Summertime

We'll be taking a bit of a hiatus from blogging for the next few weeks, as we're off to the European Evo-Devo Society meetings, among other places. We are hoping to check in from to time, especially from the meetings -- and Holly may post a time or two from the field -- but we'll be back to as normal as it gets around here the last week of July.  We'll have to do some catching up with the science news when we return -- if we miss something big, do let us know!

Soccer-head games

The World Cup is an exciting event that captures global attention. But it also raises some interesting questions about how we know things and what it is that we know--or don't. While soccer players play head games with the ball, science plays head games with the game.

Interesting questions include such things as the apparent phenomenon of momentum shifts such as occur after a goal is scored. Some are due perhaps to the manager's notions of strategy, but this has to do with the collective behavior of 11 guys and how that relates to the behavior of the 11 in the other-colored shirts. But when you need to win and you know 1-0 is not a safe lead, why can't you keep up the momentum?

Another interesting question has to do with whether the tournament winner is the 'best' team. Since goals are hard to come by, referees make bad decisions, and fluke events are so prominent, it is easy to know who the winner is, but what does it mean as to which team is 'best'?

One bad call (and this World Cup has been atrocious in the refereeing department) has collective effects, yet everybody 'knows' at some level that if you had a good game plan it should be a good game plan even if you're down a goal.

Hot and cold streaks have been debated for a long time: do they even exist? Is it only our imagination that the team deflated by bad luck or a mistake collectively changes behavior? Are streaks only identifiable after the fact, rather than being demonstrably (and statistically) real?

Sports represent a good example of complex 'emergent' phenomena. Sports psychologists and coaches obviously haven't figure out how to manage it. Do you reduce it to one or two players and talk to them to keep the higher-level organization as you want it? Do you reduce it to some compound--let's call it 'adrenalin' just as a representative word--that every player needs to sniff to regain momentum? And if that kind of reductionism is relevant, how is it that a goal by the other side reduces the adrenalin of everyone on your side?

In our book, The Mermaid's Tale, we characterize life as being about partially isolated modular units that are in communication with each other by complex signaling systems. Emergence occurs in the development of a hand or feather or leaf, as a result of a hierarchy of such inter-unit communication. A team is like an organ, and seems to respond, develop, change, and function as a result of the partial isolation, but partial communication, among its elements.

In this case the signals are not growth factors like BMP or FGF. They don't seem to be chemical (e.g., they're not pheromones). But what are they? They are visual, but also perceptual in complex ways. The brain receives the information about the changed situation, and then it signals to the cells in the body in ways that change their behavior.

Often the change is detrimental to the organism, which is not the usual effect of signaling. It's very interesting, and relevant to the general problem of understanding complexity.

But one thing is simple: a major sports competition needs competent referees. Too bad that FIFA can't find enough of them.

Right. What else could it be but intelligent design?

In the middle of an otherwise pretty sensible piece in Sunday's New York Times about efforts to ban the hunting of bluefin tuna, the author, Paul Greenberg, has this to say about why the bluefin deserves to be treated with such deference:

Not only is the bluefin’s dense, distinctly beefy musculature supremely appropriate for traversing the ocean’s breadth, but the animal also has attributes that make its evolutionary appearance seem almost deus ex machina, or rather machina ex deo — a machine from God. How else could a fish develop a sextantlike “pineal window” in the top of its head that scientists say enables it to navigate over thousands of miles? How else could a fish develop a propulsion system whereby a whip-thin crescent tail vibrates at fantastic speeds, shooting the bluefin forward at speeds that can reach 40 miles an hour? And how else would a fish appear within a mostly coldblooded phylum that can use its metabolic heat to raise its body temperature far above that of the surrounding water, allowing it to traverse the frigid seas of the subarctic?

How else indeed!

This is an amazing piece of writing for a reputable newspaper, with an often credible team of science journalists. Who let this go by?

We don't know everything about how today's life-forms got here, but no evidence suggests that any of the gaps or even possible missing pieces of our theory and understanding could lead to Intelligent Design. It is one thing for an author to use mythological phrases rhetorically, but in today's contentious society where religious inanity already has credence as part of culture-battles for power, it is inexcusable and irresponsible to let such rhetoric pass the editorial blue-pencil.

Immortality, II

We blog here whenever we have the opportunity about the astounding results from epidemiological studies, when truly profound findings are made. These go beyond new details, to a truly profound and, yes, paradigm-changing conclusion: immortality is the result of negative risk. If you avoid the risk factors being reported you can apparently reduce your risk to below 0%! Thus, by avoiding more than 100% of heart disease risks, you must presumably either grow a new heart, or have more lives than the proverbial cat.

Commenter TexBrit last week reminded us of a study that was reported a few years ago on the Beeb -- before MT was born -- showing that housework reduces breast cancer risk by around 30%. The many things that would or could be said about this ground-breaking (publicly funded?) study would exhaust the space available here, so we'll just let the story stand on its own. Because it is so highly technical, we've included the main Figure from the story, in hopes that MT readers will be able to get the true depth and importance of this Big Finding.

There could be many misinterpretations here, so we must be circumspect. We are not suggesting that women quit their jobs in droves and return to full-time domestic duties in the hopes of growing a third breast by reducing their breast cancer rate below 0%, or anything like that. We're just being neutral, and reporting the news.

Ten years on

Here is a graph showing the results of a Nature poll asking scientists what the human genome project has meant to them, 10 years on. Sequencing technology wins. But then, technology is not only the darling of our society, it is the career-maker for many of those polled, and it applies across the board in the life sciences. And with technology comes new knowledge. Much of it is truly new: unexpected findings about DNA functions. But even if we know much, much more, our basic theoretical understanding of life and its evolution have not really changed as a result.

Of course, as the graph also shows, this doesn't mean that most scientists would say that technology's the only benefit. In fact, most do say they would have their genome sequenced if it were cheaper (though the results don't show what their interest is in having the sequence), but 16% wouldn't have their genome sequenced if you paid them. The poll, but not the graph, also shows that

[m]ore than one-third of respondents now predict that it will take 10–20 years for personalized medicine, based on genetic information, to become commonplace, and more than 25% even longer than that. Some 5% don't expect it will happen in their lifetime.

Why Nature should have taken this poll this is revealing. Revealing of Nature's nature as a magazine, of the social and also vested-interest aspect of science. Ten years is not a magic number, and there's no real bottom line finding in genomics or genetics as a result of the last decade. Genome data have streamed out before and since 10 years ago, and the 'announcement' of the human genome sequence was itself a highly staged event, for publicity and other aspects of funding politics.

Genomic and genetic research have prospered in the last decades, at an accelerating pace, and across the spectrum of the life sciences. The availability of the data, and of the technology to generate that data, including experimental technologies for developmental biology, has been enormously productive and helpful. It changes everything we do. But it is not associated with any fixed point in time. That's melodrama, and the fact that scientists pay any attention to it reflects some of the material and career interests much more than anything to do with the science itself. True scientific advances aren't adjudicated by popularity polls.

Whether a scientist would get his/her own genome sequence is like that, too. Most scientists, like most lay people, have not got a very clear idea what can and can't be predicted from a genome sequence. And how could they? Everyone in and out of science is being bombarded by all sorts of lobbying, advocacy, sales pitches, fear-mongering about funding, skepticism based on scientific argument, skepticism based on politics, and so on.

So, those MT readers who are not in science would have a hard time making much sense of such an informal poll. But that's OK, because the poll makes no difference to what's going on in science.

Faith-based medicine

There's a story today on the BBC website on faith-based medicine. OK, not in the usual sense, but with the headline "Transforming medicine in the genome age", followed by sentences and quotations like this:

In conversation with the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins on BBC Radio 4's "The Age of the Genome", Craig Venter is in no doubt about the place in history that sequencing the book of life deserves: "I think it's far more important than walking on the Moon; not much has happened since walking on the Moon."

it's a pretty apt description.


The story refers to (read: promotes) a BBC radio series hosted by Richard Dawkins and called, "The Age of the Genome." We hasten to say we haven't yet listened to it -- and, well, we probably won't. As we see it, there is room for debate as to whether Dr Dawkins is 'Britain's leading intellectual' as the media often have called him.  But if you do listen, we'd love to know what you think.


The story goes on:

In 2000, we knew of just a handful of genes which influence our risk of developing common diseases such as diabetes, heart disease and cancers.

According to Peter Donnelly, director of the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics, says: "Because of the experiments we are now able to do, that number has gone from ten or twenty to something like 700, across well over 100 diseases now."

And,

One of the clinical expectations from the human genome project was that one day we would be going to our doctors for a personal genome reading.

These DNA check-ups would reveal with precision our individual risks for the whole gamut of common diseases. Our doctors would advise us on lifestyle and prescribe preventive medicines and measures accordingly, tailored to our genetic endowment.

This is all pretty curious, actually, since on this side of the Atlantic, at least, the news that all this hype might be not much more than that has reached the major media by now. We blogged about the New York Times front page story on this just last week. 

We don't like hammering away at this again and again, or just being persistent nay-sayers. The truth is that genome research is making some notable contributions, but is heavily and persistently lobbying by exaggerating its contribution to society and doing whatever it can to protect the enormous public and private investment in the genome's eyeview of life. These vested interests (e.g., the bank of DNA sequencers in the photo above) turn the temperature up on the lobbying and hyping, with media concupiscence, whenever it looks as if a bit of the tempering truth, that the promises have not been nearly lived up to, seems likely to leak out into the public domain. So as long as the carnival barkers are out there luring you in to see their side shows, we'll have to keep pointing out that the truth is much less rosy than they're telling you. 

An especially serious side of this is that, in economic hard times, there are many far more urgent and likely to succeed areas in which to invest than genome research. Without falling into simply new fads and vested interests, climate, agricultural, energy dependence, population growth and consumption, infectious disease, and other similar problems are far more important, and likely to be aided by research. And of course food and ordinary low-tech interventions and prevention, not research, are what is really needed, far more than expensive, exotic approaches to disease.

It takes a great violinist to make a great violin

What makes a great violin? This question has intrigued players, modern violin makers, and acousticians for a long time, but it's still not clear, according to a piece in Science (subscription required for the full story).

Ilya Kaler, a renowned soloist, gazes admiringly at the 269-year-old violin. He has just played four other great old Italian instruments in an invitation-only recital in the cramped quarters of Bein and Fushi Inc., violin dealers whose shop looks out over Chicago's famous Michigan Avenue. Now Kaler holds the star of the 7 April event, a fiddle named the Vieuxtemps after a previous owner and crafted by Bartolomeo Giuseppe Antonio Guarneri, also known as Guarneri del Gesù, who, along with Antonio Stradivari, is widely considered the best violinmaker ever to have lived.

The acoustics of the best old Italian violins, the Strads, the Guarneris, the Guadagnini, have been studied extensively, and tantalizing hints (e.g., here and here and here) have been found as to why they are so superior to most other instruments, but it's still not possible to say what makes a Strad a Strad.

...can subtle density variations or spectral features explain the supposedly superior qualities of Strads and Guarneris or distinguish between them? Cambridge's Woodhouse [James Woodhouse, an acoustics engineer at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom who has studied the violin for 35 years] has doubts. Acoustically speaking, researchers can now say why a violin sounds like a violin and not a guitar, he says, but they struggle to make finer distinctions. "If you chose any particular feature, you can probably find two million-dollar violins that differ from each other in that one feature as much as the million-dollar ones differ from a good $10,000 modern one," Woodhouse says.

What does this have to do with genetics or evolution or development? Complexity. The acousticians who are studying great violins have discovered complexity.

...the fact that so far tests have identified no obvious difference between great and good violins may actually be telling researchers something. Most studies have been made on violins in pristine isolation, typically suspended by rubber bands from a mount. Of course, when played, a fiddle lies clamped beneath a violinist's jaw, its neck cradled in the musician's hand, its strings worked by the bow. The instrument's defining qualities may show through only in that interaction.

"I can tell you that the violinist is the big deal," Bissinger [a physicist at East Carolina  ^{University in Greenville, North Carolina, who has studied the violin since 1969] says. "A great violinist can make even a bad violin sound good." Zygmuntowicz [a violin maker from New York City] agrees but warns that researchers may struggle to get reliable data on the working violin. "The situations that a violin operates in are really contaminated circumstances for testing," he says. "Science has shied away from that interaction because it doesn't make good papers yet."}

To hear Kaler tell it, the violin-violinist interaction is subtle. Asked what distinguishes the Vieuxtemps, he cites its resonance and ease of response. Then he adds, "If a violin responds too easily, it limits the possibility of a performer to produce many colors or to put his or her own imprint on the instrumentbecause the instrument anticipates your desires too much." So a violin must resist just enough to make the violinist work for what he wants, he says.

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Ilya Kaler.