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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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Steven Pinker and Evolutionary Psychology in The Guardian

Steven Pinker and Evolutionary Psychology in The Guardian

Jun 19 2008 | comment(s)

The Guardian has an interesting interview with Harvard Evolutionary Psychologist Steven Pinker:
You either love Pinker or you hate him. Indifference does not appear to be an option. He's either the welcome breath of fresh air who has blown away the old guard of behaviourist science in favour of an evolutionary, genetic approach to human development and language, or he's some kind of borderline-eugenicist, neo-Darwinian. There's little in-between.
Does Darwin Get Too Much Credit?

Does Darwin Get Too Much Credit?

Jun 18 2008 | comment(s)

At her NY Times blog, Olivia Judson looks at the upcoming year of Darwin celebrations (July 1, 1858 was when Darwin first presented ideas on natural selection, both his own and those of Alfred Russell Wallace, to the Linnean Society in London; Darwin's 200th birthday is coming up in February, and in November 2009 comes the 150th anniversary of the publication of On The Origin of Species - that's a lot of celebrating coming up), and asks, does Darwin really deserve all this credit? According to Judson, the answer is yes. But why, if Darwin wasn't the first to come up with the idea of evolution, and the concept of natural selection? Darwin may not have been the first, but ultimately he was the most persuasive:
The “Origin” changed everything. Before the “Origin,” the diversity of life could only be catalogued and described; afterwards, it could be explained and understood.
In other words, to be a great scientist, you have to have good ideas, and persuasively communicate them to your colleagues. Darwin did this very well - the Origin is filled with detailed evidence from a variety of fields. On top of that, Darwin argued that his ideas were testable, and proposed tests that he himself and others could do. Darwin may not have been first to come up with all of the ideas presented in the Origin, but he was the first to really get evolution going as a healthy scientific field. And for that, the celebrations are justified.
How is math the basis of reality?

How is math the basis of reality?

Jun 18 2008 | comment(s)

"Most people will have a hard time accepting that their fundamental existence turns out to be the subject they hated in high school." Discover magazine has an interesting interview with MIT cosmologist/philosopher Max Tegmark, who argues that “there is only mathematics; that is all that exists.” Tegmark's ideas the latest development in a line of thought that mathematicians, physicists and philosopher have been thinking about for years, millennia even. A good way to jump unto this subject is to read physicist Eugene Wigner's classic "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences."
Modeling Mating and Information Processing in A Yeast Cell

Modeling Mating and Information Processing in A Yeast Cell

Jun 18 2008 | comment(s)

One of the major challenges in molecular biology right now is to understand how different parts work together to produce the behavior of a cell. A cell can't really be explained by the biological equivalent of an organization chart - you can't say, "this protein does this, this other one over here does this, that one has this job..." That works for some functions, but many of the processes in a cell come about because of the way regulatory links are organized into feedback loops. This means that, when we look at the complex wiring of a cell's information processing machinery, our intuition will only take us so far. To really understand how things work, we need to make mathematical models, and we need to make careful biochemical measurements to test those models. This is the way to really understand how the whole of the cell is greater than its parts. Writing in Molecular Cell, a group at the University of North Carolina has looked into the behavior of a protein called Fus3. Fus3 is at the bottom of a chain of signal-passing events that tell yeast cells that there is a potential mating partner around.
The Pope Has Delayed My National Institutes Of Health Progress Report

The Pope Has Delayed My National Institutes Of Health Progress Report

Jun 17 2008 | comment(s)

How is it that a statement by the Vatican has delayed my annual report to the National Institutes of Health? Not being Catholic, I generally don't pay much attention to Papal announcements, but maybe I need to start listening. Apparently back in March, the Vatican suggested that "genetic manipulations which alter DNA" are mortal sins.

Since just about everything I do in the lab involves genetic manipulations which alter DNA (in fact the only organisms in our lab which aren't genetically engineered are the people who work there), I can add one more item to my long list of reasons for why I'm headed to eternal condemnation.

But before I get to Hell, I need to submit my annual NIH Fellowship update. I have a fellowship from the National Institutes of Health, which pays my not-so-large salary. In return for the money, I tell the NIH what I've been doing every year. That's fair enough - the NIH should expect something for their money.

Everything that I have done this year, however, has involved some sort of genetic engineering - which apparently upsets the Pope. This is unfortunate, because if we eliminated all genetic engineering, essentially all biomedical research would grind to a halt. Genetic engineering, in some restricted applications, has its risks, but the vast majority of genetic engineering that goes on every day in thousands of labs all over the world is essential to our efforts to understand both basic biology and the impact of genes on our health.

The Distraction of Google is Changing Our Brains

The Distraction of Google is Changing Our Brains

Jun 13 2008 | comment(s)

The Atlantic is asking Is Google Making Us Stupid? They quote a pathologist at the University of Michigan School of Medicine:
“I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print... I can’t read War and Peace anymore. I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”
Can we still think in the age of online distraction?