What do you want to be when you grow up?

David Ng is asking if biologists have physics envy, which is both a common and a peculiar question (short answer: no, physicists should have biology envy). Then he follows up with a few brief questions to determine if scientists are actually pining away, wishing they’d gone into some different field … and here are my answers.

1. What’s your current scientific specialty?

Developmental biology.

2. Were you originally pursuing a different academic course? If so, what was it?

I started my undergraduate career with a general interest in marine biology, but quickly focused on neurobiology and development as more interesting problems (but not more interesting environments or organisms!) I went into graduate school thinking neuroscience was the bee’s knees, but again shifted focus to more development — starting from a developmental perspective was the practical way to approach the complexity of the nervous system. Now I also think it is the practical way to approach the complexity of metazoan evolution. Actually, I’m with D’Arcy Thompson that “everything is the way it is because it got that way” and that development is the lens we should use to examine everything. The process is all.

3. Do you happen to wish you were involved in another scientific field? If so, what one?

Yes, all of them.

Well, all of the biological disciplines, anyway. The problem is that I tend to think of mathematics, physics, and chemistry as subsets of biology, so they all tend to get sucked into my domain of desired knowledge.

On the other hand, maybe my answer should be “no.” My interests are my interests, and I’m currently free to pursue them exactly as I will, so I can’t quite imagine changing who I am. If I were to switch to another scientific field it would only be because I saw it as a useful tool to better understand the process of development.

Go ahead, everyone, answer the questions yourselves. If you aren’t a scientist, you can still always answer questions 2 and 3 (hint: the correct answer to #3 will always be some variant of evo-devo. Different answers will be marked down accordingly.)

Bora interviews John Edwards

He doesn’t ask the obvious question — “do you believe in evolution?” — even once! I guess when you interview the serious candidates, you don’t need to ask the stupid baby questions.

It’s not a bad interview; Edwards says all the pro-science and pro-education stuff, favoring increased investment in public education, respect for the Office of Science and Technology Policy, strict standards to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, increased funding for NIH, etc., but I confess to being suspicious and not at all won over. That’s what you’d expect a candidate to say in an interview with a science blogger. I like science! I like education! We’ll do more of it if I’m president! Unfortunately, there aren’t a lot of details on how he’s going to do it, and where he does sketch out specific ideas, like his free tuition for one year to all college students, he doesn’t spell out how he’s going to pay for it, or what part of government gets cut to compensate.

I note he also doesn’t commit on certain contentious issues. He deplores the Bush treatment of stem cell research, but doesn’t come right out and say he’ll endorse the use of human embryos in research.

He also supports one major boondoggle: ethanol. It’s a farm subsidy, not an answer to our energy problems.

You are a mutant, and your genome is full of junk. What’s the problem?

These kinds of calculations are always handy. Larry Moran estimates the number of novel mutations you carry: the textbooks say about 300, he calculates something over 120. So next time a creationist tells you all mutations are deleterious, just tell him he’s a mutant himself with somewhere around a few hundred random nucleotide changes from either of his parents. What Larry doesn’t mention in this estimate, but I know he’s familiar with the idea, is that most of those mutations will be neutral: about 95% will fall into junk DNA, many won’t affect the amino acid sequence of any proteins, others may cause slight changes in the protein sequence that don’t detectably affect the phenotype.

In the category of utterly baffling pronouncements from scientists, Larry also chastises John Greally for misrepresenting junk DNA in an interview with Ira Flatow. I could scarcely believe it myself, but I listened to the interview, and Greally actually seems to be conflating regulatory sequences with junk, and Flatow introduces the story as suggesting that junk DNA may all have a function. He also claims that if you have a mutation in a gene, the “gene is dead” and will have no function. None of this is correct. It’s bizarre—I think Larry and I are fairly familiar with the genetics literature, and there’s nothing to support these contentions and quite a bit to contradict them.

It’s good to be home, especially when welcomed by Natalie Angier

I’m home from our vacation, and our painfully tiring redeye flight from Seattle, and I get a treat right as I step through the door: a copy of Natalie Angier’s The Canon(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) arrived in the mail while I was away. What did I do? Right after we got all the luggage into the house, I flopped down on the bed with it and read it until the lack of sleep caught up with me — and it’s good enough that I actually made it through the first two chapters before passing out. It’s a passionate and enthusiastic survey of basic principles in science, and it’s fun to read.

Then I discovered that onegoodmove had a video interview of Angier talking about her book. She’s very good; check it out. She’s the kind of science journalist I want to see more of, and everyone should go out and buy her book to encourage her to do more.

One annoyance: several of the commenters at onegoodmove seem to be of the concern troll variety. Here’s this smart, fluent, talented writer who is also a world-class science geek and atheist, and they start picking over her appearance and body language — it’s rather dismaying, in particular since her gestures are no more flamboyant than those of her (male) interviewer. I’ve long thought that Natalie Angier would make an excellent spokesperson for godless science, and wondered why we don’t see more of her … and I wonder if part of the reason is that the same troglodytes who grunt in disgust at the sight of someone who doesn’t respect their sky-god are also appalled at the sight of a woman speaking confidently about high geek factor subjects and also dismissing their primitive superstitions.

Now this is how to critique Ken Ham’s creation “museum”

This video is one of the most effective criticisms of Ham’s horrible little monument to ignorance in Kentucky — it’s a geological tour of the rocks the “museum” is built upon. It seems the creationists chose to build on some beautifully fossil-rich Ordovician layers.

It convinces me that if I were in the Cincinnati area I’d rather kick around in the hills around the area than to waste my time in a pile of bunk.

Here’s a useful datum to settle arguments with your spouse

Who’s chattier, men or women? This is a simple study that strapped microphones onto subjects that turned on for 30 seconds every 12.5 minutes so that the investigators could do word counts. Here’s the final tally of the average number of words spoken per day:

Men: 15,669 ± 8343

Women: 16,215 ± 7301

There’s no significant difference between the two.

Mehl MR, Vazire S, Ramírez-Esparza N, Slatcher RB, Pennebaker JW (2007) Are Women Really More Talkative Than Men? Science 317:82.