Category: Satire

Not-so-serious articles with a scientific theme

The sun has a sibling – but are they holding hands?

I guess the birth announcement got lost in the mail, which is understandable given the fact that it happened a few billion years ago, somewhat before the invention of e-mail or even a postal system. In case you haven’t heard: our Sun has a sibling! And it’s a girl!

She’s called HD 162826, which will give her some grief during grade school, but probably not as much as if she had been named Moon Unit Zappa, Elbow (3 children were given that name in 2009), Hotdog (2 in 2012), or Freak (34 in 1995). I don’t know how you determine the sex of a star, but apparently someone can, because everybody says HD 162826 is a sister. I’d love to send my congratulations to the parents, but their identity is somewhat vague.

In any case, the discovery of the Sun’s sister has triggered an outpouring of emotional responses and some typically wild speculations on the part of the press. The first article I saw on this was here, and this piece is interesting for a number of reasons. It gets off to a great start with this sentence:

“Researchers from the University of Texas at Austin has discovered that a previously known star may actually be the sibling of our own Sun.”

“Researchers… has discovered” is a little strange, but maybe that’s how they talk in Texas. All right, in the excitement it seems petty to quibble about the conjugation of verbs. The article continues:

“The possible solar system is located a mere 110 light years away from the solar system.”

This sentence is also intriguingly strange. First off, there’s nothing “mere” about “110 light years away,” at least if you’re using Google Maps to plan your trip. (I tried, and the closest hit is Hd’s Mesa, an employment agency on 1826 W. Broadway Road, Mesa, Arizona, a mere 9,100 km from my present location.)

A light year is 9.4605284 × 1015 meters. It would take the Voyager 1 spacecraft, which is traveling at a maximum rate of 62,136 km/h, at least 1,909,787,303,382.4 years to get there. That’s only if Voyager 1 is pointed exactly in the right direction, which I kind of doubt, and only if I’ve done the math right. If you find an error in my calculations, let me know.

Of course you have to take into account that 1,909,787,303,382.4 years is about 138 times longer than the current age of the universe (depending, of course, on the date at which you are reading this.) In 1.9 trillion years the universe will either still be expanding, or collapsing in on itself, depending on your feelings on the topic of dark matter. In the expanding universe scenario, some scientists calculate that the universe might double its size in 11.4 billion years. It’s unclear how things will go after that, but Voyager 1 will clearly need somewhat longer to arrive. If, on the other hand, you’re a proponent of universal contraction, everything will be closer together, so the trip won’t take quite as long. Maybe Voyager 1 should just park somewhere and wait.

But the intriguingly strange sentence above (“The possible solar system is located a mere 110 light years away from the solar system”) has more to offer. I suppose “the possible solar system” means that the sibling sun might also have a solar system, and “the solar system” at the end of the sentence presumably means “our solar system.” If I’m wrong, and these two phrases refer to the same solar system, I don’t quite understand how a thing can be 110 light years away from itself. Unless you are talking about some sort of weird, alternate reality. Of course, physicists like that kind of thing – remember Schrödinger’s cat, which demonstrates not only the possible existence of parallel universes, but also that Erwin Schrödinger had some serious issues with cats.

The idea that our planets might have long-lost siblings is old news. Earth’s first sibling was found in 2007, as you can read here. I’ve covered that story in an earlier article. A second sibling was found this year. The first candidate, Gliese 581c, is a mere 20 light years away, while Kepler 186f is 500 light years from us. That’s just how it goes: “children” (or planets, in this contorted world of familial metaphors) grow up, relocate to distant places, attend the university, and acquire huge amounts of debt before moving back home to live in the basement.

Both of these planets are “sisters.” It’s easier to tell the sex of a planet, I suppose; at least you can get closer and inspect them, without getting burned to a crisp.

* * * * *

In case you hadn’t noticed, I could go on talking about unusual grammar and interstellar sex determination all day. But the discovery of our “sister sun” has also prompted some scientific speculations that are worth considering. Consider this from the Tech Times article I cited above:

“Aside from being a potential sister star to the Sun, Ramirez and his colleagues also believe that there is a very small chance that the HD 162826 system could have planets suitable for life. While the chances may be small, the researchers are certain that the odds are not zero.”

I can’t resist one linguistic point here: the first sentence implies that the potential sister star is Ramirez and his colleagues. This is a common grammatical mistake called a “dangling participle.” The problem becomes clear if you consider a sentence such as, “Hanging from a tree, the firemen rescued a cat.” But more intriguing is the comment, “the researchers are certain that the odds are not zero.” It’s hard to find just about anything for which the odds are truly zero (rather than 0.0000000…00001); try it sometime and you’ll see.

Another article about the finding puts it this way:

“One of the most exciting consequences… is the likelihood that these stars support planets, and possibly even life. Back when the Sun’s siblings were all hanging out in their nursery together, there would have been a robust, inter-system exchange of planetary material and chemical runoff. Enriched chunks of early Earth could have been launched into other fledgling solar systems, seeding the potential for life on other planets.”

Now I don’t know how this passage strikes you, but there’s a point at which you have to be cautious about metaphors. There’s some serious hanky-panky going on in this nursery school. “Exchange of planetary material and chemical runoff” are clearly euphemistic references to some sort of bodily fluids. If you’re generous you might think the topic is spilling KoolAid, but then you get to the part about launching “enriched chunks of early Earth,” and it’s hard not to think about kids throwing around poop. Finally we get to “seeding the potential for life” – a figurative climax, if not a literal one. If by that point you haven’t figured out what the author is talking about… Let’s just say it’s not the kind of day care I’d consider for my kids.

Coming back to the science, one should remember that this nursery probably existed over 4 billion years ago, when things were pretty hot, and I’d say the limb that supports these speculations is a pretty long one. But some notable scientists – Berzelius, Kelvin, Hermann von Helmholtz, Francis Crick, and Stephen Hawking – have promoted this type of panspermia hypothesis, and I’m not one to argue with such bright bulbs.

This second piece from motherboard.vice.com (clearly one of the first places you’d go to check out the latest findings from research) goes on to say:

“The idea that we might have genuine biological relatives on planets orbiting distant solar siblings is certainly tantalizing.”

I don’t quite know what they mean by “genuine biological relatives,” unless they’re referring to Vulcans, or a long-lost cousin named Bob, but it’s safe to say that the idea is tantalizing. Most things are, to somebody.

I’d like to jump into the fray of wild speculations by suggesting that our Sun and its sibling might be holding hands. That happens sometimes, as shown by the recent birth of twins. On Mother’s Day, at that. What are the odds of that? Certainly not zero.

Fundamentalist math: another outtake from the Science Cabaret

People are always inventing new ways to tell if someone is possessed by the devil. One way is to catch a grasshopper. We have a lot of them in Kansas. Catch one and count the legs. You count six? It says right there in the Bible that they only have four. Satan is a sneaky guy, always making your eyes play tricks on you. Six legs? Hah. Those huge dinosaur fossils? They’re not really there.

But these methods aren’t foolproof. When somebody looks at a grasshopper and counts six legs, maybe he’s just forgotten his reading glasses.

Counting legs requires some basic skills in math, which people generally learn in school, but a lot of fundamentalist Christians have decided to home-school their kids so they won’t learn a lot of liberal nonsense. In fact, some of these households promote a sort of Neo-fundamentalist version of creation which attempts to reconcile scientific discoveries with the Bible. Doing so requires an alternative form of math.

God obviously counts differently than human beings. For one thing, He really does know what number lies at the end of infinity. Our minds aren’t big enough. Think of the largest number you possibly can, you can still add 1 to it. Our brains just about get there, but we always fall a few numbers short.

God’s infinite Powers also give him the ability to bend time, and to change numbers to mean different numbers. One day a six will mean six, another day it will be 2πr.

Those seven days in the book of Genesis? Everything works out fine if each of those days lasted 500 million years. Years, on the other hand, were a lot shorter in Biblical times. Methuselah lived for 969 years? Without antibiotics? Come on. It’s obvious: One year for Methuselah was ten of ours. The dimensions of Noah’s ark? Just raise all those numbers to a higher power. An ark capable of holding all the species on Earth would have to be roughly the size of Texas.

So God counts things differently than people. Maybe what is 1 grasshopper leg for us is .6666 grasshopper legs for God.

In Kansas people use the grasshopper test to see if you’re possessed by the Devil. But in ancient times there were other tests. During the Middle Ages, for instance, there was the joke test.

The joke test arose from a huge theological debate. It probably started in a bar, as most of these things do. When people have one too many, or ten too many (another example of alternative counting systems), they get philosophical. Somebody says, I wonder if God has a sense of humor?

Back in the Middle Ages you couldn’t just let a comment like that go; you had to look into it. The debate over this issue became an awfully big deal. One faction said, God can’t have a sense of humor because what would he laugh at? He created EVERYTHING, and made it PERFECT. So he couldn’t have created something just to laugh at.

In the Medieval period they obviously didn’t know about the platypus. If Europeans had the platypus, which is obviously ridiculous, they would have known that God has a sense of humor. Why else would You create something that odd?

One faction of Christians had no sense of humor at all and so they decided that God couldn’t have one, either. That meant humor must have been invented by the devil, making it perfect material for a test. If somebody told a joke, you had grounds for burning them at the stake. Which is pretty funny if you think about it. Actually, it’s not funny. It’s ironic. Can God have a sense of irony? I’m not really asking. I don’t want to start something here, particularly if it will lead to a pile of wood and a book of matches.

Eventually the Middle Ages were over. People could finally giggle in public again, which required a new test to detect the presence of Satan. Some brilliant church committee came up with the water dunking test. If people suspected you of being a witch, they tied you to a board and dunked you in the river. After about two or three hours they brought you back up. If you survived they knew, Yup, that’s a witch. If you died… well, experiments sometimes produce negative results. But they’re hard to publish, so people kept using the method for a long time.

That test still exists, by the way, but today we call it the Guantanamo test.

The Renaissance saw the beginnings of modern science, which was pure atheism, so it provided lots of material for new tests. They took you out in the middle of a field and made you look at the sun. Tell us, they’d say, does the Sun revolve around the Earth or the Earth around the sun?

Since your life is at stake, it occurs to you that this might be a trick question. So you stall for time. You say, It depends – are we on Daylight Savings Time? In the process you become blind, but you don’t need eyes anyway. They just trick you all the time.

Even fundamentalist math won’t help you answer questions about planetary motion. That topic belongs to the domains of physics, and geometry, and so we’ll save it for another time.

American football, cheerleaders, and science communication

Recently I heard someone compare science communication to a sport. I didn’t catch which sport he meant, but he was fairly drunk, so it probably doesn’t matter. Maybe it was a dumb idea anyway, but there’s no law against metaphors. A metaphor is a way of saying one thing when you are thinking about something else, such as when you’re talking to your wife about the shopping list but your mind is actually entirely focused on your Facebook page. There are good metaphors and bad metaphors. For example, the upcoming visit of your mother-in-law could be compared to an inspection by a human rights organization, an invasion of kudsu, or a hostile takeover on Wall Street; one of these will fit your particular situation better than the others.

I do remember that the general topic of the conversation was differences between the way Americans and people from other countries communicate science. Now some people attribute this to the fact that a lot of American universities offer their scientists courses and workshops in writing and giving presentations. But the reality is, at an early stage in development, kids started playing different kinds of football. That causes fundamental changes in the way their neurons are wired. Then when you play football, you kill some neurons off again. But you kill off different ones. These changes in brain architecture spill over into other types of behavior, such as science communication.

American football is simple. One team has the ball, and it lines up against the other team. Then they crash into each other. When the dust clears, you look for the ball. Wherever it is, that’s where the teams line up to do it all over again. The goal is to carry it the ball over the goal line, but you have to be upright when you get there. So if the ball comes your way, look out, because everybody on the other team will try to break your legs.

If you make it to the End Zone, your team gets six points. I don’t know how they arrived at this number. One point ought to be fine, unless the total reflects some sort of risk factor. It’s true, for example, that your chances of reaching the End Zone alive are about one in six. But that wouldn’t explain why a shot in tennis can be worth 15 points, or the absurd scores you get for throwing a dart in a pub, unless there are a lot of dart fatalities they aren’t telling us about.

Anyway, American football teams have a sort of mascot called a coach, a combination of army drill sergeant and evangelist preacher who speaks in tongues, a genetic cross between a pit bull and a Neandertal, whose vocabulary consists of 100 words of which 90 are profanities, who has to be kept on a leash at games. Otherwise he will assault the referees, people in the stands, cameramen, or players from either team, sometimes biting them. This individual is usually a former football star who has been hit on the head so many times that he believes he is preparing troops for the invasion of Normandy, the defense of Stalingrad, or some other situation involving the fascist pursuit of world domination.

On your first day of practice, this coach takes you down to one end of the field and shows you where to stand. Then he puts his face 1cm from yours and gives you a whiff of breath that would permit you, if your football field is equipped with a mass spectrometer, to conduct a precise analysis of his diet and the metabolic status of various internal organs. But you wouldn’t have time because he immediately begins shouting in your face.

“You, scumbag!” he shouts.

“Yessir!” you scream.

“You see that goal down there?” he shouts.

“Yessir!”

“That there is our goal, and this here behind you is their goal.”

“Yessir!”

“You stand here and wait until the ball comes flying through the air. You catch it and you run straight for our goal, you hear?”

“Yessir!”

“If something gets in your way, just run over it! No matter what it is! If it’s somebody from the other team, run over him! If your grandma comes onto the field, run over her! If a 7-Tesla MRI scanner weighing about 6 tons suddenly drops out of the sky, just run over it!”

“Yessir!” you scream.

This all sounds simple enough. So you stand there a while and sure enough, here comes the ball. You catch it and all hell breaks lose. You run toward the goal and half the people on the field are trying to break your legs, whereas your teammates are trying to break the legs of the other team before they get to you. Beginners sometimes get disoriented and start running the wrong way. Then things really go wild: your own team starts chasing you while the other team tries to knock them down. If you switch and run backwards and forwards a few times in a row, the result is total anarchy. It’s like mixing up willy-nilly a bunch of promoters and inhibitors and glopping them onto cells. Both football players and biochemical pathways will get confused, sometimes at the same time, respectively. This state of chaos has one benefit: the person with the ball might slip through unnoticed. In some ways this resembles the way cancer cells evade the immune system, and in other ways it doesn’t. That’s completely irrelevant here, but I just thought I’d mention it.

Eventually an American football player gets hit on the head so many times that he forgets about the option of running backwards. It’s at this point that American football might be used as a metaphor for science communication. Just in case the topic ever comes up, for example in a bar.

Say you’re standing in front of an audience with some sort of scientific result in your hands. If we consider this information the ball, then the goal is to run it straight to the End Zone (into the minds of the audience), along the most direct route possible. If your path is blocked by some nuisance, like contradictory results, or mean comments from a reviewer, or a Coke can somebody put in your electron microscope, just push it out of the way, using brute force, a control experiment, or some sort of complicated explanation. Whatever happens, keep heading for the End Zone, and try not to get your legs broken along the way.

Now earlier I mentioned that there are good metaphors and bad metaphors. In Europe they play a different form of football, which ignorant people call soccer. A lot of people apparently use this game as a model for communicating science, which leads to a lot of games with no score.
I admit that I don’t completely understand the sport, but I’ve observed it a few times. It mainly involves a lot of guys standing around kicking a ball. They kick it forward and back, and left and right, unless a person from the other team is in the way, and then they kick him. This sort of aimless kicking usually goes on for about 20 or 30 minutes. At that point a member of your team says, Hey, look down there at the other end of the field. Somebody’s put up a net. I wonder if you could hit that with the ball? What would happen? Somebody tries it, and the whole stadium goes nuts.

I don’t know how many scientific talks you’ve been to, but I often feel like the speaker starts out in the backfield kicking a ball over here, and over there, sometimes getting in a few kicks on his competitors. If you get lucky, at some point the speaker discovers that there’s some sort of goal to aim for. If he hits it, usually by accident, everybody goes crazy.
Another reason European football isn’t a very apt metaphor is that there’s no good scientific equivalent for rowdy fanatics who get drunk, rush onto the field, and tear down the goalposts, unless you count behavior at scientific conferences. Incidentally, that’s the only context in which scientists typically switch jerseys. When you wake up in the hotel room of another person attending the conference, you might grab the wrong clothes.

This behavior is a little less common in American football. We have other nuisances to distract people from the game, but even they have parallels in science: cheerleaders (the reviewers who accepted your paper), marching bands (animated graphics in PowerPoint presentations), advertisements (funding from the pharmaceutical industry), and the emergency rescue teams that rush in to scrape people off the field (acknowledgements). Impact points clearly have a significance in American football. In that sport you do actually kick the ball sometimes, to get an extra point, which is like supplemental data. So it’s a complex metaphor. I’m not sure how helmets and faceguards fit in yet, but I’m working on it.

Ontogeny recapitulates sobriety:

From the Archaeal origins of life
to the pinnacle of evolution – a PhD

Some remarks made upon the award of the title Dr. to Dr. David Fournier

Considering the evolution of life on Earth, and the evolution of David Fournier in particular, aren’t you just smacked in the head by Haeckel’s famous principle, “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”? Since that first twinkle in his father’s eye, well, actually since about four minutes after that first twinkle, David has passed through all the stages. He has made the transition from one-celled organism to undifferentiated clump of cells, worm, fish, tadpole, and rat, sometimes in the space of a single weekend. On another weekend David passed through the phases of Civil War reenactor, clownfish, and a member of the French Olympic curling team, but that’s another story. At every stage of his life, David has been curious. He was a curious tadpole. Among PhD students, he has a uniquely philosophical attitude; you can stop him on the street and discuss theories of the universe that turn out to be completely false, but are so elegantly constructed that it takes you a long time to figure that out. If you call David at three a.m. he will quote from the works of George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, with footnotes.

Anyway, if evolution were a ladder, which it is not, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise, but if it were, David now stands at the summit. Along with other members of homo molecularbiologicus, and the even more highly developed member of its clade, homo bioinformaticus. The relationship between these species almost perfectly reflects that of Neandertals and modern humans. You may interpret that however you like.

After he passed through a pupal stage in school, David was squeezed by the French university system into a Wurst-like form, a saucisson, a sort of cocoon, sucking him in like a black hole in a box, although it is difficult to see how wormholes might fit into this analogy, unless it is a box of donuts. In any case, after many sleepless nights, David experienced some sort of cerebral event that made him run for ridiculously long distances, and if you stopped and offered him a ride, he’d say, “No, thank you very much.” Where I come from, you see a man running like that, he’s running away from something, but I didn’t see anybody behind him. Did David believe invisible people were chasing him? It’s not the kind of thing you can just come out and ask.

At some point David discovered the secret to success known to all graduate students: If you drink enough coffee, interspersed with a Red Bull every once in a while just for variety, the affinity between your conscious mind and body becomes very weak; they dissociate, and your mind drifts away. Your body becomes this robot that goes to work while your mind is sitting on a beach somewhere, sipping a margherita. Every once in a while a thought sort of floats into your consciousness. You say it out loud, and far away the robot body types it down and eventually you’ve collected enough strange and unrelated facts to make up a whole dissertation. You send the robot body to your thesis defense and it stands in front of your committee receiving signals from your mind, which is located on some remote planet. Every once in a while there’s a small interruption in the transmission and the robot suffers a blackout. You think aliens might be disrupting the signal. Or it might not be aliens. It could be other things, for example, coconut crabs. Somehow.

You remain in this dissociative state for three or four years before taking the next step of development and becoming a fully mature scientist with a PhD. Providing you don’t have any dangerous genetic defects, particularly monogenic traits like a cleft chin. If you do, you’ll develop along an alternative route. You may become an ice fisherman, or a garbage collector in Naples, or a person who carves butter into the shape of The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci.

But if everything goes normally, there you are, cruising down the hill in your doctoral cannister, becoming increasingly specialized, like a ball rolling down the Waddington model, except there’s nothing downhill at all about a PhD, it’s more like climbing up Mount Waddington, and free-climbing at that, without oxygen cannisters. Anyway, at some point a receptor on the surface of the container senses a molecule, probably a pheromone, and this triggers a massive epigenetic … well, let’s call it a process, I’m not a scientist, I don’t know the technical term for it. And I can’t say a lot more about it here, because it’s part of a massive secret international project called Systems Biology. This is so secret that even scientists don’t know what it really is. No one has the complete picture. It’s been split it up into little parts and each person is given just a little piece to work on. You feel like you’re some little part of a big network, and you’re not even a very interesting part, like a diode, or a RAM, or beta-catenin. We suspect it is a huge conspiracy. I probably shouldn’t be telling you this.

This epigentic event comes right at the conclusion of your PhD and it’s like setting off some sort of developmental IED, a roadside bomb filled with shrapnel. The shrapnel are microRNAs. They fly around everywhere and derepress a pathway involving canonical Wnt signaling, or non-canonical Wnt signaling, or some other type of Wnt signaling, simultaneously or in various combinations, and as a result we have 393, 217, or 655 potential new targets for cancer research, respectively.

microRNAs are so dangerous that any cell that sets them off would have to be an idiot, because that cell is always the first to get blown to pieces. Of course, your average cell is not generally noted for its intelligence, even though its DNA might encode a complete play by William Shakespeare. You can also inscribe Shakespeare onto a grain of rice, but that doesn’t make the rice smart, despite its massive genome, which is many times larger than that of humans. No, the true sign of intelligence is to learn from your mistakes, but if you mess around with microRNAs you won’t learn anything at all, because you’ll undergo apoptosis. Letting microRNAs loose is like putting a bunch of cats and raccoons together in a cage. You might do it once, but you certainly wouldn’t climb in with them. It’s not a pretty sight.

Now for several paragraphs this piece has been headed for a point, but then it got sidetracked during a long metaphor, like meeting a woman in a bar, and then walking her home, and I won’t go into detail about what comes next, we’ll just take a little pause at this moment so that each of you can individually complete that scenario using your own imagination.

The real point is that with the award of his PhD, David Fournier has reached scientific maturity. It’s like puberty, it’s like a butterfly, two concepts which can never be combined in one sentence without sounding creepy. Yes, even if we’re talking about reaching puberty in a metaphorical, scientific type of way, some people will automatically think of sex. Especially mentally disturbed people. If you’re thinking about sex now, you should stop, and perhaps consult a psychiatrist. And last but not least (not really, but it just felt like time to throw in a common but meaningless transition device), if you started reading this piece thinking that it would contain a discussion of David’s sexual phenotype, you can think again. This is not that type of magazine.

* * * *

So here David Fournier stands at the summit of human evolution, and at the peak of his maturity, both scientific and sexual, and he’s wearing a funny hat. For just a brief moment, he feels immortal. And then he is struck by a vision, that moment of clarity that comes to everyone upon reaching the top of a ladder: the realization that there’s only one way to go from here. At some point on the way down he’ll discover Viagra, which is a mixed blessing. It improves your potency but tends to have the opposite effect on a scientific career.

Sure, you hear these rumors about guys going on to become professors, but where’s the evidence? Professors are supposed to be in their lab, or a classroom, or in their office, but when you go looking for them, they’re never there. That calls to mind something David read while doing research for his dissertation. He found a quote from the great Ernst Haeckel, who had some not-very-nice things to say about professors before becoming one himself:

Es ist eigentümlich, daß sich gerade diejenigen Professoren am meisten gegen die Abstammung vom Affen sträuben, die sich bezüglich ihrer Gehirnentwicklung am wenigsten von demselben entfernt haben.

Now David’s knowledge of German is somewhat limited, restricted exclusively to the works of Hegel, who was really French (on his mother’s side; they pronounce the name Hégelle), so I have thoughtfully provided a rather loose translation into English:

It is appropriate that those professors are the sharpest critics of the idea of the descent of man whose brains have evolved least since the apes.

David actually put this quote into his dissertation, deep in the discussion, sort of a test to make sure the committee actually read the thing, like putting a jalapeno in a piece of pie. In English the quote comes out sounding a little mean, a little superficial, completely lacking the gravitas and resonance of the German original. When my own writing suffers from these problems, often right after lunch, I run it through Google translate and see if it doesn’t sound better in some other language. Here’s the quote in Basque:

Bitxia da, hain zuzen, tximinoak jaitsiera aurka gehienek badakite irakasleek, gutxiago ikusten duten hori kendu garunaren bera garapenean.

That automatically adds some intellectual depth, because you have to be a genius to learn Basque. I can’t provide a literal translation, but when you hear it out loud it sounds terribly dark and mournful. You automatically sense that it’s talking about death: either that of the professor, or the ape, and whichever one is left is throwing a wake for the one that died. Indisputably, the best wakes are thrown by the Irish, so here’s the Gaelic version, in the form of a toast delivered in a pub:

Tá fiosracht, i gcoinne pheaca, mar shiombail de na múinteoirí, ina choinne aon.

The first time David ever heard this, he thought it was French, and I won’t tell you what he thought he heard, because in French this sounds incredibly obscene. I thought the person was speaking English, perhaps with an Italian accent, and I heard this:

Gee I feels wrecked. I’m gonna puke marshmellows in a minute onna your chinna, hon.

But that’s just ridiculous. In Irish it’s a lot better; after a literal translation back into English you get this:

Curiosity is against sin, as a symbol of the teachers, against any.

This statement has an aura of mystery, like a Zen koan, or a Communist slogan, or the kind of thing a cabdriver would say to you. Probably a foreign cabdriver, for instance someone from Belgium.

* * * *

Successfully completing his doctorate required that David learn the Secret Formula for Success in a PhD, which can be purchased on-line, providing no one has hacked your PayPal account. The program guarantees success if you buy it, rather than downloading the bootleg copy, as David did, and then religiously follow all 12 steps. It’s true that 12-step programs have become popular in many scientific fields, such as Alcoholics Anonymous, and astrology, but any similarities between their lists and this one is just one of those bizarre coincidences that sometimes happen when you live in a random, chaotic universe.

1. We admitted we were powerless over science—that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves (our group leader) could restore us to sanity, despite having no good reason for believing this.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God (our group leader) as we understood Him.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves, our lab benches, and the bottom drawer where He keeps the emergency bottle.
5. Admitted to God (our group leader), to ourselves, and to another human being, for example, a postdoc, or our psychiatrist, or just some random person in the street, the exact nature of the mistakes we made in our experiments.
6. Were entirely ready to have God (our group leader) remove all these defects of character, using only a pipette and many cover slips.
7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings, by docking our pay, or making us clean out the mouse cages.
8. Made a list of all persons whose experiments we had ruined, and offered to repeat them all, on weekends, in exchange for authorship somewhere deep in the middle of the list.
9. Made direct amends to our competitors wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others, unless we would get more impact points by sticking it to them.
10. Continued to take personal inventory, and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it, preferably before the paper had been submitted, in which case we snuck it in during the review process.
11. Sought through prayer and meditation and incredible amounts of caffeine and late-night phone calls to improve our conscious contact with God (our group leader) as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us, hopefully sent by email, and the power to carry that out if we have high-throughput technology platforms and if we feel like it.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to the next generation of predocs, by making their lives just as miserable as our had been, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

The twelfth step is hardest, especially if you have a minor genetic defect like a conscience, or a soul, and only a few truly master it. Which way will David’s ball roll? At what point will he reach his finally differentiated form? Will fundamental discoveries in stem cell research permit him to de-differentiate if he decides, at the age of 70, to start a new career playing the pan-pipe with a band of South American street musicians? Will he ascend to the Académie Française, and then be buried alongside Voltaire in the Panthéon in Paris, after they remove his heart and brain, as they did with Voltaire? Or will he end up under a parking garage in England, like Richard III? Only the future will tell. Further research is necessary. Although we do have some promising lead compounds.

– Russ Hodge

Mating with Neanderthals

Today, April 1, Nature Communications reports on another study on those sneaky Neanderthal genes that crept into the modern human genome, probably by climbing up a tree in the yard and entering through a bedroom window. In a popular article describing the project, Emily Willingham writes:

…Khrameeva and her colleagues noted that speculation regarding some Neanderthal-H. sapiens gene flow through sexual reproduction is “appealing.” And experts in the field generally agree that the idea is plausible, even if it’s not their favored explanation.

Now most Homo sapiens wouldn’t consider mating with a Neanderthal very appealing, but we do have to consider that about 4% of our genome derives from Neanderthals, so I’m guessing about it appeals to about 4% of the population. Since some governments are considering expanding the definition of marriage to include relationships with other species, at least when submitting their tax returns, it’s time for this minority to speak up and be heard.

Some little-known facts about Kansas

These remarks were short-listed from the Science Cabaret. Quite a while ago I offered them to the Kansas Board of Tourism to use as an endorsement for our state, free of charge. I am still waiting for a response.

Kansas occupies the exact geographical center of the continental United States. And on the maps they show us in grade school, the US is at the center of the world. This is somewhat inconvenient for the Russians, whose country is split in half – sometimes to go just a little distance from east to west, you have to travel all the way across the world in the opposite direction – but hey, we paid for the map. In cosmological terms, astronomers tell us that if you look up at the stars, all the galaxies in the sky are flying away from us at tremendous speeds. Put all this information together and you discover that Kansas lies at the navel of the universe. At least until a tornado comes, carries us away, and dumps us someplace else.

People are proud of this location but you shouldn’t make a big deal out of it. You have to remember we didn’t choose to live there. A long time ago when the government drew Kansas on a map, that’s where they stuck us. We would have preferred to be closer to one ocean or the other, but nobody asked. Somebody has to live at the center of the universe, and it just happens to be us. Anyway, we have lots of other things to be proud of. Right at the moment I can’t think of any, but ask me again in a couple of weeks. I’ll do some research.

This explains a lot about Kansas. For example, why we get lots of aliens. Imagine you’re zooming across the galaxy, at thousands of times the speed of light, experiencing extensions of time and your bladder. At some point you need a rest stop. We’re conveniently located, we have good coffee, and clean restrooms. And excellent steak, the cheapest in the universe. So aliens drop in all the time. About 25 percent of Kansans claim to have been abducted by aliens. They’re not trying to hurt us. It’s a mistake, they think we’re fast food. If nobody’s at home when they come by, they take one of your cows instead.

Some more little-known facts about Kansas: the state flower is the sunflower, the bird the Meadowlark, and our state song is “Home on the Range.” We learn it in the first grade, and it goes like this:

Oh give me a home where the buffalo roam
And the deer and the antelope play…

When they teach us this song you think, is this really about Kansas? Sure, we have a lot of deer; if you live in the outer suburbs they come right into your yard. Your dogs think they’re toys you’ve brought home, just for their enjoyment. In deer season, people shoot them. But you have to be careful. It’s easy to mistake your neighbors’ lawn ornaments for a deer, and people are quite sensitive about having their lawn ornaments shot to pieces. In deer season it is not unusual to see statues of the Virgin Mary, garden gnomes, and bird feeders dressed in fluorescent orange hunting jackets.

One odd thing about the song is that we know that the plural form of deer is deer. Nobody, even in Kansas, puts an –s on deer. But antelopes… We’re not so sure about that one. “Antelopes” sounds fine to me. So in the song, they’re either talking about one specific deer and one specific antelope, or a bunch of deer and that one particular antelope.

Try as I might, I have never seen that animal. And I’ve looked for it, believe me. Every time I drive through my state, I keep a sharp eye out. But I’ve never seen the antelope. And where are the buffalo that are supposedly roaming around all over the place? Your teacher says, “We killed them all.” Doesn’t seem like nice behavior towards an animal featured prominently in your state song, right there in the first line, but there you have it.

And the song neglects some of the other prominent species in our state. Right now, for example, Kansas is up to its neck in llamas. Everywhere you go these days, somebody’s started a llama farm. I don’t think you can milk one, and their eggs are inedible, but a llama must be good for something. Whatever it is, we should consider changing the state song. For example,

Oh give me a home where the buffalo (used to) roam
And the deer and the camelids play…

The song goes on to say,

…Where seldom is heard
a discouraging word
and the skies are not cloudy all day.

Here, we’re talking outright lies. I’ve heard a lot of discouraging words in my time – most, it is true, from foreigners from places like Paris and New York, but every once in a while a native will rip you with a criticism. And we do have clouds. There is the tall and majestic variety, which look like clipper ships, or six-packs of beer, or Snoopy on his Sopwith Camel, and other times they’re low and grey, hiding tornadoes and hail and all sorts of other unpleasant things.

Or perhaps I’ve misinterpreted this line. Maybe the intent is, “all day long.” To be even clearer, the phrase might mean something like: “All right, we have clouds, but they never stay in the sky all day long, because eventually the wind pushes them into Missouri.” In any case, you have to admit, the original is either a lie or is highly ambiguous.

The state motto is Ad astra per aspera, which is interesting because the number of Latin speakers in Kansas is approximately the same as the number of ancient Romans. If you say it really fast, with a Kansas twang, it sounds like “a disaster for aspirin,” but now we have Google Translate and it’s easily cleared up. Run the motto through the website and you discover it means, “To the stars with difficulty.”

They got that right. It’s difficult for anybody to get to the stars, but it’s a special challenge in Kansas. We don’t have any mountains. If you climb a mountain the stars are still far away, but they’re just a little bit closer. States with mountains have an unfair advantage when it comes to going to the stars.

Twang science 2: Communication (Fake paper 2)

Dear editor,

I am writing with regard to the recent publication in your journal concerning the acquisition, maintenance, and loss of a type of speech called a twang. Terris et al. make only cursory mention of – and thus fail to do justice to – a hypothesis that speaking with a twang might be associated with a retrovirus or another pathogen. Our lab has been pursuing this question for over 20 years and I would like to clarify the current status of the debate.

Our search for a pathogen involved in language perception and speech began with a series of observations on the phenotype: in many ways, the spread of the phenotype resembles an epidemic that is tied to particular regions. For example, Valley Fever, or coccidiodomycosis, is caused by a fungus found in dry areas of the Southwestern United States. The fungus forms spores that are spread by winds, particularly when the soil has been disturbed by storms, construction, agriculture, four-wheel drive offroading, motorbiking, or other sports activities. Inhaling the spores leads to an infection in some people.

It is estimated that about a two-thirds of the population of some regions of the Southwest will test positive for the fungus Coccidioides spp. at some point in their lives. Only a fraction develop flu-like symptoms. In severe cases, nodules form on the lungs. Their onset and their severity vary from person to person, likely for genetic reasons, which also play a role in whether the pathogen affects organs beyond the lungs. A weakened immune system greatly increases susceptibility. Symptoms may disappear and reappear over the course of a lifetime.

In many ways the spread of the twang resembles such diseases, which are caused by a pathogen restricted to a particular geophysical niche. There are “hotspots”, particularly in the Midwest, where penetrance reaches nearly 100 percent, surrounded by zones of variable penetrance. Geographical barriers may play a role in limiting its spread. The Rocky Mountains, for example, divide an eastern region of pronounced twang from western areas where it is hardly found at all. There is some evidence that following the Dust Bowl, which saw massive migrations from Oklahoma to California, the pathogen was transported to the western coast, where it was responsible for the rise of “Valley Girl” speech. It has been estimated that in their clothing and shoes, immigrants brought approximately two tons of Oklahoma dust to California. The pathogen may have come along for the ride.

Infants seem particularly susceptible; virtually every child born in a hotspot will acquire the twang, independent of his or her genetic background. Some studies indicate that the degree of penetrance is associated with socioeconomic factors. This, too, is common for pathogens associated with dirt or a lack of sanitary infrastructure. An intriguing observation comes from recent epidemiological work that links the severity of a family’s twang to the number of open beer bottles and pizza boxes lying around the house. Another correlation is the number of rusty cars parked behind the house. In each case, the higher the number, the more severe the twang.

Those exposed during early childhood typically suffer from the twang to some degree their entire lives. Interestingly, those who leave a hotspot for many years – usually decades – may lose many of its features. However, if a person returns home, for example during Thanksgiving, he or she experiences a dramatic but temporary increase in twang speech patterns. This likewise reflects the behavior of some pathogens: removed from their ideal environment, they reproduce only slowly or enter a phase of latency. Contrarily, someone who moves to a hotspot later in life may at some point begin to show symptoms, but only after prolonged exposure.

The hypothetical pathogen does not seem to be transmitted from person to person. Children raised by twang-positive parents in a twang-negative environment do not typically show symptoms. Weaker phenotypes that are occasionally observed might be explained by transmission through contact with fomites such as dust-ridden clothing, furniture, or beer bottles that have accompanied the family without being properly cleaned before a move.

The findings of Terris et al. are intriguing but do not in any way contradict the pathogen hypothesis. A range of infectious agents are known to affect CpG methylation patterns and the expression of genes. Tumors in particular regions of the brain that affect speech patterns may cause symptoms by disturbing neural networks, but they may also be accompanied by changes in the epigenetic regulation of genes.

Validating the twang-pathogen hypothesis will require studies of the metabiome of those affected compared to controls. We have recently carried out such studies using a cohort similar to the patients and controls described in the paper by Terris et al. Our preliminary work, which is currently being revised for publication, has identified three potential candidates: the strongest correlation involves a retrovirus which bears some similarity to the feline leukemia virus, and there is a somewhat weaker association to two species of fungi whose spatial distribution closely matches that of the twang. At the moment we cannot rule out combinatorial effects caused by multiple pathogens, whose lifecycles depend on a delicate balance between body homeostasis and external factors in the environment.

Sincerely,

Bob Luser

News and views: From the frontiers of Twang science (Fake paper 1)

The historical origin of the word “twang” is thought to be an example of onomatopoeia: a word that sounds like what it represents. A twang is the kind of tinny, nasal sound produced by an instrument such as a banjo. It also refers to a type of speech usually associated with the English-speaking population of regions of the Midwestern and Southern United States, as well as several country music singers. The behavior required to produce a twang is complex: speakers apply a nasal quality and usually a rise in pitch to several vowels. Acquiring a twang requires physiological mechanisms ranging from perception (infants hear the speech of those in their environment) to a feedback mechanism (imitation and self-correction) and all the body parts used to produce vowel sounds: the tongue, nasal cavity, mouth, and more extensive pharyngeal structures.

Complex speech phenotypes may have a molecular basis within cells and tissues. Speaking with a twang likely involves several regions of the brain associated with speech and learning as well as those responsible for the coordinated muscular activity of the tongue and soft palette and other parts of the mouth and nasal cavities. Researchers have proposed various mechanisms to account for twang acquisition and performance among speakers. Since the behavior is acquired and can be lost again through training or relocation to an environment where speakers have a different “accent”, it is feasible that epigenetic alterations of genes must be involved. (An early study proposing a retrovirus has been discounted.) There is also some evidence that lesions can be associated with the gain of a temporary or long-term twang, or to the loss of a preexisting twang, which may help in identifying regions of the brain that are involved in its performance.

In a study in the latest issue of Nature Genetics, Terris et al. have studied epigenetic markers around genes that have been implicated in language perception and production in previous studies. They compare the status of these genes in regions of the brain thought to play a part in speech and pronunciation to regions less likely to be involved in these behaviors.

The list of candidate genes was obtained from a database hosted at the Quantitative Neuroscience Lab of Boston University (http://neurospeech.org/–sldb). Additional candidates were obtained through a computational analysis of the PubMed literature, harvesting articles meta-labeled with tags such as the following: twang, speech, language, pronunciation, and nasality.

Tissue samples were obtained from speakers who had undergone brain surgery and were judged to have a pronounced twang (or not) by a mixed audience of native (US-born) linguists. Results were compared between this group and five sets of controls: speakers who had never had a twang, those who had had a twang earlier in life but had lost it, native speakers of French (whose speech is not estimated to have a “twang” but is highly nasal), and a few individuals who had lost or acquired a twang through a stroke or other type of cerebral damage. Evaluations were performed using a standardized “Twang scale” developed at a school of performing arts in Los Angeles. (This program was developed to remove the twang of young actors.) Speakers were graded on a scale of 0 to 10 (0 = British accent; 10 = Bob Dylan).

The lab carried out a comprehensive analysis of methylation patterns across the genome from brain tissue samples from target and control regions for all five groups. The primary method used was bisulfite sequencing, which is based on the treatment of DNA with bisulfite. This causes a chemical conversion of cytosine residues to uracil, but only if the cytosines are non-methylated. Methylated cytosines are protected from the change. Comparing the sequences of treated vs. non-treated DNA permits a base-by-base readout of loci where Cs have been transformed to Us, and those which have not. The results from each group were combined and averaged and filtered for significance. They were compared to each other and to a mixed population of all groups.

The resulting patterns were compared on a chart, which revealed spikes (upward = higher methylation, downward = lower) at specific genomic locations. Both extremes are interesting because the twang phenotype might be due to either higher levels of methylation at particular loci, lower levels, or some combination.

Interestingly, the study revealed a number of significant differences between these patterns in “plus-twang” and “minus-twang” groups. The most extreme variation was found in cells of the superior temporal gyrus and primary auditory cortex, with somewhat smaller (although still significant) peaks in adjacent tissue of the brain region known as Wernicke’s area. The highest difference was found in a region ca. 1 Mb from the FOXP2 gene on chromosome 7, a gene which is highly implicated in many aspects of language acquisition and performance. A bioinformatics analysis of this region revealed a high statistical likelihood that it plays a regulatory role in FOXP2 activation, and contains putative FOX transcription factor binding sites. Both this region and the FOXP2 gene have closely related orthologs whose sequences and relative positions are well conserved between mice and humans. Follow-up studies in mice revealed that deleting the putative regulatory region inhibited expression of the orthologous gene in several areas of the brain, and resulted in a shift in squeaking pitch.

The authors remain cautious about their findings. In the paper’s discussion they report: “The exact molecular mechanisms underlying differential methylation remain to be understood, as does the quantitative significance of the identified loci in twang acquisition (or loss).” To address the mechanistic interplay between methylated regions, their regulators, and the twang-phenotype, the group has developed transgenic Cre mice in which particular methylated regions, methyltransferases, and methyl binding proteins can be deleted in a neuron-specific manner. Additionally, libraries of small molecules are being screened for specific effects on squeaking pitch as a phenotypic marker for twang in the mouse model.

Ideally, a potential twang modulator might be found among approved drugs or natural substances, which can be used to study the methylation status of the FOXP2-associated region. The next step would be to assemble a cohort of patients (twang-plus and twang-minus) who have already tried the drug or substance, checking to see whether this exposure has altered their speech patterns.

The author would like to thank Robert Zinzen for critical review of this article.

Craig Venter and the Alien Zombies from Mars

©  2014, Russ Hodge

(sorry, Hollywood: I thought of it first!)

I don’t know about you, but I’ve really missed Craig Venter. Oh where have you been, oh guru, oh Guitar Hero of molecular biology? I just haven’t been able to think of Craig in any other way since that article in Wired magazine, which described him thus:

You are standing at the edge of a lagoon on a South Pacific island. The nearest village is 20 miles away, reachable only by boat. The water is as clear as air. Overhead, white fairy terns hover and peep among the coconut trees. Perhaps 100 yards away, you see a man strolling in the shallows. He is bald, bearded, and buck naked. He stoops every once in a while to pick up a shell or examine something in the sand …

That’s our Craig! If you’ve missed him too, HE’s BACK! And once again, he’s making news from the cusp, the cutting-edge, the very BRINK of modern science. Most people keep a respectful distance from the brink, in fear of falling off, but not Craig Venter. The man has no fear of heights at all. He’s even willing to lean way over the edge… It’s the fastest way to get your picture back on the cover of Time magazine. Maybe this time in the nude.

Craig has been off the grid, popping up from time to time in an airport with his pet monkey (no, wait, that was Justin Bieber). Maybe he’s been spending time on that huge yacht he bought with his profits from the human genome. He deserved it. Single-handedly deciphering the human genome is hard work!

But now we know that as he’s been roaming the open seas and idyllic, deserted beaches, he’s been doing a lot more than obtaining the perfect tan, equally distributed across all parts of his body. He’s also been thinking: What next? What’s the next Big Problem facing mankind? If you’ve got a biomedical megacorporation at your disposal – do something with it, man!

He considered a couple of options. He was thinking about curing death, for example, but Google beat him to the punch. Google would be stiff competition, with all their considerable expertise in the life sciences. You wouldn’t want two companies competing with each other to solve the problem of death, now would you? Remember when that happened with the human genome?

Uh, it got finished a lot faster that way…

Then he thought about cloning dinosaurs, but Michael Crichton and Steven Spielberg grabbed that one up. Old news. The second guy to try something NEVER makes it to the cover of Time magazine.

That left only one problem of sufficient importance to attract a Big Thinker like Craig: extraterrrestrial life! Craig decided to go find it, and not only that – to bring it back to Earth! And grow it in the lab! What could possibly go wrong???

For those of us who might think this sounds crazy, well, we just have simpler, less visionary minds than Craig. Behind this beautiful idea is a complex thought process that most of us just aren’t capable of. Here are the steps:

  1. It’s hard to find alien life on Earth unless it is very large, resembles a cross between a reptile and an insect, and starts eating people.
  2. Therefore, we’ll have to look for it someplace else.
  3. Mars is close, so let’s look there. (Adhering to that fundamental scientific principle: If you drop a coin, look for it in well-lighted areas, even if you dropped it somewhere else.)
  4. All life is based on DNA.
  5. Climate change on Mars has probably killed all the big animals, except the ones that look like rodents and jelly donuts. To catch them you’d need a mousetrap or a donut box. But it would cost 10 trillion dollars to send the mousetrap or donut box back to Earth. And why should you do that, when we already have plenty of rodents and donuts here at home?
  6. We can send a DNA sequencer to Mars. (Since it will be dropped onto the planet from orbit, wrap it in lots of bubble packing. The best thing would be to design a DNA sequencer that is completely made of Legos, which can be assembled by the mechanical arm on the rover.)
  7. Collect some Martian DNA with a Q-tip. (Also pack the Q-tip in bubble packing, because it might get bent.)
  8. Have the sequencer analyze the Martian DNA and send the complete sequence back to Earth by radio. (Preferably broadband, at a rate a lot faster than my modem.)
  9. Make sure you only have DNA from one organism, rather than thousands of different ones. Otherwise you may get a cross between a rat and a jelly donut. (Hmm… have to think about that one.)
  10. Fire up the DNA synthesizer in your lab and rebuild the DNA of the Martian organism.
  11. Implant the DNA in… an Earth cell? (…Have to think about that one, too.)
  12. Clone it and let it grow into an alien. (Helpful tip: since you don’t know how big it will grow to be, use a really big Petri dish.)
  13. Try to contain the alien in the lab. (Install a nuclear device so that you can destroy the lab if it escapes.)

What could possibly go wrong?

There are always skeptics around who will point out niggly things like the fact that the Martian soil contains up to about 15% iron, about three times that on Earth. Scientists have reported that excess iron damages DNA in an animal’s body, so it has to be controlled – for example, by the hemoglobin molecules in our blood cells that grab hold of it and glue it into big crystals. But evolution always finds an answer, even on Mars. Martians probably have blood cells the size of basketballs.

Some people are even skeptical about #4 – the idea that Martian life would be based on DNA. Wouldn’t the environment of Mars a couple of billion years ago have been different? Isn’t some other type of self-replicating chemistry possible? Does the starting recipe of the primoridal soup matter? Won’t any environment inevitably produce DNA, if you cook it long enough? (Try this in your kitchen.)

But those are just the skeptics talking. They don’t know about the paper written by Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel back in 1973, after a week in which they drank waaay too much coffee. The two biochemists proposed that there’s an alien spaceship that floats from galaxy to galaxy, seeding planets with DNA. It’s the reason why on Star Trek, most of the aliens look human, except for the funny ears. They also have different wrinkles on their faces. They also behave strangely, but then, aliens didn’t have the benefit of growing up in an Earth family that teaches you proper manners.

That paper didn’t make it into Nature. It was close, but one of the referees wrote: “I am well aware of Francis Crick’s reputation as a Nobel laureate. His eminent qualifications do not, however, prevent him from occasionally being a dingbat. I refer you to another paper in which he explains dreams.”

Crick’s is only one version of the Panspermia hypothesis. Other scientists think that DNA might not have originated on Earth, but this didn’t require an alien spaceship. It could have been assembled in a gassy cloud in space, probably the Crab Nebula – it certainly looks sinister, like it’s up to something.

That DNA floats around, maybe passes through a black hole or a wormhole, and when it comes out it glues itself to an asteroid. Or maybe dark matter. Then it goes on to inseminate the entire universe.

There’s yet another version of panspermia called “Necropanspermia”, which proposes that not only did DNA originate with aliens, but that the aliens were zombies. Here, too, the magazine Wired provides science with titillating new information: The article begins this way: “Life on Earth could have grown from the broken remains of alien viruses that, although dead, still contained enough information to give rise to new life.” Ergo: zombie viruses. Actually, I’m really hoping that Craig Venter will find their DNA on Mars and fax it back to Earth. That’s just what we need, a bunch of alien zombies on the loose.

Outtakes from my new “Science cabaret”

EVOLUTION
& the Global Atheist
mind-control
Conspiracy

Warning label

This is a totally politically-incorrect talk about evolution. Well, evolution and a lot of other things. Please check all guns at the front desk. Also fruits and vegetables and anything else that can be thrown, including your shoes. This topic causes some listeners to experience dramatic increases in blood pressure and symptoms of temporary insanity. To fully enjoy the event, self-medicate well in advance. And put on clean socks.

The evolution of the brain

I’m worried that someday, biology is going to fry my brain. Science is getting too complicated to fit in there anymore. I’m not talking about data… We gave up on that a long time ago. If you started reading your genome out loud the moment you were born, at a rate of two letters per second, you’d be 47.5 years old before you finished. And that’s without any breaks for sleep, or coffee. That’s why they invented memory sticks. So you can go to Starbucks on the weekend, and get some sleep.

No, even the basics of biology are getting way too complex for our brains. It used to be, DNA makes RNA makes proteins. Three steps, simple enough to remember. Now we’ve found all these annoying little steps in between: a microRNA inhibits the translation of a protein that would otherwise help a microRNA inhibit an inhibitor. That’s a real story, you can look it up. Try to hold that in your brain, it might drive you crazy. Look at some of your colleagues. It’s already happening.

The problem is our brains didn’t evolve to do really complicated science. Our brains evolved in prehistoric times. Science was a lot simpler back then. There were only four parts.

The first part was technology, stuff like how to build a shelter, start a fire, and make weapons to kill big animals like mammoths. Basically, you got something long, and sharp, threw it at the mammoth, and ran like hell.

The second part of prehistoric science was pharmacology. Its purpose was to tell you if something was safe to eat. The methods were much simpler. You found a new plant and made somebody else eat it. Then you watched them a while. If they turned blue or died, well, we won’t eat that. If they got high, then you gathered up as much as you could carry, and took it back to the tribe. And had a big party.

You also had biology class, but there the only topic was sex tips: “For best results, choose a member of your own species.” …Makes you wonder what was on the final exam.

So science was a lot simpler, and the criteria for evaluating it were a lot simpler. In prehistoric times they also had impact points, but it meant something different. Impact points meant the number of times you could impact a mammoth with your spear. A high number you succeeded, a low number… The mammoth killed you. You died.

Today, research isn’t evaluated by mammoths. It’s judged by old farts called anonymous reviewers. The old way was simpler, and some people would like to bring it back. You send off your paper to a journal, and a couple of days later a big truck pulls up in front of your house. Out comes this huge, hairy monster, and it’s walking up your driveway. It’s a mammoth. It’s your reviewer. You get to look him right in the face and kill him. Every scientist’s fantasy.

A journal couldn’t send a mammoth to every author’s house. Look at the list from the human genome paper. Mammoths would go extinct again. Well, maybe not. Probably the scientists would go extinct first.

Since there weren’t enough mammoths, they’d just send one to the last author. Boy, that would change things, wouldn’t it? A group leader comes up and says, Russ, I’ve decided to give credit where credit is due. I’m going to put you as last author on this paper.

All I did on the paper was correct the spelling and take out 950 commas. I say… Uh, thanks, but I really think John’s contribution was much more important. John’s the high school kid who fixed my Internet connection. Even John’s too smart to take on a big hairy elephant.

So your group leader has to go find a collaborator. Probably a guy from an American football team, a guy as big as a refrigerator, who’s been banged in the head a lot of times. He’ll agree to anything if you offer him beer.

Today most scientists wouldn’t know how to kill a mammoth. First you’d need some kind of weapon. I looked everywhere in my apartment and couldn’t find anything. It gives you a whole new perspective on your stuff. A corkscrew? Naw. A tube of superglue? You go up to the mammoth and say, Please step over here, on this very clean surface. And hold perfectly still for six seconds.

All I could find was an old PC, from the nineties, that weighed about fifty kilos. I could throw it at the mammoth. But if that didn’t work… what then? I sure as hell wasn’t going to throw my Mac at it. You’d have to go to the Genius bar at the Mac store and say, Can you fix this? And they’d say, What were you doing with the device when the problem occurred?

The Bauhaus would probably have what you’d need to make a weapon. You drive down to the Bauhaus and this guy in a red shirt comes up and says, “Can I help you?” and you say, “Show me everything you have that’s long and pointy.” And he says, “What kind of project do you have in mind?”

You stand there… Finally you say, “I need to kill an extinct elephant…”

Nothing in my apartment would be any use in making a weapon or anything else 100,000 years ago. The same thing goes for my brain. The only things in my brain are the names of a bunch of molecules. The rest is taken up with PIN numbers. If I remember those, I can do everything else with my SmartPhone.

You know how when you get a new PIN, you have this feeling of panic? For a week you can’t remember the new PIN or any of the old ones? That’s evolution talking. It’s telling you, You need to save this space in your brain for something useful, like how to kill a mammoth!

It’s why kids don’t like math class. Some boring teacher is going on and on about algebra, and their brain is whispering to them, Will this save your life? Let’s go outside and throw some spears? It’s a survival instinct. That’s evolution talking.

I know that biology has already fried part of my brain, the part that learns people’s names. That was important in early human evolution. It helped you avoid inbreeding. Say you’re in a bar and a woman comes on to you. You say, What’s your name? She says, Karen. You say, Wait a minute, aren’t you my sister?

Remembering names also helps in reproduction. You go on a second date with a woman and don’t remember her name, she thinks, Do I want my kids to be as dumb as a doorknob? You’re not dumb, you’re a biologist. But it’s too late, she’s making moves on a guy across the bar.

I don’t have room in my brain for people’s names anymore. They’ve been chased out by the names of molecules. They’re competing for the same brain space. Probably the hippocampus. If you’ve ever seen a hippocampus, it’s small. And it’s shaped funny. There’s just not enough room for both people names and molecule names. Something has to go.

Nobody tells you this when you start to study biology. And your brain doesn’t have those pop-up messages – you know when your hard disk is getting full. It would be helpful. Your brain would make a rude noise and say, To make space for this molecule, delete your mom’s name.

I used to be able to learn the names of all my university students, dozens and dozens of names. But now… some days I’ll be sitting in my office, and sitting across from me is my office mate. We’ve shared an office for two years, but sometimes I look at her and try to remember her name and all I can come up with is… Tubulin? P53?

It’s a problem in Germany. When you meet somebody you’re supposed to shake their hand and say their name. People shake my hand and say, Hi, Russ, and I stand there and say, Hi, uh… I usually just hide in my office unless there’s a conference. At conferences people wear name tags. But you shouldn’t be caught looking. You’re talking to a famous scientist and trying to read her name and she’s thinking, Is he staring at my breasts?

I don’t say people’s names when I shake their hands, but I have an excuse. I’m an American. Everybody knows Americans don’t have manners, or even culture. Back in the 17th century, when Europeans sailed to the New World, there wasn’t enough space on the ship for cathedrals or symphony orchestras. And you didn’t take the good silverware because the pirates would just take it. We’ll have that stuff shipped over later, they said, but there was a whole country to tame. Fighting Indians and building houses and turning lots of cows into hamburgers. It was like going back to the Stone Age, but with lots of guns.

After about 200 years we finally had time for culture again, but we’d forgotten most of it. Even the most basic things, like how to use silverware. The pirates know, but we’ve forgotten. It’s why Americans invented fast food. All fast food can be eaten with your hands. While you’re driving and talking on your cell phone.

It’s a problem when we get invited to some fancy restaurant. You sit down and there’s lots and lots of silverware. Strange utensils you’ve never seen before, you don’t even know what they’re called. Okay, you can identify a fork, but you’re sitting there thinking, Right hand? Left hand? Sometimes they give you two forks. Then you just take one in each hand.

By the 20th century America had moved out of the Stone Age. We could have learned to be polite again, but it would have cost a lot of time and money. John F Kennedy could have said, Today I’m announcing a ten-year program to restore our manners. Instead he decided to go to the moon.

Nowadays we don’t have to know how to kill mammoths. They’re extinct. But scientists are thinking about bringing them back. They found a frozen mammoth in Siberia, and they’re going to clone the thing. They’re going to take some of its cells, thaw them out in the microwave, and make clones of mammoths. What could possibly go wrong? Any ten year old could tell you what could go wrong: Jurassic Park, that’s what could go wrong.

So just in case, I’m going to the Bauhaus to get some supplies.