Gunman shoots eight, kills two at Unitarian church

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Yesterday, Jim D. Adkisson allegedly walked into a performance of a children’s musical at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church in Knoxville, Tennessee and shot eight people, two of whom are now dead. Why?

According to a search warrant for Mr. Adkisson’s house filed by the police, during interrogation Mr. Adkisson admitted to the shooting and said “he had targeted the church because of its liberal leanings and his belief that all liberals should be killed because they were ruining the country.”

Local news site Knoxnews.com says that police found books by Bill O’Reilly, Michael Savage, and Sean Hannity at Adkisson’s house. Of course, those authors right-wing nutjobs didn’t tell Adkisson to shoot Unitarians (at least, not having read their books or absorbed much of their radio and TV shows, I assume they didn’t) – they’ve only made their living comparing the political opposition to terrorists, despots, and the insane. They can’t be responsible for some crazy guy in Tennessee taking it all literally.

My self-righteous fulmination aside, I believe that the people of Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church would appreciate your thoughts and prayers.

I have no idea what they’re talking about

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Today’s New York Times Books section has a hand-wringing piece about the effect of Internet use on reading habits. I think the main point is that reading online shortens and fragments your attention span, but I never did finish the piece because I got distracted reading a New Yorker article on medical marijuana and a Times Magazine piece about Afghanistan while I set up an analysis on the UI supercomputing cluster and checked Facebook. And blogged about it.

(Meanwhile, I’m almost finished with the third volume of Neal Stephenson’s excellent, and lengthy, Baroque cycle, printed on good old dead trees.)

Chinese nationalism reborn

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Photo by dave watts.

This week in the New Yorker there’s a great piece about resurgent feelings of nationalism in the post-Tienanmen generation. It delves beneath the recent news of anti-Western protests reacting against criticism of China’s treatment of Tibet to trace their philosophical and emotional roots. For instance, it turns out that the new Chinese nationalism has connections to American conservatism. There’s also a worrying sense that the new Chinese generation isn’t so worried about democracy, so long as they prosper:

“Chinese people have begun to think, One part is the good life, another part is democracy,” Liu went on. “If democracy can really give you the good life, that’s good. But, without democracy, if we can still have the good life why should we choose democracy?”

I guess “wiki” sounded weird once, too

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Google has officially opened Knol, its answer to Wikipedia, for contributions from the general public. The principle innovation of Knol is that contributors will be encouraged to use their real identities, and primarily contribute on subjects within their own expertise. There are also apparently tools explicitly designed for collaboration.

Knol is still very much a work in progress: there are knols (= “units of knowledge,” natch) on “Leadership 101” and ganglion cysts and how to write a knol; but, as of right now, no hits on a search for “evolution,” “bicycle,” “Mennonite,” or even “plant.” Whereas Wikipedia certainly has extensive entries for each, probably including exhaustive lists of references to the terms in the films of Martin Scorsese.

For more, see the Official Google Blog and coverage by Wired.

“Evolution never takes a vacation”

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ResearchBlogging.org
This week’s column from Olivia Judson gives some examples of recent, rapid evolutionary change. She cites the evolutionary change seen in the beak size of Darwin’s finches [$-a], the flowering time of Californian field mustard [$-a], and the head shape and diet of Croatian wall lizards [$-a], but misses one of my favorite recent cases: the weed Crespis sancta.

This little plant recently moved into urban Montpelier, France, wherever its seeds land on cracks in the sidewalk or end up in patches of landscaping. And that urban landscape poses a problem for C. sancta – its seeds normally disperse like a dandelion’s, by floating on little feathery vanes. But if a plant is surrounded by pavement, most seeds that disperse this way will end up on pavement, unable to take root. So, as a recent study [$-a] shows, natural selection has favored a mutant C. sancta that doesn’t have vanes on its seeds. Vane-less seeds land right next to their parent plant, where there’s sure to be soil.

Of course, there are lots of instances of evolution in action that Judson hasn’t cataloged – because, as she rightly says, it’s going on everywhere, all the time: “Evolution never takes a vacation.”

References

P. R. Grant (2006). Evolution of Character Displacement in Darwin’s Finches Science, 313 (5784), 224-226 DOI: 10.1126/science.1128374

S. J. Franks, S. Sim, A. E. Weis (2007). Rapid evolution of flowering time by an annual plant in response to a climate fluctuation PNAS, 104 (4), 1278-1282 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0608379104

A. Herrel, K. Huyghe, B. Vanhooydonck, T. Backeljau, K. Breugelmans, I. Grbac, R. Van Damme, D. J. Irschick (2008). Rapid large-scale evolutionary divergence in morphology and performance associated with exploitation of a different dietary resource PNAS, 105 (12), 4792-4795 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0711998105

P.-O. Cheptou, O. Carrue, S. Rouifed, A. Cantarel (2008). Rapid evolution of seed dispersal in an urban environment in the weed Crepis sancta PNAS, 105 (10), 3796-3799 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0708446105

Berea College: Wait, there’s more!

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And but so after posting about Berea College’s incredible commitment to no-tuition higher education, I actually got around to looking over their website. And I found this:

The Preamble to Berea’s Great Commitments begins, “Berea College, founded by ardent abolitionists and radical reformers, continues today as an educational institution still firmly rooted in its historic purpose ‘to promote the cause of Christ.’ ” The question arises, “Does one have to be a Christian to promote the cause of Christ?” Berea’s historical record says no. [Emphasis added]

So Berea is a Christian school, and its tuition-free model arises directly from what looks to be a highly progressive and inclusive faith statement. If Berea weren’t primarily a teaching school, I might be strongly inclined to look there when it came time for my first faculty position.

College, tuition-free

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Photo by blueathena7.

At Berea College in the Kentucky Appalachians, students don’t pay tuition. At all. They’re supported, instead, by working on campus or at the College-owned hotel, and by Berea’s $1.1 billion endowment. The New York Times says that the model is attracting interest from other schools in the era of exploding tuition costs:

… the proportion of low-income undergraduates at the nation’s wealthiest colleges has been declining, as measured by the percentage receiving federal Pell Grants, for families with income under about $40,000. At most top colleges, only 8 to 15 percent of students receive Pell grants.

At Berea, more than three-quarters of the students receive Pell grants.

According to the Times article, Berea’s model comes at the cost of high selectivity (only 22 percent of applicants were accepted this year), and faculty salaries. Nevertheless, Berea is an effective reminder to other American universities that the point of higher education should be to help students improve their lives. And it’s hard to do that if you don’t make a real effort to provide access to lower-income students.

Creationist research: Not just wrong – redundant, too!

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Virologist-blogger ERV takes down a Creationist study of bacterial antibiotic resistance, pointing out (1) the methods are flawed, (2) there’s no replication, (3) the interpretation is bogus, and – my personal favorite – (4) someone else has already done the same experiment:

Look, I know relatively little about bacteria. They arent the ‘micro’ in microbiology Im most interested in. But I can do a basic PubMed search to find a paper that analyzed the fitness cost of antibacterial resistance in Serratia marcescens the hard way (ie, the right way): A Fitness Cost Associated With the Antibiotic Resistance Enzyme SME-1 β-Lactamase. [hyperlink from original]

On the Media on Science 2.0: Sounds good to us!

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[Rant alert – I’m starting to get real tired of this nonsense. Although it is proving to be good blog fodder, and it got me published in the letters column of Science. Maybe it’s not so bad. And but so …]

Wired editor Chris Anderson is on this week’s On the Media, talking up the Petabyte Age. And OTM pretty much swallows it whole.


Photo by Pixelsior.

The Petabyte Age, as Anderson describes it, is the present time in which massive volumes of data (petabytes, in fact) are supposedly marking the end of the scientific method. If you actually read the Wired story, you’ll discover that Anderson has a pretty shaky grasp on what the scientific method actually is, and apparently thinks that “statistical analysis” is not hypothesis testing. As it turns out, it is.

On OTM interview, Anderson recants the sensationalist headline, possibly in response to the long string of critical comments it drew on Wired.com. But he repeats all of the mistakes and nonsense that generated the criticism: Craig Venter sequenced some seawater without a prior hypothesis, and Google summarizes lots of data to look for patterns without prior hypotheses; ipso facto, no one needs hypotheses anymore. (Anderson insists on talking about “theories” rather than hypotheses, which only highlights his unfamiliarity with basic philosophy of science.) The interviewer, Brooke Gladstone, pretty much lets him have his say. Does she then consult an actual working scientist, or, better yet, a philosopher of science? Not so much.

This is not the sort of coverage I’ve come to expect from OTM, which is basically in the running with RadioLab for the title of My Favorite Public Radio Show. Normally, OTM specializes in pointing out exactly this sort of failing in other news shows – interviewing pundits without actually talking to people who work in the fields in question. But it would seem that they don’t feel the scientific freaking method is important enough to cover properly.

Specialization: Not always a dead end

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Ruellia sp. – probably hummingbird specialized.
Photo by Tim Waters.

ResearchBlogging.org One of the big questions in evolutionary biology is about reversibility. That is, once an organism evolves down a path of adaptation to a particular climate or biological community, how easy is it for natural selection to make a U-turn and go back to a less specialized state? Many evolutionary changes are probably irreversible – an idea that was classically expressed in “Dollo’s Law”: “An organism is unable to return, even partially, to a previous stage already realized in the ranks of its ancestors.” But many evolutionary changes may not be irreversible – and it’s not always easy to predict which ones those are.


Ruellia brittoniana – probably bee-pollinated.
Photo by petrichor.

A new study in this month’s issue of Evolution aims to answer this question [$-a] for a group of flowers in the genus Ruellia. The authors, Tripp and Manos, use a phylogeny to reconstruct the evolutionary history of pollination syndromes, groups of floral traits like color, nectar tube length, scent, &c, that are associated with pollination by different groups of animals.

For instance, bright red flowers with longish, narrow nectar tubes, not much scent, and large volumes of dilute nectar (like the Ruellia species in the upper figure), are almost always pollinated by hummingbirds; blue flowers with short nectar tubes, stronger scent, and small volumes of concentrated nectar (like Ruellia brittoniana in the lower figure) tend to be pollinated by bees or other insects. Other Ruellia species are pollinated by hawkmoths (white flowers, very long nectar tubes) or bats (yellow flowers, short nectar tubes, lots of dilute nectar, strong scent). Generally, syndromes associated with a single, small group of pollinators (hummingbirds, hawkmoths, or bats) are considered “specialized”, while syndromes associated with many more different pollinators (bees and insects) are not.

With a phylogeny of the genus Ruellia, Tripp and Manos use the pollination syndromes of currently existing Ruellia species to estimate what pollination syndromes their ancestors may have had. Then they determine how common transitions between pollination syndromes have been in the history of Ruellia, and whether any pollination syndromes are “dead ends” – that is, whether Ruellia species that evolve to specialize on, say, hummingbird pollination are “stuck” that way.

Surprisingly, Tripp and Manos found that some specialized pollination syndromes are dead ends, but one, the hummingbird syndrome, isn’t. Hawkmoth- and bat-pollinated species tended to have evolved from ancestors with the bee/insect syndrome, and they seem to be “stuck” once they get there. But in several cases, hummingbird-specialized ancestors have given rise to bee/insect-pollinated species. This has never been seen before in other, similar groups of plants. Hummingbirds are generally thought to be more efficient pollinators than bees, so while it makes sense for flowers to evolve from using bees to using birds, it’s not clear how natural selection would work in the opposite direction.

Reference
Tripp, E.A., Manos, P.S. (2008). Is Floral Specialization an Evolutionary Dead-End? Pollination System Transitions in Ruellia (Acanthaceae). Evolution, 62(7), 1712-1737. DOI: 10.1111/j.1558-5646.2008.00398.x