MishMash

Evolution of the (human) eye

Lemonodor spotted this interesting report by Richard Dawkins of a simulation experiment on evolution of a camera-type eye from photo-sensitive tissue.

Creationism has enduring appeal, and the reason is not far to seek. It is not, at least for most of the people I encounter, because of a commitment to the literal truth of Genesis or some other tribal origin story. Rather, it is that people discover for themselves the beauty and complexity of the living world and conclude that it "obviously" must have been designed. Those creationists who recognise that Darwinian evolution provides at least some sort of alternative to their scriptural theory often resort to a slightly more sophisticated objection. They deny the possibility of evolutionary intermediates. "X must have been designed by a Creator," people say, "because half an X would not work at all. All the parts of X must have been put together simultaneously; they could not have evolved gradually."

Thus the creationist's favourite question "What is the use of half an eye?" Actually, this is a lightweight question, a doddle to answer. Half an eye is just 1 per cent better than 49 per cent of an eye, which is already better than 48 per cent, and the difference is significant. A more ponderous show of weight seems to lie behind the inevitable supplementary: "Speaking as a physicist, I cannot believe that there has been enough time for an organ as complicated as the eye to have evolved from nothing. Do you really think there has been enough time?" Both questions stem from the Argument from Personal Incredulity. Audiences nevertheless appreciate an answer, and I have usually fallen back on the sheer magnitude of geological time.

It now appears that the shattering enormity of geological time is a steam hammer to crack a peanut. A recent study by a pair of Swedish scientists, Dan Nilson and Susanne Pelger, suggests that a ludicrously small fraction of that time would have been plenty. When one says "the" eye, by the way, one implicitly means the vertebrate eye, but serviceable image-forming eyes have evolved between 40 and 60 times, independently from scratch, in many different invertebrate groups. Among these 40-plus independent evolutions, at least nine distinct design principles have been discovered, including pinhole eyes, two kinds of camera-lens eyes, curved-reflector ("satellite dish") eyes, and several kinds of compound eyes. Nilsson and Pelger have concentrated on camera eyes with lenses, such as are well developed in vertebrates and octopuses.

…

Richard Dawkins

Striking stuff.

Fertility news juxtaposition

After a month away, I'm slowly catching up with (or at least deleting) email and news feeds. Reports on the holiday and conference may appear at some time.

The serendipity manufacturer that is the news aggregator brought these two items to me today:

Frozen ovary restores fertility

Fertility fears hit Atkins diet

Question is, could the former be used to compensate for the latter?

Aliens cause global warming?

Via James Robertson then Bill de hÓra:

A transcript of the Caltech Michelin Lecture given by Michael Crichton entitled "Aliens Cause Global Warming". The formatting is dodgy, but it's worth reading.

In the mean time we have predictions of massive extinction (also splashed across the front page of The Guardian), and on the Today programme this morning it was reported that Sir David King (RealAudio) was openly condemning the US for their attitude on Global Warming.

This is all very tricky for someone who finds the core of Michael Crichton's argument compelling, but who agrees strongly with Sir David that we need to do much more to reduce our profligate use of energy. Dressing up pseudo-science as science can't be the right answer, but when the politicians lie to stay in power and line their own pockets, and the press have no discernible interest in establishing facts if they get in the way of circulation, then how does one go about building up enough pressure for action to be taken?

At least the people I work with are most interested in quantifying uncertainty and in examining the value of data in order to improve our simulations as efficiently as possible. On the other hand one of the papers I have sitting on my "to read" pile is one by Peter Young which I believe (though of course I haven't read it) is critical of the whole approach taken by climate modellers.

Centenary of Dalton's atomic theory

When John Dalton walked in front of a meeting of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society on 21 October 1803, he began a revolution. [Kristine Krug, BBC News]

Undeniable. A revolution which has changed our lives and our world for better and, in ways, worse. But to call John Dalton the father of nanotech strikes me as a but silly. It's like calling John Ambrose Fleming (inventor of the thermionic valve, used in early digital computers) "the father of the computer". The Johns' work was in each case prerequisite, but neither could forsee its full future impact.

It simultaneously inflates the importance of nanotechnology, and deflates the importance of Dalton's contribution.

Nonetheless. Dalton. What a guy.

Trial EPSRC latest grants RSS feed

Update (06/11/2003):: It's broken already. It's choking on something in this grant page.

Update (06/11/2003):: OK, that's fixed now. There's a new TODO as well, though.

Well, a weekend marathon learning and coding session comes to a reasonably satisfactory close, excepting the fact that there were a pile of other things I needed to be doing.

Note to UK academics who don't know what RSS is: read on, I think you'll be glad to find out, and I explain it towards the end. It'd be great if anyone who experiments, either with RSS and aggregators in general, or with the EPSRC latest grant awards feed in particular, could let me know how they get on -- positive or negative -- either by email or, better, by leaving a comment on this item.

There is now a trial RSS 1.0 feed of the latest grants awarded by the EPSRC. The content is scraped (using Bigloo, SXML, and HtmlPrag) and rendered as a valid RSS 1.0 feed. The RSS contains some ad hoc extensions; these are aretfacts of experiments with converting the EPSRC grants information into more general RDF.

TODO:

Neuropathic pain insight

According to the BBC some good folks at the National Institute of Health Sciences in Tokyo have made some progress in establishing the mechanisms behind neuropathic pain.

Two questions.

1) Is this likely to be part of the RSI problem? Sounds likely:

The pain is caused by subtle nerve damage, can often be agonising, and frequently does not improve over time.

2) The mechanism:

The answer may lie in "microglial" cells - which can be found in the spinal cord and behave a little like immune cells.

They appear to congregate at sites where there is damage, perhaps playing some role in the repair process.

The researchers believe that a particular receptor protein on the surface of the cell may be responsible.

Given this -- that these cells may play some role in the repair process -- wouldn't it be foolish to reduce the pain by blocking the protein?

There is now the possibility - that if the same protein exists in humans - that a drug could be developed to block its effect.

John McCarthy on Technological Optimism

John McCarthy, inventor (discoverer?) of LISP, has a set of pages purporting to provide evidence in support of technological optimism.

I presume that technological optimism is the same thing as that which its detractors call "the technological imperative".

Whale fart

It is science, really! Cory Doctorow spotted this story about a whale fart captured on film.

The wonders of medical research

There seems to be something basically flawed about this, even apart from the Humans /= Rats issue. Humans may or may not choose to refuse a drug because they believe it to be addictive, or dangerous, or both. Rats do nothing of the sort. Former addicts have through their own efforts stopped using a drug, whereas the rats in this experiment have had it witheld.

And the closing paragraph: if you take a drug to remove the cravings for another drug, have you made any progress? "Why trust one drug and not another; that's politics, man."

In other drug related news, the new head of the CPS has a conviction for possession of cannabis. According to the BBC:

shadow home secretary Oliver Letwin said: "There may be public disquiet about the appointment of a chief prosecutor who has himself been prosecuted in the past."

On the contrary, this should surely be an advantage.

New Dinosaur

The BBC reports the discovery of a new species of dinosaur in India, now named Rajasaurus (oh dear). Late, contemporaneous with T Rex.