Category: Science cabaret

THE EVOLUTION OF PIZZA: Novel insights into the fourth domain of life

Russ Hodge1*, Pablo Mier Munoz2, and Miguel Andrade2

 

  1. Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine of the Helmholtz Association, 13125 Berlin, Germany
  2. Faculty of Biology and Center for Computational Sciences in Mainz (CSM), Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, 55128 Mainz, Germany

* Corresponding author: Russ Hodge, hodge@mdc-berlin.de

Conflict of interests: This project has received no funding from the pizza industry or its competitors, and there are no other conflicts of interest.

INTRODUCTION

Pizza has long held a stigma in biological research that dates back to Linneaus, who was intimately familiar with its properties as an aphrodisiac but failed to recognize it as a living organism. As a result, species of pizza found no place within his elaborate system of classification, and have consequently been entirely omitted in the clade systems developed by evolutionary biologists. Add to this the nigh impossibility of maintaining pizza in laboratories, from which it tends to spontaneously disappear through mechanisms that are poorly understood, and the result is that pizza has been forgotten in the deep freeze as the life sciences have moved forward in great strides.

The physiology of pizza makes it difficult to classify; on the one hand its structure bears striking similarities to a single cell, vastly scaled up, if you think of the crust as a membrane, and from that perspective the ingredients resemble organelles. Yet it also has properties we normally associate with highly developed multicellular organisms. One could also consider it a sort of complex ecosphere containing many subspecies. Data from an evolutionary study should show us which of these models is most appropriate, but the data will have to be new. The fact that pizzas never evolved a skeletal or exoskeletal system has led to a paucity of fossil remains which otherwise would surely have generated interest among the paleobiology community and provided insights into the descent of modern species.

The synthesis of Darwin’s theory of evolution with findings from genetics has led to modern, computational approaches that compare the features of modern organisms to reconstruct those of their common ancestors. Here we apply this basic principle of “common descent” to construct the first evolutionary tree of pizza.  We should note a potential confounding factor: Modern varieties have clearly been shaped by human domestication and selection, and a small number of mutant strains have spontaneously appeared in recent years, probably due to exposure to microwave radiation. While these factors confound the picture to some degree, the method does, in fact, permit a means of resolving questions about pizza biology that have long resisted analysis.

The resulting diagram introduces considerable clarity into the path by which current species of pizza arose from a single common ancestor, through stages that became the founders of major branches, and finally to modern forms. It permits us to hypothesize the existence of ancestral forms that have homologs in the varieties that exist today. Finally, it provides insights into fundamental biological processes that are unique to pizza, supporting a claim that these species represent a fourth domain of life which is distinct from archaea, bacteria, and eukarya, but which has clearly interacted with them in ways that have shaped its evolution.

We find evidence that pizza has managed to co-opt fundamental biological processes from the other domains of life and mix them in a way that hints at hitherto unexplored evolutionary mechanisms. Pizza appears to have snatched genes from various sources on its way to becoming an independent organism, then undergone a phase in which it became wholly dependent on human domestication, leading to a simplification of its biology. Our study suggests that the appearance of pizza in complex ecospheres containing other life forms influences them on several levels – from the neurological to the behavioral to the social, altering patterns of predation and other types of interspecies interactions.

METHODS AND RESULTS

We visited approximately 100 different Italian restaurants in a sample of no less than five European countries over a period of 4 years (extrapolated from social media statistics of the authors: FourSquareTM, GoogleTM Location History, etc.) to gather the names and ingredients present in a total of 58 different pizzas (Supp.File1). While we did not taste them all, we can attest that none are venomous and their organoleptic qualities can therefore be successfully transmitted mouth-to-mouth to the next generation of diners.

The ingredients were clustered in 9 groups according to their origin and use in cuisine (Table 1). Tomato sauce and mozzarella form their own groups, as they are not considered ingredients but inherent components of the pizza (Combet et al., 2014). The pineapple was set apart in a group by itself as an obvious aberration, due to the fact that it is universally recognized as a dysfunctional mutation that arises from a hybridization event (somewhat like the mule) and cannot produce viable offspring.

Table 1. Ingredients considered per group.

Class Ingredients
Tomato sauce Tomato sauce
Mozzarella Mozzarella
Extra sauce Cream, truffle cream
Extra cheese Gorgonzola, parmesan, ricotta cheese, fontina cheese, scamorza, stracchino, asiago
Meat / eggs Beef, salami, raw ham, ham, bacon, sausage, bresaola, egg
Fish / seafood Tuna, anchovies, seafood
Pineapple Pineapple
Condiments / herbs Pepper/green peppers, oregano, rosemary, parsley, genoese pesto, garlic, olive oil
Vegetables Artichoke, zucchini, asparagus, spinach, peas, eggplant, assorted vegetables, sliced tomato, courgette flower, onions, olives, mushrooms, rucola/rocket, potato, french fries, corn, polenta, radicchio

It is notable that not a single pizza contains more than three ingredients from the same group, which hints that this might lead to some sort of synthetic lethality, or a genetic event along the lines of the acquisition of excess chromosomes.

The pizzas were scored by counting the number of ingredients they contained per group. Exceptions are the tomato sauce and the mozzarella, which were counted as three ingredients each due to their importance in the general composition of the pizza. The data was analyzed using the R programming language and Rstudio, to cluster the pizzas based on their ingredients. The result was plotted in a clustered heatmap using the pheatmap R package (Kolde, 2015).

Tomato sauce and mozzarella are the key components in the pizza and serve as classifiers (Figure 1). Ingredients from the meat/eggs and/or vegetables groups are often used as the toppings to go together with the main components of the pizzas.

Figure 1. Clustering of the 58 types of pizzas analyzed based on their ingredient composition.

DISCUSSION

Here we present the first rigorous investigation of the origins and evolution of pizza, a form of life that has been shamefully neglected by science even as it has been shamelessly devoured by scientists. While the reasons are unclear, one cannot rule out some sort of large-scale conspiracy on the part of commercial entities. It would not be in their interest to recognize pizza as a life form; such recognition would likely trigger a cascade of intrusive regulatory measures that would curtail society’s wholly utilitarian approach to pizza’s handling and use. Ethical issues, too, have had an influence: in many societies, pizza is treated as an inanimate object, like a rock (only softer), and no consideration whatsoever is given to the possibility that it might possess some sort of limited awareness, possibly even experiencing feelings of distress or pain.

In modern times, pizza species have become entirely dependent on human cultivation, just like many plants, domesticated animals, and model organisms that are studied in laboratories. The biology of pizzas has become simplified through this dependency. Modern forms have, almost certainly, lost genes that were originally crucial to their ancestors’ survival. As a result, pizzas are no longer competent for survival in the wild. Although it should not be considered a parasite, pizza’s dependency on humans has likely sent it along an evolutionary path resembling that of pathogens and viruses.

Under normal processes of natural selection, one would expect organisms that are tastiest to their predators to be eaten more, and this would subject certain types of pizza to to intense negative selection. This would also be the case for pizza, particularly since it has no intrinsic means of locomotion that would allow it to escape from its human predators.

But domestication has reversed this trend, positively selecting for the forms that are most likely to be eaten.

Nutritional and Health Implications for Non-Pizza Species

Pizza is a fixture of worldwide ecosystems and global food chains, nourishing species as diverse as college students, police, bowling teams, and other categories of humans—and also dogs, cats, hamsters, pigs, rats, cockroaches, crocodiles, fish, etc. The decaying remains of pizza crusts that have fallen down cracks in sofas provide a rich environment for microbial life, including bacteria such as legionella, Yersinia pestis and Mycobacterium leprae, which might otherwise be in danger of extinction. In this way, pizza plays a central role in global biodiversity; one might even regard it as the glue that holds everything together. But this notion is somewhat speculative.

Technical obstacles have made it difficult to maintain pizza in laboratory cultures, creating a sort of black hole of knowledge with regards to its biology. This is alarming in light of the numerous epidemiological studies tying pizza to serious health problems including obesity, addiction, attention deficit disorders, frostbite, burnt tongues, and deaths related to placing aluminum foil in microwave ovens.

Excessive consumption retards human cognitive development, pushing adolescence far into the college years, a situation which can only be reversed by adding vegetables to the diet. Predatory consumption of pizza has led to a major reduction of human motility; delivery services have completely eliminated the hunter-gatherer activity that used to be required to obtain it.

Summary of Pizza’s Biological Features

By applying well-established methods of phylogenetic analysis to the features of pizza (namely, the ingredients found in 58 extant species) we derived the first systematic evolutionary account of its descent from an ancestral form. The results point firmly to a last common ancestor, providing insights into fundamental aspects of its biochemistry, development, and the selective forces that have shaped its evolution into diverse types. Our observations of pizza in situ suggest that its basic biology draws on unique features which are hard to reconcile with those of traditional biological models. A key finding is that the ancestral pizza exhibited very little elaboration of specialized structures. It consisted of only three tissues: dough, tomato sauce, and mozzarella. Each of these tossues exhibits a high degree of molecular complexity, while having stable biophysical properties that are crucial to maintaining the integrity of the organism over time.

 pizzaoverview

Figure 2.  Artist’s reconstruction of the last common ancestor of all current species of pizza

  1. The Pizza Lifecycle

The pizza lifecycle is marked by the three phases embryogenesis, maturation, and decline.

Entry into a phase is determined by environmental factors: embryogenesis takes place at room temperature; maturation begins when the temperature dramatically rises to about 220 degrees Celsius and usually lasts 10-12 minutes. Returning to normal room temperature introduces a brief period of homeostasis after which pizza enters the phase of decline.

Laboratory experiments have shown that pizzas which have completed embryogenesis can be preserved through cryopreservation, which induces a state of dormancy or hibernation. They can be maintained this way for a year or two without any apparent damage. The decline phase can be prolonged by a day or two through cooling, after which a brief exposure to heat is used to revive the pizza. This may cause it to repeat the last stages of maturation and then enters the decline phase, which is now accelerated.

At the beginning of the decline phase, most pizzas separate into segments in a process we have termed alternative slicing. The result is a series of cracks or furrows that extend from one side through a mid-point and end exactly opposite around the circumference. Multiple slices develop, leading to wedge-shaped units—most often an even number (between 4 and 12) of segments. It is unclear whether this process begins at the middle and radiates outwards, or starts at an edge, traverses the middle, and arrives at the other side. The mechanisms required for these two processes would necessarily be fundamentally different. Either way, a number of fascinating questions arise: As each split begins, what molecular signal does it follow to stay on course rather than veer away? What determines the total number of divisions that will occur? How does one side of the pizza “know” what is happening on the other side, so that the proportions of the slices remain equal? We are exploring these questions through the “Virtual Pizza,” which we developed for use in computer simulations.

The biological functions of these subdivisions are unclear. We hypothesize that they have been sustained through a unique sort of evolutionary mechanism that does not directly benefit the pizza itself, for example by promoting its survival, but rather by ensuring a harmonious environment around it.  A failure of the pizza to divide would cause its predators to fight over the whole. Even if only a very small fraction of these conflicts were fatal, over long periods of time this would offer a slight advantage to animals that fed off the sliced form. Since pizza now exists only as a domesticated species, its genomic features can be seen, in a way, as an extension of the gene pools around it. For whatever reasons, this leads to better chances of survival for pizza variants that promoted harmony among the other species around it. The effect appears to be bi-directional: research has shown that just the presence of a slice of pizza triggers a release of dopamine among humans.  This makes them less aggressive and more sociable. So ultimately, the integration of pizza into the human diet appears to have played some role in the development of modes of primitive social organization that became more and more elaborate until they acquired the forms familiar to us today: priesthoods, the military, and governments. And bowling alleys, and pizza parlors.

simulations

Figure 3.  The Virtual Pizza: Computer modeling of alternative slicing

  1. Tissue Structure Through the Lifecycle

Dough begins as an elastic substance under room temperature, which is characteristic of the environment of embryogenesis; in the heating phase it becomes crisp, and remains that way as it cools, matures, and approaches death.

The sauce begins as a thick fluid which crystallizes somewhat at the pinnacle of the heating phase, remaining gummy through the first phases of cooling, then hardens until it is nearly all crystallized at the end of cooling.

Mozzarella begins as a rubbery substance, melts into a liquid under heat, and only hardens after an extended period of cooling over time.

These transformations of the three tissues do not alter the basic structural integrity of the whole, unless the pizza is subjected to unusual biomechanical forces such as it would encounter when flung through the air. An embryonic pizza would stretch and fly apart; the hardness of a mature pizza gives it the properties of a Frisbee.

pizza_quer copy

Figure 4.  Layers of pizza tissue structure (side view)

  1. Embryogenesis

The earliest stage of pizza’s embryonic development bears some similarities to Dictyostelium (“slime mold”), an organism that lies at the borderline between unicellular and multicellular life.

Dough assembles in an environment containing sufficient concentrations of the necessary chemical and biological ingredients: particles of wheat, water, sugar, and some form of oil. Such environments usually contain abundant populations of yeast cells, which get dragged along as the components are attracted to a central location, probably by sensing chemokine-like molecules that have been secreted by a cook’s hands.

Upon arrival, the components merge in a sort of symbiotic collective that draws on the genes of the wheat and yeast to trigger a series of metabolic reactions that derive energy from the sugar and oil. The result is to fuse everything into a pliant, undifferentiated mass of dough. Originally this is a ball-shaped mass with stem-cell like properties that may yield a single pizza, or be pinched off to form genetically identical twins.

The ball spreads across a surface to form a flat, circular basal membrane on which new layers will arise. The dough induces the formation of tomato sauce, rapidly followed by a layer of mozzarella. In more elaborated forms, additional organelles such as salami or anchovies arise through chemical interactions between the sauce and mozzarella. Yet the three-layered structure is retained.

This is highly reminiscent of the tissues that arise in animal gastrulation, but that process begins with a group of cells that have retained the ball-like shape, causing inner layers to interact in more complex ways. This difference is a determining factor in pizza evolution, because it leaves the lower layer attached to a substrate, while the upper remains naked and exposed to the environment. The lack of a membrane or shell means that the upper layers of a pizza must constantly contend with fluctuations in the surrounding environment.

This single difference, combined with the fact that embryonic pizza does not have a womb to protect it from dramatic changes in temperature, probably severely restricted the degree to which ancient pizzas could vary from the original design. While eventually pizzas developed specialized organelles such as salami and funghi, there was never much variation to serve as the basis for selection. So the type of evolutionary tinkering that occurred in animals, and shaped the formation of highly sophisticated organs such as the brain, never occurred in pizza.

Conclusions

Our investigation provides the first account of the evolutionary route by which modern species of pizza diverged from an ancient, ancestral form. We characterize the last common ancestor as sharing the three-layer structure of modern pizzas, which resembles the first stage of animal gastrulation. In contrast to animals, however, pizza got stuck there, and never added additional developmental stages.

It is interesting to speculate what might have happened if instead of flattening, dough had retained its original, ball-shaped form, and built layers of sauce and cheese inside. Pizza calzone, a modern species, obtains this type of structure by folding the membranous dough around to seal off the interior, but this is the very last stage in its embryonic development. If, in the distant past, this progression had advanced to the beginning of embryogenesis, pizzas might have followed an evolutionary path much more like our own. Potentially this could have made pizza, rather than humans, the preeminent form of intelligent life in the known universe.

Thinkers such as Richard Dawkins see the evolutionary value of intelligence in its promotion of the survival and reproduction of a species’ genes. Pizza found an alternative by entering into a dependency on humans, who gladly overtook measures to ensure its reproduction, which would have required the development of new social structures. Over time the dependency increased and ultimately restricted the evolution of pizza along paths toward the species we know today. But this notion is somewhat speculative.

Preliminary data suggest that it may be possible to push the knowable ancestry of pizza back even farther, to a point at which the last common ancestor diverged from other organisms such as crêpes, pancakes and burritos. We are currently digesting the data from that investigation, which has presented some technical challenges (mainly due to the fact that we have gained so much weight we no longer fit into our cars).  Once these issues have been resolved, we anticipate publishing the results at a later date,

References

“Development of a Nutritionally Balanced Pizza As a Functional Meal Designed to Meet Published Dietary Guidelines,” Emilie Combet, Amandine Jarlot, Kofi E. Aidoo, and Michael E.J. Lean, Public Health Nutrition, vol. 17, no. 11, 2014, pp. 2577-2586.

“pheatmap: Pretty Heatmaps,” R. Kolde, R package version 1.0.8, 2015. <https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=pheatmap&gt;

 

References

  • Combet E., Jarlot A., Aidoo KE., Lean ME. Development of a nutritionally balanced pizza as a functional meal designed to meet published dietary guidelines. Public Health Nutr. 2014 Nov;17(11):2577-86. doi: 10.1017/S1368980013002814.
  • Kolde R. (2015). pheatmap: Pretty Heatmaps. R package version 1.0.8. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=pheatmap.

Supplementary files will be provided by the corresponding author upon request

The Devil’s dictionary rolls on…

Today’s words: optometry, locus, teleology, microbiome, gravid, gill bars, micromolar, and derivatives of the word -scope, all explained with mathematical models and all sorts of other complicated stuff.

See the complete Devil’s Dictionary of Scientific Words and Phrases here.

3707_001

all entries in the Devil’s Dictionary copyright 2017 by Russ Hodge.

optometry  a science that applies quantitative methods to the characterization of a delusional mental state called optimism.

teleology  the scientific study of 1) television sets and 2) the content they broadcast; i.e., the powerful hallucinations that occur when viewers are exposed to a television’s electromagnetic field. To avoid fatal accidents, the first type of study should only be carried out after disconnecting a television set from its source of electricity. The second should only be attempted after disconnecting the rational parts of the brain.

locus  a site in the genome occupied by a pestilential insect that prefers a diet of corn but in a pinch will eat other things, such as old shoes, slow pets, and rusty cars sitting on cement blocks in the backyard. When satiated, it retires to a tree where it sheds its outer layer, leaving a perfect but hollow replica of itself that you can place on your grandmother’s pillow, if you’re in the mood for some excitement. The plural form is loci, a word which no one knows how to pronounce, but is required when referring to a congregation of at least two locuses, until you discover that one is merely a hollow shell. (In everyday speech the plural of locus is “plague”.) Loci make frequent appearances in the Bible, usually at the moment someone thinks, “It surely can’t get any worse than this.” In one famous scene, for example, the Israelis use trained locuses to carry out a drone strike on Egypt; finding no corn, they eat a pyramid.

The Bible reports that locuses have only four legs, although any fool can see that they have six, like every other insect. Seeing six legs may be the work of Satan, however, who takes pleasure in making people believe they are seeing more legs than loci actually have. The conundrum presented by this Biblical passage remains unsolved despite the best efforts of scientists using million-dollar technology platforms, people in bars, golfers, motorcycle gangs, shoppers in WalMart, NASA, the Locus Genome Project, and the Federal Reserve of the United States of America, which is responsible for determining how much a dollar is worth. (Their reasoning is that the confusion between four and six may also arise in other situations, so no one really knows how much money is actually out there.)

Quite predictably, the nastiest, foulest discussions about locipedia take place within the theological community. At least ten Popes have been assassinated because of their stance on the issue – in fact, the true number may be higher because it is unclear whether whoever counted them used a methodology that took into account the possibility of a four-six switcheroo. Thus the true number of Papal deaths that should be attributed to locimortis may be as low as six or as high as 64. This demonstrates the need to provide a full record of protocols and computational environments in any experiment which produces more than 3 or fewer than -3 pieces of data.

microbiome  one millionth of a biome. This might be somewhat helpful if someone ever bothered to define the size of a biome, but there’s no consensus in the scientific literature. Some use the term “biome” to encompass ecosystems as vast as Antarctica, while others claim you have a whole biome living in your belly button. These two scales are so different that it is hard to see how they can be classified under a single term, but scientists learn mental contortions during their studies that permit them to do this and even stranger things.

Biomes differ not only in size, but also in composition: one of them contains penguins, for example, while the other normally does not. This breaks biomes into the two classical categories of penguin-positive and penguin-negative. Another difference is that Antarctica has almost no plants, whereas flora sometimes sprout from a belly button, through a phenomenon whose underlying mechanisms have not yet been fully characterized but have been negatively correlated to the taking of showers. Despite the lack of a rational, personalized approach to treatment, two methods are usually effective: dabbing a little weed-killer on the thing, or attacking it with a very small pair of garden shears. While the latter is a relatively minor procedure, it should only be undertaken by specialists or trained professionals, due to a risk of perforating the intestines when performing any surgical procedure on the belly button with a pair of shears. (Note that the effects of the two therapies are additive, which suggests that applying both generally leads to shorter sprouts, except in the case of a perforation, which is usually fatal to the plant after killing its host.)

gravid  an adjective used to describe someone whose body is full of eggs, either in anticipation of a pregnancy or in the aftermath of an egg-eating competition, or both. In medical practice it is important to tell the difference, usually by inserting some type of invasive probe. Another method which has performed almost as well in double-blind studies is to squeeze the person really hard. If eggs emerge from the mouth, they most likely entered during a competition. If they emerge from somewhere else, they’re probably the other type of egg, now out on the town and looking to get hooked up.

gill bars  the only regions in an aquarium where a gar can get a real drink.

micromolar  a millionth of a molar, which is a type of tooth. A micromolar happens to be the average distance that a bacterium can bore through tooth enamel in one second, as derived from the following formula:

mm1 = 1/bx (he / f * (t?)[(C – mm2) + mm3]) – DG

where mm1 represents the distance (in micromolars); b is the bacterium; x is the number of bacterium involved in drilling the same hole; h represents the hardness of the enamel, which can only be determined by solving the equation and then inverting and converting and doing whatever else is necessary to it so that he jumps over to the left of the equal sign and everything else is piled up on the right, often upside down; f is the force the bacterium is capable of applying; t is the amount of time spent actually drilling, which has to be corrected by ?, the so-called mystery variable, if t is not being measured in seconds; C is Colgate toothpaste; mm2 stands for the number of M&Ms a person has eaten in the recent past, and mm3  refers to “mom’s madness”, a quantitative measurement of the degree of physical force your mother is prepared to inflict on the anyone who fails to apply C after mm2 (note that as C – mm2 approaches zero, mm3 approaches infinity); and DG stands either for the degree of grinding that a particular molar undergoes when a person has to share the mm2 with someone of the opposite political persuasion, or Director General – I can’t remember which. Replacing the variables with true values produces mm1, which may need to be adjusted to account for the degree of freedom (otherwise known as the “fudge factor”) which means the number of times you are permitted to lie when filling in the values to solve the formula. Note that by definition, mm1 must always end up being 1; if this doesn’t happen, just change the answers for the other variables until it does. There’s a way to do this with Excel tables, but I couldn’t tell you what it was if my life depended on it. I’m having a hard enough time explaining this as it is.

The formula yields the result mm1 in terms of bacterial boring distance per second, but the result can be easily converted to minutes by multiplying mm1 by 60, into years by multiplying mm1 by 1315440, and in relation to the age of the universe up to the present date by multiplying mm1 by 1817938080000000000000000 + sn (where sn is the number of seconds that elapse between the time you read this and the moment you get around to making the calculation).

-scope  an instrument used to “check something out,” usually to determine whether it could serve as an appropriate sexual partner. The first scopes, in fact, were developed to search for genitals before scientists discovered their locations on the body. Later the suffix was attached to other types of instruments, including:

telescope  an instrument developed to look at things so far away they lie in another dimension, called teleology.

colonoscope  an instrument first developed to probe the depths of a person’s ear. Prior to its invention, no one knew the true depth of the auditory canal, so colonoscopes were made very long. With enough force the instrument could be pushed in so far that it emerged from the other end of a person. At some point scientists discovered that more information could be collected about the auditory canal by examining it from the other side, so they began inserting the colonoscope at the former exit point.

endoscope  this term was originally derived from the expression, “end o’ th’ scope,” and referred to the end that was farthest from the person in charge of the instrument, and closest to the victim. If it changed hands in the middle of a procedure, for example when the patient snatched it to end the abuse, endoscope now referred to the end held by the former patient, and the person who initiated the incident was called the endoscopee. This caused confusion in cases where two people both got their hands on the thing. If each tried to tell the other in no uncertain terms what he could do with his end of the endoscope, this produced garbled communication and often fatal results. A national committee was formed to find a solution. Eventually a consensus was reached through the creation of the new terms proximal endoscope and distal endoscope, also sometimes seen in the forms myendoscope and urendoscope, as defined by the end that was cleanest at any given time.

microscope  a type of scope that moves the eye one million times closer to whatever it is you are trying to look at. At the time of invention another theory was proposed to account for the functions of the instrument: it actually made objects one million times larger for a very brief period of time. Fortunately this is not the case, because a lot of the things you see with a microscope are disgusting enough without being made a million times larger. This early “expansion theory” of microscopy was not fully discarded until Einstein published the theory of relativity. Einstein proved that if two people with microscopes were standing on trains that were pulling away from each other at the speed of light, they would never see each other because rays emanating from the microscope’s light source would never reach the slide, unless they turned around and faced the other direction. At that point each would either see what the other person had looked like a million years in the past, or be crushed as the two trains underwent a sudden, million-fold expansion. Since neither outcome was particularly desirable, scientists discarded the theory for the one they liked better.

The microscope revolutionized science because it was so powerful it could detect things so small that they didn’t actually exist, which explained why they had been invisible to the naked eye in the first place. It also played a key role in the deanthropomorphization of science by disproving the concept of the Big Picture. Through a microscope one realizes that the Big Picture is nothing more than a lot of Smaller Pictures containing things so small they defy human cognition, unless they somehow manage to reach it by entering through an ear. Thus the Big Picture can be discarded altogether.

Understanding why this is the case can be demonstrated through a metaphor: Imagine cutting any normal puzzle into a million pieces. Now try to assemble it again. You’ll discover that this is impossible because the maximum amount of information in 1/1,000,000th of an image is an R, G, or B dot, and not even a whole one, and good luck matching that to the picture on the box. But you’ll never get that far because you’ll never find the corners. Theoretically you could, but it would take an amount of time that can be represented by the formula UP * (n)1,000,000/4!, where n = the time it takes you to locate a single corner piece that it has become so small that you have to apply the Uncertainty Principle (UP), which means that whenever you go looking for it, it probably isn’t where you think it is, and even if it were, it would be gone before you could grab it.

Today’s updates in the Devil’s Dictionary

See the complete Devil’s Dictionary of Scientific Words and Phrases here.

3707_001

all entries in the Devil’s Dictionary copyright 2017 by Russ Hodge.

 

insectivore  a person who rides a motorcycle with his or her mouth open. Contrast with omnivore and chiliconcarnevore.

angiogenesis  a process in organisms that is the biological equivalent of attaching new structures to city water and sewage services. Until this occurs, cells and tissues have to use outhouses. Angiogenesis is paid for by the rest of the organism, typically through a municipal tax hike, and often leads new organs and tissues to be shunned by the oldtimers. Compare to antiangiogenesis, which involves shutting down the services to cells that fail to pay their bills, usually after a visit by a process server.

carrying capacity  the average total number of plates, glasses, silverware and other service items that can be carried by a member of a species that has been trained to do so, without producing a carambolage or a loud crashing noise. In general, of all the members of the animal kingdom, the octopus has the highest average carrying capacity. It’s the suction cups, you know.

catabolism  a biological process akin to the natural process by which societies revert to anarchy. Catabolism takes place when complex entities become so large that its members decide it is unmanagable and ungovernable, at which point they decide to fragment into smaller parts which are equally unmanageable, but at least one knows who is responsible. The products of catabolism are eventually sucked up by whatever neighbor decides to consume them.

chorein  a situation in which a harmonious, tranquil state of homeostasis is disrupted by the entrance of a choir.

cnid  a fragment, subunit, or portion of a cnidarian, a large family of organisms that consist mostly of jello packed within thin membranes. Cnid is often produced through the interaction of cnidarians with boat propellors, but when jello is shaped through the use of a mold, into forms such as a brain or the Last Supper of Leonardo daVinci, the result is also considered a cnidarian consisting of cnid. Naturally occurring cnidarians live in aqueous environments and often have nettle-like tentacles. They sting like the dickens because they are used to inject toxins into unwitting prey or people who disturb cnidarians by splashing about in the water, although these features of cnidarians are usually omitted from jello molds. Cnid is an uncountable word, so it does not occur in the plural form. To refer to quantities a word is added that is usually measure of volume: “Give me a spoonful of that cnid,” or, “After you have molded graham crackers into a crust, pour on 3 cups of cnid and apply, if desired, a generous amount of whipped cream as a topping.” (Recipe suggested by my mom, Jo Hodge.)

germ layer  a stratum composed of bacteria, viruses, dandruff, species of lice and other noxious entities that naturally develops on any surface that you don’t wash as often as you should. Germ layers can be transferred from one organism to another, usually through bowls of peanuts placed on bars.

multiple hit hypothesis  A scientific model referring to the effects on the biology of an organism that has usually been assaulted in some violent manner by a scientist, for example by exposing it to large doses of radiation to see how many gamma rays are needed to kill it. This introduces double-stranded breaks in DNA in multiple locations, or hits. The result is coitus interruptus among cells that are pleasurably engaged in reproducing their genetic material. A sufficient dose of iodine may permit them to resume this activity; otherwise they typically produce offspring which are either highly creative forms of their parents or monstrous mutants, or both, depending on your point of view.

 

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Even God’s first paper got rejected

Plus the other pieces in the categories “satire”, “science cabaret,” and “hilarious moments in science communication.” And there are, of course, many serious pieces on the site.

Feel free to pass along the link to your fellow science nerds! And, of course, quote the Devil’s Dictionary – just remember the reference! All material here is copyrighted Russ Hodge.

Yoo-hoo! Another update in the Devil’s dictionary…!!!

See the complete Devil’s Dictionary of Scientific Words and Phrases here.

3707_001

all text and images copyright 2017 by Russ Hodge

omnivore  as nearly the exact opposite of a vegan as you can get.

accessoire  a technical term for anything that must be removed from the body before undergoing an examination with an MRI machine.

monomer  Derived from the Australian pronunciation for “my number,” this expression has been traced back to an incident that occurred in a bar between an Australian and an attractive young lady who spoke some more natural form of English. Before parting company the Australian offered to give her “monomer”, which she misinterpreted as an obscenity and then promptly fled the scene. By extension, in biology, the term is now used to refer to a molecule that can’t get a date.

digit  structures on the hands and feet of animals that originally evolved from twigs. In the earliest animals, digits were still very twig-like. Animals grew from the tips of their fingers and toes, sometimes to amazing distances from the body they belonged to. Leaves and fruits sprouted from the twigs, which put a lot of food conveniently within grasp. But mutations in an early animal stunted the growth of digits to the point that they could no longer bud. Genetic engineers might have helped restore these characteristics, but the Crispr/Cas system hadn’t yet been acquired from simpler organisms, due to conflicts over issues of rights and patents.

After about 100 million years, evolution managed to get the digits hooked up to body utility services such as the vasculature and sewage lines, and at some point a cable company appeared and linked them into the network of the CNS, suddenly placing them under the control of the brain. There were advantages: digits could now be used to pick lice off a spouse, or grab a potential spouse by the hair, or point at things you wished for your spouse to bring to you, such as a bottle of beer, and you could even indicate the number of beers you wanted, provided it didn’t exceed 10 at a time. That was all right because 10 was about the most bottles your spouse could handle in a single trip. Finger-pointing covered most situations that otherwise would have required language, so the evolution of that region of the brain was postponed for a few more hundred million years. During that period mouths were used mostly for eating things and the tongue for picking food from the teeth. Any utterances were simply the by-product of exhaling air through a larynx, past the glottis, the tongue, the teeth, etc.

hydrophile  a customer in a bar who orders exclusively Perrier, which is frequently an indicator that you are dealing with a recovering alcoholic. Compare with vinophile and hopsophile.

keratinization  any process that produces a carrot from some object that is different enough from a carrot that if you had seen it before it became a carrot, in its undeveloped state, you would never guess that its fate was to produce a carrot.

oviduct  Today this refers to a chute or apparatus in an egg factory which transports an egg from its point of origin in a chicken to its destination in an egg carton. The etymology of the word is interesting; the roots are derived from ovi- (eggs) and ductus, which was a Medieval vocal composition to be performed during marches or processions. The link between eggs and music is a custom from ancient times that began before dawn every day when a procession of soldiers, priests, and other dignitaries marched to a farm, selected an exceptional egg, and marched it back to the palace, setting the pace by singing a ductus. At the palace the egg was delivered to the Duke of Breakfast, who examined it for cracks or other obvious flaws, such as syringe marks, which might be an indication of an assassination attempt, in a ceremony adorned by plenty of Pomp and whatever Circumstances the occasion might require. After the Duke’s formal acceptance of the egg, he placed it in a bejeweled container called an ovi-carton and personally delivered it to the King. The King conducted his own inspection, with the option of declaring it kingsworthy and handing it to a page for delivery to the kitchen, or rejecting it and cutting off the Duke’s head.

Thus the original meaning of oviduct is best captured by a phrase such as, “Processional music for the King’s Egg.” The oviductus was one of the major musical genres of the late Renaissance and Early Baroque eras, undergoing an evolution not dissimilar to that of the sonata, dance suite, opera, and kazoo symphony, fulfilling an essential social function by providing a livelihood for musicians who were contractually obligated to compose a new one every day for as long as they were employed by the court, unless they died or went insane. All oeuvres in the genre share a feature: the rhythmic structure of the “Colonel Bogey March.”

In modern times Kings get their eggs from Amazon.com, sometimes using the delivery-by-drone service, and this sounded the death knell of/hammered the final nail into the coffin of/brought a definitive end to the art form known as/ushered in the Götterdämmerung of the musical genre known as the oviductus.

When a thing disappears the word often follows, unless it jumps the species barrier to inhabit another object. Oviductus was rehabilitaed in the shorter form oviduct: understood as a chute, apparatus, delivery robot or limousine service that collects a product at its source (chicken) and delivers it to its destination (egg carton). Linguistic creativity led to the combination of -duct with other roots in words such as aquiduct, boviduct, air conditioning duct, etc. In the process –ducts came to represent passageways between the starting position of a thing and its final resting point: Acquiduct, for example, is the route by which “aqua” (water) is passed to cities and towns and ultimately into kidneys for recycling. Bovi-, the Latin root for cattle, has now been used to coin the term boviduct, a passageway in slaughterhouses used by cows who have been selected for passage to the Other Side, and a new plane of existence which must be pretty wonderful because they are never heard from again. By extension, one should understand air conditioner duct as the network of passageways in a house by which air conditioners are shuttled from room to room.

I recently came across a modern reference to a boviduct in a text in Dutch on a website. Here I present the original and a rough translation. (For those of you who don’t speak Dutch, a word of caution: be aware that according to some scholars, Dutch isn’t a real language. It’s a random mixture of German and English and some old Viking words, thrown together with any word order a speaker feels comfortable with, and then vocalized in a Scottish brogue. This is actually wonderful for translators, because it gives them a great deal of freedom in interpreting the text.) I certainly wouldn’t call myself an expert in Dutch, but after a weekend of immersion I’m starting to get enough of a feel of it to offer a rough translation:

Original

Een aantal panden kan worden afgevoerd omdat ze inmiddels zijn gesloopt of zodanig verbouwd dat de historische kantjes er wel af zijn. Maar de speurders kunnen er ook wat aan toevoegen: karakteristieke stukjes bebouwing die beschermd dorpsgezicht zouden moeten worden, mogelijke archeologische vindplaatsen (Oene) en een aantal kleine cultuurhistorische objecten. Een daarvan is het ‘boviduct’ in Vaassen, een tunneltje als doorgang voor het vee onder de Geelmolensebeek door, die even voor de Geelmolen in een hoge bedding stroomt. Het zou de enige boviduct in Nederland kunnen zijn.

Translation:

A portion of panda can work effectively if governed in the middle of ten sloppy sudden buildings where the historical corners are well-seen. But the spurters can hook something up to the tobogan; characteristic pieces built the smeary (beschmierde) dork-face that has suddenly become mute (Note: the word in the original Dutch is moet, and the author may instead be referring to the alcoholic beverage), perhaps like archeological wind palaces (or at least one of them) and a smidgen of small culturo-histo objects. A divan is the “boviduct” in Vaassen, a tunnel which begins at the doorway of the horny moles’ back door, which existed even before the horny moles needed it to “storm” (move with effort) a huge bedding. It is there that the only boviduct in the Netherlands can be seen today.

Reference: https://ampt-epe.nl

methane  an organic substance produced by enzymes and other components of the metabolic machinery making up the gastrointestinal tract of cows. Methanes have an affinity for each other, and so in the cow gut they accumulate until they form a bubble which can only be ejected from the system by a fart. This is one of three sounds that a cow can produce. The others are lowing, a sound that a cow makes when it is trying to be discrete (ref: “Away in a manger,” Kirkpatrick 1895, Murray 1887) and mooing, which typically indicates distress or loneliness. An ability to control the release of a fart would give bovide a third sound which, if used with the others in a combinatorial system, would vastly increase the number of concepts that could be expressed in cow language. However, it has been impossible to reproduce an initial experimenting hinting that the temporal distribution of farts is non-random, which would lend credence to the control hypothesis. The result is a hot debate in the field, the literature, and the barn over whether cows possess such a fart regulatory system, or whether its existence is simply another case of scientific wish-fulfillment-as-the-end-of-the-current-funding-period-grows-nigh. If the system exists, it opens the door on another controversy: whether the mechanism is physically located in the gut or in some other tissue that is close enough to make sense, such as the tail. In any case, once methane escapes a cow’s body, through a type of release valve at the posterior end of the animal, the bubble bursts and methane scatters into the atmosphere, where it interacts with other volitile substances in ways that, according to current climate models, will completely destroy the Earth’s atmosphere in about 12 years.

Searching for Oslo: a non-hypothesis-driven approach

Ontogeny recapitulates sobriety: from the Archaeal origins of life to the pinnacle of evolution: a PhD

Plus the other pieces in the categories “satire”, “science cabaret,” and “hilarious moments in science communication.” And there are, of course, many serious pieces on the site.

Feel free to pass along the link to your fellow science nerds! And, of course, quote the Devil’s Dictionary – just remember the reference! All material here is copyrighted Russ Hodge.

The Devil’s dictionary, May 21 update

finally: New updates in the Devil’s dictionary!!!

See the complete Devil’s Dictionary of Scientific Words and Phrases here.

3707_001

All entries in the Devil’s Dictionary copyright 2017 by Russ Hodge

proboscis   a tissue extending from the front of the face which evolved as a mechanism to probe the space ahead, a bit like a blind person’s cane, or the front bumper of a car. If an animal walked slowly enough and hit an obstacle, it would first detect the impact via the proboscis, which is composed of tissue soft enough to absorb the impact providing the animal is not traveling faster than about 10 cm per second. Upon encountering an obstacle, sensors in the proboscis trigger a reflex that instinctively brakes the rest of the body before it suffers so much damage that insurance companies need to get involved. In many mammalian species this function became redundant through the evolution of whiskers, which is why the species with the longest whiskers tend to have the smallest noses (felines), and vice versa (elephants, whose tiny whiskers are purely ornamental). Derivatives include proboscuity, a habitual and socially offensive behavior in which the proboscis is inserted into places, situations or affairs where it has no business being.

alignment  placing two things next to each other in a way that lines up their ends, at which point they will be determined to have equal length or not. If not, the problem generally needs to be corrected. If aligning one end causes the other not to align, the standard procedure is to chop off the longer one to achieve double-ended alignment. If you cut off too much then the other item will now be the longer one and you must now repeat the operation on the second item, being careful not to get them confused. It is considered aesthetic to align hair, for example, on opposing sides of a person’s head to achieve a symmetrical result, but the actual process of ensuring that each hair on the left side aligns with its partner hair on the right is so complex that it must generally be done by experts and costs about $400. Amateurs often misalign the two sides numerous times in succession, which is the major cause of baldness. This can be avoided by placing a bowl on the head of the person you are trying to align, checking to ensure that their spine and head are straight through the use of a leveling device, and then cropping the hair evenly around the rim of the bowl. The bowl itself, of course, must be perfectly symmetrical and balanced at the exact zenith of the head, preferably by fixing it into place with a small nail or powerful adhesive so that slippage does not occur.

In genetics the term refers to aligning the genomes of two species to determine which one has “the longer one.” Anything hanging over is probably responsible for features found in one species but not the other. It is a myth that females tend to choose mates with extra letters that extend the length of their genomes. Technique is just as important.

conditioning  any process of training which causes a biological entity, such as your hair, to behave the way you want it to rather than to follow its natural instincts.

diuretic  a substance produced by plants which, when ingested by an animal, causes it to release the water it has taken up from the environment more quickly, and closer to its source, rather than carrying it long distances away and depositing it in a foreign watershed. This phenomenon means that diuretic plants get more water and have an advantage in natural selection. A high number of non-diuretic plants in a particular environment usually triggers the rapid development of deserts: the water needed by the plants is carried too far away to do them any good. Upon the death of such plants, the organisms that eat them migrate away, further reducing the recycling of water. The effect is self-reinforcing, which ultimately causes animals to cluster along coastlines, resulting in a huge spike in real estate prices and making a species susceptible to extinction by tsunami. Over the long term this cycle leads to environmental conditions like those found on the moon and Mars, which could have been prevented by the evolution of a single plant with diuretic properties.

generation time  the period of time that a mother requires between giving birth to one child or litter and the next. Mathematically the generation time for a species can be calculated using the following formula:

gestation time + x

where gestation is the amount of time between conception and birth and x is the amount of time between giving birth and the resumption of sexual activity by the mother, usually due to the insistent behavior of her partner.

For humans this generally results in a generation time of 9 months + 20 minutes

habituation  the process by which the brain becomes desensitized to sounds, smells, advertising, well-meaning advice from family members, and various other annoying stimuli rather than responding in an instinctual way, for example by becoming an ax murderer.

mammary gland  what you say to your mother if it becomes necessary to refer to her boob.

If you liked the Devil’s Dictionary, you’ll probably also enjoy:

Some little-known facts about Kansas

 

 

Even God’s first paper got rejected

All images and texts on this site copyright 2017 by Russ Hodge

 

Editor-in-Chief   

The BIBLE

 

Prof. God
Paradise Avenue
Heavenly Realm

 

Dear Prof. God,

 

Thank you for submitting your paper, “Genesis: A method of generating matter,
space, time, and living species from Nothingness,” for our consideration. We agree
that the creation of the universe might be of interest to our general readership.
However, after considering the reviewers’ comments, we regret that we are unable
to publish the manuscript in its current form. If you feel that you can satisfy their
concerns with further experiments, you are welcome to resubmit a revised version
of your manuscript at a later date.

The following represent only a small selection of the most significant issues,
in our view, but for a resubmission you should address all the reviewers’ comments,
which are in the 5000 GByte attachment appended to this file.

 

Reviewer #1:

Hasn’t this author ever heard of controls? The author should have started
with two samples of Nothingness, applied the method of creation to one
while observing the other to ensure that the various reactions did not occur
spontaneously over time. He provides no quantitative description of this
Nothingness, gives no account of the conditions under which it was produced,
and no proof that Nothing was actually there.   

There are no references to previous literature, so we have no way to judge
the author’s qualifications in the field or the extent to which this work is
innovative vis-a-vis that of other groups.

The indirect, third-person style of the text is old-fashioned and should be
updated. Phrases such as, “In the Beginning God created” should be modernized
to a form like, “In a first step, we produced…” Another example:
“And God found that it was good” should be replaced with,
“The results confirmed our initial hypothesis.”

 

Reviewer #2:

From what I can tell, the physical and biological systems described in the
paper seem to have gone from a very low state of order to high complexity
within a remarkably short period of time. This hints at the use of extremely
powerful catalysts, which are not described anywhere in the text. Are they
commercially available? If so, were the manufacturer’s protocols rigorously
followed?

In fact, the author has failed to offer any model or hypothesis that could
mechanistically explain the results, or justify the claim that His efforts
somehow caused them. The implication is that things happened just because
He willed them to. This is the reason we have double-blind experiments, people!

 

Reviewer #3:

The human cloning experiment was not described in nearly enough detail.
What types of cells were extracted from the male’s rib, and what method was
used to generate induced Pluripotent Stem Cells and then the female? More
significantly, since the cell was derived from a male, where did they get the
second X chromosome? Was it simply a clonal copy of the first? Theoretically
it is possible, I suppose, that the female was actually genetically male but
suffering from some sort of defect in her SRY gene. If that were the case, half
of her gametes would be chromosomally Y. This would lead a quarter of her
offspring to be entirely X-less, i.e., Y-Y, which might explain the violent behavior
of some of her children. Or perhaps radical genetic engineering technologies
were used to create the female, such as CRISPR/Cas9, although I hope not,
because the fight over the patent was already a mess, and getting God
involved certainly wouldn’t make things go any smoother.

In any case, the type of genetic modifications needed to make a female from
a male would have been in direct violation of every ethical standard and
numerous international laws. Not to mention the horrendous, ensuing inbreeding
effects that could be expected in a population descended entirely from a couple
who were not only closely related, but actual clones.

Please note that I did not receive any paperwork indicating that the project
had been submitted to ethical review. Apparently the Author considers
Himself superior to any sort of moral authority; either that, or he paid
someone off. If I am wrong, and an Ethics Commission did in fact approve
the project, please let me know the country. I would consider moving
my laboratory there.

 

Today’s updates in the Devil’s Dictionary

Dear friends, finally some updates in the Devil’s Dictionary… Today’s words include archaea, gold standard, planarium, and the null hypothesis! Enjoy…

See the complete Devil’s Dictionary of Scientific Words and Phrases here.

3707_001

all entries in the Devil’s Dictionary of Scientific Words and Phrases are
copyrighted 2017 by Russ Hodge

archaea  a unicellular organism known as an extremophile, generally meaning that it thrives in places the rest of us would find uncomfortable, such as hot thermal vents on the ocean floor, where they are thought to have evolved about 3.5 billion years ago, or in the tanks of Jacuzzis in hotels, the cloud palaces of Venus, or the belly button of a man who refused, for reasons that are unclear, to take a shower or otherwise bathe for many years. It is also unclear how the Archaea got into the belly button, although 3.5 billion years is probably enough time to crawl there from the ocean floor if you have a clear destination in mind and don’t make a lot of pit stops along the way. Some scientists believe that archeae invaded primitive bacteria and established a symbiotic relationship, leading to the evolution of the modern eukaryotes, although it is hard to see what they got out of the deal, unless they regarded the bacteria as hotel resorts where they could get cheap Jacuzzis.

Regarding the belly button, I cite from the original article: “Of special note are three phylotypes of Archaea [we found in the belly button], a domain of life often found in extreme environments and not previously reported from human skin [1], [27], multiple phylotypes of which we isolated from two independent samples (see online Supporting Information S1). Two of these three phylotypes were from an individual who self-reported not having showered or bathed for several years.” Reference: Jiri Hulcr, Andrew M. Latimer, Jessica B. Henley, Nina R. Rountree, Noah Fierer, Andrea Lucky, Margaret D. Lowman, Robert R. Dunn. A Jungle in There: Bacteria in Belly Buttons are Highly Diverse, but Predictable. Plos One: Nov. 7, 2012. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0047712

gold standard  an amount of pure gold equivalent to the value of an impact point. In ancient times, alchemists were actually awarded gold for their achievements (i.e., the degree to which their strange experiments came close to making it). In modern times, the gold standard was replaced with paper currency (journal articles), and is basically worthless in objective terms.

planarium  a strange model organism that never dies, but simply shrivels up for a while when food is scarce and then fattens again, and sometimes reproduces, when food is plentiful, resembling the way humans attempt to control their phenotype through various diets. When you attack a planarium with a knife and cut it into up to 256 pieces, each subunit is capable of reproducing an entire organism. The 257th piece is used as food. It is unclear why this hasn’t left the Earth piled in heaps upon heaps of planaria. The best explanation is that there are lots of planaria shriveled up in various locations, waiting for their chance to puff up and achieve world domination.

null hypothesis  a theory claiming that everything is nothing, or nothing is anything, or that nothingness pervades the universe, or would do so if the universe existed, but according to the null hypothesis it doesn’t, so what would there be to be filled with an infinite amount of nothingness? And does a system containing only nothingness obey the Second Law of Thermodynamics? Can the same volume hold different degrees of nothingness, which differ only in the density of nothingness against a background of nothingness, and if so can the nothingness in a system increase over time, or decrease, depending on how you see these things, to the point that eventually all the nothingness will be gone, and there will be nothing left at all, not even any nothingness?

If you like the Devil’s Dictionary, you will probably enjoy these older posts:

Searching for Oslo: a non-hypothesis-driven approach

Ontogeny recapitulates sobriety: from the Archaeal origins of life to the pinnacle of evolution: a PhD

Plus the other pieces in the categories “satire”, “science cabaret,” and “hilarious moments in science communication.” And there are, of course, many serious pieces on the site.

Feel free to pass along the link to your fellow science nerds! And, of course, quote the Devil’s Dictionary – just remember the reference! All material here is copyrighted Russ Hodge.

New updates in the Devil’s Dictionary!!!

See the complete Devil’s Dictionary of Scientific Words and Phrases here.

3707_001

 

in situ  an experiment that can be done sitting down, preferably in the comfort of your own home, without having to get up, allowing you to do science while remaining within reach of the TV remote and alcoholic beverages, although it is permissible to have other people bring you things. An example of an in situ experiment is to extract organic material from your belly button for use in a metagenomics experiment. Another is to stare fixedly at a computer screen for as long as possible without blinking, repeating this several times, and then taking an on-line eyesight test to determine the degree to which your eyesight has worsened. At that point you can order new glasses via the Internet and have them delivered to your door.

fontanelle  a gap in the skull of newborn humans that was originally used for whistling and snorkeling. It could also be used to add or remove parts of the brain as a means of enhancing the learning process. Nowadays the fontanelle has changed dimensions to the point that it is almost exactly the size of a USB port, in anticipation of the day in the near future when knowledge will be transferred via flash drives.

proboscis   a tissue extending from the front of the face which probably evolved as a mechanism to probe the space ahead, a bit like a blind person’s cane, or the front bumper on your car. If you walked slowly enough and hit an obstacle, you would first detect the impact via the proboscis, which was soft enough to absorb an impact providing you weren’t traveling faster than about 10 cm per second, which would trigger a reflex that instinctively brakes the rest of the body before it suffered so much damage that insurance companies needed to get involved.

icthyology  the study of the religions and belief systems of fish.

fluke  a case in which the tail of a whale appears spontaneously, unexpectedly, and inexplicably in the middle of any laboratory experiment or procedure or some other place where you do not typically expect to find one, for example in a test tube full of ribosomes,  or in a yeast culture, or on a highway in Kansas, or in your sock drawer.

flagellum  a whip-like structure that arose in early prokaryotes as a mechanism by which they could express displeasure by beating on their neighbors. Because early microbes had not yet discovered the principles of Newtonian physics, they were perplexed when this activity caused an equal and opposite reaction: beating your neighbors also pushed you away from them, which was usually desirable, at least until they learned to behave, and had the added benefit of bringing you into contact with more types of organisms that you could beat. In the long term this caused the environment to adjust to your basic desires, rather than the other way around.

The advent of multicellular organisms had two major effects on the structure and functions of flagella: 1) it meant that neighboring cells began to exclusively beat each other, because they were stuck together, leading to a relationship resembling marriage, and 2) flagella initially caused problems of orientation, because in essence the organism had lots of rowers, each of whom rowed in whatever direction he or she pleased. The development of mechanisms that coordinated the beating behavior of flagella in multiple cells had a survival advantage: if rowing carried you away from a source of food, you could steer back toward it. This led to the evolution of social hierarchies, such as dictatorships, in populations of cells, giving one cell the decision-making power over other cells in determining the direction that they should row. From that point it was just a hop, skip, and a jump to the modern human brain.

funghi  a foodstuff that originally evolved as an organelle of Pizza Rustica, but then underwent a sort of metastatic process through which fungi wandered off the plate, into the forest, and adapted in ways that permitted growth in moist soil. This had health benefits for pizza eaters, because to get the best tasting funghi they had to get off the sofa and go for walks outside.

parsimony  a basic principle in science which involves trying to keep things simple. This can only be achieved in a scientist’s early years, before life gets cluttered by events such as matrimony. At that point parsimony becomes very difficult, and in the alimony phase it is completely impossible.

If you like the Devil’s Dictionary, you will probably enjoy these older posts:

Searching for Oslo: a non-hypothesis-driven approach

Ontogeny recapitulates sobriety: from the Archaeal origins of life to the pinnacle of evolution: a PhD

Plus the other pieces in the categories “satire”, “science cabaret,” and “hilarious moments in science communication.” And there are, of course, many serious pieces on the site.

Feel free to pass along the link to your fellow science nerds! And, of course, quote the Devil’s Dictionary – just remember the reference! All material here is copyrighted Russ Hodge.

Today’s updates in the Devil’s Dictionary

See the complete Devil’s Dictionary of Scientific Words and Phrases here.

3707_001

 

enantiomer  a form of asymmetry which becomes obvious when a glove is put on the wrong hand, a shoe on the wrong foot, or an arm or leg is surgically reattached to the wrong side of the body, which happens more often than you would think, but which at least puts the glove or shoe back on the correct foot. In this case the gloves and shoes are still called enantiomers, but at least they’re the matching enantiomers. Most molecules are enantiomers, which gives them the same sort of problem with gloves. Human beings are not enantiomers, at least not in this dimension, unless you count your evil twin who lives in the mirror. This raises the fascinating philosophical question: if you could choose someone to be your enantiomer, whom would you pick?

 null hypothesis  a theory claiming that everything is nothing, or nothing is anything, or that nothingness pervades the universe, or would do so if the universe existed, but according to the null hypothesis it doesn’t, so what would there be to be filled with an infinite amount of nothingness? And does a system containing only nothingness obey the Second Law of Thermodynamics? Can the same volume hold different degrees of nothingness, which differ only in the density of nothingness against a background of nothingness, and if so can the nothingness in a system increase over time, or decrease, depending on how you see these things, to the point that eventually all the nothingness will be gone, and there will be nothing left at all, not even any nothingness?

potential drug target  something in a biological system that is not affected by any known drug and probably never will be.

sally forth  a more elegant way to say “go”, which should be used as often as possible in scientific papers.

If you like the Devil’s Dictionary, you will probably enjoy these older posts:

Searching for Oslo: a non-hypothesis-driven approach

Ontogeny recapitulates sobriety: from the Archaeal origins of life to the pinnacle of evolution: a PhD

Plus the other pieces in the categories “satire”, “science cabaret,” and “hilarious moments in science communication.” And there are, of course, many serious pieces on the site.

Feel free to pass along the link to your fellow science nerds! And, of course, quote the Devil’s Dictionary – just remember the reference! All material here is copyrighted Russ Hodge.

Today’s updates in the Devil’s Dictionary

See the complete Devil’s Dictionary of Scientific Words and Phrases here.

3707_001

press release  a shortened form of the expression “press and release:” a description of the activity of the intestines when trying to digest and then expell a piece of science that has been swallowed without chewing.

p value  a numerical value used in statistics to shows whether life is a random, meaningless sequence of events, or whether the universe really is out to get you. If an experiment doesn’t work out, the p value can help as you try to decide whether to repeat it, or give up science and become a sheep herder. The p value shows that no matter how bad things are, they can always get worse. Suppose, for example, when you redo an experiment you produce some antimatter. Even a very small amount might blow up the galaxy. This hasn’t happened before, as far as we know, which means the p value for antimatter is probably very low, less than one. But until we get some data, the number might jump up into the millions, with no warning whatsoever. It is easier to estimate the p value of other things, for example, the chance that your group leader will be struck on the head by a bowling ball that a passenger flushed down the toilet of an airplane. Here the p value will be higher than 0, since all group leaders die someday (100%), and in a few cases the cause will be a bowling ball. Start by calculating the maximum number of days your group leader might live under optimal circumstances (daystotalgroupleadermightlive). Skew the figures a little bit to account for the fact that Tuesday is the most popular day for dying. Throw in a few other numbers just for fun, and then start calculating. The result should be p = approximately 1 / daystotalgroupleadermightlive. If the bowling ball does not descend that day, you will have to recalculate the p value the next day, because every day that passes without a fatality reduces the total number of days before death is inevitable, (daystotalgroupleadermightlive – 1). Since p is inversely correlated with this number, p will get a little higher every day, just like the rising, anticipatory mood in the lab. The same approach can be used to figure out the p value of a zombie apocalypse (hint: 1 / daysmaximumuntilzombieapocalypse). Since no one knows the value that should be inserted for daysmaximumuntilzombieapocalypse, you can insert different numbers until you get a p value that pleases you. Note that these two formulae can be combined, somehow, to account for the possibility that your group leader will be one of the first victims of the zombie apocalypse.

simple  the quality of being simple. While scientists prefer that things be simple, they don’t like their descriptions of things to sound simple, because people might get the idea that science is simple, and then anyone could do it. So scientists have developed many alternative ways of describing simple things, including the following: “a gratifyingly low degree of complexity, bordering on null,” or “a state of not having achieved, evolved, or developed any apparent structural modularity,” or, “an entity or process which can be described without adding a lot of boring, unnecessary detail, particularly those features or properties that have no effect on the outcome of an experiment.” For those who prefer a single word, the base “simple” can be ornamented with some useless consonants: simplifical, simplificability, or simplificabilical. A word can also be built on some other base whose simple meaning can be deduced by anyone with a thorough knowledge of Latin and classical Greek: aheterocomplificatory, apolymorphological, nonmultifeaturologicistical, unquantiplurifiable, monouniformalogically integrated, etc.

If you like the Devil’s Dictionary, you will probably enjoy these older posts:

Searching for Oslo: a non-hypothesis-driven approach

Ontogeny recapitulates sobriety: from the Archaeal origins of life to the pinnacle of evolution: a PhD

Plus the other pieces in the categories “satire”, “science cabaret,” and “hilarious moments in science communication.” And there are, of course, many serious pieces on the site.

Feel free to pass along the link to your fellow science nerds! And, of course, quote the Devil’s Dictionary – just remember the reference! All material here is copyrighted Russ Hodge.