By: RachelM,
on 1/31/2016
While out driving one afternoon, I notice a bus speeding down the road towards me. As it approaches, the bus drifts into my lane, forcing me to swerve and strike a parked car. The bus doesn’t stop and, while I glimpse some corporate logo on the side, I’m shaken and I don’t manage to make it out.
The post When probability is not enough appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Maud Newton,
on 6/29/2015
My Longreads profile of Orphan Black’s brilliant science consultant Cosima Herter — known to the show’s actors and creators as “Real Cosima” — ranges from science, chance, and emotion to Darwin, humanized mice, DIY synthetic biology, and much more. Here’s how it starts:
BBC America’s Orphan Black seems so immediate, so plausible, so unfuturistic, that Cosima Herter, the show’s science consultant, is used to being asked whether human reproductive cloning could be happening in a lab somewhere right now. If so, we wouldn’t know, she says. It’s illegal in so many countries, no one would want to talk about it. But one thing is clear, she told me, when we met to talk about her work on the show: in our era of synthetic biology — of Craig Venter’s biological printer and George Church’s standardized biological parts, of three-parent babies and of treatment for cancer that involves reengineered viruses— genetics as we have conceived of it is already dead. We don’t have the language for what is emerging.
It’s one of my favorite things I’ve written, and also one of the strangest. It’s very much keeping with the forward-looking aspects of the book I’m working on. And it has the endorsements of a whole lotta Orphan Blackers, including, Tatiana Maslany, Graeme Manson, and Herter herself, which makes me happy.
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By: Lana,
on 2/1/2010
John C. Avise is Distinguished Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of California, Irvine. His new book, Inside the Human Genome: A Case For Non-Intelligent Design, tackles the philosophical question of why humans are imperfect on the genetic level if made by a Creator God. In this excerpt, Avise asserts that evolution is not random (as Intelligent Design proponents argue) due to natural selection.
Advocates of Intelligent Design contend that complex biological features cannot arise by chance, the implication being that chance equates to sentient forces. From a scientific vantage, however, the driving force of adaptive evolution–natural selection– is itself the antithesis of chance. Hereditary factors that promote organismal survival and reproduction in a particular environment tend to be precisely those that proliferate across the generations and thereby come to characterize natural populations. Whenever genetic variation and differential 
reproduction exist in nature (as they do in all known species), natural selection is inevitable, both logically and empirically. Biological traits that emerge from this inexorable operation may have the superficial aura of intelligent artistry, but that appearance is illusory (under a scientific interpretation). Natural selection can be a highly creative process (given a suitable supply of genetic variation to work from), but it is merely a mechanistic phenomenon– as inescapable and insentient as gravity.
This is not to say that evolution is devoid of important stochastic (i.e. chance) elements. Natural selection can sift only among the genetic variants available for its scrutiny, and two of the three primary sources of genetic variability– de novo mutation and recombination– occur essentially at random with respect to forging adaptations. The new mutations and recombinant genotypes that arise in each generation have no biased tendency to enhance either an individual’s genetic fitness (its reproductive success relative to other individuals) or the adaptive needs of a species. In other words, favorable alleles and more fit genotypes have no known mutational tendency to arise disproportionately when needed. In this important sense, the genetic fodder upon which natural selection acts can indeed be characterized as stochastic or chancy in origin.
The third source of population genetic variation entails a mixture of “chance and necessity.” Apart from de novo mutations and recombinant genotypes, the genetic variety available for natural selection in any generation is also a function of historical circumstance, that is, of idiosyncratic genealogical outcomes that have been affected by both stochastic and directive evolutionary processes across all prior generations. Evolution going forward can work only with the biological substrates–”ghosts of evolution past”– are not supernatural legacies, but instead they are real genetic lineages and real species that have been subjected for eons to the full panoply of evolutionary processes including natural selection (the directive agent of adaptive evolution) as well as idiosyncratic mutation, recombination, and genetic drift (stochastic forces in the sense described above).
The temporal nature of heredity also means that evolu
