Photo by blmiers2.A new edition of the Carnival of Evolution is online over at The Atavism. Highlights of the monthly roundup of online writing on all things relating to descent with modification include John Wilkins on evolutionary novelty, Anne Buchanan on disgusting evolutionary storytelling, and Bjørn Østman on Michael Behe. Also represented: recent work from this blog, and from Nothing in Biology Makes Sense!. Go check it out! ◼
Snails crossing. Photo via Nothiing in Biology Makes Sense.The latest post at the collaborative blog Nothing in Biology Makes Sense is from contributor C.J. Jenkins, who describes the fieldwork that’s taken her to the ends of the earth. Or, well, New Zealand, anyway.
A little over a quarter century ago, Curt Lively, noted this adorable little New Zealand snail (Potamopyrgus antipodarum) has sexual and asexual forms that coexist at varying frequencies in lakes across New Zealand. This variation suggests that there are some environments where it is advantageous to reproduce asexually and some environments where it is better to be sexual.
From then on P. antipodarumhas become an excellent system to study the evolution and maintanence of sexual reproduction, a long standing debate in evolutionary biology
Want to contribute to NiB? Drop me an e-mail and tell me what you want to write about. ◼
So yesterday a friend pointed this out on Facebook:
The nation’s leading breast-cancer charity, Susan G. Komen for the Cure, is halting its partnerships with Planned Parenthood affiliates — creating a bitter rift, linked to the abortion debate, between two iconic organizations that have assisted millions of women.
The change will mean a cutoff of hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants, mainly for breast exams.
Planned Parenthood says the move results from Komen bowing to pressure from anti-abortion activists. Komen says the key reason is that Planned Parenthood is under investigation in Congress—a probe launched by a conservative Republican who was urged to act by anti-abortion groups.
Komen cites a new policy to the effect that they have to cut off ties to organizations that are “under investigation.” There’s also some possible influence from a new, anti-abortion Vice President for Public Policy at the cancer charity. But what this boils down to is cowardice.
Susan G. Komen for the cure is an immensely well-regarded organization, with influence and visibility many other charities can only dream of—they’re part of a movement that got NFL players to wear pink, for crying out loud. Faced with controversy trumped up around one of their partner organizations—and a partnership that specifically works to provide breast cancer screenings to women who can’t afford them—Komen could have cashed in on some of that goodwill capital to say “We know Planned Parenthood does good and important work, and we’re standing by them even though some ideologues in Congress are out to get them.”
That would’ve been a little risky, but it also would’ve demonstrated that Komen’s priority is womens’ health, not political gamesmanship.
Instead, Komen decided they’d rather cut services to poor women than risk even a little “controversy.” That’s straight-up cowardice, as I said last night on Twitter. It’s capitulation to political bullies, and it gives the lie to anything Komen might say about the importance they place on fighting and treating cancer.
I’m still getting retweet notifications from my little blast of online indignation; I’m far from the only person who finds this reprehensible. Let me suggest a way we can help Planned Parenthood make up the lost funding, and let Susan G. Komen know exactly how we feel about it: Send Planned Parenthood a donation, and when you get the e-mail confirming it, forward that message to news@komen.org, Komen’s PR contact address. [Edit: When you forward that e-mail, make sure you first delete any personal information that you don’t want Komen to have! I’ve just sent mine.]
Further edit: I am advised by Balloon Juice (via Dan Savage) that Planned Parenthood has established a fund specifically for donations to cover the breast exams Komen is no longer funding. So that’s probably your best bet; I’ve updated the donation link above accordingly.
Still further edit: You can also help make up the funding to Planned Parenthood’s breast cancer screening by buying John Scalzi’s e-books, if you buy before 8 Feb. ◼
Wood thrush, or mercury-poisoning canary? Photo by dermoidhome.◼
Something kind of incredible is going on over at Ta-Nehisi Coates’s place: Bouncing off some typically reprehensible and ahistorical remarks by Ron Paul—who apparently thinks that (1) the U.S. Civil War was started by the North, (2) for the express purpose of ending slavery, even though (3) nonviolent means, such as “compensated emancipation,” could have accomplished that end—Coates is not simply rounding up the contrary evidence, but actually trying to work out whether and how a nonviolent end to the “peculiar institution” could have worked. It’s like a Harry Turtledove novel, except fascinating and good and informative.
Nevertheless, the saving of people is, indeed, a noble goal, and Paul is not without at least the rudiments of a case. Enslaved black people were constructed into an interest representing $3 billion. ($70-75 billion in 21st century money.) But including expenditures, loss of property, loss of life (human capital,) the war, according to Ransom, costs $6.6 billion.
The numbers are clear–the South’s decision to raise an army, encourage sedition among its neighbors, and fire on federal property, was an economic disaster for white America. Moreover, the loss of 600,000 lives, in a war launched to erect an empire on the cornerstone of white supremacy and African slavery, was a great moral disaster for all corners of America.
In the most crude sense, it would have been much “cheaper” for the government to effect a mass purchase. But how?
Spoiler alert: compensated emancipation doesn’t look very practical, especially considering that Southern slaveholders were pretty damned hostile to the idea. But getting to that conclusion is enlightening, and the discussion in Coates’s famous comments section is as well worth your time as the posts. ◼
Evolution can make leaps—but how frequently? Photo by Flavio Martins.
Does evolutionary change happen in big jumps, or a series of small steps? The question may seem a little esoteric to non-scientists—how many mutations can dance on the head of a pin?—but it has direct implications for how we identify the genetic basis of human diseases, or desirable traits in domestic plants and animals.
That’s because the evolutionary path by which a particular phenotype, or visible trait, first evolved in a population is closely related to the genetics that underlie the trait in the present. Phenotypes that arose in a single mutational jump will probably remain connected to one or a few genes with large effects; phenotypes that evolved more gradually do so because they are created by the collective action of many genes. So what kind of evolutionary change is most common will determine which kind of gene-to-phenotype relationships we should expect to find.
In an excellent recent review article for the journal Evolution, Matthew Rockman, a biologist with the Department of Biology and Center for Genomics and Systems Biology at New York University, makes the case that the era of genomics has, so far, been much too focused on finding genes of large effect. Fortunately, Rockman also sees the beginnings of a new movement towards acknowledging the importance of small-effect genes—one which may ultimately make genomic association studies more useful.
Between this and a kick-ass State of the Union address, I’m feeling pretty damned optimistic, all of a sudden. It’s a weird sensation. I think I may be a bit light-headed. ◼
Watch this on full screen mode, or don’t watch it at all. All of a sudden, I need an excuse to go west.
Via Line Out. ◼
Experimental evolution of multicellularity. Photo by Nothing in Biology Makes Sense!In this week’s new post at the group blog Nothing in Biology Makes Sense!, Sarah Hird discusses the recently published experimental evolution study that used laboratory yeast to tackle one of the biggest questions in reconstructing the history of life:
Some of the biggest questions in evolutionary biology deal with the origin of life. For example, if I go back one generation, I find my parents. Two generations, my grandparents. Ten generations are human beings who may or may not have looked like me. Five hundred thousand are, oh, I don’t know. Maybe a bipedal hominid? Anyway, if we continue going backward like this, we inevitably get to time zero and encounter some big-time questions that can really cause a brain to cramp up.
I promise you, if you read the whole thing, you will not experience brain cramps. Quite the opposite, in fact.
In other news, Nothing in Biology Makes Sense! has put out a call for guest contributors. If you work in biology—anything from medicine to plant breeding—and you’ve been thinking about giving this science blogging thing a try, send us an e-mail!  ◼
Between the fact that it’s been a record-setting-ly mild winter, and the fact that I usually take the bus, I’d gone nearly seven months living in Minnesota without this happening.
Time to cross another item off the ol’ bucket list. ◼