Darwin and Spencer in the Middle East [The Primate Diaries]
It is a common argument by those who are opposed to evolution's implication for religious belief to label Darwin as a social Darwinist and a racist. Adrian Desmond and James Moore's book Darwin's Sacred Cause has gone a long way towards dispelling any claims that Darwin sought to justify black inferiority (in fact, as they show, countering such arguments was an important part of Darwin's work). However, the claim that Darwin inspired social Darwinism is a persistent argument and those that proffer it will stoop to any level in order to discredit him. As I pointed out in my series Deconstructing Social Darwinism, the political theory is incredibly inconsistent but the central tenets were formed by Herbert Spencer, not Darwin. Darwin himself largely eschewed politics and economics and felt that Spencer had misconstrued his ideas for his own political ends. However, despite how frequently this fact has been presented the erroneous argument continues to appear over and over again.
Religious fundamentalists such as Jonathan Wells or Harun Yahya (whose book blaming Darwin for Hitler, Stalin, Mao, hemorrhoids, long lines at Starbucks and other terrible evils can be seen in the image above) are well known for this line of thought. However, the latest attempt to label Darwin with this brush is Richard Weikart, an historian at California State University, Stanislaus in his article Was Darwin or Spencer the father of laissez-faire social Darwinism? in the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization.
Weikart's argument is very poorly constructed, as you would expect of someone who works for the Intelligent Design think tank The Discovery Institute and who wrote a book blaming Darwin for Hitler's ideas on eugenics and genocide (a book so powerfully argued that it took a single blog post to refute it). Rather than point out the poor scholarship in his own article I thought it would be more illuminating to look at a case study that offers a novel way of determining whose ideas were interpreted as social Darwinian and whose were viewed as neutral science. I recently discovered such a case study in the form of a PhD dissertation by an historian of Middle Eastern science Marwa Elshakry.
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Wednesday Whatzits: Icelandic sagas, Chaiten, Erta’Ale’s lava lake and a volcano simulator [Eruptions]
Did I mention its a busy week?
The lava lake at Erta'Ale in 2008. Image courtesy of Stromboli Online.
- Our Icelandic saga continues, with more earthquakes and more speculation/information on the parts of Eruptions readers. Keep up the discussion - I'll be fascinated to see who turns out to get closest to what actually happens, prediction-wise. The seismicity has quieted somewhat again in the last 12 hours, so we wait eagerly to see what comes next. Remember, Iceland is the land where volcanoes helped change history, so it is always fun to talk Icelandic volcanism.
- The NASA Earth Observatory has some great new images of Chaiten - and probably best view of the new domes I've seen so far. There was no real plume when the image was shot on March 3, so you can clearly see the dome and dome-collapse material (along with ash) that is filling the old Chaiten caldera. Give it another few years of eruption, and Chaiten might look like a normal volcano again, lacking a strong caldera in profile. Just shows how quickly you can rebuild a volcano.
- With my trip next week to Death Valley, I am going to attempt to have a revived Volcano Profile post up, focusing on Erta'Ale in Ethiopia. So, it was nice to see the volcano make some news this week. The summit lava lake is at unusually high levels, only 20 m below the crater pit's edge. The crater also has an active hornito producing strombolian explosions of lava as well.
- Finally, how come I just found out this existed? It is an online volcano simulator, it is actually pretty darn good, both in information and coolness. Thank you Alaska Museum of Natural History!
JAMA: Vaccinating Kids Protects Unvaccinated Adults [Mike the Mad Biologist]
I've argued many times on this blog that an influenza vaccination policy, as opposed to the non-policy we currently have, would focus on vaccinating the people who are likely to spread the disease. Or as Yogi Berra might have put it, you can't get the flu from someone who doesn't have it.
So who are these germ dispersal units? Children, which why I've remarked that grandparents are being killed by their grandchildren. Theoretical work has suggested that vaccinating 80% of children could massively reduce influenza in the rest of the population. We've also seen the effect of child vaccination with Streptococcus pneumoniae vaccination.
Well, somebody decided to practice TEH SCIENTISMZ! and see if that hypothesis holds for influenza.
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A Worm Free World [Tomorrow's Table]
Check out this great post by Mary M on biofortifed. In it she reviews a new research paper that describes how the use of Bt could potentially save the lives of millions.
You can download a video about the researchers and their work here.
From Mary's post: "For some people, a great deal of the conflama around genetically-engineered (GE) crops has to do with the presence of a pesticide in the plant material--mainly the Bacillus thuringiensis or Bt protein--rather than coating the surface of the plant as organic Bt sprays or chemical-style pesticides would. No matter how many times I explain that there are benefits to this strategy (such as reduced impact on non-target species and on improvements in farm family health among others), it doesn't seem to help. No matter how many times I explain that pesticides aren't the only modification to plants (as we see at Biofortified regularly), it doesn't matter to critics of GE. The fact that plants make their own pesticides? Not interested. And no matter how many times I explain how the Bt proteins work only on species that have the specific receptor for that interaction--and therefore does not affect humans as it would the corn borer pest--it doesn't seem to have any impact. The misplaced fear continues to be used by the critics.ResearchBlogging.org
So when I saw this paper that suggested the Bt protein may be a powerful strategy for improving the lives of impoverished children around the world, all I could do was wonder if that might finally register with those who make unsupported claims of the effects of Bt on humans."
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DNA from the largest bird ever sequenced from fossil eggshells [Not Exactly Rocket Science]
Even extinction and the passing of millennia are no barriers to clever geneticists. In the past few years, scientists have managed to sequence the complete genome of a prehistoric human and produced "first drafts" of the mammoth and Neanderthal genomes. More controversially, some groups have even recovered DNA from dinosaurs. Now, a variety of extinct birds join the ancient DNA club including the largest that ever lived - Aepyornis, the elephant bird.
In a first for palaeontology, Charlotte Oskam from Murdoch University, Perth, extracted DNA from 18 fossil eggshells, either directly excavated or taken from museum collections. Some came from long-deceased members of living species including the emu, an owl and a duck. Others belonged to extinct species including Madagascar's 3-metre tall elephant bird and the giants moas of New Zealand. A few of these specimens are just a few centuries old, but the oldest came from an emu that lived 19,000 years ago.
It turns out that bird eggshells are an excellent source of ancient DNA. They're made of a protein matrix that is loaded with DNA and surrounded by crystals of calcium carbonate. The structure shelters the DNA and acts as a barrier to oxygen and water, two of the major contributors to DNA damage. Eggshells also stop microbes from growing and it seems that ancient ones still do the same. Oskam found that the fossil shells had around 125 times less bacterial DNA than bones of the same species did.
This is important - bacteria are a major problem for attempts to extract ancient DNA and they force scientists to search for uncontaminated sources, like frozen hair. Eggshells, it seems, provide similarly bacteria-free samples. Still, Oskam's team took every precaution to prevent contamination. They used clean rooms and many control samples. Many of their sequences, like those of Aepyornis, were checked by two independent laboratories.
The Aepyornis sequences are particularly encouraging because many scientists have previously tried to extract DNA from the bones of this giant and failed. Eggshells seem like a more promising source and it certainly helps that the eggs of many of these giant species were massive and thick. But Oskam did also recover DNA from a fossil duck egg, which suggests that it should be possible to sequence the genes of even small extinct birds, like the dodo.
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Pocket Science – chameleons hunt with cold-proof tongues and zebrafish babies go blind at night [Not Exactly Rocket Science]
Cold-proof tongue allows early chameleon to catch early insect
Chameleons are some of the most versatile of lizards. They live in baking deserts and freezing mountaintops and part of their success hinges on a weapon that works just as well in the warmth as in the cold - its tongue. Relying on stored elastic power for its ballistic strike, the chameleon's tongue is largely cold-proof. At temperatures that would flummox most reptile muscles, the tongue carries on snatching insects with great efficiency.
Chameleon tongues can reach twice the length of their body in less than a tenth of a second, latching onto prey with a sticky, grasping tip. Rather than pushing it forward with muscle power, like a spear-thrower, the chameleon behaves more like an archer. It ratchets the tongue backwards by slowly contracting its muscles, as if it was drawing an arrow on a bow. It fires by relaxing its muscles, and the whole sticky snare shoots forward on its own momentum. Once the prey is caught, long muscles pull the tongue back into the mouth.
Christopher Anderson and Stephen Deban from the University of South Florida filmed veiled chameleons with a high-speed camera as they shot their tongues at dangling crickets. Their performance certainly improved as the temperature increased from 15 to 35C, but not by much. Even at low temperatures, the tongue shot out with impressive acceleration, speed and power that fell by just 10-20% across a ten degree gradient. When it retracted under muscular control, the effects of the chill were more obvious and a similar gradient led to a 40-60% fall in performance.
By freeing their killer strike from the constraints of temperature, chameleons have been able to exploit chilly windows of opportunity denied to other lizards. They can hunt during the early morning hours when insects are very active and they can expand across a wide range of habitats. They also have to waste less energy on the simple business of keeping warm. After all, why bother with central heating when you can catch food at body temperatures of 3.5C, as some chameleons can?
Reference: PNAS http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0910778107If this link isn't working, read why here
Image by Christopher V Anderson
More from Jennifer Viegas at Discovery News and from NERS on the mayfly-like chameleon that lives mostly as an egg
Zebrafish babies shut off their eyes at night
Many animals find it harder to see in the darkness of night, but the larvae of zebrafish must find it particularly difficult. Every night, they essentially shut down their eyes, losing the ability to see. Fairda Emran found that the retinas of the baby fish responded normally to light during the day, but they were almost totally impassive after 90 minutes of darkness. The fish themselves totally failed to follow a moving target.
The babies' body clocks drove this cycle of blindness. It kicked in every night and even if the fish were kept in darkness for several days, they always anticipated the arrival of daylight by restoring their sight. Only a flash of light at night managed to break this tidy cycle, restoring the zebrafishes' vision at a time when they would normally be blind.
At five days of age, baby zebrafish have just used up all the yolk from their eggs and are starting to find their own food. For them, energy is a precious commodity and eyes are energy-guzzling appliances, even when they're set to standby at night. It makes sense to just shut them off instead.
Reference: PNAS http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0914718107 If this link isn't working, read why here
More from NERS on how animal eyes cope with darkness, including animals that use DNA as lenses, squid that have bacterial flashlights and the bizarre double-eyes of the spookfish,
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A hero in the Philippines [Pharyngula]
The Philippines has a problem with a rising number of AIDS cases every year, and members of the government have been promoting a sensible response: Health Secretary Esperanza Cabral has sponsored a program that distributes free condoms, for instance. You can guess who opposes prophylactics, though.
"The condom business is a multimillion dollar industry that heavily targets the adolescent market at the expense of morality and family life," said Bishop Nereo Odchimar, president of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of the Philippines. He called fidelity and premarital chastity "the only effective way to curb the spread of AIDS."
The Catholics have informed Cabral that she has "one foot in hell." How sweet. They are also actively campaigning against any politician who promotes birth control.
I'm so sorry that the Philippines is so deeply afflicted with forces for insanity and irrationality, but at least they've got brave people like Esperanza Cabral standing up for what is right.
Toyota Prius acceleration incident reported in New York (Reuters)
DETROIT, Mar. 10, 2010 (Reuters) -- Federal regulators said they were looking into a report of another runaway Toyota Prius, this one in Westchester County, New York, where police said a woman pulling out of a driveway zoomed across a busy street and into a stone wall. ... > read full story
"JihadJane" accused of terror plot in Sweden (Reuters)
WASHINGTON, Mar. 10, 2010 (Reuters) -- A Pennsylvania woman has been charged with plotting to kill a Swedish man and trying to recruit fighters via the Internet to commit violent attacks overseas, the U.S. Justice Department said on Tuesday. ... > read full story
Obama effect boosts Nobel Peace Prize nominations (Reuters)
OSLO, Mar. 10, 2010 (Reuters) -- A record 237 people and organizations have been nominated for the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize, with interest boosted by last year's award to President Barack Obama, organizers said on Wednesday. ... > read full story