Evolve the vote?

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Barack Obama in Lima - November 2nd President Obama at a rally in Lima, Ohio, on Friday. Photo via Barack Obama.

You may have heard that there’s an election happening in the United States today. It’s been ten months of “campaign season” since the early Republican party primary elections in Iowa and New Hampshire, and the two presidential campaigns and their various allies have raised and spent going on two billion (billion!) dollars on advertising and campaigning and probably also consultants’ fees.

This seems like an awfully expensive and inefficient way to choose someone to run a government, which is to say an awfully expensive and inefficient way to work together to decide upon and achieve common goals. Winston Churchill famously noted that democracy is the worst form of government “except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” But Churchill was really only talking about democracy in comparsion to other human forms of government. The living world contains all sorts of examples of individuals coordinating their actions for mutual benefit, and none of them need political action committees to do it.

Is there a better approach to group organization somewhere else on the tree of life? Let’s consider a few options:

Flock of starlings Starlings flocking together don’t communicate via attack ads. Photo by t.klick.

Flocking: Many animals forage and travel in groups that coordinate their movements. This may be best studied in birds: individuals within the flock watch and react to other nearby individuals, which lets them spend less effort watching for predators [$a] or finding food [$a].

This seems like it might have an obvious application to human government — we’ll just all agree to take our cues from the people nearest us to decide whether we need to subsidize agriculture or preemptively invade an oil-producing nation. Actually, now that I think about it, this sounds pretty much like what we’re doing already.

Dominance hierarchy: Many animals establish some sort of hierarchy within social groups, which decides who gets precedence in conflicts over food, or preference for mates. In wolf packs, for instance, social rank seems to be strongly related to age and reproductive status [$a], with relative ranking mediating food sharing or division of labor within the pack.

Wolf Noble-looking, sure, but no basis for a system of goverment. Photo by Tancread.

Unfortunately for human governance, dominance within wolf packs is structured by familial relationships — so it’s not going to translate very well for decision making at any level greater than individual precincts, or maybe individual school districts in some of the more rural parts of the country. Which is just as well, because I don’t particularly want to share this elk I’ve just caught. Mmm, elk.

Quorum sensing: Many species of bacteria change their behavior and activity when they’re in big groups [PDF]. To achieve this, individual cells produce signalling molecules at a predictable rate. As they detect more signalling compound, they can “know” that there are more cells of their species nearby, and can begin to do things that only make sense when there are lots of cells in one place. Different bacterial species use this approach to “decide” whether to begin a growth phase that harms an infected human, to start making chemicals that kill off competitors, or to generate bioluminescence for squid.

So, what would government by quorum sensing look like? Well, clearly we’d just all gather at some location, and, when there were enough of us present, we’d build a bridge or start a school or whatever it is that needs doing. I foresee no complications whatsoever with this approach.◼

Seriously, though, people. If you’re a U.S. citizen, you should go find your fucking polling place, and please vote Sensible.

References

Clark, C. and M. Mangel. 1984. Foraging and flocking strategies: Information in an uncertain environment. American Naturalist 123:626–641. DOI: 10.1086/284228.

Krebs, J., M. MacRoberts and J. Cullen. 1972. Flocking and feeding in the great tit Parus major-an experimental study. Ibis 114:507–530. 10.1111/j.1474-919X.1972.tb00852.x.

Mech, L. D. 1999. Alpha status, dominance, and division of labor in wolf packs. Canadian Journal of Zoology 77:1196–1203. DOI: 10.1139/z99-099.

Miller, M. and B. Bassler. 2001. Quorum sensing in bacteria. Annual Reviews in Microbiology 55:165–199. DOI: 10.1146/annurev.micro.55.1.165.

Powell, G. V. N. 1974. Experimental analysis of the social value of flocking by starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) in relation to predation and foraging. Animal Behaviour 22:501–505. DOI: 0.1016/S0003-3472(74)80049-7.

Waters, C. M. and B. L. Bassler. 2005. Quorum sensing: Cell-to-cell communication in bacteria. Annual Review of Cell and Developmental Biology 21:319–46. DOI: 10.1146/annurev.cellbio.21.012704.131001.

Down to the wire

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With less than two days to go before Minnesotans put the right to marriage up for a majority vote, the latest poll — and, I’m guessing, the last one before Election Day — finds a majority of Minnesotan voters opposed to amending the state constitution to ban same-sex marriage. Here’s the report directly from Public Policy Polling:

The more interesting findings on our final Minnesota poll deal with the state’s high profile amendments to ban gay marriage and require voter identification. We find both narrowly trailing. 45% of voters say they’ll vote for the gay marriage ban, compared to 52% who are opposed to it. …

The marriage amendment is trailing because of a massive generational divide. Seniors support it by a 57/40 margin but every other age group opposes it, including a 36/62 margin against it among voters under 30. Republicans support it (79%) and Democrats oppose it (76%) in almost equal numbers, but independents tip the balance by opposing it 41/55.

Polling historically overreports support for marriage equality, and by margins more than big enough to wipe out a 52-45 majority. (E.g., California’s Proposition 8.) Still, this is the first time we’ve seen better than 50% opposition to the amendment after a couple months of statistical ties. And that age gap means I made exactly the right choice when I signed up to spend Election Day doing get-out-the-vote work in the neighborhoods adjoining the University of Minnesota.

I’m hopeful, and scared to get too hopeful.◼

Science online, ovulate the vote edition

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Voting Apparently there’s an election coming up. Photo by KCIvey.

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Apparently I’m a “social media maven”

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So I was interviewed, along with several other University of Minnesota biologists, for an article on the UMN College of Biological Sciences website about the use of online media (mainly Twitter) by scientists. You may find that article here.◼

Carnival of Evolution, November 2012

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Stay a little longer Photo by Mark J P.

The monthly compendium of online writing about all things evolution-y is live at Sorting out Science.◼

The Molecular Ecologist: Tallying differences between species — across the whole genome

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Muchárik bielokrký (Ficedula albicollis); Collared Flycatcher A collared flycatcher. Photo by Photo Nature.

This week at the Molecular Ecologist, I discuss a new, genome-wide study of genetic differentiation between two closely related species — the collared flycatcher and the pied flycatcher.

Equipped with the core genome sequence, the team collected still more sequence data from ten male flycatchers of each species, and aligned these additional sequences to the genome sequence, identifying millions of sites that vary within the two species, and millions of sites where they share variants. They scanned through all these sites to identify points in the genome where differences between the two small samples of flycatchers were completely fixed — that is, sites where all the collared flycatcher sequences carried one variant, and all the pied flycatcher sequences carried a different variant. The frequency of these fixed differences varied considerably across the genome, but there are dozens of spots where they’re especially concentrated, forming peaks of differentiation.

To learn what all those “islands of divergence” could tell us about how the two flycatchers came to be different species, go read the whole thing.◼

Nothing in Biology Makes Sense: Tuning the molecular clock

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Clock Photo by Earls37a.

Over at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense!, guest poster Gustavo Bravo explains why evolutionary biologists spend a lot of time thinking about how frequently DNA mutations occur.

There are two ways in which we can translate the number of substitutions between a pair of lineages into absolute dates. First, we can calibrate the clock against absolute times resulting from independent evidence such as fossil or geological dates. And secondly, we can measure directly the rate of mutation by comparing DNA or protein sequence data in present day organisms. Because the fossil record for some groups is incomplete and the dating of geological events remains controversial, some of those clocks are likely to produce inaccurate estimates of time.

To learn how re-setting the “molecular clock” has changed our thinking about human evolution, go read the whole thing.◼

Plants are creepy, too

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Christopher Martine’s web series about all things botanical, Plants are cool, too! (which I’ve mentioned before) has a new episode up just for Halloween. It’s on carnivorous plants, natch.

Elsewhere on the science-y web, Scicurious talks about real-life werewolves, and Kate Clancy offers a terrifying peek at her schedule. Happy trick-or-treat-ing, if you’re doing that sort of thing on a school night.◼

You should watch: Cloud Atlas

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MOTHs in a china shop. Image via TeeVee in DC.

So last night I saw Cloud Atlas, the big new film directed by the Wachowski siblings and Tom Tykwer. I don’t know what I was expecting, exactly, beyond that it’s based on a widely respected and reputedly un-filmable novel and that I haven’t cared much for anything the Wachowskis have directed since the original Matrix. But, well, wow.

Cloud Atlas weaves together a set of stories set hundreds of years apart, using the same core cast of actors — including Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, Hugo Weaving, Jim Sturgess, and Ben Whishaw — in different-but-related roles. If that sounds potentially unwieldy already, consider that many of the actors switch genders and races (to widely varying degrees of effectiveness) from story to story, and that in fact each story is really a completely different genre. There’s a Merchant Ivory-style tale about a nineteenth-century lawyer voyaging home from a slave-buying expedition, a farce that might as well have been an episode of that BBC sitcom about life in a retirement home, a mystery thriller set in the 1970s, a quest across a postapocalyptic wilderness, a tragedy about a miserable old-timey homosexual who’s composing a groundbreaking symphony in prewar Britain, and a Blade Runner-style science fiction action film.

All these films are intercut so as to highlight, with varying success, the overlaps and interconnections between their stories. The melody at the core of the symphony composed in prewar Britain recurrs in a San Francisco record shop in the 1970s, in the slums of futuristic Neo-Seoul, and among the ruins of nuclear war. In the farce, a bumbling old publisher writes a memoir which is adapted into a movie that inspires revolution centuries later. People are made captive, and set free; they help and hinder each other in their various quests. Multiple characters in multiple stories muse aloud about the interconnectedness of all people and the transmigration of souls, which is mostly unnecessary given how often we can see that, if the stories don’t quite repeat themselves, they unmistakably rhyme.

Whether or not you like Cloud Atlas will boil down to how well you think it weaves all these stories together — I came away almost entirely satisfied. I’m a sucker for big and ambitious and wide-ranging, and while there’s more than a few moments of fridge logic within the individual stories that comprise Cloud Atlas, I walked out of the theater looking forward to seeing it again.


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Science online, shaky verdict edition

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Pills 3 Photo by e-MagineArt.com.

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