Information falling from the skies! Right into your hands!

All right, so you don’t think you can flit off to some conference somewhere whenever you feel like it. This is the 21st Century! Do it virtually! You may not be aware of this, but the Howard Hughes Medical Institute is an awesome resource that provides tons of information for free to the public. Among those resources are their annual holiday lectures, presented live on the web, and this year featuring Bones, Stones, and Genes: The Origin of Modern Humans.

Where and when did humans arise? What distinguishes us from other species? Did our distant ancestors look and behave like us?

When Darwin proposed that humans evolved from a common ancestor with the great apes, he lacked fossil evidence to support his idea. One hundred and fifty years later, the evidence for human evolution is plentiful and growing, including detailed molecular genetics data, an impressive fossil record, and artifacts of early human culture like stone tools.

Leading scientists John Shea of Stony Brook University, Sarah Tishkoff of the University of Pennsylvania, and Tim White of the University of California, Berkeley, will guide us on a global exploration spanning millions of years to illuminate the rise of modern humans.

Live Webcast October 6 & 7, 2011 10:00 a.m. ET. Re-webcast 11:00 a.m. PT

I know some of you are homeschoolers (I cluck disapprovingly in your direction…), but here’s a chance to get quality, high end instruction from prominent experts in the field right in your home, for no additional cost. How can you turn it down?

Also, I’ve mentioned this before but it’s worth mentioning again: the HHMI also provides a whole library of free DVDs, including all of the past Holiday Lectures, that you can have shipped to your home. For free. Did I say this was free? Yes it is, and you’re crazy not to take advantage of this offer.

(Also on Sb)

No Jerry, no cure

We’re finally rid of Jerry Lewis and his smarmy, condescending sponsorship of a telethon for muscular dystrophy. I think he meant well, but he had the wrong ideas: this article celebrating his absence makes a significant point. There are many diseases for which there can be no cure short of magically rebuilding entire bodies and brains — that is, no cure short of changing essentially the entirety of who the person is.

All that money was supposed to find what Jerry called “a cure.” Every year he said “We’re closer than ever to a cure.” But every doctor and nurse will tell you the same thing: there is no cure. In the program for the 2011 annual meeting of the Muscular Dystrophy Coordinating Committee, the word “cure” does not appear.

What people with the disability need is help with their symptoms and with mobility. Their quality of life can be improved, their symptoms can be reduced. They also need “accessible public transportation and housing, employment opportunities and other civil rights that a democratic society should ensure for all its citizens.” That’s what Mike Ervin says—he calls himself “a renegade Jerry’s Kid” who was an official telethon poster child in the 1960s.

That’s not a message of hopelessness. To the contrary, it’s saying there are positive improvements that can be made that don’t involve relegating the disabled to the rubbish bin of ‘God’s mistakes’.

(Also on Sb)

Freebie!

As Jerry Coyne has alerted us, there is a free evolutionary biology textbook available on Kindle — grab it while you can (if you don’t have a kindle, just put the free Kindle app on your computer).

I haven’t had a chance to look the book over myself. Eugene Koonin is a respected name, but books that claim to establish a “Fundamentally New Evolutionary Synthesis” put me off a bit. Other stuff in the summary sounds interesting, though, just downplay the grandiose claims a bit when reading it.

(Also on Sb)

Now I’m a little embarrassed to own an iPhone

I was just reading this analysis of costs and profits of the iPhone, and it’s rather dismaying. It’s largely about how the costs are distributed: the iPhone is assembled in China, and contributes to our trade imbalance, but it’s not because China has a technological edge — all the components are made in Japan, Korea, Germany, and the US, and just shipped to China for the final assembly by the cheap labor there.

The total component cost of an iPhone in 2009 was $172.46. Workers in China assemble the iPhone, but because their wages are low the assembly cost per phone (labeled manufacturing costs in the table below) is quite small, only $6.50 a phone. The total production cost per phone is $178.96.

Apple has a 64% profit margin on the iPhone! That’s not a surprise, though — I’m used to tech companies charging a premium price for the fancy toys, and Apple has never had a reputation as a budget brand. This is what surprised me:

For the sake of discussion, they assumed that assembly line wages in the U.S. are ten times higher than in China. Given that Chinese production workers earn roughly $1 an hour, that is not an unreasonable assumption. The higher wages would mean that the total assembly cost per phone would rise to $65 and the total manufacturing cost would approach $238. If Apple continued to sell the iPhone for $500, the company would still earn a very respectable 50% profit margin.

There is admittedly a very large difference between 64% and 50%, and I can understand why a company would balk at cutting profits by 14%, and it would be an irrational business decision to shift assembly to the US for reasons of national altruism. But still…50% seems obscene enough.

I hope Apple is at least paying respectable taxes on that profit. The article doesn’t say; I don’t have expectations that they are.

(Also on Sb)

Not like a worm?

Ann Coulter is back to whining about evolution again, and this week she focuses on fossils. It’s boring predictable stuff: there are no transitional fossils, she says.

We also ought to find a colossal number of transitional organisms in the fossil record – for example, a squirrel on its way to becoming a bat, or a bear becoming a whale. (Those are actual Darwinian claims.)

Darwin postulated that whales could have evolved from bears, but he was wrong…as we now know because we found a lot of transitional fossils in whale evolution. Carl Zimmer has a summary of recent discoveries, and I wrote up a bit about the molecular genetics of whale evolution. Whales have become one of the best examples of macroevolutionary transitions in the fossil record, all in roughly the last 30 years — which gives us a minimal estimate of how out of date Ann Coulter’s sources are.

But then she writes this, which is not only wrong, but self-refuting.

To explain away the explosion of plants and animals during the Cambrian Period more than 500 million years ago, Darwiniacs asserted – without evidence – that there must have been soft-bodied creatures evolving like mad before then, but left no fossil record because of their squishy little microscopic bodies.

Then in 1984, “the dog ate our fossils” excuse collapsed, too. In a discovery the New York Times called “among the most spectacular in this century,” Chinese paleontologists discovered fossils just preceding the Cambrian era.

Despite being soft-bodied microscopic creatures – precisely the sort of animal the evolution cult claimed wouldn’t fossilize and therefore deprived them of crucial evidence – it turned out fossilization was not merely possible in the pre-Cambrian era, but positively ideal.

And yet the only thing paleontologists found there were a few worms. For 3 billion years, nothing but bacteria and worms, and then suddenly nearly all the phyla of animal life appeared within a narrow band of 5 million to 10 million years.

It’s so weird to read that: yes, people have been predicting that the precursors to the Cambrian fauna would have been small and soft-bodied (what else would you expect), and that they would be difficult to fossilize…but not impossible, and further, scientists have been out finding these fossils. Somehow this is a refutation of evolution? What we’re seeing is exactly what evolution predicted!

What we have is a good record of small shelly fossils and trace fossils from the pre-Cambrian — before there were fully armored trilobites, there were arthropod-like creatures with partial armor that decayed into scattered small fragments of shell after death, and before that there were entirely soft-bodied, unarmored creatures that left only trackways and burrows. Even in this period Coulter wants to call abrupt, we find evidence of gradual transitions in animal forms.

And then to claim that there is an absence of transitional forms because all that was found were worms! Um, if you take an animal with an armored exoskeleton or bones, and you catch it before the hard skeleton had evolved, exactly what do you think it would look like? Like a worm.

As evolution predicted. As the evidence shows.

I can’t even guess what Ann Coulter was expecting a pre-Cambrian animal to look like. Not like a worm, apparently…but like what?

(Also on Sb)

Anti-caturday post

I have been trying to understand the peculiar popularity of these posts about sharp-clawed carnivores called “cats”, and near as I can tell it has something to do with the property of cuteness. “Cute” seems mostly undefinable, however, but usually seems to involve playful juvenile behavior by large-eyed creatures. This seems to qualify: Sepiolid burying behavior. It’s adorable!

It’s cute how it so quickly conceals itself to lurk and wait for prey to swim by.

I’m still trying to grasp the concept of cute, though. Is this cute? It’s a giant Pacific octopus swimming up an Alaskan creek.

Do you live near water? Then you are not safe. The giant tentacled molluscs will find a way to get to you, and I find that charming.

(Also on Sb)

Botanical Wednesday: Yes, mistress

I don’t know whether to be intimidated or aroused by the description that goes with this image. Or both.

The dominatrices of the orchid world are the Bucket Orchids. They are pollinated by orchid bees that want the plant’s aromatic oils to use them in their courtship dance with females. But what the poor bees go through to get them!

The orchids secrete the aromatic fluid into the bucket-shaped lip, and
the bee will often fall into the fluid at the bottom of the bucket. There are knobs inside that go one way but the rest of the bucket is lined with smooth hairs pointing downwards and so that they can’t climb back up.

Finally following the knobs, the bees come to what looks like freedom, a spout exiting. The orchid, however, has no intention of letting the bee go yet. Instead, it constricts the spout and presses pollen packets against its thorax, keeping it there until the “glue” has set. Finally, it is set free to go and find another orchid and this time displace the pollen packets to pollinate it. It can take up to 45 minutes for the bee to escape the orchid as it is kept trapped for the orchids sexual needs and bent to her will.

Wait, this sounds like my home life!

(Also on Sb)