When I started this blog, my plan was to write about interesting papers or at least blog about the ones from my lab. This post is a bit of both. I was recently asked to write a “Journal Club” piece for Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology, which is now available online. It’s paywalled unfortunately. It’s also very short, due to the format. For these reasons, I thought I’d expand a bit on the papers I highlighted.
The standard simplified narrative of evolutionary adaptation goes something like this. A population of organisms is exposed to a challenge of some kind. Perhaps a new predator has appeared on the scene, or the temperature of the environment has ticked up a degree or two, or the warm little pond is slowly accumulating a toxic chemical.
Charles Darwin collected all sorts of cool stuff (like a vampire bat, caught while feeding on his horse) on his journey aboard the Beagle, and it has to be said that he understood little of it until after he got back. The finches that bear his name were identified as such by someone else, and his own bird collections from the Galapagos were nearly worthless due to the fact that he hadn't bothered to label specimens as to their place of origin.
The wing of a bat is an amazing thing. It's not just a wing; it's clearly a modified mammalian limb. A bat looks like a lot like a rodent with really long, webbed fingers on elongated arms. Image from Animal Diversity Web at the University of Michigan.
We interrupt this series on "junk DNA" and rampant folk science to bring you a months-overdue Journal Club. I wonder how many of my readers remember this little tidbit of American genius: I remember some very funny spoofs, mostly on T-shirts. (Back then, I think the Internet was still a toy for geeks at the NCSA.) "This is your brain. This is your brain on drugs. This is your brain on drugs with a side of bacon.
One of the most common refrains of anti-evolutionists is the claim that evolutionary mechanisms can only degrade what has already come to be. All together now: "No new information!" It's a sad little mantra, an almost religious pronouncement that is made even more annoying by its religious underpinnings, hidden or overt. But it's a good question: how do new genes come about?
Optimism or delusions of grandeur? Bullish or blinkered? Looking on the bright side, or gazing through rose-colored glasses? Am I a romantic, or am I just in denial? I do consider myself a romantic, and this blog is a testament to a particular form of optimism that I just can't shake off: I'm ever hopeful that people (like me) can learn new things and change their minds.
Evolutionary science is so much bigger, so much deeper, so much more interesting than its opponents (understandably) will admit. It's more complicated than Michael Behe or Bill Dembski let on, and yet it's not that hard to follow, for those who are willing to try.
Souls will come up regularly in this blog, for lots of reasons. For one, disembodied spirits (wandering souls, I presume) are everywhere in Shakespeare, and his very conception of death seems to be the separation of the soul from the body. I can't very well bring up Shakespeare without conjuring ghosts or visions thereof.
The jaw-dropping diversity of life begs for explanation, but at the same time it defies description, so much so that it has inspired hyperbole, even hyperbole of the finest variety.