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

NY Times on the Challenge of Teaching Evolution in Florida

Aug 26 2008 | comment(s)

Teaching evolution to a bunch of graduate students is easy; conveying something about evolution to a diverse group of high school students, some of whom have been coached to be openly hostile towards the subject, is a major challenge. Sunday's NY Times covered the efforts of one skilled Florida high school teacher. If only we had more teachers like this one. The teacher explained that science deals with ideas about the natural world that are testable by observation - unlike say, miracles. One student objected: God can be proven, he insisted. We have fragments of Noah's ark from Mt. Ararat to prove it. What do you say to that? My response would not have been charitable, which is why I'm not a high school teacher.

A quick tour of 5 mind-blowing scientific theories

Aug 22 2008 | comment(s)

Don't think you have time for science? Cracked.com ("America's Only Humor & Video Site, since 1958" - we've got humor and video here at Scientific Blogging, but we haven't been around since 1958), has a quick summary of 5 scientific theories that will make your head explode. One of those theories is evolution:

We’re all familiar with the basics of evolution: that a munificent monkey-goddess birthed us all from Her banana-scented womb. But there are some lesser-discussed implications of natural selection that are just plain weird...

Evolution As The Recycler Of The Cell's Tools

Aug 18 2008 | comment(s)

Part 2 on The Plausibility of Life

How does evolution shape living things? The fact that evolutionary forces, such as natural selection, can shape living creatures is well-established, but how malleable those creatures are, and what the increments of change are is less well established. We have a fairly good idea of how genes can change, but how does that genetic change translate into physical changes in the shape and functioning of the organism itself - that is, how does genetic change translate into changes in the organism's phenotype?

The authors of The Plausibility of Life, Marc Kirschner and John Gerhart, argue that this issue has been ignored in evolutionary theory (although they go on to say that it was justifiably ignored for a long time - before modern molecular and cell biology, there was no way to effectively address this question):

What if evolutionary biologists were wrong to think of phenotypic variation as random and unconstrained? How much would it matter if we really understood how genetic variation leads to phenotypic variation, and in particular, how facile or difficult is it to achieve a specific phenotype?

These questions get to the heart of the evolution of complexity.

How to Kill Education: Replace Degrees with Technical Certificates

Aug 14 2008 | comment(s)

In yesterday's Wall Street Journal, we read an argument for getting rid of the college degree. You've heard this argument before: under our current system, a college degree doesn't mean anything, because most of the time you don't come out with any directly applicable job skills:

The solution is not better degrees, but no degrees. Young people entering the job market should have a known, trusted measure of their qualifications they can carry into job interviews. That measure should express what they know, not where they learned it or how long it took them.

U. of California can reject creationist college prep classes

Aug 13 2008 | comment(s)

Religious conservatives who decry postmodernism in the academy, and object to what they see as identity-based scholarship, such a Marxist school of history or African American Studies, have no problem trying to push their own Christianity-based science on academic institutions. These efforts hit a major legal setback recently, as a California judge ruled that it's OK for the Unversity of California system to reject creationist high school biology classes as valid pre-college course work. An association of Christian schools had sued the University of California for not considering creation-based high school biology classes as adequate preparation for college classes.

Yeast Cells on Psychoactive Drugs

Aug 12 2008 | comment(s)

When you put yeast on Prozac, do you observe any side effects? Off-target effects of psychiatric drugs are a big problem, and researchers have been eager to identify the cellular processes that are responsible for these side effects. Often the cellular process involved in the drug's the main effect is known, but what causes the side effects is not well known. To get at this issue, a group of researchers at the University of Toronto tested the effects of 214 psychoactive drugs on yeast. Why yeast? When it comes to the most basic cellular processes, yeast have the same ones we do, and in yeast it is easier to identify what parts of the cellular machinery are being affected by the drug. Even better, yeast don't have any of the sophisticated neurological machinery we have. That neurological machinery is the main target of these drugs; since that main target is absent in yeast, scientists can focus purely on the off-target drug effects.