Words of Wisdom from the Tallest Man in the World

Perspective

A scientific understanding of the cosmos begins by gaining a sense of perspective.  Thanks to Mary and Claudia for digging this out of their memory banks.

Beauty in the everyday: water drop

Pride of the Navajo

Post with the Most on Tom Paine's Ghost!

Get your keyboards dusted off and ready to take part in a good ol' fashion competition of creativity. The first annual Post with the Most on Tom Paine's Ghost is underway. Read the details here. A cash prize and glory as long as the internet lives await the winner.

The Astronomist shows the first inkling of interest bringing our collective attention to a dark period in the history of the universe.

"My own research centers around the end of the cosmic dark ages, reionization. The cosmic dark ages are a period of time between about 300,000 and 1 billion years after the big bang where there were no stars or galaxies. During reionization the first stars and galaxies formed and the modern era of galaxy evolution began. Quite and amazing analogy to the cultural renaissance. Perhaps I should write about this..."

Happy Birthday Carl!

Today is Carl Sagan's 75th birthday. May his spirit live on. A real world Spock, Carl Sagan represents so much to anyone lucky enough to catch even a little of his infectious enthusiasm. My fascination with Carl did not begin, as it should have, when I watched Cosmos in middle-school earth science class, but rather when I spent a year of weekends in Ithaca, NY talking to people that had lived around him and knew the man. His existence like the existence of so many bright stars shined through the smiles of people's faces when you asked about him. He is legend for his passion. Inspiring countless scientists to pursue their own passion for critical thinking and skepticism while balancing these things with a sense of wonder and fantastic speculation. Dragons of Eden was a transformative book for me having the same kind of effect as Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Siddhartha. Recommended to me by one of my first scientific mentors this walk through the human mind was unparalleled for me in clarity and intrigue. Attempting to explain and rationalize the seemingly impenetrable world of emotions by suggesting biochemical origins and charting out evolutionary pathways the brain's systems may have arisen through brought a sense of possibility. Thinking it possible that someday humans might understand their own physico-chemical make up well enough to predict and prevent suffering made it seem worth pursuing science as a life's goal.

For me his reach went further than Ithaca, eventually following me to Fort Collins, Colorado. Here in my second year of graduate school I was lucky enough to meet and discuss some big ideas in biology with Lynn Marguilis, once married to Carl. She was visiting as a Monfort Scholar and gave two lectures, one on the Gaia Theory and one on the current state of endosymbiont thought. The most striking of the information presented there still echos in my memories. She talked about green worms that had actually incorporated photosynthsizing algae under their skin to provide food for themselves in-house! The first inklings of a plant-animal hybrid. After her second lecture she gave an extra discussion session which only a handful opted to attend. Here we were able to discuss the rise of the eukaryotes for hours almost one on one. While we talked I was tempted to ask her about Carl but kept the conversation centered on science. As the first person to really communicate broadly the endosymbiont theory she and I speculated on the origins of histones and their role in keeping distinctions between the eukaryotes and their helpful passengers - the mitochondria and the chloroplasts. The smile she had on her face as she let her biological wisdom flow into open ears came from herself, yes, but I could not help but think Carl's spirit and the synergistic conversations they must have had. Their son Dorian Sagan continues in his father's path telling the world about amazing science as it happens. If you have not experienced Carl please let him speak for himself.

Neanderthal: Sly as a FOXP2?

Response to Robert Carter

By Kristopher Hite

This rant was composed after reading about a "geneticist" named Robert Carter who recently gave a three part lecture series in Fort Collins, Colorado on how Darwin was wrong and "modern science" disproves evolution.

Intelligent design proponents sure know how to put on a show. Sad to see that they really never talk about actual science. I'd like to know how our collective modern understanding of genetics, species, biochemical processes, proteins, plate tectonics, and sedimentation disprove evolution. To me the scientific method has uncovered an enormous amount of data to back up some of Darwin's fundamental postulations.

Evolution by means of natural selection through descent with modification. That was Darwin's novel concept and that has indeed withstood the test of time. Emerging information is constantly incorporated into the overarching theories that make up the cornerstones of modern science. And evolution is one of these cornerstones.

Since I opened by complaining that Robert Carter did not anywhere in this article talk about any actual science let me follow my own advice. While studying biochemistry it is impossible to avoid making some observations that can be very well explained by evolution. This happened for me recently while contemplating the molecules known as the porphyrins. These are the conjugated macro-cyclic rings that hold iron in its place in hemoglobin (the proteins in blood that shuttle oxygen around the body). These SAME molecules - the porphyrins - are also used by plants to hold magnesium atoms in place to do some of the key enzymatic reactions converting light energy to chemical energy in the chlorophyll. In both humans and plants the same set of enzymes build the porphyrin molecules though in the end the molecules have different functions. However, when the genetic disease porphyria arises in an animal a strange thing happens. The mal-formed porphyrins revert to their plant function as light harvesters. Indeed these molecules exist as non-functioning metabolites in any animal with a gall bladder. Called bilins these molecules serve no function other than to make the bile the green color. But in plants the "phycobilins" actually decorate the thylakoid membrane within the chloroplast and help harvest and subsequently direct light energy into the photo-centers (where the reactions that turn light energy into chemical bonds happen). In a human patient with porphyria these bilins build up to high concentrations in the skin, blood, urine and tooth enamel.

The tooth enamel is where an observer can see these molecules revert to their evolutionary heritage. When UV light is shone on the teeth of a patient of porphyria, the teeth glow! The mal-formed porphyrin molecules are reverting to their plant function - harvesting light energy! In this one instance we see that the biochemistry of humans and plants are one and the same.

We do have a common ancestor with all life in fact, and the keys to understand this fact lie in the base paired code of our genome. We can see what we call homologs. Basically these are genes that are the same in more than one species. But not only that, we can trace back, through molecular phylogeny, certain genes that have duplicated and then diverged in their ultimate function. The porphyrin-containing family of proteins is one example but there are thousands of others. This simple observation blows the "irreducible complexity argument" favored by so many intelligent design proponents, out of the water because it explains how the seemingly infinite complexity of the cell can actually be explained by the emergence of new genetic "concepts" by the process of gene duplication and divergence.

Until a vast majority of the global population can move past this silly debate of whether all living things on earth were created "as is" by an invisible sky-father 6,000 years ago, or the product of millions and millions of years of evolution by natural selection driven by descent with modification, we really can not move forward toward any kind of sustainable future. In fact, if we keep bickering about this nonsensical non-science we will most likely have a real-world rapture of our own making in the form of global resource wars caused by climate refugees, resource depletion, and overpopulation. Only by understanding why the dodo and the dinosaur went extinct can we hope to postpone our own extinction.

Are there Demons in your M&Ms?

This is why Nick and I still need to give our Biochemistry of Halloween lecture. Read about our attempt to elaborate on some rational explanations of the origins of vampires, witches, and zombies here here and here.

Our talk, originally slated for last Wednesday October 28th, was canceled due to the freak snow storm in Colorado. It was rescheduled for this Wednsday November 4th at 3PM in 101 Pathology at the CSU campus in Fort Collins, CO. If you can't make it we will try to have it up on you tube by Thursday.

Magnetic Fields in the Everyday

Magnetic Movie from Semiconductor on Vimeo.