Trout, Your Mama Was a Salmon

From Science:

Trout Scientists have for the first time coaxed salmon to produce trout sperm and eggs. These special deliveries might allow researchers to resurrect extinct species from frozen cells. The study clears a major conservation hurdle. Scientists often freeze eggs and sperm of endangered animals to keep viable genetic material around in case of extinction. However, fish eggs cannot be preserved this way because of their large size and high fat content. But undeveloped male sperm cells, called spermatogonia, do fine in a freezer. When thawed and implanted into another fish, they migrate to the gonads and grow into either sperm or eggs, depending on the sex of their host. This technique works within a species, but no one had tried transfers between fish species.

Researchers at the Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology collected spermatogonia from adult rainbow trout and injected them into sterile salmon embryos. The researchers raised the fish to sexual maturity and found that 10 of the 29 male salmon produced trout sperm, and five of the 50 female salmon produced trout eggs. In comparison, a control group of sterile salmon that did not receive transplants had no mature sex cells at all. As the team reports in the 14 September issue of Science, when it combined eggs and sperm from the recipients, a new generation of healthy trout hatched. Co-author Goro Yoshizaki says his team used sterile recipient fish so that only donor-derived sex cells could be produced. That way, when the researchers mixed eggs from the female salmon with sperm produced by the males, they got “100% trout.”

More here.



Thursday, September 13, 2007

fides et ratio

Reemtsma5

The current pope calls our opinion “the dictatorship of relativism” and says, plainly, that the view that religion is a private matter and that its potential public role is defined on the basis that it is a private matter is an act of aggression against religion. And the late Pope, as an acknowledged enemy of an open, secular society, called this view the “unforgivable sin against the Holy Spirit”.

Therein lay for him the meaning of the story of the Fall – and this is a coherent theological interpretation: “That is what the words of the book of Genesis refer to: ‘Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil’; that is to say, you will decide for yourselves what is good and what is evil.”[8] The pride of the secular society actually consists in living in this kind of sin.

more from Eurozine here.

JEFFERSON—AND NO GOD!!!

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The year is 1800. Americans go to the polls to elect a President. Which Founder do you favor? The Federalist incumbent, sixty-four-year-old John Adams, or the Republican challenger, fifty-seven-year-old Thomas Jefferson, who, awkwardly enough, is currently serving as Adams’s Vice-President?

Consider your vote carefully. This is the most important election in American history. What Jefferson dubbed “the revolution of 1800” marked the first transition of power from one party to another. It led to the passage, in 1804, of the Twelfth Amendment, separating the election of Presidents and Vice-Presidents. (Before that, whoever placed second became the Vice-President, which is what happened to Jefferson in 1796.) It might have—and should have—spelled the end of the Electoral College. At the time, many people, not all of them members of the Adams family, thought that it might spell the end of the American experiment. As Edward J. Larson observes in his new book, “A Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800, America’s First Presidential Campaign” (Free Press; $27), “Partisans worried that it might be the young republic’s last.”

more from The New Yorker here.

Que sais-je?

Clive_james

In 1576, having sought refuge from public life and taken up residence in the library of his family estate near Bordeaux, Michel de Montaigne gave instructions for an engraved medal to be placed on a wall above his writing desk: Que sais-je? This admonishment to be sceptical in the face of received knowledge was to be Montaigne’s motto during the composition of the Essais, the great record of his mind over the last two decades of his life. “Ainsi, lecteur, je suis moi-même la matière de mon livre”, cautions Montaigne; “ce n’est pas raison que tu employes ton loisir en un subject si frivole et si vain.” A finer example of what the rhetoricians call praeteritio could hardly be found, as Montaigne’s winking warning invites the reader to accompany him on a kind of holiday journey as he embarks on the thrilling endeavour of sketching the intellectual terrain of Renaissance humanism.

Four and a quarter centuries later, Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the margin of my time arrives as the record of a properly Montaignean project – the adventures of Clive James’s agile mind as it confronts the culture and history of the century just ended.

more from the TLS here.

The World Wide Web v. High Culture

In the TLS, Paul Duguid reviews Andrew Keen’s The Cult of the Amateur: How today’s internet is killing our culture:

If debates about the internet are turning to examinations of our culture, this is to be welcomed. The turn may reflect an exasperation with the way economic concepts have come to dominate such discussions. Even the New Yorker, the stately home of cultural debate in America, now feels obliged to provide room for a “financial” page. Changes that fall under the heading Web 2.0 do have cultural implications. For example, collectively produced and dynamically changing pages, like those of Wikipedia, unsettle implicit notions about what a page is and how it might be understood, notions that extend back at least to the rise of print culture, if not to the appearance of the codex. The end of the page as we knew it will be unsettling not only for biblio- philes, but even for such Web 2.0 businesses as Google, whose empire depends on its ability to rank pages, and the inherent assumption that with these there is something relatively constant and coherent to rank.

A debate pitting [Raymond] Williamsites such as Benkler, who are in support of expanding popular culture, against [Matthew] Arnoldians such as Keen, who write in defence of a circumscribed “High Culture”, would not be new, but, in the context of the internet, it might nonetheless be worth having. Unfortunately, Keen, who seems happy on the plains, lamenting the loss of NBC programming, is less likely to thrive on the higher altitudes he has chosen.

Is Pairing Science and Atheism a Bad Political Strategy?

Jake Young over at Pure Pedantry invokes some lessons from John Dewey:

Let me frame the debate this way. As I see it we have two realistic choices:

Choice #1: We link atheism and science. We frame atheism as scientific. We as far as we are able exclude the religious from the scientific enterprise. The result of choice one is that the majority of Americans are going to associate science with a secular elite — i.e. science is not for the consumption of the general public. Science in this world is for only special people to understand. Science will in effect become a marker of social status rather than a general approach to understanding the world…

The logical consequence of making science exclusive is to make those in favor of science a minority. And if we make those in favor of science a minority than we are endangering things that we care about. We are, for instance, drawing continuing scientific funding into question. Why would the public continue to fund what it perceives as counter-cultural and profoundly elitist minority?

Choice #2: We dissociate atheism and science. We argue that atheism is a valid way to see the world, but that scientists can be religious as well. Further, we stop excommunicating people from the scientific enterprise for what are fundamentally small political differences. We emphasize the importance of science in terms of what it can provide for society, not in terms of metaphysical assertions about the world…

Let me make clear that Choice #2 does not involve abandoning core scientific values such as verification, commitment to evidence, and argument on the basis of facts rather than interpersonal attacks. We still argue for evolution, for the reality of global warming, and for the utility of stem cell research. What we stop doing is stating that acceptance of science implies a set of political and philosophical values that are unequivocal and about which there can be no discussion.

The Immigration Charade

In the NYRB, Christopher Jencks reviews Patrick J. Buchanan’s State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America:

The collapse of this year’s bipartisan push for immigration reform suggests that ending the charade will be extremely hard. This should not be the case. Many employers would accept more stringent penalties for hiring illegal immigrants in the future if that were the only way to legalize their current workers, and many immigrant groups would do the same. On the other side, many conservative activists might accept legalization of today’s illegal immigrants if that were the only way to ensure a crackdown on hiring illegal immigrants in the future. In principle, therefore, a deal should be possible.

But this deal turns out to have a fatal flaw. Legalization can be implemented within a few years, while penalties for hiring illegal immigrants have to be enforced indefinitely. That means employers get what they want right away, while opponents of illegal immigration have to wait. In view of the federal government’s miserable record on enforcement, no sensible conservative— indeed no sensible person of any political persuasion—would now accept mere promises. The conservative mantra is therefore “enforcement first.” For many employers that sounds like the road to bankruptcy. They want “legalization first.” As long as each side insists on getting what it wants before the other side does, no deal is possible and illegal immigration, with all its unhappy consequences, will persist.

Cool v. Uncool Cities

Via Andrew Gelman, Bill Fulton over at his blog with the California Planning and Development Report:

A few years ago, a little-known academic named Richard Florida turned the economic development world upside down by publishing a book called The Rise of the Creative Class. In a nutshell, Florida’s argument was that to be successful today, cities have to be cool…

The minute Florida declared that cities had to be cool, however, it was only a matter of time before Joel Kotkin starting writing that cities wouldn’t succeed unless they were un-cool. Kotkin had long been a fan of what he calls “nerdistans” – boring suburbs (he always seems to mention Irvine) that nevertheless house some of the most powerful drivers of the American economy, especially in the tech sectors. But Florida’s work really revved him up. In a typical article for the Manhattan Institute last year, Kotkin called the cool cities idea “shtick” and suggested that the creative class “by the time they get into their 30s, may be more interested in economic opportunity, a single family house and procreation than remaining ‘hip and cool’ urbanites.”

The question of how to rebuild New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina gave Kotkin a special opportunity to wave the flag for uncool cities.

Noted African Grey Parrot, Alex, Dies

Alex, the 31 year old African grey parrot who demonstrated an understanding of concepts, including allegedly the concept of zero, died this past week. Over at Edge, you can find his researcher Irene Pepperberg, as well as Marc Hauser, on Alex and complex comunicative combinations. Pepperberg:

For the past 26 years I’ve been studying the cognitive and communicative abilities of Grey parrots. My oldest bird, Alex, can identify about 50 different objects using English labels. He can also label seven colors, five shapes, and quantities up to and including six. He has functional use of phrases like “I want X” and “I wanna go Y”, where X and Y, respectively, are object or location labels. He combines these labels to identify, refuse, request and categorize more than a hundred different items. He has concepts of bigger and smaller, of category, of sameness and difference, of absence of information, and of number.

We test him not only through direct questions about these concepts (e.g., “What color bigger?” for two differently sized and colored blocks), but also by using questions that involve complex structures—recursive phrases or conjunctive, recursive phrases—such as, “What object is green and three-corner?”; he answers all these questions with about 80% accuracy. We think the reason he doesn’t achieve 100% accuracy is boredom; he seems to get tired of repeatedly telling us about colors and shapes and materials. For example, he sometimes will state every color but the correct one, behavior that suggests that he is carefully avoiding the right answer; statistically, he couldn’t do that by chance.

[H/t: Misha Lepetich]

The Crop Raiders of Bossou

From Science:

Monkey For chimpanzees living next to the West African village of Bossou, Guinea, scoring papayas can also mean scoring a mate. That’s one conclusion of a 3-year study that followed Bossou’s adult males as they staged daring raids on crops and then used the plundered foods to woo females. According to the authors, the crops-for-sex strategy has never been recorded outside of Bossou, and it provides further evidence of an evolutionary basis for the seductive power of male bravado.

“We believe the males may be using crop raids as a way to advertise their prowess, especially to the opposite sex,” explains Kimberley Hockings, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Stirling in the U.K. “It’s not just meat that can be used as social currency but any risky or difficult-to-obtain foods.” Bossou is one of six sites in Africa where long-term chimpanzee studies are being carried out, the oldest and most famous being Tanzania’s Gombe Stream National Park, where Jane Goodall first observed cooperative hunting and meat sharing in the early 1970s.

More here.

Scientists untangle mystery of giant web

From MSNBC:

Web_2 WILLS POINT, Texas – A variety of spider species built on one another’s work to create a sprawling web that blanketed hundreds of yards of trees and shrubs at a North Texas park, according to entomologists who studied the unusual formation.

The web covered 200 yards (meters) along a trail at Lake Tawakoni State Park, about 45 miles (72 kilometers) east of Dallas. The August discovery of the massive web spurred debate among entomologists about its origin and rarity. Mike Quinn, a biologist for the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, collected spiders from the trees and sent them to Texas A&M. Dean studied 250 specimens and identified 12 families of spiders in the same web. He said the most prevalent type is from the Tetragnathidae family, which typically weave individual orb-shaped webs.

More here.

Wednesday, September 12, 2007

Michael Wood on Antonioni and Bergman

From the London Review of Books:

It’s too late to climb on the bandwagon now, and it wasn’t much of a bandwagon to start with. If cinephilia is dead, as Susan Sontag some time ago suggested it was, who cares about the simultaneous death of two cinéastes? Still, no reader of signs can resist a coincidence, the image of a meaning that can’t be there. Michelangelo Antonioni (born 1912) and Ingmar Bergman (born 1918) both died on 30 July 2007 – as if time, otherwise indifferent to plot and meaning, had something to say about the cinema.

But time, it turns out, seemed to say one thing and meant another. This was the end of an age, apparently, or would have been if the age represented by these directors had not ended quite a while ago. The whole world of slow-moving angst we associate with their best-known films is scarcely a memory. Panic and fanaticism are our modes, or the modes we think we need to deal with. But then the new coincidence reminds us of old coincidences, and invites us to think about what these echoes mean.

More here.

Alien Eels, Pufferfish, and Other Novelties

Carl Zimmer in his excellent blog, The Loom:

Screenhunter_05_sep_12_1646The bloggers here at Scienceblogs all have other professional lives–professors, doctors, software engineers, and so on. My own line of work as a science writer can make blogging a bit awkward every now and then. Take, for instance, an article I wrote for tomorrow’s New York Times about moray eels. It turns out that they have bizarre jaws hidden in their throats that catapult forward into their mouth to grab prey.

If you read other blogs at Scienceblogs, this may sound like slightly old news. That’s because the paper describing this research came out on Wednesday in the journal Nature, and was promptly described in a couple excellent blog posts–one at Neurophilosophy and one at Pharyngula. The Times’s science section doesn’t come out till Tuesday, so I’ve kept quiet.

One reason I find this story so cool–beyond the obvious weirdness–is that the scientists who discovered the hidden jaws have been thinking carefully about how the jaws evolved. This is par for the course for one of the co-authors, Peter Wainwright, who has been studying the evolution of new traits for a long time now in fish. In fact, I wrote about some of his work long ago in 1997 in Discover–an elegant study of the pufferfish, and how it evolved from much more ordinary animals.

More here.

The Edifice of Pinkerism

Seth Lerer in the New York Sun:

Screenhunter_16_sep_04_0214This argument, what we might call Pinkerism, sets up a fundamental relationship between language and mind. Its implications have been seen across a gamut of human experiences: from understanding social relationships to developing artificial intelligence. Indeed, some adherents might claim that Mr. Pinker’s work gives us not just a template for humanity, but a program for computer architecture. In short, this is a blueprint for the brain, whether it be organic or virtual.

Mr. Pinker has written so much on this subject, and his work has been the object of so much debate, that one may wonder why we need another 400-plus page book on the matter. “The Stuff of Thought” adds little to the intellectual edifice of Pinkerism. It does, however, furnish that edifice’s rooms with popular examples, political and social implications, and reflections on the ways in which we all use language every day. There are extended chapters on swearing and obscenity, discussions of metaphor and figurative expression in literature and popular culture, and ruminations on the social codes of conversation.

Some of this material is fascinating. I was particularly struck by the discussion of “indirectspeech”: why we often make requests or indicate desire in oblique ways. “Would you like to come up for coffee,” has become an indirect request for sex. “I was wondering if you could pass the guacamole,” has become a polite way of saying, “Pass the guacamole.” Politeness and desire compel us to speak and write in subtle ways, and Mr. Pinker’s sensitivity and knowledge make his account far more substantive than those of other writers on this matter.

More here.  My own review of The Stuff of Thought is here.

Krugman on Chait

Over at TPM Cafe, Paul Krugman comments on Johnathan Chait’s The Big Con: The True Story of How Washington Got Hoodwinked and Hijacked by CrackpotEconomics:

Jon’s description is correct, but, I think, somewhat incomplete.

First, supply-side quackery is only one of the gambits used to sell tax cuts.

There are other, older versions – notably the claim that government is wasting your money on vast armies of useless bureaucrats. Way back in 1964, in his famous speech on behalf of Barry Goldwater, Reagan talked about how crazy it was that the federal government employed 2.5 million civilian workers; nobody pointed out that two-thirds of those civilians worked either for the Pentagon or for the post office.

Second, Jon talks at some length about the media, and in particular about the Republican ability to get journalists to harp endlessly on supposed character flaws of Democrats, while their own candidates get a free pass…

The Joys of Business Ownership, Research, and Fatherhood

From Science:

Fathersonshoes_160_jpg Mohammed Homman is in no hurry to defend his dissertation. It’s not because the Karolinska Institute doctoral candidate needs more time to write or perform a few more experiments. Nor is it because he needs to be home most days by 5 p.m. to help his wife, Maria Homman, who heads her own research and development lab at Akzo Nobel, care for their two daughters. Homman is taking his time to finish his degree because he’s busy wooing investors, hiring researchers–some of them with their own doctorates–and establishing business partnerships. Finishing his degree just isn’t his highest priority right now.

There’s also the pesky matter of patents. Announcing his results publicly in the form of a dissertation might interfere with the two pending patents his company, Vironova, needs to grow. Homman started the bioinformatics company in 2005 to commercialize technology he developed that automates virus detection using digital images from electron microscopes. Homman, who is 33 years old, is CEO of the company, which has 11 employees and has raised more than $5 million in capital so far. The target in the current fundraising round is $50 million.

How does he get it all done? “I do not get much sleep,” he says cheerfully.

More here.

Bowling Alone

Joseph O’Neill in The Atlantic Monthly:

Book Beyond a Boundary by C.L.R. James.

The general American mystification with cricket is not merely anomalous but a tad perverse — you might even say it’s the stuff of a national blind spot (“a region of understanding in which one’s intuition and judgment always fail,” according to my dictionary). Well, what of it? Why not turn a blind eye to a complicated, time-consuming, weird-looking sport? And don’t we have our own game involving sticks and balls and hot summer days?

A possibly eccentric but, I would suggest, far-reaching response to this line of argument would be as follows: To be deprived of knowledge of cricket is to be deprived, at the very least, of a full appreciation of C. L. R. James’s strange and wonderful Beyond a Boundary, the American publication of which occurred almost a quarter century ago. The original, British publication came in 1963, and ever since, the book has gone down pretty well with the critics. “To say ‘the best cricket book ever written’ is pifflingly inadequate praise,” blurbs the most current U.K. paperback edition, which quotes this further encomium:

Great claims have been made for [Beyond a Boundary]: that it is the greatest sports book ever written; that it brings the outsider a privileged insight into West Indian culture; that it is a severe examination of the colonial condition. All are true.

Such praise cannot be dismissed as self-serving hyperbole: Derek Walcott has written of “a noble book,” and V. S. Naipaul, in the days before his glorious unpleasantness had fully manifested itself (needless to say, he eventually turned on James), rejoiced at “one of the finest and most finished books to come out of the West Indies.”

More here.

Mearsheimer, Walt and the Erudite Hysteria of David Remnick

Tony Karon in Rootless Cosmopolitan:

_41630968_children416_afpFirst, an illustrative anecdote: A little over a year ago, Iraq’s prime minister Nuri al-Maliki arrived in Washington and addressed Congress. The event was supposed to be a booster for the elected Iraqi leadership, showing U.S. support for the new government. But at the time, Israel was pummeling Beirut in response to Hizballah’s capture of two Israeli soldiers, so U.S. legislators naively tried — and failed — to get Maliki to condemn Hizballah. And, revealing the extent to which Washington is encased in a bubble when it comes to matters involving Israel in the Middle East, Senators Chuck Schumer, Harry Reid and Dick Durbin wrote Maliki a letter saying the following: “Your failure to condemn Hezbollah’s aggression and recognize Israel’s right to defend itself raise serious questions about whether Iraq under your leadership can play a constructive role in resolving the current crisis and bringing stability to the Middle East.”

To cut bluntly to the chase, there is scarcely a single politician in the Arab world willing to endorse Washington’s definitions of the problems or the solutions when it comes to Israel’s impact on the region — and that even among the autocrats with whom the U.S. prefers to work, much less that rare breed that Maliki represents, i.e. a democratically elected leader. It is the U.S. leadership that is in denial about what is needed to create security in the region.

More here.

The Rules of Infidelity from Tokyo to Tennessee

Robert Scott Stewart in Metapsychology:

Screenhunter_04_sep_12_0027Despite what we have all heard, married folks in America are actually wildly monogamous. In 2004, only 3.9 % of married men and 3.1% of married women engaged in extramarital sex in the past year (62). The figure that is often heard – that more than half of married men, and a quarter of married women will cheat on their spouses over their lifetime – turns out to be both highly problematic and overestimated. These later figures come from Alfred Kinsey’s studies in the 1950’s, and they are based upon badly unrepresentative samples (46). This was exacerbated by later studies by Shere Hite and Cosmopolitan magazine which placed adultery figures as high as 70% for both men and women. It turns out that in the U.S. only about 20% of men and 10% of women have extramarital sex over their lifetimes (50), although, as Druckerman notes, statistical evidence in this area is strangely hard to come by.

Why there should be such a dramatic difference between reality and perception is interesting. Part of it clearly has to do with the fact that some segments within our society who receive a disproportionate amount of media coverage – such as sports and movie stars, famous politicians and, one wants to add, but probably shouldn’t, evangelical ministers like Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart, and Ted Haggard — do commit adultery in numbers much higher than the norm.

More here.