Expelled Exposed

The people at the National Center for Science Education have a new website dedicated to countering the Expelled movie. It's a good explanation of all the things that are horribly wrong, one-sided and unfair about the movie. From Pharyngula.

Anna's hummingbird

Nature's The Great Beyond blog has an interesting post about the Anna's hummingbird. It seems its mating calls are generated by its tail, not its mouth or wings. It's a (so far) new and unique way of bird communication.

Journal article in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Encyclopedia Brittanica video of hummingbird flight.

National Post doesn't understand evolution, either

The National Post, which is one of Canada's prime hotbeds of climate change denialism, has an editorial showing that they don't understand evolutionary genetics either.

Toni Vernelli, a dedicated British environmental crusader, may strike some as a deeply devoted champion of her cause. Frankly, she strikes us as more than a little off balance, perhaps even cultish. At 27 (Ms. Vernelli is now 35), she had herself sterilized in order to "protect the planet." Prior to that, she had an abortion rather than bring another consumer/ emitter into the world.

"Having children is selfish," she recently told London's Daily Mail newspaper. "It's all about maintaining your genetic line at the expense of the planet. Every person who is born uses more food, more water, more land, more fossil fuels, more trees and produces more rubbish, more pollution, more greenhouse gases and adds to the problem of over-population."

Toni Vernelli obviously gets the modern understanding of evolutionary genetics. Genes behave in ways that appear to us as selfish.

The National Post, obviously doesn't get it:

We like to think (as most people do) that giving another person life and agreeing to raise them through infancy, childhood and the teenage years into adulthood is the height of selflessness, not selfishness. How much easier to be able to come home from work when you want, not when a child needs picking up from school, or to go out when you want and not have to worry about being home in time to put children to bed and get the babysitter home. No pretending to enjoy animated television or movies. No sitting up nights nursing a scared and feverish little one. No 6:30 a.m. hockey practices. No fights with a ninth-grader over friends, clothes or hair. No worried late nights waiting for a high schooler to return with the car.

Yes, most people think having children is unselfish, because it "ruins" your previous life. Suddenly, you're a full-time child care worker. And having no children seems selfish, because you can do whatever you want, have more disposable income, and far fewer wrinkles than your child-rearing peers.

But from the gene's point of view, having children is exactly the most selfish thing that can possibly be done: pass on your genes to the next generation. That's point of kids. Keep the genes moving. From a gene's point of view, Vernelli is so unselfish her combination of genes are going to go extinct.

The National Post's stupidity continues, and I can't be bothered to pick it all apart. It winds up with:

Finally comes the most indelicate observation of all: If it is selfish of environmentalists to have children because of the damage those offspring would do, isn't it even more selfish for those environmentalists to stay alive themselves when they are consuming every bit as much water, land, fuel and timber, and producing just as much pollution and greenhouse gas? Why sacrifice the lives of their potential children before they have sacrificed their own? Mightn't suicide be the ultimate sacrifice an environmental extremist should make for his or her beloved planet?

Even suicide isn't a solution, nor the ultimate sacrifice for the environment. The bacteria, fungi, insects and worms that devour our bodies are all greenhouse gas emitters. So you can't win, even in premature death.

When Inbreeding Isn't So Bad

My third Just Science post:

German researchers have found a fish that prefers to mate with its relatives, rather than strangers. The result, published in Current Biology, suggests inbreeding can be a good evolutionary strategy. Timo Thünken et al. studied African cichlids (Pelvicachromis taetiatus), a river fish. They found that the fish preferred to mate with unfamiliar close kin over unrelated kin. To put it in human terms, they'd rather mate with a distant cousin than a stranger.

Why would this be a good strategy? Well, your kin are more likely to help you than a complete stranger. In this species the male and female care for the young. They have to cooperate to care and feed their young broods, which requires time and energy. The researchers measured the degree of cooperation between related and unrelated parents, and found that related parents invested significantly more time in caring for the young. The desired result is to produce more, stronger offspring.

The scientists also found that there was no inbreeding depression, which is the fancy way of saying the children weren't talking one-eyed mutants with 18 flippers.

The scientists suggest there may be other instances of inbreeding waiting to be discovered.

To be crystal clear, this is not an endorsement of human inbreeding!


Thünken et al.: “Active Inbreeding in a Cichlid Fish and Its Adaptive Significance”. Publishing in Current Biology 17, 225–229, February 6, 2007 DOI 10.1016/j.cub.2006.11.053.

Making life's first RNA molecules

Scientists have discovered a way to synthesize an important component of RNA from small molecules. The finding lends support to the RNA world hypothesis, which is one of the hypotheses describing how life got started on earth.

RNA is the intermediary between DNA and protein. DNA gives cells instructions, proteins carry out the instructions. But somehow, this all had to get started from extremely simple molecules, like ammonia, water, methane and carbon dioxide.

DNA is a difficult molecule to make. Its sugar portion has a modification that can only happen with enzymes. It is incredibly unlikely to find it naturally. That's where the RNA world hypothesis comes in: it has a much easier to make sugar, therefore it was the molecule that started life on Earth, not DNA, even though DNA is now by far the most common genetic material. Only a few viruses use RNA to transmit information through generations.

Importantly, strands of RNA can catalyze reactions. Scientists think this could have led to the formation of proteins and DNA.

The details are not completely known. But John Sutherland and colleagues from the University of Manchester have found a way to make the sugar portion of RNA from three smaller precursor molecules, glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate, 2-aminooxazole, cyanoacetylene, and water.

Water was common on the primordial earth. The scientists speculate that the other two molecules could combine when one evaporates and is delivered to the location of the second component in rainfall.

By doing this, they sidestep a chemical bottleneck that avoids creating a problematic molecule, ribose-phosphate, which is hard to make and decays quickly, and they also offer a way of making RNA from smaller molecules, which may show how life got started from small molecules.

It should also stick in the craw of creationists and intelligent design fans. They always like to wonder how complex things arose, an argument that basically stems from personal incredulity. Well, if this discovery pans out, it shows just such a logical way.

Reference:

J. Am. Chem. Soc., 129 (1), 24 -25, 2007. 10.1021/ja066495v S0002-7863(06)06495-X
Web Release Date: December 13, 2006 Copyright © 2006 American Chemical Society
Two-Step Potentially Prebiotic Synthesis of -D-Cytidine-5'-phosphate from D-Glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate
Carole Anastasi, Michael A. Crowe, and John D. Sutherland

Neil Tyson speaks the truth

Talking about the recent case of a teacher spouting religious anti-science nonsense in class, Neil de Grasse Tyson wrote in his letter to the New York Times:

To the Editor:

People cited violation of the First Amendment when a New Jersey schoolteacher asserted that evolution and the Big Bang are not scientific and that Noah’s ark carried dinosaurs.

This case is not about the need to separate church and state; it’s about the need to separate ignorant, scientifically illiterate people from the ranks of teachers.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

New York, Dec. 19, 2006

The writer, an astrophysicist, is director of the
Hayden Planetarium.

PS. 500th post!