The most terrifying country on earth

"Anyone with an interest in China, its economy, its place in the world, or the kind of future it will fashion, please take note: This is a big deal."

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/evanosnos/2009/07/where-is-xu-zhiyong.html

Great Photo

Julia Child from "The French Chef"

Moon Landing Anniversery Day

Turns out it Neil's foot wasn't the first thing to hit the moon, how depressing is that?

As I was geeking out and reading the official Apollo radio transcripts, I was intrigued to find that six minutes before stepping onto the moon for the first time, Armstrong took a "jettison bag" and dropped it onto the surface.

The bag, NASA explains, contained "empty food bags and other things"...including bodily waste collected inside their space suits. In other words, garbage.


One Small Schlep for Mankind

Science is Liberal

“The facts have a well-known liberal bias” Stephen Colbert

Adam Smith versus Darwin

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/12/business/economy/12view.html

This brings evolution and economics together in a really nice article.

10 most influential columnists

Top 10

NYTimes go nab the top three, not bad.

What are the old folks doing this week?

Sunset from our back deck - or is it the front deck?
more photos at:
http://picasaweb.google.ca/walter.sudmant/SaturnaJuly2009#

The Evolutionary Arms Race and the Futility of GMO

What's the Mendealio? 07/07/09

The Red Queen: “It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.”--Lewis Carroll, “Through the Looking Glass”

The Red Queen Hypothesis: “For an evolutionary system, continuing development is needed just in order to maintain its fitness relative to the systems it is co-evolving with.” --Leigh Van Valen (1973)

The Red Queen Hypothesis has been demonstrated in many different biological contexts. This phenomenon, also known as co-evolution, describes how (in the most simple case) two biological systems with opposite goals, must continually compete to out-evolve each other, in order simply to maintain existence. Coevolution is most often demonstrated in sexual evolution, (interesting article about immaculate conception in sharks,and further reading for those interested), one example being sperm and egg proteins in a single organism. Sperm will be naturally selected to fertilize eggs (organisms with more fertile sperm will be more successful), and as such there is selective pressure on sperm proteins to better fertilize eggs. As a result of this however, "polyspermy," or, the situation in which multiple sperm fertilize a single egg, is selected for. Polyspermy, however, is not in the best interest of the egg. Multiple sperm fusing with a single egg ends up being detrimental to the overall fitness of an organism as this results in either the splitting up of the precious resources of a single egg, or the complete failure of the fertilization all together. Ultimately, what results is an evolutionary arms race between egg and sperm proteins. Fascinatingly, when scientists measure the rate of evolution in egg and sperm proteins in organisms (including humans!), sperm and egg proteins are some of the fastest evolving genes, and furthermore appear to correlate in their evolution as a result of co-evolving.

This evolutionary arms race takes place on an evolutionary time scale, which, for different organisms means different things, but, for genetically modified organisms (GMOs) has meant a sudden unexpected mass armament at the hands of man. This arming of organisms in the case of GMO crops like corn or canola has allowed humans to impart a significant evolutionary advantage upon these plants over their natural predators, insects and other pests. Unfortunately, as organisms have a tendency to do, the pests are evolving in response. As commented on in the journal Nature, and reported in this weeks edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, in a laboratory setting insects have evolved to survive two individual pesticides created by synthetic genes in GMO cotton. What makes this result so important and indeed worrisome is that the insects evolved to simultaneously thwart two individual genetic pesticide onslaughts. Recently, to counteract the effects of evolution companies have been placing multiple genes which target the same pest in different ways into their products, a process known as "pyramiding." This most recent result demonstrates that natural evolution could successfully counteract our synthetic attempts. It is important to note this phenomenon has yet to be observed in nature, and was carefully constructed in a lab environment, however, implications are clearly alarming . Now, given that pests can and will evolve to combat our synthetically evolved organisms, will we be able to counter their new evolved onslaughts?

In the world of nature co-evolution is not usually the case. In fact, most people are probably more familiar with evolution as a means by which organisms out-compete each other through natural selection. What separates selection from co-evolution when competition is at stake is the ability of an out-competed organism to evolve in response, and as such propagate the arms race. In the case of synthetic evolutionary advantages conferred on organisms by humans, it is not clear that we will be able to respond to the evolutionary weaponry challenge set forth by nature. Indeed if current bacterial antibiotic resistance is any indication of our inability to confront evolutionary assaults, this is one arms race that we will most certainly lose. This of course is extremely worrisome if the players in this race constitute the worlds supply of food. And so of course if one cannot run fast enough to remain in the same place, the Red Queen's solution? Off with your head.

The Malthusian Insult

Great blog entry from Krugman, The Malthusian Insult

What very few people realize is that Malthus was right about most of human history — indeed, he was right about roughly 58 out of 60 centuries of civilization: living standards basically did not improve from the era of the first Pharaohs to the age of Louis XIV, because any technological gains were swallowed up by population pressure. We only think Malthus got it wrong because the two centuries he was wrong about were the two centuries that followed the publication of his work.