguise his biases by ignoring all those who disagree with him. Instead, he tries to explain why his view of biology is correct. In this sense he is like Richard Dawkins, although he differs significantly from Dawkins because he (Eldredge) is better at correctly describing the views of his opponents.

Eldredge has written 20 popular books on evolution. Dawkins didn't select anything from Eldredge for The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing. I can't imagine why.

The first example of Eldredge's writing is from Darwin: Discovering the Tree of Life published in 2005. You'll soon see why I choose it.

Imagine for a moment, Charles Darwin taking one of his daily walks along his beloved "Sandwalk"—that stretch of Kentish gravel Darwin had built along the rear edge of his property at Down House. Outwardly, things were normal. It is mid-June 1858. Darwin picks up his walking stick and goes out the back door of Down House. He is a middle-aged man of forty-nine years—a man of regular habits. Strolling along the Sandwalk, a path lined with bits of chalk, flint, and the occasional fossil from the local Cretaceous bedrock of southeastern England, he regularly took the air, inspected his grounds—and mulled over his life and work. He often found peace walking along the path that lay between his expansive field and his neighbor's adjoining property. And he occasionally felt that exhilaration that comes when sudden insight pops into the brain—a solution to a nagging problem that often did not even seem to be uppermost in one's mind at the moment. Darwin was a highly intuitive man, a man whose capacity for creative thought was perfectly matched by his rigor in testing his ideas with observation and analysis, de rigueur in the freshly minted practice of modern professional science.

But things were far from normal that day. For one thing, his two-year old retarded child, Charles Waring, was battling scarlet fever and near death. His fifteen-year-old daughter Etty (Henrietta) had diphtheria, and Darwin had already lost his dear Annie seven years earlier. She had been the second child, Emma and Charles's first daughter, her death from tuberculosis in 1851 had removed what little was left of his religious faith. All this was enough to make him upset. Though another son, Francis, was to write many years later that his father hardly knew a day when his health was robust and normal, that June day his stomach must have been in even greater turmoil than usual.

But there was more, far more, upsetting Darwin's stomach that day. For Charles Robert Darwin had lived the past twenty-two years as a man with a secret. And this was not just any old garden-variety secret like a clandestine love affair, or commission of a crime (although he often thought of it in those terms). He had traveled the globe as a young man in the 1830s, gentleman ship's naturalist and companion to the Beagle's captain Robert FitzRoy, and by the time he reached home in late 1836, not quite twenty-eight years old, he was convinced that life had evolved through natural causes. He saw that human beings were no exception: we are part of the spectrum of life along with all other species of animals, plants, and the then largely unknown microbial world.

....

Darwin had finally begun writing his magnum opus, to be entitled Natural Selection, on May 14, 1856. As he trudged along the Sandwalk that June day in 1858, he had already amassed some ten chapters, and there was still a long way to go. He was cramming in virtually all the examples he had found in his life that supported his ideas: observations he had made as long ago as the Beagle voyage in the 1830s; analysis by experts of some of the plants, animals, and fossil he had brought back from that epic voyage; but also assorted facts on natural history that he had amassed over the past twenty years from the newly emerging scientific literature—and not least, from the dozens of contacts he had made through correspondence with botanists, zoologists, geologists, and plant and animal breeders throughout the world.

His correspondents included a young man named Wallace who, in part modeling himself after Darwin, had been studying the fauna and flora of the far-flung islands of what are now Malaysia and Indonesia. Darwin had written Wallace, encouraging him to pursue his work, including his thoughts on species.

But, prodigious as this fledgling manuscript on Natural Selection had already become, it was too little, too late. What was bothering Darwin most that June day in 1858 was the arrival a few days before, of yet another letter along with a manuscript from that far-off naturalist and specimen collector, Alfred Russel Wallace. With it came a fresh round in Darwin's own personal "struggle for existence." For Wallace had truly scooped him—outlining a theory of natural selection (though he didn't call it that) so well that Darwin later said he could hardly have written a beter abstract of his ideas himself.

The next example is from Eldredge's excellent book Reinventing Darwin: The Great Debate at the High Table of Evolutionary Theory, published in 1995. This is required reading for anyone who wants to understand the controversies in evolutionary theory.

Eldredge claims, correctly, that the dominant paradigm of the late twentieth century was an over-emphasis on natural selection acting on individuals (or genes). Those who accept this point of view are called Ultra-Darwinians. Richard Dawkins and John Maynard Smith were the ringleaders. The ultra-Darwinians dominated the High Table and only reluctantly invited their opponents to visit on special occasions.

The grand mistake, the cardinal sin that rightly carries automatic suspension of seating privileges at that High Table, is to suggest a theoretical proposition that assumes that the neo-Darwinian paradigm is somehow erroneous. Theories that claim, in some fundamental sense, to be alternatives to the neo-Darwinian paradigm bear an immense (and I believe insurmountable) burdon of proof on their metaphorical shoulders.

Ultra-Darwinians who people the following chapters are fond of accusing their opponents of precisely that crime.: opposing the core of the neo-Darwinian paradigm. That's precisely what Fairfield Osborn did with his theory of "aristogenesis" in the 1920s, and that, too, is the original sin of Richard Goldschmidt. But that's not what the latter day arrivistes at the Table are doing. We are making the milder, far more defensible, claim that one cannot simply take the neo-Darwinian paradigm and extrapolate it all across the board. We simply do not believe in attributing population-level phenomena to such disparate entities as species, higher taxa, social systems, and ecosystems. And that's precisely what the ultra-Darwinians have been up to, claiming all the while that they've actually demonstrated the truth of what was in reality assumed all along: that the neo-Darwinian paradigm of the workings of natural selection within populations is necessary and sufficient to explain evolutionary history. We naturalists agree that it is necessary. But it isn't sufficient.

Naturalists argue that ultra-Darwinians look endlessly at the minutia of population biology, periodically glancing up to apply their principles across the board in simplistic and generally unrealistic ways. Never shy, the ultra-Darwinians persist in telling anyone who will listen that our naturalists' attempts to formulate theoretical propositions on the nature of the evolutionary process are overwrought failures.

It sounds like George Simpson's story of geneticists versus paleontologists all over again. But there has been progress, within both the ultra-Darwinian and modern versions of the naturalist camps. The problem is reconciling the two. Anyone not seated at (or in the immediate vicinity of) the High Table would surely be reminded of the blind men and the elephant. And while the spirit of the present enterprise remains argumentative, I share George Simpson's conviction (and Maynard Smiths' sometime view) that surely someday, somehow a genuine rapprochement will emerge. One day evolutionists will be able to dine in relative harmony at the High Table.

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1. Gould was better when he was alive.

Henry Morgentaler Receives Order of Canada

 
Dr. Henry Morgentaler is a Canadian physician who campaigned for a woman's right to choose abortion. He is responsible for overthrowing the laws against abortion in Canada. Here's the entry in Wikipedia [Henry Morgentaler].

On June 1, 1970, Morgentaler was arrested in Montreal for performing illegal abortions. ... He was acquitted by a jury in the court case, but the acquittal was overturned by five judges on the Quebec Court of Appeal in 1974. He went to prison, appealed, and was again acquitted. Morgentaler first went to the Supreme Court of Canada in an attempt to overturn the country's abortion law in Morgentaler v. The Queen but was unsuccessful.

In 1982, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms was enacted as part of the Canadian Constitution. Morgentaler was charged again in 1983 in Ontario for procuring illegal miscarriages. He was acquitted by a jury, but the verdict was reversed by the Ontario Court of Appeal. The case was then sent to the Supreme Court of Canada. He was acquitted once again, and the Canadian Supreme Court declared the law he was convicted under to be in violation of the Charter and thus unconstitutional in the case of Morgentaler et al. v. Her Majesty The Queen 1988 (1 S.C.R. 30). This ruling essentially ended all statutory restrictions on abortion in Canada.

Yesterday, Canada Day, Morgentaler was named to the Order of Canada in recognition of his service to women and to the country. Canadian Cynic has a funny posting about the discussion that might have gone on when the committee was making up it's mind about Morgentaler [Fly on the wall, Order of Canada edition]

As you can imagine, not everyone in Canada is pleased about this award. The (Not Progressive) Conservative government under Prime Minister Stephen Harper was among the first opponents of women's rights to speak out as reported in the Globe & Mail [Cheers, jeers greet Morgentaler's honour].

The Harper government was quick to distance itself from the announcement that Henry Morgentaler, the controversial abortion doctor who changed the face of health care in the country, was named on Tuesday to the Order of Canada.

The Tories, no doubt sensing a brewing backlash from their conservative base, issued a brief response outlining how the appointment process has nothing to do with the government.

“The Conservative government is not involved in either deliberations or decisions with respect to which individuals are appointed to the Order of Canada,” the PMO statement said.

On the other hand,

But Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion called for politics to be put aside and asked Canadians to look at Dr. Morgentaler's contributions to society.

“Dr. Morgentaler has stood up for a woman's right to choose for his entire career, often at great personal cost and risk,” Mr. Dion's office said in a statement. “The Order of Canada process has been designed to keep politics out of it and I think we should all respect and celebrate the decisions of the panel and the Governor-General.”

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Nobel Laureate: Sir Frederick Hopkins

 

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1929.

"for his discovery of the growth-stimulating vitamins"

Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins (1861 - 1947) received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his seminal contributions to the discovery of vitamins. Hopkins identified essential components in milk that were absolutely required for growth and development in rats. Only a few drops of milk per day were sufficient.

The essential vitamins in milk can be separated into two different components. The lipid-soluble component consists of vitamins A and D [Monday's Molecule #78].

Hopkins is often credited with being the discoverer of vitamins but he disclaims this honor, pointing out in his Nobel Lecture that essential nutrients had been recognized by many others before him. He shared the Nobel Prize with Christiaan Eijkman. Altogether, there have been seven Nobel Prizes awarded for work on vitamins.

Hopkins became Professor of Biochemistry at Cambridge University in 1914. I think he was the very first Professor of Biochemistry at Cambridge.

The presentation speech was delivered by Professor G. Liljestrand, member of the Staff of Professors of the Royal Caroline Institute, on December 10, 1929

THEME:
Nobel Laureates

Your Majesty, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen.

That the fruits of civilization are not solely beneficial is shown by, inter alia, the history of the art of medicine. Not a few illnesses and diseases follow close on the heels of, and are more or less directly caused by, civilization. This is the case with the widespread disease beriberi, first described more than 1,300 years ago from that ancient seat of civilization, China. In modern times, however, it was not until towards the end of the 17th and the beginning of the 18th century that the disease attracted more general attention. Subsequently it has, on different occasions and with varying degrees of violence, made its appearance in all five continents, but more particularly its haunts have been in Eastern and South-Eastern Asia. At times the disease has been a serious scourge there. Thus in 1871 and 1879, Tokio was visited by widespread epidemics, and during the Russo-Japanese War it is said that not less than one-sixth of the Japanese army was struck down.

Beriberi shows itself in paralysis accompanied by disturbances in the sensibility and atrophy of the muscles, besides symptoms from the heart and blood vessels, inter alia, tiredness and oedema. Decided lesions have been shown in the peripheral nerves which seem to explain the manifestations of the disease. Mortality has varied considerably, from one or two per cent to 80 per cent in certain epidemics.

A number of circumstances indicated a connection between food and beriberi: for example, it was suggested that the cause might be traced to bad rice or insufficiency in the food of proteins or fat.

The severe ravages of beriberi in the Dutch Indies led the Dutch Government to appoint a special commission to study the disease on the spot. At the time, bacteriology was in its hey-day, and it was then but natural that bacteria should be sought as the cause of the disease, and indeed it was thought that success had been attained. The researches were continued in Java by one of the commission's coadjutors, the Dutch doctor Christiaan Eijkman. As has so often been the case during the development of science, a chance observation proved to be of decisive importance. Eijkman observed a peculiar sickness among the hens belonging to the laboratory. They were attacked by an upward-moving paralysis, they began to walk unsteadily, found difficulty in perching, and later lay down on their sides. The issue of the disease was fatal unless they were specially treated. It has been said that the secret of success is to be prepared for one's opportunity when it presents itself, and indubitably Eijkman was prepared in an eminent degree. With his attention focussed on beriberi, he immediately found a striking similarity between that disease and the sickness that had attacked the hens. He also observed changes in numerous nerves similar to those met with in the case of beriberi. In common with beriberi, this ailment of the hens was to be described as a polyneuritis. In vain, however, did Eijkman try to establish micro-organisms as the cause of the disease.

On the other hand, he succeeded in establishing the fact that the condition of the hens was connected with a change in their food, in that for some time before they were attacked they had been given boiled polished rice instead of the usual raw husked rice. Direct experiments proved incontestably that the polyneuritis of the hens was caused by the consumption of rice that by so-called «polishing» had been deprived of the outer husk. Eijkman found that the same disease presented itself when the hens were fed exclusively on a number of other starch-rich products, such as sago and tapioca. He also proved that the disease could be checked by the addition to the food of rice bran, that is to say, the parts of the rice that had been removed by polishing, and he found that the protective constituent of the bran was soluble in water and alcohol.

Eijkman's work led Vorderman to carry out investigations on prisoners in the Dutch Indies (where the prisoner's food was prepared in different ways according to the varying customs of the inhabitants), with a view to discovering whether beriberi in man was connected with the nature of the rice food they consumed. It proved that in the prisons where the inmates were fed on polished rice, beriberi was about 300 times as prevalent as in the prisons where unpolished rice was used.

When making investigations to explain the results reached, Eijkman considered that protein or salt hunger could not be the cause of the disease. But he indicated that the protective property of the rice bran might possibly be connected with the introduction of some particular protein or some special salt. At the time it might have been readily imagined that the polyneuritis in the hens and beriberi were due to some poison, and Eijkman set this up as a working hypothesis, though his attempts to establish the poison were in vain. In his view, however, such a poison was formed, but it was rendered innocuous by the protective substance in the bran. It was only Eijkman's successor in Java, Grijns, who made it clear that the substance in question was used directly in the body, and that our usual food, in addition to the previously known constituents, must contain certain other substances, if health is to be preserved. Funk introduced the designation vitamins for these substances, and since then the particular substance that serves as a protection against polyneuritis has been called the «antineuritic» vitamin.

It might have been expected that Eijkman's discovery would lead to an immediate and decided decline in beriberi - perhaps to the disappearance of the disease. But this was by no means the case, and not even in the Dutch Indies, where Eijkman and Grijns had worked, were the results particularly brilliant. The reasons for this were several: the reluctance of the inhabitants to substitute the less appetizing unpolished for polished rice, the opinion that polyneuritis in birds was not a similar condition to beriberi in man, and an inadequate appreciation of Eijkman's work. As a result of numerous experiments by different investigators on animals and human beings, who offered themselves for experimental work, it has gradually become clear that beriberi is a disease for the appearance of which lack of the vitamin found in rice bran - but also other circumstances - is of decisive importance. These experiences, in addition to successful experiments made in various places on the basis of Eijkman's observations, especially in British India, have gradually led to a general adoption of Eijkman's views. The successful attempts to combat beriberi which are now proceeding are the fruits of Eijkman's labours.

It was the analysis of the nature of the food used in cases of polyneuritis in hens that led Eijkman to his discovery. As a rule, analysis and synthesis complete each other, and indeed the employment of both these avenues of approach has been of decisive importance also for the development of the science of vitamins.

Although a number of experiments carried out about 50 years ago supported the assumption that, if our food is to have its full value, it must contain something more than the long-known basic constituents - proteins, fat, carbohydrates, water, and salts - yet it is not until our own days that complete certainty has been reached. One line of development has been sketched above. But numerous investigations have also been carried out by different experimentors with a view to testing the value of foods composed exclusively of the above-mentioned constituents in pure form. Sometimes it has proved to be a matter of some difficulty to get young animals to grow on such foods. One explanation put forward for this was the monotony of the food, and another was that the excessive purity resulted in the absence of certain substances giving the food taste which are necessary for appetite, and which must be present if the food is to be taken in sufficient amount. From other quarters, however, it was reported that even from the pure constituents, a food had been successfully produced which led to growth in the young organism.

When Hopkins joined the numbers of those who were trying to find a solution to this problem, he had the advantage of a far-reaching experience within similar fields of research, for he had done a great deal of detailed work on the presentation in pure form of certain proteins, and in connection therewith he had discovered the amino acid tryptophane as an element in certain proteins. As early as 1906 he had carried out careful feeding experiments on mice with different proteins, and by means of regular weighings it was observed whether the food was sufficient or not. It appeared from these experiments that the animal organism cannot itself build up tryptophane - proteins which do not contain it are not sufficient for the needs of the body. The simple methods employed by Hopkins came to play an important role later on.

When Hopkins continued his experiments, he fed young rats on a basic diet which, in addition to the necessary salts, contained a carefully purified mixture of lard, starch, and casein, i.e. the protein that is most abundantly found in milk. After some time the animals ceased to grow, which showed the insufficiency of this basic food in itself. By various experiments, however, Hopkins demonstrated that it was only necessary to add a very small daily amount of milk - two to three cubic centimeters for each animal - for growth to recommence. This amount of milk only corresponded to one or two per cent of the energy-content of the food, so that in this respect the addition of milk was insignificant. It was indeed found that incompletely purified casein, e.g. the ordinary casein of commerce, owing to the slight quantities of active substances present, was sufficient, with the other basic food, to maintain growth, even though it was considerably delayed. It was evident, as Hopkins was able to show more explicitly, that here was to some extent the explanation of the older and conflicting results.

Hopkins showed that there was a sufficiency of food consumed without the added milk, but it could be fully utilized by the body only when the growth-promoting influence of the milk was present. This effect was found not to be connected with any of the known constituent parts of milk. It was found also with yeast and the green parts of plants.

Hopkins communicated certain of his main results - but in an extremely brief form - as early as in 1906, and he returned to the subject in 1909 in a series of lectures, but it was not until three years later that his work was published in its entirety. By then Stepp had given accounts of experiments which, though they certainly seem less capable of one definite interpretation than those of Hopkins, yet point in the same direction, and the ground was also in other respects prepared, so that Hopkins' work was a great incentive to continued experiments in the young science of vitamins. Chiefly by American investigations it was shown that there are at least two vitamins necessary for growth, one soluble in fat, the other in water. It is still an open question whether the latter is identical with the antineuritic vitamin.

Just as at one time the newly acquired knowledge of bacteria as causes of illness opened the door to an entirely new province of research of extraordinary importance, so now the discovery of vitamins - even though to a lesser degree - has opened up new vistas to medicine, and we have advanced nearer to the understanding of numerous obscure maladies. Under the influence of Eijkman's discovery, Holst, with Frölich, exposed the nature and character of scurvy. Above all by the efforts of Hopkins' pupil Mellanby, it was found that rachitis was an illness due to lack of certain substances, and others have shown similar conditions for a large number of other maladies, the last one being pellagra, the similarity in principle of which to beriberi was already indicated by Eijkman in his classic work.

At the same time, extensive and important contributions have been made to the question of the nature of the physiological processes which are affected by vitamins.

Thus the discovery of vitamins, which is this year rewarded with the Nobel Prize, implies an advance of extraordinary significance, but there is still much of importance to be discovered that can at present be but dimly discerned or suspected.

Your Excellency, Baron Sweerts de Landas Wyborgh, Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins. Many years have passed, since Eijkman found the antineuritic principle in food, but the great importance of this work has been appreciated but slowly. Today, however, the outstanding significance of the discovery is universally acknowledged not only for our understanding and our attempt to combat beriberi, but also because it has indicated a way of investigating and controlling many other deficiency diseases.

You, Sir Frederick, have demonstrated the physiological necessity of the vitamins for normal metabolism and growth, thus very considerably extending our knowledge of the importance of vitamins for life processes as a whole.

The discoveries of the antineuritic and the growth-promoting vitamins, for which the Caroline Institute has awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine this year, are foundation stones of the science of vitamins. Great as has been the progress in this field, yet we may still hope to reap rich harvests in the future.

On behalf of the Caroline Institute I express its hearty congratulations to the prizemen, and I beg Your Excellency to convey to your famous countryman its felicitations. With these words I have the great honour of asking you to accept the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine from the hands of His Majesty the King.

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[Photo Credit: Wikipedia]

Urban Cowboys

 
Here's a photo of Gord [Gordon Moran] and Rach about to descend into the Grand Canyon. Cute hats, eh?


The mules turned out to be stubborn and uncooperative. For a picture of what Gordon looked like when he was like that much younger, see here.

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Good Science Writers: David Raup

 
David M. Raup is Avery Distinguished Service Professor (emeritus) of Geophysical Sciences, Evolutionary Biology, and The Conceptual Foundations of Science at the University of Chicago. He retired in 1994.

One of Raup's major interests is extinction. He worked closely with John Sepkoski on patterns of extinction in the fossil record and especially mass extinctions. In the introduction to his 1991 book, Extinction: Bad Genes or Bad Luck, Stephen Jay Gould writes,

... no topic now commands more interest among paleontologists than extinction. The reasons are many, with a prominent root to the impact theory of mass dying. But the principle architect of this shift is my brilliant colleague David M. Raup. Dave may be more at home before a computer console than before a dusty drawer of fossils (and he gets his share of flack from traditionalists for this predilection), but he is the acknowledged master of quantitative approaches to the fossil record. He saw the power of the impact scenario right from the beginning, when most paleontologists were howling with rage or laughter, and refusing to consider the proposal seriously. He has made the most important discoveries and proposed the most interesting and outrageous hypotheses in the field, including the suggestion that mass extinctions may cycle with a frequency of 26 million years. He is also the perennial Peck's bad boy of paleontology—a hard act to maintain past the age of fifty (I am struggling with him), but truly the most sublime of all statuses in science. If Dave has any motto, it can only be: Think the unthinkable (and then make a mathematical model to show how it might work); take an outrageous idea with a limited sphere of validity and see if it might not be extendable to explain everything. This book is a wonderful exposition of this potentially valid iconoclasm.

Raup is not one of the featured authors in The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing. This shouldn't be a big surprise since not only is Raup a paleontologist—not Richard Dawkins' favorite topic—but his main thesis is the randomness of evolution—also not one of Dawkins' favorite topics.

The following quotations are from Extinction: Bad Genes or Bad Luck.

I have taken the title of this book from a research article I published in Spain some years ago. I was concerned then with the failure of trilobites in the Paleozoic era. Starting about 570 million years ago, these complex, crab-like organisms dominated life on ocean bottoms—at least they dominated the fossil assemblages of that age. But through the 325 million years of the Paleozoic era, trilobites dwindled in numbers and variety, finally disappearing completely in the mass extinction that ended the era, about 245 million years ago.

My question in Spain is the one I still ask: Why? Did the trilobites do something wrong? Were they fundamentally inferior organisms? Were they stupid? Or did they just have the bad luck to be in the wrong place at the wrong time? The first alternative, bad genes, could be manifested by things like susceptibility to disease, lack of good sensory perception, or poor reproductive capacity. The second, bad luck, could be a freak catastrophe that eliminated all life in areas where tilobites happened to be living. The question is basically one of nature versus nurture. Is proneness to extinction an inherent property of a species—a weakness—or does it depend on vagaries of chance in a risk-ridden world?

Of course, the problem is more complex than I have presented it, just as the nature-nurture question in human behavior is complex. But in both situations, nature (Genetics) and nurture (environment) operate to some degree, and the challenge is to find out which process dominates and whether the imbalance varies in time and space. (pp. 5-6)

Raup is known for his "Field of Bullets" scenario. Imagine that individuals in various species are killed at random. If the kill rate is high enough (e.g. 75%) then many species will be wiped out merely by chance while others will survive because some individuals were not struck by bullets. By chance, some genera will disappear because all of its species were wiped out. Sometimes an entire family or class of organisms will go extinct under this scenario: not because they were unfit but just because of bad luck.

Raup also describes The Gamblers' Ruin. Eventually all gamblers will lose all their money as long as they keep playing. That's because their winnings fluctuate up and down by chance but, while there may not be an upper limit to the amount of money they can win, there's definitely a lower limit and once the gambler runs out of money they are finished (extinct).

By recognizing these possibilities, Raup was able to model the life history of species and compare it to what is observed in the fossil record.

In the first chapter, I commented that the title of this book was taken from a research article I had published on the extinction of trilobites. The case provides another example of taxonomic selectivity.

In the rocks of the Cambrian period (570-510 ma BP), somewhat more than six thousand species of trilobites have been found and named. This is three-quarters of the fossil species known in the Cambrian. By the end of the Paleozoic era, 325 million years later, all were gone. On the working assumption that speciation and extinction rates for trilobites were the same as for all other animals of the Paleozoic, my question was whether a group as large as the trilobites could have drifted to extinction by bad luck—as an affluent gambler can drift to bankruptcy, given enough time.

I used mathematical models ... to estimate the probability that the trilobites could have died out because of a chance excess of species extinctions over speciations. The result was a vanishingly small likelihood that chance was operating alone in the trilobite case. The working assumption that trilobites had inherent extinction and speciation rates equal to the Paleozoic average was clearly wrong. It followed that trilobites had (for some reason) either less capability for speciation or a higher risk of extinction. Testing for the latter possibility, one finds the extinction credible only if one assumes life spans of trilobite species 14-28 percent less than the Paleozoic average.

From this, I concluded that the trilobites were indeed doing something wrong. (or that other groups were doing something better). One vote for bad genes. (pp. 102-103)

The trilobites may be the exception to the rule. In other chapters, Raup documents the apparent randomness of extinction. He concludes,

Extinction is evidently a combination of bad genes and bad luck. Some species die out because they cannot cope in their normal habitat or because superior competitors or predators push them out. But, as is surely clear form this book, I feel that most species die out because they are unlucky. They die because they are subjected to biological or physical stresses not anticipated in their prior evolution and because time is not available for Darwinian natural selection to help them adapt.

Having just made an advocacy statement—bad luck not bad genes!—I hope the reader appreciates its uncertainties. Favoring bad luck over bad genes is my best guess. It is shared by many of my colleagues even though a majority of paleontologists and biologists still subscribe to the more Darwinian view of extinction, that of a constructive force favoring the most fit species.

Is extinction through bad luck a challenge to Darwin's natural selection? No. Natural selection remains the only viable, naturalistic explanation we have for sophisticated adaptations like eyes and wings. We would not be here without natural selection. Extinction by bad luck merely adds another element to the evolutionary process, operating at the level of species, families, and classes, rather than the level of local breeding populations of single species. Thus, Darwinism is alive and well, but, I submit, it cannot have operated by itself to produce the diversity of life today.

I don't know why Raup's ideas are not more widely recognized and accepted. But it's not because he's a bad writer. His book is an example of how one can advocate a particular position while still giving other points of view their proper due. It's the hallmark of a good science writer.

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Who Was More Important: Lincoln or Darwin?

 
This week's issue of Newsweek has an article by Malcolm Jones comparing the influence of Charles Darwin, the greatest scientist who ever lived, and an American politician named Abraham Lincoln. Why, you might ask, would anyone make such a comparison? It's because they were both born on February 12th, 1809.

Now, you might think this was a slam-dunk in favor of Darwin but that would be foolish. Remember that this is an American magazine. In America, Lincoln is responsible for abolishing slavery—conveniently ignoring the fact that slavery had already been illegal in the British Empire for almost thirty years. The Slavery Abolition Act was passed in 1833 and gave all slaves their freedom.

The answer is ... Lincoln!!! [Who Was More Important: Lincoln or Darwin?].

Lincoln and Darwin were both revolutionaries, in the sense that both men upended realities that prevailed when they were born. They seem—and sound—modern to us, because the world they left behind them is more or less the one we still live in. So, considering the joint magnitude of their contributions—and the coincidence of their conjoined birthdays—it is hard not to wonder: who was the greater man? It's an apples-and-oranges—or Superman-vs.-Santa—comparison. But if you limit the question to influence, it bears pondering, all the more if you turn the question around and ask, what might have happened if one of these men had not been born? Very quickly the balance tips in Lincoln's favor. As much of a bombshell as Darwin detonated, and as great as his book on evolution is (E. O. Wilson calls it "the greatest scientific book of all time"), it does no harm to remember that he hurried to publish "The Origin of Species" because he thought he was about to be scooped by his fellow naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, who had independently come up with much the same idea of evolution through natural selection. In other words, there was a certain inevitability to Darwin's theory. Ideas about evolution surfaced throughout the first part of the 19th century, and while none of them was as cogent as Darwin's—until Wallace came along—it was not as though he was the only man who had the idea.

Lincoln, in contrast, is sui generis. Take him out of the picture, and there is no telling what might have happened to the country. True, his election to the presidency did provoke secession and, in turn, the war itself, but that war seems inevitable—not a question of if but when. Once in office, he becomes the indispensable man. As James McPherson demonstrates so well in the forthcoming "Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief," Lincoln's prosecution of the war was crucial to the North's success—before Grant came to the rescue, Lincoln was his own best general. Certainly we know what happened once he was assassinated: Reconstruction was administered punitively and then abandoned, leaving the issue of racial equality to dangle for another century. But here again, what Lincoln said and wrote matters as much as what he did. He framed the conflict in language that united the North—and inspires us still. If anything, with the passage of time, he only looms larger—more impressive, and also more mysterious. Other presidents, even the great ones, submit to analysis. Lincoln forever remains just beyond our grasp—though not for want of trying: it has been estimated that more books have been written about him than any other human being except Jesus.

If Darwin were not so irreplaceable as Lincoln, that should not gainsay his accomplishment. No one could have formulated his theory any more elegantly—or anguished more over its implications. Like Lincoln, Darwin was brave. He risked his health and his reputation to advance the idea that we are not over nature but a part of it. Lincoln prosecuted a war—and became its ultimate casualty—to ensure that no man should have dominion over another. Their identical birthdays afford us a superb opportunity to observe these men in the shared context of their time—how each was shaped by his circumstances, how each reacted to the beliefs that steered the world into which he was born and ultimately how each reshaped his corner of that world and left it irrevocably changed.

Answer: Lincoln

In fairness, if you only consider the United States of America, then the answer might be correct. Darwin's ideas do not have much influence there.

The comments on RichardDawkins.net are fun to read.

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[Hat Tip: RichardDawkins.net]