Except, perhaps, when the pet is an 18-foot long, 300 pound snake which thinks a 3 year old looks tender and tasty. The kid is alright, although he was bitten and almost crushed, but sadly the snake succumbed to 17 stab wounds inflicted by the mother.
I do have to wonder, though, about parents who keep a carnivore twice the size of an adult human being in the house with a small child. It seems rather irresponsible and cruel to me.
The latest news: in a vote on whether to keep the silly “strengths and weaknesses” phrasing in the Texas state science standards, the forces of light on the board of education have defeated the goblins of the darkness by a one vote margin. There are more votes to come, though, so the battle isn’t over yet.
The cover story of New Scientist asks, “Was Darwin wrong?”, as if this were surprising news (he was wrong about many things) or as if the discovery of new details would somehow demolish the whole structure of evolutionary theory. I’ll let Larry Moran take care of this one.
It’s a symptom of creationist influence that journals would think that hyping a story that “150 year old theory gets revised!” is newsworthy. And, of course, the creationists are eating it all up.
Usually, Begley is reasonably good on science, but her latest piece is one big collection of misconceptions. It reflects a poor understanding of the science and of history, in that it confuses long-standing recognition of the importance of environmental factors in gene expression with a sudden reinstatement of Lamarckian inheritance, and it simply isn’t — she’s missed the point of the science and she has caricatured Lamarck.
Some water fleas sport a spiny helmet that deters predators; others, with identical DNA sequences, have bare heads. What differs between the two is not their genes but their mothers’ experiences. If mom had a run-in with predators, her offspring have helmets, an effect one wag called “bite the mother, fight the daughter.” If mom lived her life unthreatened, her offspring have no helmets. Same DNA, different traits. Somehow, the experience of the mother, not only her DNA sequences, has been transmitted to her offspring.
That gives strict Darwinians heart palpitations, for it reeks of the discredited theory of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829). The French naturalist argued that the reason giraffes have long necks, for instance, is that their parents stretched their (shorter) necks to reach the treetops. Offspring, Lamarck said, inherit traits their parents acquired. With the success of Darwin’s theory of random variation and natural selection, Lamarck was left on the ash heap of history. But new discoveries of what looks like the inheritance of traits acquired by parents–lab animals as well as people–are forcing biologists to reconsider Lamarckism.
She’s describing real and interesting phenomena, but it isn’t new and it isn’t revolutionary. These are results of plasticity and epigenetics, and we aren’t having heart palpitations over them (you’re also going to have a difficult time finding any “strict Darwinians” in the science community who are even surprised by this stuff). We load up pregnant women with folate and maternal vitamins and recommendations to eat well, and we tell them not to get drunk or smoke crack for a few months, because it is common sense and common knowledge that extra-genetic factors influence the health and development of the next generation. Genes don’t execute rigid, predetermined programs of development — they are responsive to the environment and can express radically different patterns in different contexts. The same genes build a caterpillar and a butterfly, the difference is in the hormonal environment that selects which genes will be active.
It’s the same story with the water fleas. Stressed and unstressed mothers switch on different genes in their offspring epigenetically, which lead to the expression of different morphology. It’s very cool stuff, but evolutionary biologists are about as shocked by this as they are by the idea that malnourished mothers have underweight babies. That environmental influences can have multi-generational effects, and that developmental programs can cue off of the history of the germ line, is not a new idea, especially among developmental biologists.
This is just wrong on evolution:
Water fleas pop out helmets immediately if mom lived in a world of predators; by Darwin’s lights, a population of helmeted fleas would take many generations to emerge through random variation and natural selection.
It misses the whole point. The population of water fleas have a genetic attribute that allows the formation of spines under one set of conditions, and suppresses them under others. This gene regulatory network did not pop into existence in a single generation! If it did, then Begley would have a big story, evolution would have experienced a serious blow, and we’d all be looking a little more carefully into this ‘intelligent design’ stuff. The pattern of gene regulation was the product of many generations of variation and selection; only the way it was expressed in a phenotype experienced a shift within a single generation.
It’s also not Lamarckism. It’s another of those short and simple-minded myths perpetuated by high-school textbooks that Lamarck and Darwin had competing explanations for the same phenomena. They did not. This story of giraffes stretching their necks is an example of the purported inheritance of acquired characteristics … and here’s some headline news, Darwin proposed exactly the same thing! Darwin did not have a solid theory of heredity, and he himself proposed a mechanism of pangenesis which permitted the inheritance of characters by use and disuse and by injury or malformation. The key difference is that Darwin proposed that these variations could lead to the formation of new species; Lamarck believed in the fixity of species, and thought that a species would merely express a constrained range of forms in differing environments.
Both were wrong. A concept called the Weismann barrier emerged in the late 19th century, which suggested that the only influences that can be transmitted across generations are those that affect the germ line, the cells that give rise to sperm and egg, and that modification of the somatic tissues alone would not propagate. This is correct, and it’s still true: nothing in these reports suggest anything but that when perturbed by environmental stressors, gametes can switch on different genetic programs.
I think epigenetics and plasticity are important and play a role in evolution, certainly, but these kinds of elaborations on how cells interact do not imply in any way that there is a revolution in evolution, or that evolutionary biology has had it all wrong, or that this is heresy in progress. It’s also annoying to see all the vague handwaving about discrediting a “Darwinian model” — what Darwinian model? These discoveries are about mechanisms of genetic inheritance, and Darwin didn’t have a valid mechanism in the first place. In that sense, the only real heresy that counted was Mendel’s.
We had a little drama in St Paul this morning: an anti-choice kook decided that an effective way to silence a family planning clinic was to smash the entrance to Planned Parenthood with his SUV.
Several employees were in the building at the time, said Planned Parenthood spokeswoman Kathi Di Nicola. She said the SUV hit the front door of the clinic two or three times, damaging the clinic’s front door and surrounding stonework.
When Di Nicola arrived at the clinic, she said the man had gotten out of the SUV and was pacing around it, holding a crucifix and chanting. “He was agitated and he was saying, ‘shut down this Auschwitz,’ ” she said.
Violent, unthinking, incoherent, and flaunting his piety. Typical.
In contrast, the staff at the clinic responded calmly and with discipline.
Or, as we used to call ’em when I was a young’un, a comic book. Check it out — it’ll be an illustrated Darwin biography for all the people who don’t want to wade through the magnificent, but long, two volume Janet Browne bio.
I know I’ll be buying a copy. There are other evolution books in graphic novel form, and Scott Hatfield has a summary.
I have my reservations about Obama, but I am seeing clear differences between him and the previous tenant of the White House already — good changes.
US President Barack Obama is expected to announce that he is ordering the closure of the Guantanamo Bay prison camp within a year.
He is also expected to order a ban on abusive interrogations and a review of military trials for terror suspects.
Why do I suddenly feel this unfamiliar sensation? Is this what they call “hope”?
Here’s another gagworthy media experience for you all: an interview on Skeptiko with Denyse O’Leary, author of one of the worst books I’ve ever read, The Spiritual Brain. O’Leary is awful, as usual, but the interviewer is horribly credulous as well — I had to turn it off when he started nattering on about the wonderful evidence of near-death experiences.
I’m feeling terribly cruel this morning. It must be the fact that on Thursdays I have to teach an 8am class.
This is a promo for a wingnut movie that portrays the autonomy of women as a great evil … with an all-female cast. Even this short clip is nauseating.
The lies fly thick and fast. I’m particularly disgusted with the one interviewee who claims that, as a former representative of family planning education, she would go into schools and increase the teen pregnancy rate so that the girls would have 3-5 abortions between the ages of 13 and 18, and that this was the goal of her agency. Right. It is, of course, the antithesis of what family planning organizations actually do.
The rest is also vile, starting with the odious Phyllis Schlafly. And the foundation of their outrageous claims? The rantings of the 16th century proto-Puritan preacher, John Knox. Hasn’t the passage of 500 years been enough to expose him as ridiculous?
