So I’ve been extremely busy the last few weeks trying to get everything wrapped by the deadlines that always come with the end of the semester. I just completed working on a paper for Molecular Biology about cystic fibrosis. Before I go any further, let me define just a few genetic concepts using the analogy of shoes, so that I don’t have to worry about readers being completely lost. Thirty seconds of biology won’t kill you, I promise.

• allele - alternative version of gene. If shoes are a gene, then cowboy boots, sandals, and tennis shoes would be alleles. For any given gene, you’ve got two alleles - one from mom and one from dad.
• homozygous - you’ve got the same two alleles for a given gene. You’re wearing matching tennis shoes.
  • homozygous dominant - both of your alleles make the same working protein. You’re wearing matching tennis shoes.
  • homozygous recessive - both of your alleles either don’t make a protein or make a protein that doesn’t work. You’re not wearing any shoes and have two bare feet.
• heterozygous - you’ve got different alleles for a given gene. You’re wearing one cowboy boot and one sandal, or one cowboy boot and one bare foot.

Cystic fibrosis is a homozygous recessive trait. You’ve got to get two CF alleles that don’t work right to get the disease.

Enough of the background information. I was focusing on one thing in particular. The allele that causes CF is a lot more common in European populations than one might expect for such a seemingly detrimental allele. In fact in Caucasian populations, the frequency of carriers can reach as high as 1 in 25 people! That’s pretty darn high when you consider that if two copies of those alleles end up in a child, that child’s dead before they’re three years old. How do you explain that? The likely explanation is what’s called heterozygous advantage, where heterozygous are better fit for their environment than homozygotes.

The classic example of this is sickle-cell anemia and malaria. It turns out that heterozygotes are much less likely to get malaria than homozygotes. I was looking on the internet for a reference to the scientific literature that discusses heterozygous advantage with sickle-cell anemia, when I came across this page from the website of a medical doctor at Harvard. (Incidentally, it’s a nice lengthy discussion if you want to learn more about natural selection favoring a detrimental allele through heterozygous advantage.) But it contained one little illustration that immediately caught my eye and made me laugh out loud.

Figure 2. Schematic representation of the effect of the sickle cell hemoglobin gene on survival in endemic malarial areas. People with normal hemoglobin (left of the diagram) are susceptible to death from malaria. People with sickle cell disease (right of the diagram) are susceptible to death from the complications of sickle cell disease. People with sickle cell trait, who have one gene for hemoglobin A and one gene for hemoglobin S, have a greater chance of surviving malaria and do not suffer adverse consequences from the hemoglobin S gene.

Oh, okay. I get it. But still, it’s a rather odd and comical choice for the illustration. It tickled my funny bone so much that I had to share.

So getting back to cystic fibrosis, the main evidence for heterozygous advantage comes from a study1 which showed that the bacteria which cause typhoid fever use the protein that the cystic fibrosis gene creates. Thus, if you’re heterozygous (one good copy, one bad) then you have less of that protein on the surface of your cells lining your digestive tract. Using mice as a model, they showed that typhoid bacteria are 86% less successful at infecting cells of heterozygotes. They also showed that mice containing two bad copies of the CF gene were not infected by any typhoid bacteria. Thus typhoid are using that protein as their entries into the cell.

As typhoid is a disease that has ravaged Europe for many years in premodern time, it now becomes understandable why selection would increase the frequency of the CF allele in European populations.

It’s been too long, hasn’t it? I’ve got friends asking me to write again, friends that are hilariously cajoling me into writing again, and absolute nutjobs that leave the craziest comments on old posts.

This latter comment is especially hilarious for it’s illiterate ramblings against evolution, repetition of the belief that no one is required to pay income taxes, and then a sudden divergence into the necessity of vitamins and seed eating to prevent cancer. The list of seeds we should eat are apple, peach, and apricot seeds, which as any good biologist can tell you are filled with cyanide. If you’re skipping the fruit and going straight for the seeds, it doesn’t take but a handful at once to provide a lethal dose. But hey, you don’t get cancer! I especially liked the National Cancer Institute’s description of a drug name Laetrile based on these seed products. “Laetrile has shown little anticancer effect in laboratory studies, animal studies, or human studies. The side effects of laetrile are like the symptoms of cyanide poisoning.”

Yes, it’s been too long since I’ve blogged.

Why did I stop blogging?

The short and sweet answer is that I suddenly got tired of it. It felt more like a chore than it did fun. As the amount of time I poured into school skyrocketed (and so did the amount of writing for school), it was hard to enjoy blogging.

I’m also completely done with these eternal debates about evolution and creationism. At least online anyway. Like the above comments shows, the number of people who froth at the mouth and show up to leave comments far outweighs those interested in learning how science works. We live in the age of Google. In 30 seconds you can get more information about a subject than you can read in 30 days. An understanding of evolution and how it works is not lacking because of a lack of information. Therefore, I’m much more interested in having real conversions with people, face to face, who actually want to learn how things work, not just argue. The time I’ve spent at church talking with people about it on a number of occasions is just so much more fulfilling than blogging about it.

I also face the problem of being a fairly good but extremely slow writer. One story in particular illustrates this better than anything. Not long after we got married, my wife was working on this very lengthy paper for a class. She called me in to ask for help with wording a single sentence. I spent 30 minutes and finally came up with wording that we both liked. So out of 10 pages, I wrote one sentence. When she got the paper back (with a good grade of course), the professor had underline that single sentence and written in the margins, “Nicely worded!” (I’ll smile about that for the rest of my life). But the problem you see is that I can’t spend that long writing a post to Ocellated. There’s not enough hours in the day.

So What Comes Next?

I didn’t want to post again until I really knew what I wanted to say. I think where I am right now is that I would love to post about science. There’s just too many cool little things that I learn to not share them with anyone. And I have fun whenever I can taking pictures, so there’s no better medium than the web for sharing the fruits of that labor.

I promise nothing. I certainly won’t be posting every day. Maybe once a week. Maybe once a month. We’ll just have to see how it goes. But I’d definitely like to get back to talking about science, birds in particular, and I’ve got a few papers that are worth sharing due to their general “cool factor.”

I can’t just leave you with nothing

So for all three of you still checking the blog, I’ll leave you with a few pictures. I have been busy working at photography when I have the time, and I’ve posted many of these quite some time ago, but never wrote a post announcing them. Here’s a list of the recent galleries. Some of the pictures are of course better than others.

• San Antonio Lakes, 12-27-06
• Marfa, TX 12-18 to 12-19-06
• Christmas Bird Counts 2006
• San Angelo State Park, 12-8 to 12-10-06
• OH Ivie Reservoir, 12-2-06
• Forth Worth Nature Center, 11-25-06
• San Angelo Birding, Nov. 2006
• S Tx Birding Festival 2006
• Davis Mountains and Lake Balmorhea, 10-2006

The trip to Marfa, TX (which is in deep southwest TX north of Big Bend National Park, was probably one of the most enjoyable though. I managed to get a couple of incredible pictures of a juvenile Red-tailed Hawk.

There’s more in that album too. And speaking of pictures, I’ve got lots more to process from recent trips which I’ll be posting shortly.

A reader sent in a link to this video. It’s our old friends Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron, the creationists that have names sounding suspiciously like adult entertainers. I’ve mentioned them before as making on the worst evolution videos I’ve ever seen. This clip’s much shorter, though just as bad.

While I do find them extremely funny, deep down they really sadden me. This level of scholarship aint what we’re called to as Christians. Any person on the street can say, “Ok Ray, what about the pineapple or coconut? Where’s their pull tab?” And they know this. It’s all a game of showmanship. They’re not concerned with actually making good arguments. At the end of the day, they’re concerned with making arguments they know will go over with their audience.

They also fail to understand the most basic aspects of science, namely that it does not attempt to proclaim the underlying meaning of everything. While one could try to explain that to them, I fear it would be every creationist’s worst nightmare.

… as the famous line from Monty Python goes.

Though I’ve recently felt close. I survived a test on Monday, with another one this afternoon.

In addition, tonight I start a 5 week series in the university class at church on the evolution / religion issue, and I’ve been spending a lot of time getting that prepared.

Here’s how the schedule looks to be shaping up.

• Week 1 — What is Science (briefly), natural selection, sexual selection.
• Week 2 — Large scale evolutionary change, the fossil record, genetics, biogeography, human evolution.
• Week 3 — early Genesis, nature of science, nature of religion, history of the church’s response to the theory of evolution.
• Week 4 — Christian frameworks for interfacing with science and religion — youth earth creationists, old earth creationists, intelligent design creationists, and evolutionary creationists.
• Week 5 — discussion. You can bet I’ll come prepared with plenty of open-ended questions in case the audience needs some prompting.

Not to leave you without something to look at though, I’ve put up some pictures of an outing a couple of weeks ago to a local ranch, where my university’s biology department hosts an annual Bioblitz, identifying every species regardless of taxa they possibly can.

I managed to get one picture in particular that I just really like.

Another highlight of the weekend was this Hoary Bat, a species I had previously only seen in pictures. They are arguably the most beautiful of bats found in the U.S.

More from me if I survive today.

A study reported by National Geographic News places the U.S. near the very end of a shameful list.

Yes, only Turkey rejects evolution more than the United States.

The reasons are what you’d expect — religion — but even I was surprised by the low percentage. Only 14% of U.S. adults thought that evolution was “definitely true.” Oh, I could rant and rave about the way evolution is a theory with every bit as much footing as our other theories in science. I could point out that science seeks truth with a lower case t, not ultimate meaning. I could point out the utility of science, and that the 86% of U.S. evolution rejectors already turn to evolution when they seek medical care, and that in our lifetimes, our knowledge of evolution and its application to medicine will increasingly deepen. Indeed, the article makes this point for me.

Third, the study found that adults with some understanding of genetics are more likely to have a positive attitude toward evolution.

I could do all these things, but as they say, you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.

National Geographic also offers a great solution to this problem. An excellent article by David Quammen titled Was Darwin Wrong? which appeared in the print edition of the November 2004 magazine. (Alas, the online version lacks the pretty pictures.)

I also offer my own solution. It’s meager, and perhaps a little incomplete. (I could add more to it while condensing it some to make it tighter). But I like to think it’s not bad. My old article on the basics of evolution. Though I’m but a humble grad student, the U.S. would do well to read it. At least 86 percent of them would.

In my week long break, there were a bunch of things that I should have blogged about. Hardly having the time to cover any of them in depth, I’ll simply include a list with some links for your perusal.

• Perhaps the biggest story I missed in my week off was Kansas. The state board of education got an “anti-science” cleansing in the primary elections. Several republicans that were vehemently opposed to properly teaching science were replaced by moderate republicans, most notably Connie Morris. MSNBC covers the details and describes just how crazy life in Kansas is.
  

  Control of the school board has slipped into, out of and back into conservative Republicans’ hands since 1998, resulting in anti-evolution standards in 1999, evolution-friendly ones in 2001 and anti-evolution ones again last year.

  And for more on the political math in the election, see this post on Red State Rabble, a good source for Kansas politics as they relate to education.

• NASA has joined the search for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker by using air planes and “lasers” to map vegetation and identify potential habitat. While I lean on the side that the bird is extinct, it may be very interesting to see what they can learn about the habitat through techniques like this. I think every grad student studying ecology should get their own laser equipped NASA aircraft.
• In a new study, Sooty Shearwaters have been found to migrate over 40,000 miles in a single year. There are a couple of great write-ups on this story from the BBC and The Australian, as well as this site, which also included a nice picture gallery. At these distances, the birds would easily claim the title of longest migration in the world from Artic Tern. However, I might slightly quibble with how we define migration. Shearwaters and other tube-nosed birds (like Albatross) are ideally suited to cruise the open oceans. It is their habitat. It doesn’t mean this isn’t impressive. Just that perhaps it’s still impressive when a bird like the Arctic Tern makes the trip between poles to find favorable habitat.
• I had no idea that high polar latitudes and temperatures lower than -176°F could cause psychedelic clouds. Here’s the story, some really nice pictures, oh and leave it to the British to ruin the moment and kill the beauty.
• The latest edition of Carnival of the Spineless (all about invertebrates) was held over at Words and Pictures. There were a number of very interesting posts, including (I would like to think) two (here and here) from yours truly.

Newsweek carried a depressing article this morning. It seem that if parents are tired of God’s little angels, they can send them off to creation camp for the summer. And naturally for those so inclined, there’s an atheist camp for the little tikes too.

Now I know this shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise to me. I imagine there’s a summer camp for just about every demographic imaginable, including vegan black angus cattle ranching children. But it’s downright depressing and for a couple of reasons.

First, it just deepens the divide that much further. Apparently before the kids are even ready to fight about it, there parents are stirring the pot. I understand (and strongly support) teaching your kids values as they grow up. But creation camp? Why don’t we just start making the villains in two year old’s stories field biologists.

Secondly, if you’re indoctrinating your kid in this way from a young age, it’s going to be a very painful process for both you and them when they start asking questions. For example, one of the organizations mentioned in the article also offers a dinosaur dig.

Experience a paleontology dig in a protected setting. You’ll participate in uncovering several dinosaur skeletons. Along with working in the hands–on dig, you’ll learn about flood geology, the Biotic Message Theory, and visit local natural wonders!

Ah, a protected setting! Thank God. Those paleontologists are terrifying people.

Let me suggest something to these parents. If they think exposing their children to dinosaurs is going to convince them that we live in a world 6,000 years old, they may not have thought this out to its logical conclusion. These camps set the stage for a very painful process for any kid smart enough to read a few books and ask a few questions.

This is pain and misery — both for the kid and the family — that’s unnecessary.

And finally, I have one other objection to Christian summer camps. I think that many times, they take the euphoria that comes with sleep deprivation and turn it into the power of God. It’s a tough call. I’m not against having a bunch of Christian kids get together for a fun experience. But God does not exist (nor work most powerfully) only on summer vacations. And I think kids would do quite well to learn this message, starting from their parents.

Not long ago, George Gilder — one of the founders of the Discovery Institute — wrote a piece called Evolution and Me for the print edition of National Review. (It’s online at the Discovery Institute though).

Yesterday in a shockingly violent manner, John Derbyshire (also at the National Review) was caught mercilessly pummeling Gilder’s piece beyond recognition. It’s nice to see that the National Review is keeping it in house.

Derbyshire’s piece, though long, is a poignant response to Gilder’s article, and includes some good insights.

I’ll also say that I write the following with some reluctance. It’s a wearying business, arguing with Creationists. Basically, it is a game of Whack-a-Mole. They make an argument, you whack it down. They make a second, you whack it down. They make a third, you whack it down. So they make the first argument again. This is why most biologists just can’t be bothered with Creationism at all, even for the fun of it. It isn’t actually any fun. Creationists just chase you round in circles. It’s boring.

While Gilder argues that throwing off the search for natural (that is material) means of explaining the world around us is the only way science will break new ground, Derbyshire points out that on the contrary, biology is just hitting it’s golden age and evolution is squarely at the center of it all.

Speciation via evolution underpins all of modern biology, both pure and applied. Note that in the latter category fall such things as new cures for diseases and genetic defects, new crops, new understandings of the brain, with consequences for pedagogy and psychology, and so on. To say to biologists: “Look, I want you to drop all this nonsense about evolution and listen to me,” is like walking into a room full of pilots and aeronautical engineers and telling them that classical aerodynamics is all hogwash.

Biologists are of all scientists least in need of a new metaphysic. Neurophysiology aside, it is in the “hard” sciences that our epistemological underwear is showing. When physicists have to resort to explanations involving teeny strings vibrating in scrunched-up eleven-dimensional spaces a trillion trillion trillion trillionth of an inch across, or cosmologists try to tell us that entire universes are proliferating every nanosecond like bacteria in a petri dish, there is a case to be made for a metaphysical overhaul. Not that work in these fields has come to a baffled dead stop, as George seems to imply. Far from it; the problem in fundamental physics and cosmology is not so much that we have run out of theories, as that we have too many theories. I’ll grant that there are epistemological issues, though.

Biology, by contrast, really has no outstanding epistemological problems. With the tools of modern genomics at its disposal, it is in fact going through a phase of great energy and excitement, so that biologists are much too busy to be bothered with epistemological issues. To modify the simile I offered above: Creationists are walking into that room full of pilots and aeronautical engineers right at the peak of the Golden Age of flight, around 1930. “Hey, those machines of yours don’t really fly, you know…”

He then hits the nail squarely on the head by pointing out the utter and total emptiness of intelligent design.

That brings us to the second problem that scientists have with George’s system: After being around for many years, it has not produced any science. George’s own Discovery Institute was established in 1990; the offshoot Center for Science and Culture (at first called the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture) in 1992. That is an aggregate 30 years. Where is the science? In all those years, not a single paper of scientific standing has come out of (nor even, to the best of my knowledge, been submitted by) the DI or the CSC. I am certainly willing to be corrected here. If the DI or CSC have any papers of scientific standing — published or not — I shall post links to them to NRO for qualified readers to scrutinize.

Scientists discover things. That’s what they do. In fast-growing fields like genomics, they discover new things almost daily — look into any issue of Science or Nature. What has the Discovery Institute discovered this past 16 years? To stretch my simile further: Creationists are walking into that room full of pilots and aeronautical engineers right at the peak of the Golden Age of flight, never having flown or designed any planes themselves. Are they really surprised that they get a brusque reception? [emphasis in original]

With so much of the objections to evolutionary theory coming from the political right, I’m always happy to see conservatives like Derbyshire (or George Will or Charles Krauthammer for that matter) trying to correct the record. I’d be just fine with de-politicizing science in our culture.

The big news today is that Kent Hovind, one of the most prominent young earth creationists, has been arrested on 58 federal counts, including evasion of taxes and making threats against investigators. He also allegedly payed his employees with cash while calling them “missionaries” to avoid taxes, and made repeated withdrawls under the $10,000 limit to avoid reporting the transactions. His wife was arrested too, with 44 charges filed against her. The Pensacola News Journal provides the details.

Hovind represents the absolute worst of Christian objectors to evolutionary theory. Long before the federal charges came, even before the state closed down his Dinosaur Adventure Land for lack of a building permit, he’s been lying his way through every argument he makes.

While the pessimist in me doubts it, I really wish this would serve for a wake up call to the many Christians who will accept arguments they want to hear, and ignore the reliability or integrity of the source.