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It was nothing but gray skies and intermittent rain while I was there. It was so beautiful … it felt like home. It was also good seeing my old mentors from grad school days, Chuck Kimmel and John Postlethwait.
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Patrick Phillips played this video on the big screen. In my presence. I thought about hiding under a table.
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The wackaloons of the Oregon Right to Life group were meeting in the same hotel with us. They should have snuck into our talks and seen all the pretty embryos we were looking at. Or maybe some of us should have snuck into their sessions, so there’d be at least a few people in the room who know something about embryology.
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It was a fairly small meeting, about 100 people. That’s the way I like them — I actually got to meet some new faces.
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The most horrifying story: Jerry Coyne mentioned that people had written in to say that Hopi Hoekstra did not deserve tenure after publication of the now infamous Hoekstra and Coyne paper, which was critical of evo-devo. That was unbelievable. I didn’t agree with everything in the paper, but then 1) I don’t agree with everything in any paper, and 2) it was useful, productive criticism.
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I really like this IGERT program. Sometimes, the granting agencies get a great idea.
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I am very, very tired, but it’s a good tired.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
WHAT? Are you saying that you *don’t* support the expulsion of people who disagree with you? You better watch it, PZ, or you’ll be thrown out of the Big Science-club, as well as the Nazi party… [/BenStein]
I appreciated the tidbits from the symposium, as much as a layman could. But the video showing evokes even more curiosity. Why was it played? Did you get any commission? And is it true that the supporting artists are going by the name “PeZe Posse and The Machine”?
I appreciated the tidbits from the symposium, as much as a layman could. But the video showing evokes even more curiosity. Why was it played? Did you get any commission? And is it true that the supporting artists are going by the name “PeZe Posse and The Machine”?
It was played because it is funny.
You have to understand — science conferences are places where generally enthused and happy people* gather and learn stuff and have a good time and drink beer. Funny fits into the atmosphere perfectly.
*Except for the grad students and post-docs who are about to enter the job market. They tend to be enthused and stressed, very stressed.
I have to agree about the grad-students about to enter the real world being stressed. My wife has about 3 weeks left in her MBA program and if her head doesn’t spin around twice and then fly off her shoulders and around the room at least once a day I wonder who replaced her with some pod-person replicant.
Big Science: A Monolith In Crisis.
Grad students before their qualifying exams.
Wow! ONly 11 more days until Expelled opens nation wide, tens of thousands see the science quacks of darwinland, the brownshirts for doggins, the drop out wackos for pee wee and then America regains science as a legitimate value neutral persuit by 2010.
And I can get my license that permits me to pepperspray any 50 evobats of my choice before 2009 without penalty.
Robert Thille #4 wrote:
That sounds like a marketable skill. If she were to hook up with a faith healer doing “exorcisms,” I daresay she’d rake it in.
Just something to consider.
The evo-devo meeting ended a little over an hour ago and it was really just all-around splendid. If people are interested, I was planning to do a little write up of the final four talks, as they did a nice job, collectively of adding to the big picture and were nicely presented, for the most part. I’ll post it here later this afternoon unless I return to the thread to find a chorus of “No way!!”‘s :-)
Hey, Art (#6)! You got that one right! Hilarious.
DanioPhD – It would be great if you would post it. Thanks!
ah, IGERT. My great failure.
I had an IGERT fellowship once. I was going to study genomics. Then in my second year events in my life conspired to break me, I had to take a medical withdrawal for depression and they didn’t want me back.
Ok, I have to call Poe’s law here. Is Keith’s post real or satire? If satire, then my compliments, Keith. You hit just the right amount of fifth-grade level humor and creative writing.
DanioPhD – I’d certainly be interested in your write-up. Maybe you could ask PZ to put in a separate post for you, if that’s alright with him.
I dunno, Taz. Somebody calling himself Keith Eaton came a-trolling recently. I’m guessing he morphed.
Keith is a troll we’ve had some dealings with him on the florida post. Please don’t feed him. :)
Robert Thille @ #4
Mr Shrek is about 3/4 of the the way through his MBA programme. I feel you pain man.
Mind you I’m in ther last 6 months of my LLM so he thinks I get wacky often to. If we coincide our freakouts together the kids leave us alone afterwards for hours!
Is this the grad students relay their insanity thread? I just sent a draft chapter of my dissertation to my advisor. I want to throw up. I’ve wanted to throw up every day for the past couple weeks.
It helps to have an avenue to vent. NORMAL people ( you know the ones who don’t intentionally torture themselves with years of extra education just for the “fun” of it)just don’t understand. I feel so misunderstood. Sob.
I feel your pain, temporarily anonymous.
I lost all focus in the last year of my Ph.D. and didn’t get diagnosed until three months after I’d just cleared my desk and left my office without telling anyone (three months after my funding had run out at which point the official paperwork said my final deadline would be – not that they bothered noticing, so I ended up having to fight the administration to let me go, so I could claim benefit …).
Was only diagnosed because my internet friends – my last contact to the outside by then – insisted I go see my GP after my mother’s dead at the same time.
*death
And this was cut lost for some reason </whine>
Hi All,
I dashed off a summary while my kids attended a noisy birthday party this afternoon. I hope it’s halfway understandable. It’s been an exhausing but very intellectually gratifying weekend:
This morning’s final series of talks each focused on a different phylum, but the unifying theme was one of bridging the processes of microevolution and macroevolution. The first talk after breakfast (and a long night of Scotch-drinkin’ and story-swappin’ prior to that) was Bernie Degnan of the University of Queensland. He summarized his work on Amphimedon queenslandica, a sponge species developed as a model of a representative primitive metazoan. Sponges diverged from the metazoan lineage ca. 700 MYA and possess the most minimalist metazoan body plan–no nervous system, muscles, nor any discernible tissues in the adult body architecture. Their embryos, however, feature robust anterioposterior patterning, distinct cell types organized into tissues, and cell morphogenesis typical of more complex metazoans. These embryonic characteristics are achieved by a regulatory network of genes, which, while inactive in the adult sponge, strongly support the presence of similar molecules in the ancestral metazoan genome. A few million years after the divergence of porifera, metazoans were able to co-opt these molecular toolkits to build the diverse, molecularly and morphologically distinct tissues common to all bilaterians. PZ has previously written up one such sponge tale here describing the molecular precursors to a nervous system in the sponge genome. Precursors to pretty much every other developmental ‘big gun’, e.g, Hox genes, Pax genes, Wnts, Hedgehog, etc. are also present as a basic prototype, in the Amphimedon genome.
Next up at the podium was Michael Wade, of Indiana University. He presented a model for the evolution of maternal effect genes and made predictions based on algebraic expression of the rates of maternal effect alleles within and between populations. This was a bit outside my area/interests, but for more specifics, please see (this link to the relevant paper abstract). The take-home message was that the maternal genotype has critical input into embryonic development and survival, irrespective of the zygotic genotype. The mode of transmission and expression of maternal effect genes differ from zygotic genes, in that all offspring will be influenced by the maternal genotype, but only female offspring will activate these genes from their own genome. This gives natural selection different ‘access’ to these genes as compared to the garden variety zygotic gene pool, thus positive selection (selecting for advantageous mutations) and purifying selection (purging deleterious mutations) will work at different rates on maternal effect genes as compared to zygotic genes.
Bill Cresko of the University of Oregon presented his work on the evolution of bone morphogenesis in sticklebacks. This was another example of a microevolution study that may have applications useful for understanding macroevolution. Briefly, there are oceanic–andromatous, actually, as they migrate to fresh water for spawning–populations of sticklebacks that have existed in roughly their present form for over 10 million years. They feature some wicked bony spikes around their pelvic region and lateral dermal bones, both of which presumably confer some protection against predators. There are several fresh water species as well, young (15,000 years or less) populations descendent from the migratory oceanic stock who were trapped in fresh water by receding glaciers. The key feature of these new stickleback populations is their rapid (in evolutionary time) and repeated loss of both the pelvic spikes and the body armor. It happens in isolated freshwater stickle populations all over the world, over and over again. Bill’s group has been intercrossing the oceanic and freshwater stocks to identify the genes responsible for these changes. Mapping has revealed that the genetic regulators of pelvic spines are independent of those that regulate the lateral plates. From the gene clusters implicated in the latter, several interesting candidates with roles in mineralization, osteoblast function, and Calcium ion processing have been identified. Intriguingly, it’s not clear at all that selection is acting on the bony plate factors at all. It’s just as likely that some other linked factor is the real target of this rapid and repeated selection, and the bony plate genes on the same chromosome are just along for the ride.
Kevin Peterson, a paleontologist from Dartmouth College was the final speaker. He gave a broad and engaging summary of recent work on the evolution of microRNAs. microRNAs (miRs) are short (22-mer) RNA sequences which, after several steps of post-transcriptional modification to their shape and configuration, have precise, cell-specific effects on mRNA, either by degrading it altogether or inhibiting translation. Described as the ‘dark matter’ of the genome, these tiny, unassuming molecules were largely overlooked until recent investigations revealed their hitherto unknown importance in gene regulation. Peterson’s angle was to apply the known data on miRs across the phyla and take a novel look at the macroevolution of these factors. For years, evolutionary biologists have sought to explain the explosions of diversity and complexity seen in the vertebrate clade.
Morphological change plotted against time reveals that the biggest degree of change happened early in our lineage, and subsequent increases in complex phenotypes have been relatively miniscule. When the molecular era revealed the genome duplication phenomenon, many pinned their hopes on this as the explanation for complexity, but this rationale fails under further scrutiny. Similarly, as we learned from the Coyne-Wray duel on Friday night, Cis-regulatory elements were enthusiastically embraced as a key factor behind evolutionary complexity in vertebrates, but again, this explanation alone cannot account for many of the observed changes. Peterson and others have shown that miR gene families are present throughout all phyla, and have continued to evolve throughout evolution. There is a very low rate of secondary loss of miRs, once they appear, and sequence divergence is restricted due to the required nucleotide specificity of the recognition sequences which anneal to the target transcripts. These characteristics lend themselves to the creation of a robust phylogeny, which, in addition to clarifying some controversial assignments between morphological and molecular phylogenies, shows an acquisition of new miR families at a rate which largely overlaps that of the morphological changes noted in vertebrate evolution. Thus, the fine-tuning of cell-specific gene regulation conferred by the evolution of novel miRs may be an important mechanism in generating complexity.
Thank you for that final summary, Danio. I hope PZ promotes it to the top at some point.
The miRNA bit sounds fascinating. I learn something new here every day.
Danio, that would be ‘anadromous’ (from Greek, ‘running up[stream]). Fish that go downstream to breed (e.g. Anguilla eels) are catadromous (‘kata’, down).
And thanks for the summaries.
Oh, thanks for catching that, John! How humiliating! I certainly won’t be able to show my face around Bill Cresko’s lab anytime soon :/
I like the IGERT program, too, since it has paid for me to come back to school and work on a PhD, as I mentioned in the other thread. It has been a great way to get the engineers and neuroscientists talking to each other in this particular program. It looks like it has helped strengthen the neuroscience community in Atlanta (at GaTech, where we have the program, and Ga State and Emory University). It has also helped engineers at Georgia Tech make and strengthen collaborations with neuroscience-related researchers at other top universities around the US and Europe.
It’s a great program. We’ve got 2-3 IGERT programs at GaTech and Emory in different areas. How’s the NSF doing in fighting for real science these days?
Hoekstra’s work deserves more than just tenure. Plus she’s a nice person to boot.
Oh, I was jesting. Conferences can be great fun, and that video doesn’t rule the roost.
I see that you duck the money question. Afraid the Trophy Wife™ will demand a cut? Or grumpy that you are Expelled (never cut in, more probably) from yet another video business?
Oh, I was jesting. Conferences can be great fun, and that video doesn’t rule the roost.
I see that you duck the money question. Afraid the Trophy Wife™ will demand a cut? Or grumpy that you are Expelled (never cut in, more probably) from yet another video business?
# 18 & 19:
PhD comics’ website (phdcomics.com) has some great forums for the insanity that exists in these hectic 4 (5? 6?) years of your life.
This conference was a great opportunity to meet not only the biggest names in this field, but also commiserate with fellow grad students and, as PZ astutely observed, stress & speculate on the looming job market and dare to dip a big toe into *gasp* the private sector, on the off chance that we end up in the group of 75% of our peers who can’t get a job as a PI.
Sigh. Looks like another trip to PhD comics for me…