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Melville on Science vs. Creation Myth

From Melville's under-appreciated Mardi: On a quest for his missing love Yillah, an AWOL sailor...

Non-coding DNA Function... Surprising?

The existence of functional, non-protein-coding DNA is all too frequently portrayed as a great...

Yep, This Should Get You Fired

An Ohio 8th-grade creationist science teacher with a habit of branding crosses on his students'...

No, There Are No Alien Bar Codes In Our Genomes

Even for a physicist, this is bad: Larry Moran, in preparation for the appropriate dose of ridicule...

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Michael WhiteRSS Feed of this column.

Welcome to Adaptive Complexity, where I write about genomics, systems biology, evolution, and the connection between science and literature, government, and society.

I'm a biochemist

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Biological Engineering - Present and Future

Biological Engineering - Present and Future

Jan 08 2010 | comment(s)

The latest issue of Cell has some goodies on synthetic and systems biology: "Engineering Static and Dynamic Control of Synthetic Pathways, by William Holtz and Jay Keasling:
Maximizing the production of a desired small molecule is one of the primary goals in metabolic engineering. Recent advances in the nascent field of synthetic biology have increased the predictability of small-molecule production in engineered cells growing under constant conditions. The next frontier is to create synthetic pathways that adapt to changing environments.
Neanderthal Art News

Neanderthal Art News

Jan 08 2010 | comment(s)

I'm fascinated by the effort to reconstruct the Neanderthal life - how they ate, where they lived, their physiology, their cognitive workings, their use of symbols. They were more like us than any other species (or sub-species) out there, and yet also more distinct from us than any two modern human populations. John Hawks, who is always a good source for Neanderthal news has some great recent posts and links worth checking out: Methylation in Neanderthal DNA
Late Morning Science Poem

Late Morning Science Poem

Jan 08 2010 | comment(s)


...Why are you so insistent on the sweeping

Poetry of sky and sea? Are you, then, fonder
Of the circumference of earth's impounding
Than of some sphere on which the mind might blunder,


If you, with irrepressible will, abounding
In..                         wish for revelation,
Sought out the unknown new in your surrounding?

- Wallace Stevens, from "For an Old Woman in a Wig"






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Lean Bacon And A Domesticated DNA Parasite

Lean Bacon And A Domesticated DNA Parasite

Jan 07 2010 | comment(s)


Here is a molecular biology discovery that we can chalk up to our increasing love of lean bacon:

"ZBED6, a Novel Transcription Factor Derived from a Domesticated DNA Transposon Regulates IGF2 Expression and Muscle Growth", in PLoS Biology.

If you're a bacon lover, you may not realize how much your culinary satisfaction is intertwined with genetics. The drive to breed leaner pigs has led to the search for genetic variants that affect muscle mass and fat deposition in pigs. Some years back, in order to find such genetic variants, a Swedish research group crossed European Wild Boars and Large White domestic pigs.
Biology's Getting Crowded

Biology's Getting Crowded

Jan 06 2010 | comment(s)


The biomedical field is feeling crowded. I blame women. And the data back me up:



This slide is from FASEB, which compiled a bunch of helpful graphs based on various sources of data about the biomedical sciences job market.
Morning Science Quote

Morning Science Quote

Jan 06 2010 | comment(s)

There may remain theorems whose confirmation is technologically infeasible; thes can be assigned to the category of "harmless." Theorems for which confirmation is logically impossible should be discarded as meaningless.

- Foster Morrison, The Art of Modeling Dynamic Systems (2008), p. 19





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