I'm going to a birthday party!

It's Bruce Alberts' 80th birthday party in San Francisco. There will be food, wine, cake, and (probably) dancing but first you go to the symposium on education.

Bruce Alberts’ 80th Birthday Gathering and Symposium
Saturday, April 14
Symposium on Science Education and Science Policy in Honor of Bruce Alberts’ 80th Birthday
(At the Metropolitan Club, 640 Sutter St., San Francisco 94102)

9a Guests arrive and register

10a Introduction by Master of Ceremonies Gregor Eichele

10:10a Session 1 How do we convey the importance of science to the public?
Moderator: Maureen Munn
Panelists: Janet Coffey, Will Colglazier, Janet English, Caroline Kiehle

11:40a Break

12p Buffet Lunch served in the Garden Room

1:30p Session 2 Innovations in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education
Moderators: Doug Kellogg and Kimberly Tanner.
Panelists: Judy Miner, Sally Pasion (one more panelist TBA)

2:30p Coffee and tea break

3p Session 3 Challenges Facing the Next Generation of Scientists
Moderators: Cynthia Fuhrmann and Bill Theurkauf.
Panelists: Marc Kirschner, Barry Selick, Nolan Sigal

4p Break

4:30p Session 4 Science Policy
Moderators: Mary Maxon and Jason Rao
Panelists: Bill Colglazier, Haile Debas, Donna Riordan, Keith Yamamoto

5:30p Elaine Bearer’s Duet for clarinet and viola: “Replication Machine”

6:15p Reception at Metropolitan Club Bar (4th Floor)

7p Buffet Dinner (Metropolitan Club Main Dining Hall — 4th Floor) Ending at 9:30p.

Sunday, April 15

10a - 2p Drop-in Brunch for all hosted at Beth Alberts’ home

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Photo: Bruce Alberts with his first three graduate students: Glenn Herrick (right), Keith Yamamoto (left), Larry Moran (middle right), Bruce Alberts (middle left).

Cafe Scientific Mississauga: The Good, Bad, & Natural

Dan Riskin: The Good, Bad, & Natural: What Mother Nature says
about morality?

Thursday, April 12, 2018
7:30 - 10:00 pm
The Franklin House
263 Queen Street S
Streetsville (Mississauga), Ontario, Canada

"People often act like “natural” is synonymous with “good.” Using heinous examples from the scientific literature, Dan Riskin will blow the hinges off that misconception. Then he’ll give some thoughts about where, if not from nature, the roots of human morality might lie.

Dan Riskin, PhD, is a television personality, scientist, author, and podcaster. He is best known as the co-host of Discovery's flagship science program, Daily Planet, and as the host of Animal Planet's show about parasites, Monsters Inside Me. To make science accessible and interesting to wide audiences, Dan has appeared as a guest on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, The Dr. Oz Show, and on several news outlets, including CP24, CTV, CNN, and CBS. Dan has published more than 20 papers in scientific journals, and his first popular book, Mother Nature is Trying to Kill You was a Canadian bestseller.

IMPORTANT:
This meetup starts 30 minutes later than our regular meeting time to give Dan time to drive to Mississauga from Scarborough.
You are welcome to come at 7 or 7:30, but don't expect the talk to begin before 8 pm. It will definitely be worth it."

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Subhash Lakhotia: The concept of 'junk DNA' becomes junk

Continuing my survey of recent papers on junk DNA, I stumbled upon a review by Subash Lakhotia that has recently been accepted in The Proceedings of the Indian National Science Academy (Lakhotia, 2018). It illustrates the extent of the publicity campaign mounted by ENCODE and opponents of junk DNA. In the title of this post, I paraphrased a sentence from the abstract that summarizes the point of the paper; namely, that the 'recent' discovery of noncoding RNAs refutes the concept of junk DNA.

Lakhotia claims to have written a review of the history of junk DNA but, in fact, his review perpetuates a false history. He repeats a version of history made popular by John Mattick. It goes like this. Old-fashioned scientists were seduced by Crick's central dogma into thinking that the only important part of the genome was the part encoding proteins. They ignored genes for noncoding RNAs because they didn't fit into their 'dogma.' They assumed that most of the noncoding part of the genome was junk. However, recent new discoveries of huge numbers of noncoding RNAs reveal that those scientists were very stupid. We now know that the genome is chock full of noncoding RNA genes and the concept of junk DNA has been refuted.

Peter Larsen: "There is no such thing as 'junk DNA'"

The March 2018 issue of Chromosome Research is a Special Issue on Transposable Elements and Genome Function. I found it as I was doing my routine search for papers on junk DNA in order to see whether scientists are finally beginning to understand the issue. Peter Larsen (guest editor) wrote the introduction to the special issue. He says ...

There is no such thing as “junk DNA.” Indeed, a suite of discoveries made over the past few decades have put to rest this misnomer and have identified many important roles that so-called junk DNA provides to both genome structure and function (this special issue; Biémont and Vieira 2006; Jeck et al. 2013; Elbarbary et al. 2016; Akera et al. 2017; Chen and Yang 2017; Chuong et al. 2017). Nevertheless, given the historical focus on coding regions of the genome, our understanding of the biological function of non-coding regions (e.g., repetitive DNA, transposable elements) remains somewhat limited, and therefore, all those enigmatic and poorly studied regions of the genome that were once identified as junk are instead best viewed as genomic “dark matter.”

What's In Your Genome? - The Pie Chart

Here's my latest compilation of the composition of the human genome. It's depicted in the form of a pie chart.¹ [UPDATED: March 29, 2018]

What is "dark DNA"?

Some DNA sequencing technologies aren't very good at sequencing and assembling DNA that's rich in GC base pairs. What this means is that some sequenced genomes could be missing stretches of GC-rich DNA if they rely exclusively on those techniques. This difficult-to-sequence DNA was called "dark DNA" in a paper published last summer (July 2017).

The paper looked at some missing genes in the genome of the sand rat Psammomys obesus. The authors initially used a standard shotgun strategy in order to sequence the sand rat genome. They combined millions of short reads (&lt200 bp) to assemble a complete genome. A large block of genes seemed to be missing—genes that were conserved and present in the genomes of related species (Hargraves et al., 2017). They knew the genes were present because they could detect the mRNAs corresponding to those genes.

Making Sense of Genes by Kostas Kampourakis

Kostas Kampourakis is a specialist in science education at the University of Geneva, Geneva (Switzerland). Most of his book is an argument against genetic determinism in the style of Richard Lewontin. You should read this book if you are interested in that argument. The best way to describe the main thesis is to quote from the last chapter.

Here is the take-home message of this book: Genes were initially conceived as immaterial factors with heuristic values for research, but along the way they acquired a parallel identity as DNA segments. The two identities never converged completely, and therefore the best we can do so far is to think of genes as DNA segments that encode functional products. There are neither 'genes for' characters nor 'genes for' diseases. Genes do nothing on their own, but are important resources for our self-regulated organism. If we insist in asking what genes do, we can accept that they are implicated in the development of characters and disease, and that they account for variation in characters in particular populations. Beyond that, we should remember that genes are part of an interactive genome that we have just begun to understand, the study of which has various limitations. Genes are not our essences, they do not determine who we are, and they are not the explanation of who we are and what we do. Therefore we are not the prisoners of any genetic fate. This is what the present book has aimed to explain.

Is evolutionary psychology a deeply flawed enterprise?

We were discussing the field of evolutionary psychology at our local cafe scientific meeting last week. The discussion was prompted by watching a video of Steven Pinker in conversation with Stephen Fry. I pointed out that the field of evolutionary psychology is a mess and many scientists and philosophers think it is fundamentally flawed. The purpose of this post is to provide links to back up my claim.

Can the Dunning-Kruger effect be reversed?

The Dunning-Kruger Effect was first proposed in a classic 1999 paper (Kruger and Dunning, 1999).¹ People suffering from this effect show one of two characteristics. If they are not knowledgeable about a subject they tend to overestimate their ability. If they are experts in a subject they tend to underestimate their ability (see figure).

The phenomenon is more significant in people who overestimate their ability because it includes a large number of people who are making decisions on subjects that they know little about. Because of the Dunning-Kruger effect, they are confident that their decisions are based on facts and evidence. That's bad enough, but there's another aspect to this problem—why do these people seem to be incapable of recognizing that they are suffering from the Dunning-Kruger effect? Here's how Kruger and Dunning explain this ...

Junk DNA and selfish DNA

Selfish DNA is a term that became popular with the publication of a series of papers in Nature in 1980. The authors were referring to viruses and transposons that insert themselves into a genome where they exist solely for the purposes of propagating themselves. These selfish DNA sequences are often thought, incorrectly, to be the same as the Selfish Genes of Richard Dawkins¹ [Selfish genes and transposons]. In fact, "selfish genes" refers to the idea that some DNAs enhance fitness and the frequency of these genes will increase in a population through their effect on the vehicle that carries them. It's an adaptationist view of evolution. The selfish DNA of transposons and viruses is quite different. These sequences only propagate themselves—the fitness of the organism is largely irrelevant. These elements do not contribute directly to the adaptive evolution of the species.

Transposons and integrated viruses are subjected to mutation just like the rest of the genome. Deleterious mutations cannot be purged by natural selection because inactivating a transposon has no effect on the fitness of the organism.² As a result, large genomes are littered with defective transposons and bits and pieces of dead transposons. This is not selfish DNA by any definition. It is junk DNA [What's in Your Genome?].

Human genome books

Theme
Genomes
& Junk DNA

I'm trying to read all the recent books on the human genome and anything related. There are a lot of them. Here's a list with some brief comments. You should buy some of these books. There are others you should not buy under any circumstances.

Test your irony meter

The irony meter was a running joke on the newsgroup talk.origins back in the last century. Our irony meters were supposed to protect us from the craziness of creationists but as soon as we built a really good irony meter a new bit of creationist crazy came along and fried it. Apparently Jesus and Mo have the same problem.

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Scientists fight back against fake news and pseudoscience

You probably know that climate change is real and humans are a major cause of global warming. You probably know that life has evolved and the Biblical story of creation is false. Scientists have been actively promoting these ideas for decades and they've been relatively successful in most countries. What you may not know is that these are just two of the many controversial claims that scientists are fighting. You may even have been tricked into believing some of the other pseudoscientific claims that are out there.

Dirty bacteria

Did you know that the dirt in your local park is full of bacteria? Each scoop of soil contains millions of bacteria. And it's not just in your local park, soil bacteria are everywhere. This is part of the reason why the total mass of bacteria on the planet outweighs all of the eukayotes combined, including elephants and whales.

There are hundreds of different species of bacteria in your local dirt. They are as different from each other as moose and mushrooms.

Did you ever wonder whether the bacteria in Australian soil are similar to the bacteria in Austrian soil? Delgado-Baquerizo and his colleagues did, so they tested soils from all over the world. The results are published in a recent issue of Science (Delgado-Baquerizo et al., 2018).

The answer is yes ... and no. They looked at 237 locations on all continents except Antarctica. Most samples had about 1000 different species—the authors call them "phylotypes" because it's hard to define what a species is in bacteria. Only a small number of species (phylotypes) were found in all locations (511 out of 25,224 = 2%) but they accounted for almost half of the total mass. Here's how the authors describe their result ...

Together, our results suggest that soil bacterial communities, like plant communities, are typically dominated by a relatively small subset of phylotypes.

Most of those 511 dominant phylotypes fall into two large and diverse clades (phyla?): Proteobacteria and Actinobacteria. The distribution is shown in Figure 1 of the paper (left). It illustrates a little-known fact about bacteria; namely, that they are a very diverse group. Scientists are only beginning to explore this diversity. Only 18% of the 511 dominant phylotypes were previously known to science!

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Image Credit: Bacillus Sp. soil bacteria from The ecology of soil-borne human diseases

Delgado-Baquerizo, M., Oliverio, A.M., Brewer, T.E., Benavent-González, A., Eldridge, D.J., Bardgett, R.D., Maestre, F.T., Singh, B.K., and Fierer, N. (2018) A global atlas of the dominant bacteria found in soil. Science, 359(6373), 320-325. doi: doi: 10.1126/science.aap9516

Happy Darwin Day 2018!

Charles Darwin, the greatest scientist who ever lived, was born on this day in 1809 [Darwin still spurs tributes, debates] [Happy Darwin Day!] [Darwin Day 2017]. Darwin is mostly famous for two things: (1) he described and documented the evidence for evolution and common descent and (2) he provided a plausible scientific explanation of evolution—the theory of natural selection. He put all this in a book, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection published in 1859—a book that spurred a revolution in our understanding of the natural world.

Modern evolutionary theory has advanced well beyond Darwin's theory but he still deserves to be honored for being the first to explain evolution and promote it in a way that convinced others. Here's one passage from the introduction to Origin of Species.

Although much remains obscure, and will long remain obscure, I can entertain no doubt, after the most deliberate and dispassionate study of which I am capable, that the view which most naturalists entertain, and which I formerly entertained—namely, that each species has been independently created—is erroneous. I am fully convinced that species are not immutable; but that those belonging to what are called the same genera are lineal descendants of some other and generally extinct species, in the same manner as the acknowledged varieties of any one species are the descendants of that species. Furthermore, I am convinced that Natural Selection has been the main but not exclusive means of modification.

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