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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...

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

Believe in Evolution and Go To Hell

May 24 2008 | comment(s)

If education can help attitudes about evolution, we have a lot of educating to do. Maybe it was my Scientific Blogging T-shirt, or my anti-Bush bumper sticker, but something motivated a member of the church near my children's day care to hand me this well-reasoned, tightly argued attack on evolution:

This is How We Teach Critical Thinking?! My Kid's Science Homework

May 23 2008 | comment(s)

Not teaching evolution isn't the only problem in America's science classrooms. The evidence for this for this came home today in the form of my third grader's homework. My daughter's third grade class is learning about plant life cycles, from a textbook whose publisher I will, out of mercy, refuse to name. This textbook attempts to teach eager young students about some of the critical thinking skills scientists use, including making predictions, making inferences or drawing conclusions, and making comparisons. Teaching critical thinking skills - it sounds great, right? The problem though, is that this textbook drums home these key words without making any distinction whatsoever between them.

Evolution of a New Protein-Coding Gene

May 21 2008 | comment(s)

How does a new protein-coding gene evolve? In most cases, new genes are essentially modified copies of older ones. An old gene produces a protein with a particular function; after one of many well known types of random events creates an extra copy of this gene, one copy may, through mutation, produce a protein with a different function. But how do protein coding genes arise in the first place? How do you get from a non-coding sequence to a coding one?

Evolution: Winning In Court But Losing In Class?

May 20 2008 | comment(s)

In the perpetual fight over evolution in public schools, there is good news and bad news. The good news is that supporters of science education have largely been successful in shutting down creationist attempts to undermine evolution through state legislatures and state school boards. While there is still mischief going on in many state legislatures, these efforts rarely go anywhere, thanks to vigilance by supporters of good science education. An essay in PLoS Biology today argues that, at the state level, things are going well:

At this time, not a single state uses its content standards to explicitly promote ID or creationism. School boards are monitored by organizations like the National Center for Science Education, by state academies of science, and by local scientific and professional organizations. As a result, few state school boards can formally consider measures like the one adopted in Dover without scrutiny and challenge from organizations representing the scientific profession.

But here comes the bad news:

There are many reasons to believe that scientists are winning in the courts, but losing in the classroom.

The First Report Card for Genome Wide Association Studies

May 19 2008 | comment(s)

Genome-wide association studies are the hottest thing in human genetics right now, but how well do they work? The idea is to look at genetic variants in hundreds or thousands of patients with a particular disease, as well as a healthy control population. Genetic variants that show up in the patient population more often than in the control population are said to be associated with the disease, although how these variants contribute to the disease requires much more detailed follow-up.

Let's stop stifling the careers of young scientists

May 16 2008 | comment(s)

In today's issue of Science, AAAS CEO Alan Leshner argues that young scientists are getting a raw deal, and that the current system is stunting the growth and creativity of young scientists:

A major problem is that in many countries, research funding is quite constrained, so it's getting increasingly difficult for new investigators to secure their first grants.