I just finished Carl Zimmer‘s excellent book At the Water’s Edge, a general audience recounting of two major events in macroevolution–the evolution of tetrapods and of whales. One of the major recurring themes is how past events in evolution constrain the probability space of the future. This passage (in a section describing Hox genes and limb development) stopped me cold:

Neil Shubin has found one of the most striking demonstrations of how the innovation of the limb imposes a new order. In 1991 a freak freeze turned a pond in Marin County, California, to ice. It killed hundreds of rough-skinned newts and perfectly preserved their corpses. Shubin, who was working at the time at Berekely, got hold of the newts while they were still frozen, and in the years that followed was able to study 452 of their limbs. In this one gathering of a single species, he discovered an orgy or variation: almost a third of the newts had some dramatic oddity in their limbs…Yet the variation was actually very limited and biased. Fusions and extra bones always occurred along the path of the branching limb axis that Shubin and Alberch had identified in 1986.

My two thoughts/questions:

1. One-third of the individuals in this small population had dramatic variation in their limbs (bone fusions, extra bones). That’s a lot. Does anyone know of numbers like this for humans? Are we as polymorphic as this in terms of structure?

2. The fact that all these mutations occured along the branching limb axis set essentually by Hox genes is striking, and emphasizes the role of development in determining natural variation (ok, yeah, evo-devo people have been saying this for years. duly noted). Have these sorts of results been found in other organs (like say, the brain)? I think this is going on my list of books to read.

As a child it seemed that everyone preferred Lion Voltron to Car Voltron. I was a contrarian and asserted that I preferred Car Voltron, and yet in my heart of hearts I knew Lion Voltron was the true bomb. Is there an evolutionary psychological reason why Lion Voltron would be more popular than Car Voltron? I mean, there are lions on national flags, but cars? Lions play a role in mythology, and C.S. Lewis even selected a lion as a Christ analogue. Could it be cognitively lions give us more “free information” and inferential power? Could it be that Lion Voltron simply fit into a more relatable mental slot than Car Voltron? After all, Lion Voltron was set on a quasi-medieval planet. Quasi in that there was a monarch, witch and a castle, but they also had lasers and space ships. In contrast, Car Voltron (vehicle Voltron) was “lost in space,” and so the whole creation of a humanoid mega-bot seemed a little canned.
Addendum: Typing Voltron into google images just brings back Lion Voltron. You have to type Vehicle Voltron to find any of the other morph, and even then the iamges aren’t very good. Just goes to show, Lion Voltron does roar, even today.

Last week I pointed you to 10 questions for Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, and hinted that there is another 10 Qs for another student of R.A. Fisher. Well, that time has come, today David B. posted his 10 questions for A.W.F. Edwards. I want to follow up last week’s theme in regards to population substructure, because A.W.F. Edwards has been the most prominent recent expositer of why phylogeny, clustering of populations, is still possible though we are a genetically young and homogenous species. We asked A.W.F. Edwards on his motivations for writing Lewontin’s Fallacy, and I think you’ll find the answer interesting (below the fold). I also believe that the this 10 questions is special because Dr. Edwards responded with multiple “mini-essays,” he even attempted a new elucidation of the Fundamental Theorem of Natural Selection.

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Today’s science column by Anjana Ahuja in the London Times, available online here, has a couple of stories.

First, she describes a new book by linguist Charles Yang about the acquisition of language. Yang apparently argues that babies are born with an extensive set of innate grammatical capacities – sufficient to cover all the world’s languages – most of which are then discarded or suppressed as the baby learns the specific grammar of its own ‘mother tongue’. It’s difficult to tell just from this description how Yang’s theory differs from those of Chomsky or Pinker, but it sounds like he hypothesises a much richer innate repertoire of grammar than they do. I have no idea how this stands up to the evidence, but I can’t help thinking it sounds very inefficient in evolutionary terms. Wouldn’t one expect a relatively simple and general language capacity to evolve first, and then specific languages to evolve (culturally) to be consistent with the general innate capacity? Whereas Yang seems to envisage an elaborate evolved capacity, much of which is never used in any single culture. But the book sounds like one to add to the reading list – eventually!

The second report is about the Hobbit controversy. The point to note is that there is a further paper forthcoming in the Journal of Human Evolution, which defends the Hobbit as a distinct species. No doubt Dienekes, John Hawks and others will comment in due course.

Nothing much to do with genes, but while looking up the online edition of the Times to find Ahuja’s article I came across the following ‘breaking news’ item, here, the text of a remarkable letter by the Austrian girl who was kidnapped and held captive in a basement for 8 years. If it is really all her own work, it shows an astonishing intelligence and maturity in the circumstances.

The LA Times just ran two article about genetic engineering (here and here). I can’t guarantee that these articles are free of “idiotic mistakes” of the kind that drive Greg Cochran nuts, but I thought they were interesting. A money quote:

Gene therapy is making a comeback after a series of serious setbacks that threatened to permanently derail human tests. In recent years, European scientists have cured more than two dozen patients suffering from three rare, and in some cases lethal, immune disorders.

Spurred by this success, plus the development of new techniques aimed at making the therapy safer and more effective, more than 300 gene therapy trials, including the one for Parkinson’s at UC San Francisco, are underway in the U.S. and abroad.

Recently, myself, RPM, afarensis, Robert Skipper, John Wilkins and John Hawks made about 10 assertions about evolution of about 10 words or less (some participants fudged, no worries, I’m not Tony Soprano). We all went in different directions, but issues that cropped up several times
* The relationship between selection and evolution, and its particular elucidation
* Mutation is not always deleterious
* Common descent of species
* Species concepts
* The fact that humans are still evolving
I haven’t done a rigorous comparison, so your thoughts are welcome.

Here is a portion of an email I received from an occasional correspondent:

I often find Indians scientists, doctors and engineers singularly uninformed/uninterested in anything much beyond their own expertise. The trend is increasingly pronounced with passing generations. My parents’ generation had a lot of spill across the sciences and humanities. A reasonably educated person could carry on a conversation about several topics without necessarily knowing the technical minutiae of each one. Scientists and philosophers within my family conversed and debated each other with ease. My own generation lost some of those interdisciplinary skills. The current generation in India is even more compartmentalized.

The comment is not India-specific. Many of my friends with little or no science background are poorer for it. They make grand generalizations about human “nature” with pretty much zero understanding of the biological constraints, and psychological propensities, of our species. And yet, in my experience many scientists are utterly clueless outside of their own field of expertise. Many “old timers” on this blog will remember David Deutsch getting schooled by godless capitalist in regards to evolution and genetics. In a broader sense, if scientists stuck to talking about their particular set of questions that would be fine, but their attempts to discuss history or international politics in my opinion are often as nuanced or informed as Post Modernists who use the gloss of mathematical terminology in their hucksterism.

And yet the demands of the modern world mean that there are few Leibniz’s, and it seems unlikely that anyone could be a Leibniz. Even within fields like “biology” and “chemistry” there are clans which never meet and speak in mutually unintelligible dialects.

Ironically, though today we often (at least among the elites) deny the importance of a “canon,” it maybe that a canon is even more important in providing common points of reference as our professional interests become more specialized. Analogies and metaphors are laced throughout our speech, conversation and dialogue, and yet they rely on some level of common knowledge and deep understanding of the conceptual structures which characterize a particular idea or system. To some extent the canon does not matter in regards to content. I think the substance does have utility in other ways, e.g. a knowledge of American history, and the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, might be beneficial to Americans, especially the elites, in the way they approach their responsibilities as a citizen. But, the important point is to facilitate smooth communication. Of course, we all have pop culture. We all know Real World and Nelly. That’s a common lexicon. But is this sufficient? Is the idea that we should know Great Books simple snobbishness? Does watching Real World allows us to generate templates of the “Angry Black Guy” (e.g., Kevin from New York I, etc.) or “Rural Virgin” (I forget) which aid in getting across our points?

This is the man….

OK, so I finally read Coming to Life by Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard. Unfortunately, I am having a hard time finding something original to say. To recap, Janet, Shellee, Bora (hey, check out Bora’s link, books_coming_to_life_by_christ.php!), RPM, The Poreless One and PZ hit this book hard. The reviews are damn thorough, and you have a wide disciplinary perspective, from neuroscience to developmental biology to evolutionary genetics to physiology to biochemistry, and over into philosophy. How’s that for multidimensional?
So where does that leave me? Since I am so late already I figured I would post something, and when a brilliant thought pops into my head I can riff off of it in a follow up entry. But right now I’ll offer some quick impressions. I think this paragraph from PZ captures my own thoughts pretty well:

It wasn’t what I expected at all, but I think readers here will be appreciative: it’s a primer in developmental biology, written for the layperson! Especially given a few of the responses to my last article, where the jargon seems to have lost some people, this is going to be an invaluable resource.

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“…you know, Microsoft is like a cush government job.”
-friend who is an ex-Microsoft employee.
“I just noticed in this year’s update to Excel that they finally added that feature I worked on 10 years ago!”
-friend who is an ex-Microsoft employee.