topics: |  science | biology

Excerpts

Shannon's idea is that information and entropy are opposite faces of
the same coin... The less entropy a system has, the more information
it contains. - p.16

[paraphrasing Samuel Butler] A protein is just a gene's way of making
another gene; and a gene is just a protein's way of making another
protein. Cooks need recipes, but recipes also need cooks. - p.17

The surface life on earth is but a veneer. Perhaps ten times as much
organic carbon as exists in the whole biosphere is in thermophilic
bacteria deep beneath the surface, where they are possibly responsible
for generating what we call natural gas. - p.19 [T. Gold, Am Scientist
v. 85:408-11, 1997]  [bacteria is less complex than a single cell].

[Bacteria are likely not our ancestors. We have "little bits of RNA"
inside the nucleus - guide RNA, vault RNA, self-splicing
introns... Bacteria has none of these and it is more parsimonious to
believe that they dropped them rather than we invented them (Occam's
razor - simpler explanations are more probable.) Bacteria, under great
pressure to be quick copiers and very simple, dropped these RNA since
they lead to higher error rates at hot temperatures. - 1998 theory ] -
p.21

Pope John Paul II in his message to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences
on 22 October 1996, argued that between ancestral apes and modern
human beings, there was an 'ontological discontinuity' - a point at
which God injected a human soul into an animal lineage. Thus can the
Church be reconciled to evolutionary theory. 

[The human being has one less chromosome than the 24 chromosomes in apes -
two of their chromosomes are fused into our somewhat large 2nd chromosome.]
Perhaps the ontological leap came at the moment when two ape chromosomes
were fused, and the genes for the soul lie near the middle of chromosome 2.
	[Jolly, Lucy's Legacy: 'even the Pope now concedes that it is a
	"theory of vast explanatory power." ']

[Humans collectively amount] to some 300 million tons of biomass. The
only large animals that rival or exceed this quantity are ones we have
domesticated -  cows, chickens and sheep -- or that depend on man-made
habitats - sparrows and rats. - p.25

We are, to a ninety-eight percent approximation,
chimpanzees. .. chimpanzees are only ninety-sever percent gorillas
[but are ninety-eight percent human. 
Chimpanzees are closer to humans than they are to gorillas. ... ]

If you took two plastacene amoebae and turned one into a chimpanzee
and the other into a human being, almost all the changes you would
make would be the same. Both would need thirty-two teeth, five
fingers, two eyes, four limbs and a liver.  From the perspective of an
amoeba, or for that matter a fertilized egg, chimps and human beings
are ninety-eight percent the same. There is no bone in the chimpanzee
body that I do not share. There is no known chemical in the chimpanzee
brain that cannot be found in the human brain. There is no known part
of the immune system, the digestive system, the lymph system, or the
nervous system that we have and chimpanzees do not, or vice versa.
[But of course, we have only 23 chromosomes vs their 24.] - p.29

	All forms that perish other forms supply,
	(By turns we catch the vital breath and die)
	Like bubbles on the sea of matter borne,
	They rise, they break, and to that sea return.
	 		- Alexander Pope, Essay on Man

What is truly revolutionary about molecular biology in the post
Watson-Crick era is that it has become digital ... the machine code of
the genes is uncannily computer-like.
		- Richard Dawkins, River out of Eden, 1995 (p.50)
[IDEA: HW in ESC101 on 4-ary code - ACTG ... follow up with the
3-letter dictionary for the 20 primary amino acids.]

The fact that people with high IQ's have more symmetrical bodies suggests
that they were subject to fewer developmental stresses in the womb or
in childhood. - p.89

James Flynn [NZ political scientist] noticed that IQ
is increasing in all countries all the time, at an average rate of
about three IQ points per decade. ... [Ulric Neisser: due to modern
saturation of TV and other sophisticated visual media - we are better
at visual IQ that dominate IQ tests] - p.89-90

[Language instinct: To make this sentence into a question, how do we
know which vowel to move to the start: A unicorn that is eating a
flower is in the garden"? The first "is" fails since it is from the
noun phrase.] Yet four-year olds can comfortably use this rule, never
having been taught about noun phrases. ... No parent uses the word
'goed', yet most children use it at some stage. No parent explains
that the word 'cup' refers to all cup-like objects, and not just this
cup, not just the handle, nor the material or colour, or the action of
pointing to a cup. - p.93-94

[Derek Bickerton: 19th c. foreign labourers brought together invent
an inefficient language - too long to say it, only simple concepts.
But when children grow up with it, they give it rules of inflection,
word order, grammar - adults create it like learning a second language
as an adult. - p.95]

	There is no such thing as evolutionary progress... The black-smoker
	bacterium [that inhabits sulphurous vents in the Atlantic seabed] is
	arguably more highly evolved than the bank clerk (p.25)

from NYT Review by Lee M. Silver

    Thousands of years ago, a tribe of Asiatic people with an unusual language
invaded the land that is modern Finland. This prehistoric event is manifest
in the language spoken by Finns today. Yet linguistic analysis cannot tell us
how the invaders treated the indigenous people. Remarkably, that detail of
the ancient invasion is revealed in the DNA of Finnish boys alive today. The
foreigners killed all the local men and settled down to have babies with the
local women.

On a Long Island playground this morning, a Jewish child carries a
different message in her DNA -- one from the overcrowded Eastern European
ghetto her ancestors called home a few centuries ago. Her ancestors used this
very same DNA message to ward off tuberculosis even as their neighbors
succumbed to the disease.

Other messages from the past are hidden in all of us. You and I carry
faint echoes of the pugnacious little protolife form that existed for a
moment four billion years ago, and spawned everything that lives on the
planet today.

'Genome," is unlike any other popular book about genes. It is not
about the Human Genome Project or the way research is carried out. Ridley, a
British journalist with a doctoral degree in zoology, does touch on the
incredible potential of genetics for alleviating human misery, and he can't
help releasing regular salvos at the antigenetics crowd. But much of his
remarkable book is focused on a higher plane of pure intellectual
discovery. It is a nearly jargon-free expedition that hops from one human
chromosome to the next (23 in all) in search of the most delightful
stories. Even practicing geneticists -- apt to view the genome as a boring
research tool -- will come away with a greater sense of wonder at the hidden
secrets in the text.

Ridley also explores the most contentious area of genetics -- human
behavior. He has nothing but contempt for those who deny the role played by
genes in personality, sex and intellectual differences. He provides an
example of psychologists who observe a child behaving like a parent and
assume without question that environment must be the cause, although a child
receives both environment and genes from its parents.

Behavioral genetics is so contentious because, more than any other area
of science, it has a direct impact on political theory and practice. If we
accept a significant influence of genes on behavior and ability, we are
forced to concede that genes would be of the utmost importance in determining
who wins and loses in an idealized meritocracy where environments and
opportunities are all equalized. And in a court a defendant's genes would
have to be considered the same way that "mental status" is today in
determining whether someone is fully responsible for his actions.

He also challenges the traditional academic analysis of the
early-20th-century American eugenics movement. The blame for this sorry
chapter of history is often placed on overreaching geneticists. Not
surprisingly, modern geneticists routinely denounce eugenics as bad
science. Ironically, current science and technology are so advanced that
eugenics is no longer implausible. If people with little understanding of
heredity in the past could turn wolves into different breeds of dogs, in
theory our current knowledge could be used to control the look and behavior
of future human generations -- but, as Ridley says, "at a gigantic cost in
cruelty, injustice and oppression." What is wrong with eugenics is not the
science but coercion -- taking reproductive decisions away from individuals
and giving them to the state. Eugenics laws were examples not of unrestrained
science but of unrestrained government.
- Lee M. Silver in the NYT