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...

Michael White

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

You Can Still Win a Nobel Prize Even When You Engage With The Public

Oct 14 2008 | comment(s)

Whatever your political views, this is an example to follow: Ezra Klein on Paul Krugman:

Nobel prize winner. And Krugman won it his way: He never retreated into the academy, never jealously insulated his expertise and insight from controversy because that would be safest for his reputation. Lots of folks seem to think that engagement with the public sphere puts a ceiling on academic achievement, and some had even said to me that Krugman had made himself too controversial to ever win a Nobel prize.

Sunday Science Book Club

Oct 12 2008 | comment(s)

Only A Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul
by Kenneth R. Miller
Viking, 2008

Ken Miller is not preaching to the choir. Although he has a day job as an active research biologist at Brown University, Miller has spent more than two decades on the front lines of the battle over evolution as a writer, lecturer, and expert witness in court. During these two decades of culture war, he has come to realize that, although the stakes are high in this fight, sometimes the best tactic is the non-martial one: don't treat the American public as pawns in a propaganda war.

Miller starts with the assumption that most people will be fairly open-minded about evolution and intelligent design. Before they make a firm judgment on the role of evolution in our public schools, people genuinely want to know what the scientific status of evolution is, and whether intelligent design is truly a scientific challenger. Many previous books debunking evolution have missed people like this. Such books typically fall into two categories: necessary but dense, technical works that provide, in detail, the scientific community's best response to the claims of intelligent design advocates, and scathing, hard-hitting attacks that fire up those who already accept evolution, but turn off readers who are trying hard to understand this issue without being strongly biased either way. Only A Theory is a genuine attempt at persuasion, and its approach is a result of Dr. Miller's years of practice speaking to audiences who want to give both sides a fair shot.

Don't be fooled, however, into thinking that Miller is trying to find some mutually satisfactory middle ground. For those who want to know whether evolution really is good science, his answer is unambiguous - evolution is one of the most successful and important theories we have in biology. And what about intelligent design? Its advocates have not even attempted to make this a real scientific discipline; evolution is the only scientific game in town.

Green Fluorescent Protein Is Cool, But Is It Nobel Prize-Level Cool?

Oct 10 2008 | comment(s)

This year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry goes to three scientists responsible for transforming a green-glowing jellyfish protein into a ubiquitous tool in molecular biology. Green fluorescent protein (or GFP in lab jargon) and its various colored relatives have made many previously impossible experiments cheap and easy, and you would be hard-pressed to find any molecular or cell biologists who have never used some variant of GFP. There is no denying the influence of GFP, but was its discovery Nobel-caliber?

San Diego Beach Scene, Fluorescent E. coli on agar, Nathan Shaner, photography by Paul Steinbach, created in the lab of Nobel Prize winner Roger Tsien, posted under the GNU Free Documentation License

John Derbyshire Misunderstands Race and Genetics

Oct 08 2008 | comment(s)

There's been some comment recently about pundit John Derbyshire's belief that Obama will try to shut down biology because it has validated racism. Needless to say, Derbyshire is full of it, and he has a poor grasp of what recent genetics has actually demonstrated regarding nature, nurture, and race.

A DNA Chip Pioneer Talks About His Latest Invention

Oct 08 2008 | comment(s)

Joseph DeRisi is a young scientist who at age 39 has already racked up some amazing career achievements. He tells about his new DNA chip for detecting viruses:

My colleague Dave Wang and I were sitting around the office one day in 2000 asking, “How were viruses discovered in the past?” We knew that it had always been a laborious and time-consuming effort. When an epidemic struck, what researchers generally did was go to electron microscopes and try to figure out what they were seeing. Sometimes, it took 10, 20 years to find a virus they knew had to be in there. Earlier, when I was a Stanford graduate student, I’d worked on developing DNA microarrays, which are often called DNA chips. They allow a researcher to do many biological tests at once. The chips are now widely used in gene discovery, cancer detection, drug discovery and toxicology. So Dave and I reasoned that these DNA microarrays would be perfect for viral discovery. I said, “We can build a similar device representing every virus ever discovered, and it could simultaneously look for them.”

The Nobel Prize in an Age of Collaboration

Oct 06 2008 | comment(s)

And the controversy has started already. Two French scientists, Luc Montagnier and Francoise Barre-Sinoussi are being awarded the Nobel Prize for discovering H.I.V. An American scientist, Robert Gallo, says he was shafted - he has frequently been credited as a co-discoverer of HIV. If the Nobel could be split among more than three people (the third person on this year's prize discovered H.P.V.), Gallo surely would have been included. Controversies over the Nobel prize and credit are nothing new, but they are bound to get much, much worse.