I just got home a short while ago, and of course I had to spend an hour shoveling snow. So I need this right now.
(via Florida Photo Magazine)
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
I just got home a short while ago, and of course I had to spend an hour shoveling snow. So I need this right now.
(via Florida Photo Magazine)
The latest issue of Priscum, the newsletter of the Paleontological Society (pdf), has an interesting focus: where are the women in paleontology? They have a problem, in that only 23% of their membership are women, and I hate to say it, but the stereotype of a paleontologist is Roy Chapman Andrews — most people don’t imagine a woman when they hear the word paleontologist (unjustly, I know!)
On the other hand, 37% of the paleontology presentations at the GSA were by women. They’re there, but they aren’t getting far up the ladder of success. They’re not achieving high status positions within the society at the same rate as men, and then there’s this skewed distribution:
So women are over-represented in the student category, but under-represented in the professional category. The optimistic way to look at that is that there is an opportunity for change, and maybe that wave of current students will move on up and change the distribution ten years from now. More pessimistically, it suggests that there could be barriers that preferentially block the advancement of women in the field; if the distribution doesn’t change in the next decade, that says that there were more frustrated women who left the discipline than men.
So why would women experience greater barriers to advancement? It isn’t about evil men keeping the women down, and I wish we could clear away the resentment some men express when they hear that there are greater obstacles to women’s progress — too often I hear angry responses to accusations of academic sexism taken personally, as if it were a statement of personal criminality. It’s a product of the system, and men and women mostly contribute to it by neglect and an unwillingness to change the status quo.
What I most often see is statements of fact that I don’t disagree with, such as that women on average have lower publication rates than men, but the problem is that these advocates of blaming the inherent properties of women for their failure don’t think it through. Why do women have lower publication rates? Are there structural/cultural/professional properties that conflict and cause problems that men don’t see? And most importantly, if there are, what can we do to correct those institutional biases? Just saying that “women publish less” begs the question.
This article had a very helpful diagram illustrating the contributing factors, taken from a paper discussing a similar problems among evolutionary biologists.
Right there in the center is issue of lower publication rates in women, but it looks deeper at consequences and causes. Follow the arrows. I’ve seen similar charts before — it looks a heck of a lot like an extinction vortex, a self-perpetuating cycle of defeat.
Another article in the same newsletter describes the distribution of the leadership of the Paleontological Society. It shows steady improvement in the proportion of women in the society leadership, but still, most of the executive positions have been held by women less than 10% of the time. The more recently the position was created, the higher the proportion of women. I also noticed one outlier: 67% of the Education and Outreach Coordinators (a very new position) have been women. That’s another stereotype, too, that women are better suited to teaching. Look at the diagram above: going into teaching is also one of the factors that hurts research productivity, and as long as research is more highly valued than teaching, and teaching is considered ‘women’s work’, it’s going to skew representation of the sexes.
They have a proposal to correct the imbalance. Notice that it doesn’t involve simply declaring that they have equality of opportunity (which they don’t!) and doing nothing. Correcting these kinds of biases requires active intervention.
Societies are strengthened by incorporating diversity (of gender, of ethnicity, of abilities, of ideas, and of disciplines). As a society, we need to be aware of equity issues and take intentional steps to counteract imbalances. The recommendations below relate to increasing ALL types of diversity. So far, we have data on gender equity, but there are many other types of diversity we should work to improve. This set of recommendations applies to all of them.
Intentional nominations. Think about the excellent female colleagues you have. Now nominate at least one of them for a leadership position (we have several open this year!) or a society award. All Society positions are open nominations, so please share your ideas!
Mentoring. Establish professional relationships with young women in paleontology (students and early career professionals). Spend some extra time at poster sessions meeting some of our student members. Encourage women to submit abstracts for oral presentations. Established women, share your career stories and experiences.
New initiatives. PS Council is dedicated to increasing equity for all types of diversity in our membership. Please share any ideas you may have for initiatives with [the author] or other council members—now and in the future.
You might have seen this already: Media Matters caught it and it’s making the rounds, including at my green energy joint at KCET. Fox News talking head Shibani Joshi says the reason Germany’s leading the U.S. in solar power installations by a factor of about 20 is that Germany has more sun than we do in the U.S. It’s toward the end of the clip:
Money quotes: Gretchen Carlson asked “What was Germany doing correct? Are they just a smaller country, and that made it more feasible?” Joshi: “They’re a smaller country, and they’ve got lots of sun. Right? They’ve got a lot more sun than we do.”
Here’s the inconvenient truth (as they say), courtesy the National Renewable Energy Laboratory:
It’s almost like they just don’t care they’re lying.
A few days back my neighbor Teddy Quinn asked me if I’d be willing to provide a minute or so of audio on the whole “bobcat trapping in Joshua Tree” issue I mentioned this week. Said audio would be aired on his new project, Radio Free Joshua Tree, a community podcast.
He asked me for a minute and I gave him five, but he played the whole thing anyway. It’s at minute 17 of hour 2 of his variety show for February 3, the whole thing of which you should check out. My neighborhood is replete with good musicians, and Teddy is kind of a local impresario curating their work and boosting their careers.
But if you don’t have time for that, or if you hate music, I’ve posted just my audio at Coyote Crossing as well.
I was reminded, doing this, of how easy and fun audio work is. I’ve decided I want to do more. Probably mostly ruminations on life in the desert, that kind of thing. If you want to be kept in the loop, my Twitter account is probably where I’ll announce new recordings more reliably. Follow me there to be part of the in-crowd.
It’s always gratifying to see a scientific organization step up and use their collective expertise to make a clear statement on a political and economic issue. The Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) has published an open letter to President Obama rejecting the Keystone XL pipeline. The pipeline is a ghastly stopgap that hinders the promotion of better, cleaner alternative energy sources by encouraging ever more desperate and destructive efforts to harvest marginal energy sources…efforts to keep us on our petroleum addiction until the last drop of oil is wrung out of the earth, at any cost.
How about taking the billions that would be squandered building a big ugly pipe and instead invest it in research and conservation?
6 February 2013
From the Presidents of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology
An open letter to President Barack Obama,
Members of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology are biologists from throughout the U.S. with the broadest possible perspectives—from microbes to whales, from molecules to ecosystems. The undersigned current and past presidents of the Society have watched with increasing dismay the deterioration of the life support system of our planet, threatening all life as we know it. It has long been known that one product of burning fossil fuel, carbon dioxide, is a powerful greenhouse gas, and more recently that this gas has been associated with drastic climate variations in Earth’s past. Consequently, it is no surprise that prodigious worldwide burning of fossil fuel is creating large-scale climate change with increasing disruption of life on the planet. While many in the western developed nations still enjoy relative prosperity – despite the horrific storms experienced in the U.S. in recent years – it is in poor nations around the world that the impacts of climate change are currently most destructive. Pacific Island nations are disappearing beneath the tides as sea level rises. Desertification is destroying agriculture in northern Africa and massive floods have devastated Pakistan, Bangladesh and Thailand in the last two years.
It is too late to avoid substantial disruption, but further damage can be reduced if we act immediately to keep remaining fossil fuel deposits in the ground, out of the air and sea. A most immediate decision is yours: whether or not to approve the Keystone XL pipeline. More important than the fact that the pipeline itself will endanger aquifers and life along its length, the pipe will deliver the dirtiest, most CO2-producing petroleum source known to the refineries of the Gulf Coast. Additionally, the Athabasca tar-sands mine is destroying vast regions of northern Alberta that have been home and hunting and fishing grounds for First Nations peoples for thousands of years.
Even before fossil fuels are burned, releasing climate-altering greenhouse gases, the extraction phase itself produces environmental disasters, including toxins in water supplies due to hydraulic fracturing for natural gas, degradation of watersheds by mountain-top coal mining, and the loss of marine life from offshore drilling. Permits for all of these activities lie in the hands of agencies of your administration.
Alternative sources of energy are at hand. We do have the individual and collective intelligence and technology to see the urgently needed transition through to better times. What we require is sufficient political will on a global scale to meet the challenge. The U.S., for the last three federal administrations, has been a major impediment to ratification of international climate treaties. Clearly, the future demands that we – through your administration – reverse this pattern and join with leaders of other nations to ratify agreements that will quickly and drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Mr. President: you are arguably the most powerful person in the wealthiest and most powerful nation on the globe. To be clear: change will come, one way or another. Your task is no less than to steer the course of history away from its current devastating trajectory toward a sustainable existence for humankind.
Signed by:
Billie Swalla, University of Washington* President, 2013-2014
Peter Wainwright, University of California, Davis*
President-elect, 2013-2014
Ken Sebens, University of Washington* Past President, 2010-2012
Rich Satterlie, University of North Carolina, Wilmington*
Past President, 2009-2010
John Pearse, University of California, Santa Cruz*
Past President, 2007-2008
Sally Woodin, University of South Carolina* Past President, 2005-2006
Marvalee Wake, University of California, Berkeley*
Past President, 2001-2002
Alan Kohn, University of Washington* Past President, 1997-1998
Mike Hadfield, University of Hawaii* Past President, 1995-1996
David Wake, University of California, Berkeley*
Past President, 1992
* Affiliations for identification only and do not represent endorsement by the organization”.
Lynn Riddiford, University of Washington* Past President, 1991
Albert Bennett, University of California, Irvine*
Past President, 1990
Stephen Wainwright, Duke University* Past President, 1988
William Dawson, University of Michigan* Past President, 1986
Patricia Morse, University of Washington* Past President, 1985
Edwin L. Cooper, University of California, Los Angeles*
Past President, 1983
F. John Vernberg, University of South Carolina*
Past President, 1982
Mary E. Rice
Past President, 1979Approved by the Executive Committee of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology, 5 February 2013, as was the Society’s Resolution on Climate Change and Ocean Acidification, which was approved on 1 March 2012: http://www.sicb.org/resources/resolutions.php3#climate
I’ve been playing with it for a while. It turns out that when you go back to Cretaceous Morris, you need to be able to swim really well, but Cambrian Morris is high and dry on a fairly small landmass (whoa, but oxygen is way down and carbon dioxide way up). You can have your own time machine, too — it’s the EarthViewer app for iPad, and it’s free from HHMI Here’s what it has:
• Data and continental reconstructions dating back billions of years
• Climate and carbon dioxide data for the last 100 years
• The ability to manipulate the globe and zoom to any location
• Track the location of modern cities back over 500 million years
• In depth features on major geological and biological events in Earth history
• Clickable details on geologic eons, eras, and periods
• Automated play modes
• An extensive reference list
• Suggestions for classroom use
• Tutorial videos
Did I mention that it’s free? This HHMI thing is pretty danged sweet.
It’s a harsh world for us men. Oh, sure, we’ve got all the political and economic power, and we’ve got most of the guns, but step into a senior citizens’ center and you’ll notice the preponderance of elderly women. Men die younger, on average. I’m also acutely aware of the growing disparity as we get older: my wife seems to be aging at about half the rate I do. If you’ve been watching House of Cards on Netflix, you may have noticed that the character played by Kevin Spacey, face a bit puffy and deeply lined, is married to a character played by Robin Wright (Princess Buttercup!) who is looking fabulous: mature, a bit severe, but still looking great. This situation is not unusual.
This is not fair. The average life expectancy of women in the US is 80 years, while men live to be about 75.
Why?
It’s not sufficient to say it just is that way; we have to dig deeper and figure out the differences. Part of the answer is that human males have a youthful history of riskier behavior than females, but again we have to ask why: what is driving men to do stupid stunts that lead to higher rates of mortality? But even if we have a good answer for that one, it doesn’t address that other problem, the accelerated rates of male senescence. I’ve survived my heightened risk of death by misadventure, so why am I getting increasingly decrepit while women my age are looking more fit and healthy?
Part of the answer may be in your genes, your mitochondria, and evolution. Mitochondria play an extremely important set of roles in aging. They hold the keys to cell death and responses to cancer; most apoptotic responses are triggered by the release of signals from the mitochondria. Mitochondria are the agents that produce energy for the cell, and also produce reactive oxygen species in their normal operation. You may be hearing the hype about anti-oxidants, and are diligently taking cofactors and vitamin pills to reduce, hypothetically, the deleterious effects of these avidly destructive molecules, but the primary source of those oxidants is by the activity of mitochondria. There are overt hereditary diseases of mitochondria, like LHON and MELAS which reveal the importance of mitochondria in normal metabolism, but there are also other diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s that have a mitochondrial component that plays a role in the severity of the effects. And aging is a disease that is also associated with mitochondrial function.
But wait, you’re thinking, mitochondria are equally important in men and women, so how can they account for a difference between the sexes?
Keep in mind that mitochondria are not magically autonomous. They contain about 35 genes essential for metabolism, and use about a thousand more that come from the nuclear genome, so there’s a significant amount of information shuttling back and forth between the nucleus and the mitochondrion. There are also epigenetic influences: mitochondrial states are known to modulate states of DNA methylation in the nucleus. And obviously, there are subtle differences in between the nuclear genomes of men and women, and probably even greater epigenetic differences between the two. So here we have two complex genetic units, the nucleus and the mitochondria, interacting with one another, and in a perfect world they’d be beautifully fine-tuned and singing in harmony with one another…but at the same time we have sex differences in the nuclear genetics, which complicates the problem of matching the two.
And this is where evolution steps in. There’s a genetic problem here.
The inheritance of mitochondria is asymmetric: you only get them from your mother, and your father makes no mitochondrial contribution at all. Your father’s mitochondrial contribution dies with him and is not passed on. What does that mean? It means that there can be no selection to fine tune mitochondria to the male nuclear genome. As a recent paper by Wolff and Gemmell explains:
The asymmetry in mtDNA inheritance, however, becomes problematic in the case of traits that affect exclusively males and shared traits that, if compromised, have a disproportionally greater effect on males than females. In this instance mutations that harm males but leave females unaffected will escape purifying selection and lead to the accumulation of a mutational load in the mitochondrial genome detrimental to male-specific traits; a scenario described as mother’s curse. Male reproductive traits have long been in the limelight as ideal candidates to fall victim to this mechanism. Compelling support for such male specific reproductive effects comes from a recent study. Using a fly model, Innocenti et al. expressed five different naturally occurring mtDNA variants alongside a standardized nuclear genome and profiled the resulting gene expression within these mitolines. A pronounced asymmetry in nuclear gene expression profiles was observed between males and females with the majority of affected transcripts being overexpressed only in males and highly over-represented in male reproductive tissues. Overall, this study suggests that naturally occurring mtDNA variability exerts a much stronger effect on male fitness than it does on female fitness, strongly supporting the concept of mother’s curse. This finding is well in line with a range of studies that identified either mtDNA variants or specific mito-nuclear lineages as associated with male reproductive impairment across a variety of taxa.
The name “mother’s curse” is a bit unfair. It’s not just the maternal contribution that affects us males, but the fact that our nuclear genomes (which are derived from both our mother and father) may be subtly out of synch with our mitochondrial genomes (which are derived exclusively from our mother). Don’t blame your mom for your wrinkles and grey hair, guys — you should still call her on Mother’s Day.
Two other points to make: 1) this phenomenon of greater male senescence is universal, and seems to be found all across multicellular phyla. Apparently, earlier death is something that actually is a guy thing. 2) While there aren’t opportunities to directly select for greater compatibility between mitochondria and nuclei in males, don’t count inclusive fitness out. Male mortality can obviously effect female survival, so you can have indirect effects that promote better male survival.
It suggests that males are not only subject to heightened risks of disease and infertility, but implies that across almost all eukaryotic life they will have shorter lives simply as a consequence of the maternal inheritance of the mitochondrial genome. The diminutive mtDNA plays David to the nuclear Goliath because of the inability of selection to eliminate mutations harmful to males, but neutral or beneficial to females, under most scenarios. Recent theoretical work suggests that, under scenarios in which there are high levels of positive-assortative mating and strong inclusive fitness, the indirect costs to females may be great enough to enable selection to remove mtDNA types deleterious to males but not females. However, on the whole there is little opportunity for deleterious mtDNA mutations to be selectively eliminated from populations, unless they have direct fitness costs to females.
Hmmm. I should probably do things that make sure my health and fitness are correlated with my female partner’s health and fitness, so that my mitochondrial-nuclear matching is relevant to the survival of my offspring. Yeah, that’s the ticket. I should start consciously thinking that way.
Wolff JN, Gemmell NJ (2013) Mitochondria, maternal inheritance, and asymmetric fitness: Why males die younger. Bioessay 35(2):93-9. doi: 10.1002/bies.201200141.
Finally my lifelong lack of a college degree pays off! As it turns out, college degrees are bad for living things. At least that’s according to sterling citizen Cliff Gardner of Ruby Valley in Nevada, who said this to the New York Times:
“I’m sure most of the people being considered for [the state’s Department of Wildlife director] job graduated from a college. These people are the cause of the destruction of wildlife.”
