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Ancestry is a fundamental perplexity of life. We come from our parents, who came from their parents, who descended, as the Bible would put it, from their fathers and their fathers’ fathers, but we are separate beings. We begin with the sperm of one man and the egg of one woman, and then we enter the world and we become ourselves.

 

Beyond all that’s encoded in our twenty-three pairs of chromosomes—our hair, eyes, and skin of a certain shade, our frame and stature, our sensitivity to bitter tastes—we are bundles of opinions and ambitions, of shortcomings and talents. The alchemy between our genes and our individuality is a mystery we keep trying to solve.

The June issue of Harper’s – with my essay on America’s (and my) ancestry obsession — will be available on newsstands for about the next two to three weeks, if you were planning to pick up a copy. The paragraphs quoted above are a teeny excerpt.

You can read more about the essay and my writing of it in the Dallas Morning News and at PEN, and hear more in interviews with KERA and Wisconsin Public Radio.

I’ll be at Cafe Society this Friday, June 6, to discuss the essay and the book.

By Adam L. Brandt and Alfred L. Roca

Do conservation genetics and ancient Greek history ever cross paths? Recently, a genetic study of a remnant population of elephants in Eritrea has also addressed an ancient mystery surrounding a battle in the Hellenistic world. After Alexander the Great died unexpectedly in 323 BC, his generals divided his territory, founding several empires. Their successors ended up fighting each other during the next few centuries, often using elephants to intimidate the enemy and disrupt military formations. The Seleucids, heirs to the lands neighboring India, traded treasure and territory for access to Indian war elephants. They fought the Ptolemaic dynasty of Egypt, seeking control of the lands between the two empires during the Syrian Wars. The Ptolemaic pharaohs, desperate for their own pachydermal tanks, established outposts in what is today the country of Eritrea, to capture African elephants for warfare.

Elephants from the two continents were put to the test at the Battle of Raphia in 217 BC, between Antiochus III and Ptolemy IV Philopater. In The Histories, which includes the only known account of African and Asian elephants meeting in warfare, the Greek historian Polybius described the resulting fiasco:

“Most of Ptolemy’s elephants, however, declined the combat, as is the habit of African elephants; for unable to stand the smell and the trumpeting of the Indian elephants, and terrified, I suppose, also by their great size and strength, they at once turn tail and take to flight before they get near them. This is what happened on the present occasion; when Ptolemy’s elephants were thus thrown into confusion and driven back on their own lines.”

As every school child knows, Asian elephants are smaller than African elephants. So why did Polybius get this wrong?  One British writer, perhaps unconsciously affected by the corporal punishments meted out by Classics teachers to disruptive students at English schools, decided that Polybius must after all be correct. He pointed out that, although African savanna elephants are larger than Asian elephants, there is a different species of elephant that lives in the tropical forests of Africa, and which is smaller in size than the Asian elephant. Thus began the tale that the war elephants of the pharaohs were actually African forest elephants, ignoring the thousands of kilometers that separate the range of forest elephants from places where the Egyptians captured their war elephants. This tale was then perpetuated by subsequent authors, each citing authors before as definitive sources.

A savanna elephant in Kruger National Park, South Africa

In a recent conservation genetics study, we examined the elephants of Eritrea, the descendants of the population that was the source of Egyptian war elephants. Eritrea currently has the northernmost population of elephants in eastern Africa. Perhaps one or two hundred elephants persist there, in isolated and fragmented habitat. Using DNA isolated from non-invasively collected dung samples we examined three different genetic markers. First we looked at slow-evolving nuclear gene sequences in the Eritrean elephants. In every case the sites always had the same sequence found in hundreds of savanna elephants, and in no case did we ever get a match to sequences found across all forest elephants. This established that Eritrean elephants were savanna elephants.

When we then looked at very fast evolving regions of the nuclear genome, the Eritrean elephants proved to be a close match to savanna elephants in East Africa, and again were genetically unlike forest elephants. Finally, we looked at mitochondrial DNA, which often has a different pattern than other genetic markers in elephants. Mitochondrial DNA is transmitted only by females, and these females do not geographically disperse away from the natal heard. Very often, one can infer a signal of ancient genetic events that persist only in the pattern of the mitochondrial DNA. Yet in this case, the mitochondrial DNA agreed with the nuclear results: these were savanna elephants, and there was not the slightest trace of any ancient forest elephant presence in Eritrea.

Given this result, why did Polybius claim that the Asian elephants were larger than African elephants? It turns out that in the ancient world there was a legend that, due to the wet climate, animals were always larger in India than they were elsewhere. This legend was widespread among authors before and after Polybius. Go back and look at the way the translation of the Polybius text is worded. Even in translation, it is evident that Polybius has interjecting his own beliefs onto the account, and not recounting an actual observation.

Our genetic study indicated that the isolated population of elephants in Eritrea has low genetic diversity. Habitat loss and human-wildlife conflict are major concerns for conservation of this population, which luckily has not yet been impacted by China’s lust for illegal ivory. Increasing and protecting suitable habitat for their long-term survival is critical, and in the very long run it may become possible to create habitat corridors to other surviving but distant populations. Luckily, the government of Eritrea is committed to protecting the country’s natural environment, and has recently reported an increase in the range and number of elephants.

Adam L. Brandt is a PhD candidate, and Alfred L. Roca is an Assistant Professor, in the Department of Animal Sciences of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. They are the authors of the paper ‘The elephants of Gash-Barka, Eritrea: Nuclear and mitochondrial genetic patterns‘ published in Journal of Heredity.

The Journal of Heredity covers organismal genetics: conservation genetics of endangered species, population structure and phylogeography, molecular evolution and speciation, molecular genetics of disease resistance in plants and animals, genetic biodiversity and relevant computer programs.

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Image credit: Savanna elephant in Kruger National Park, South Africa. By Felix Andrews (CC-BY-SA-3.0) via Wikimedia Commons.

The post Proving Polybius wrong about elephants appeared first on OUPblog.

        

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By Danielle Venton

For millions of years, the stout, muscular Przewalski’s horse freely roamed the high grasslands of Central Asia. By the mid-1960s, these, the last of the wild horses, were virtually extinct: a result of hunting, habitat loss, and cross breeding with domestic horses.

Recovering from a tiny population of 12 individuals and only four purebred females, there are now nearly 2,000 Przewalski’s horses around the world. Once again, the light-colored horses, standing about 13 hands, or 1.3 meters, tall, are beginning to graze on the Asian steppe, thanks to captive breeding and reintroduction programs.

Protecting Przewalski’s horses, listed as critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, will require far more than protecting their habitat. Understanding and safeguarding their genetic diversity is key, said Kateryna Makova, an evolutionary genomicist at Pennsylvania State University. In a new study (Goto et al. 2011), Makova and her colleagues Hiroki Goto, Oliver Ryder, and others report on the most complete genetic analysis of Przewalski’s horses to date, clarifying previous genetic analyses that were inconclusive.

Because Przewalksi’s horses are the only remaining wild horses, many people have hypothesized that they gave rise to modern domestic horses. The Australian Brumbies or the American Mustangs, sometimes referred to as wild horses, are actually feral domestic horses, adapted to life in the wild. Przewalski’s horses are not the direct progenitors of modern domestic horses, Makova and her colleagues conclude, but split approximately 0.12 Ma. Horses were likely domesticated several times on the Eurasian steppes. It is not known where and when the first event took place. Recent excavations in Kazakhstan indicate humans were using domestic horses as early as 5,500 years ago.

Przewalski’s horse and offspring

The team base their findings on a complete sequencing of the mitochondrial genome and a partial sequencing, between 1% and 2%, of the nuclear genome. They used one horse from each of the historical matrilineal lines. After processing the DNA samples with massively parallel sequencing technology, they compared the Przewalski’s horses to each other, to domestic Thoroughbred horses, and to an outgroup, the Somali wild ass.

Their results carry several implications for breeding strategies. Przewalski’s horses and domestic horses come from different evolutionary gene pools, so breeders should avoid crosses with domestic horses, they advise. Przewalski’s horses and domestic horses have a different number of chromosomes (66 for the former, compared with 64); yet their offspring are fertile (with 65 chromosomes). The hybrids are viable because they differ only by a centric fusion translocation, also called a Robertsonian translocation. The process of pairing chromosomes during meiosis is not disrupted. Cross breeding should be a last resort, if too few Przewalski’s horses are available. Their analysis also suggests that, since diverging, Przewalski’s and domestic horses have both retained joint ancestral genes and swapped genes between populations. One of the two current major blood lines, the “Prague” line, is known to have a Mongol pony as one of its ancestors. The other primary line, the “Munich” line, is believed to be pure. However, because the two groups have historically mixed, keeping “pure” Przewalski’s horses from Przewalski’s horses with known domestic horse contributions might not be necessary, the authors write.

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This is the latest post in our regular OUPblog column SciWhys. Every month OUP editor and author Jonathan Crowe will be answering your science questions. Got a burning question about science that you’d like answered? Just email it to us, and Jonathan will answer what he can. Today: how do organisms evolve?

By Jonathan Crowe

The world around us has been in a state of constant change for millions of years: mountains have been thrust skywards as the plates that make up the Earth’s surface crash against each other; huge glaciers have sculpted valleys into the landscape; arid deserts have replaced fertile grasslands as rain patterns have changed. But the living organisms that populate this world are just as dynamic: as environments have changed, so too has the plethora of creatures inhabiting them. But how do creatures change to keep step with the world in which they live? The answer lies in the process of evolution.

Many organisms are uniquely suited to their environment: polar bears have layers of fur and fat to insulate them from the bitter Arctic cold; camels have hooves with broad leathery pads to enable them to walk on desert sand. These so-called adaptations – characteristics that tailor a creature to its environment – do not develop overnight: a giraffe that is moved to a savannah with unusually tall trees won’t suddenly grow a longer neck to be able to reach the far-away leaves. Instead, adaptations develop over many generations. This process of gradual change to make you better suited to your environment is called what’s called evolution.

So how does this change actually happen? In previous posts I’ve explored how the information in our genomes acts as the recipe for the cells, tissues and organs from which we’re constructed. If we are somehow changing to suit our environment, then our genes must be changing too. But there isn’t some mysterious process through which our genes ‘know’ how to change: if an organism finds its environment turning cold, its genome won’t magically change so that it now includes a new recipe for the growth of extra fur to keep it warm. Instead, the raw ‘fuel’ for genetic change is an entirely random process: the process of gene mutation.

In my last post, I considered how gene mutation alters the DNA sequence of a gene, and so alters the information stored by that gene. If you change a recipe when cooking, the end product will be different. And so it is with our genome: if the information stored in our genome – the recipe for our existence – changes, then we must change in some way too.

I mentioned above how the process of mutation is random. A mutation may be introduced when an incorrect DNA ‘letter’ is inserted into a growing chain as a chromosome is being copied: instead of manufacturing a stretch of DNA with the sequence ATTGCCT, an error may occur at the second position, to give AATGCCT. But it’s just as likely that an error could have been introduced at the sixth position instead of the second, with ATTGCCT becoming ATTGCGT. Such mutations are entirely down to chance.

And this is where we encounter something of a paradox. Though the mutations that occur in our genes to fuel the process of evolution do so at random, evolution itself is anything but random. So how can we reconcile this seeming conflict?

To answer this question, let’s imagine a population of sheep, all of whom have a woolly coat of similar thickness. Quite by chance, a gene in one of the sheep in the population picks up a mutation so that offspring of that sheep develop a slightly thicker coat. However, the thick-coated sheep is in a minority: most of the population carry the normal, non-mutated gene, and so have coats of normal thickness. Now, the sheep population live in a fairly tempera

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This is the latest post in our regular OUPblog column SciWhys. Every month OUP editor and author Jonathan Crowe will be answering your science questions. Got a burning question about science that you’d like answered? Just email it to us, and Jonathan will answer what he can. Today: what is gene mutation?

By Jonathan Crowe

In my last three posts I’ve introduced you to the world of biological information, taking you from the storage of biological information in libraries called genomes, which house information in individual books called chromosomes (themselves divided into chapters called genes), to the way the cell makes use of that stored information to manufacture the molecular machines called proteins.

But what happens when the storage of information goes wrong? If we’re reading a recipe and that recipe contains a mistake, chances are that the end-result of our culinary endeavour won’t end up as it should. And so it is at the level of cells. If the information the cell is using is somehow wrong, the end result will also be wrong – sometimes with catastrophic results.

I’ve mentioned in previous posts how biological information is captured by the sequence of the building block ‘letters’ from which DNA is constructed. The sequence of letters is ultimately deciphered by a molecular machine called the ribosome, which reads the sequence of letters in sets of three, and uses each trio to determine which amino acid – the building block of proteins – should be used next in its mission to construct a particular protein. It should come as no surprise that, if the recipe for the protein is changed – if the sequence of DNA ‘letters’ is altered – the protein that is manufactured will probably contain errors as a result. And if a protein contains errors, it won’t be able to function correctly, just as flat-packed furniture will end up being decidedly wobbly if you construct it from the wrong parts.

Imagine a snippet of DNA has the sequence GGTGCTAAG. The ribosome would ‘read’ this sequence, and would use it as the recipe for building a chain of three amino acids: Glycine-Alanine-Lysine. Now imagine that we alter just one letter in our original sequence so that it becomes GGTCCTAAG. All we’ve done is swap a G for a C at the fourth position in the DNA sequence. However, this change is sufficient to affect the composition of the protein that is produced when the sequence is deciphered: the ribosome will now build a chain with the composition Glycine-Proline-Lysine.

Surely such a small change won’t actually cause significant problems in a cell, though. Right? Wrong. Amazingly (and perhaps unnervingly) the tiniest error can have really quite significant consequences.

Let’s take just one example. Sickle cell anaemia is a condition that affects the red blood cells of humans.  Red blood cells fulfil the essential role of transporting oxygen from our lungs to all the living cells of our body: they continually circulate through our arteries and veins, shuttling oxygen from one place to another. A healthy red blood cell looks a bit like a ring doughnut (though it doesn’t actually have a hole right through the middle); by contrast, the red blood cells of individuals with sickle cell anaemia become warped into crescent-like shapes (like a sickle, the grass-cutting tool, after which the disease is named). These sickle cells no longer pass freely through our arteries and veins. Instead, they tend to get entangled with each other. As a result, the flow of oxygen round the body is impeded, and

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This is the third post in our latest regular OUPblog column: SciWhys. Every month OUP editor and author Jonathan Crowe will be answering your science questions. Got a burning question about science that you’d like answered? Just email it to us, and Jonathan will answer what he can. Today: How is the information in a gene used by a cell?

By Jonathan Crowe

In my last two posts I’ve introduced the notion that DNA acts as a store of biological information; this information is stored in a series of chromosomes, each of which are divided into a number of genes. Each gene in turn contains one ‘snippet’ of biological information. But how are these genes actually used? How is the information stored in these genes actually extracted to do something useful (if ‘useful’ isn’t too flippant a term for something that the very continuation of life depends upon).

Many (but not all) genes act as recipes for a family of biological molecules called proteins: they literally tell the cell what the ingredients for a particular protein are, and how they should be combined to create the protein itself. (Proteins have a range of essential roles in the human body. Some act as building materials for different components of the body, such as the keratin we find in our hair and nails. Others act as molecular transporters: haemoglobin, which is found in our red blood cells, carries oxygen from our lungs to other parts of the body. A family of proteins called the enzymes are arguably the most important, however. Enzymes cajole different chemicals in our body into reacting with one another. Without enzymes, our bodies would be unable to generate energy from the food we eat (and you’d not be reading this blog post).)

So, somehow, the information stored in a DNA molecule is deciphered by the cell and used as the recipe for a protein. But how?

To answer this question, let’s take a journey inside the cell. We can imagine a cell to be like a factory, but one that has been divided into a series of physically separated compartments. Unlike a factory filled with air, a cell is filled with a jelly-like fluid called the cytoplasm, which surrounds the various compartments enclosed within it. In an earlier post I likened a genome to a biological library. And, inside the cell, this library is stored within a particular compartment called the nucleus.

I mentioned earlier that genes often act as recipes for proteins. But here comes a bit of a quandary: chromosomes – and the genes they contain – are locked away inside the cell’s nucleus. By contrast, proteins are manufactured by the cell in the cytoplasm, outside of the nucleus. So, for the genetic information to be used, it has to get out of nucleus and into the cytoplasm. How does this happen? Well, if we’re in a library with a book that contains information we really need, but we’re unable to take the book out of the library, we might make a photocopy of the page that holds the information we’re after. To get the information it needs out of the nucleus and into the cytoplasm the cell does something remarkably similar. The chromosome containing the gene of interest has to stay inside the nucleus, so the cell makes a copy of the gene – and that copy is then transported to where it is to be used: out of the nucleus and into the cytoplasm.

The copy of the gene generated during this cellular photocopying is made not of DNA but of a close cousin called RNA. RNA is made of three of the same building blocks as DNA – A, C and G. Instead of the T found in DNA, however, RNA uses a different block represented by the letter U (for ‘uracil’). Despite this

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This is the second post in our latest regular OUPblog column: SciWhys. Every month OUP editor and author Jonathan Crowe will be answering your science questions. Got a burning question about science that you’d like answered? Just email it to us, and Jonathan will answer what he can. Today: What are genes and genomes?

By Jonathan Crowe

I described in my last blog post how DNA acts as a store of biological information – information that serves as a set of instructions that direct our growth and function. Indeed, we could consider DNA to be the biological equivalent of a library – another repository of information with which we’re all probably much more familiar. The information we find in a library isn’t present in one huge tome, however. Rather, it is divided into discrete packages of information – namely books. And so it is with DNA: the biological information it stores isn’t captured in a single, huge molecule, but is divided into separate entities called chromosomes – the biological equivalent of individual books in a library.

I commented previously that DNA is composed of a long chain of four building blocks, A, C, G, and T. Rather than existing as an extended chain (like a stretched out length of rope), the DNA in a chromosome is tightly packaged. In fact, if stretched out (like our piece of rope), the DNA in a single chromosome would be around 2-8 cm long. Yet a typical chromosome is just 0.00002–0.002 cm long: that’s between 1000 and 100,000 times shorter than the unpackaged DNA would be. This packaging is quite the feat of space-saving efficiency.

Let’s return to our imaginary library of books. The information in a book isn’t presented as one long uninterrupted sequence of words. Rather, the information is divided into chapters. When we want to find out something from a book – to extract some specific information from it – we don’t read the whole thing cover-to-cover. Instead, we may just read a single chapter. In a fortuitous extension of our analogy, the same is true of information retrieval from chromosomes. The information captured in a single chromosome is stored in discrete ‘chunks’ (just as a book is divided into chapters), and these chunks can be read separately from one another. These ‘chunks’ – these discrete units of information – are what we call ‘genes’. In essence, one gene contains one snippet of biological information.

I’ve just likened chromosomes to books in a library. But is there a biological equivalent of the library itself? Well, yes, there is. Virtually every cell in the human body (with specific exceptions) contains 46 chromosomes – 23 from each of its parents. All of the genes found in this ‘library’ of chromosomes are collectively termed the ‘genome’. Put another way, a genome is a collection of all the genes found in a particular organism.

Different organisms have different-sized genomes. For example, the human genome comprises around 20,000-25,000 genes; the mouse genome, with 40 chromosomes, comprises a similar number of individual genes. However, the bacterium H. influenzae has just a single chromosome, containing around 1700 genes.

It is not just the number of genes (and chromosomes) in the genome that varies between organisms: the long stretches of DNA making up the genomes of different organisms have different sequences (and so store different information). These differences make sense, particularly if we imagine the genome of an organism to represent the ‘recipe’ for that organism: a human is quite a different organism from a mouse, so we would expect the instructions that direct the growth and function of the two organisms to differ.

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When cops in East Cleveland went looking for more victims of Anthony Sowell - a serial killer who once lived among the bodies of 11 women for months - they found something else.

Another serial killer.

Read more here

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Today we’d like to introduce our latest regular OUPblog column: SciWhys. Every month OUP editor and author Jonathan Crowe will be answering your science questions. Got a burning question about science that you’d like answered? Just email it to us, and Jonathan will answer what he can. Kicking us off: What is DNA and what does it do?

By Jonathan Crowe

We’ve all heard of DNA, and probably know that it’s ‘something to do with our genes’. But what actually is DNA, and what does it do? At the level of chemistry, DNA – or deoxyribonucleic acid, to give it its full name – is a collection of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and phosphorus atoms, joined together to form a large molecule. There is nothing that special about the atoms found in a molecule of DNA: they are no different from the atoms found in the thousands of other molecules from which the human body is made. What makes DNA special, though, is its biological role: DNA stores information – specifically, the information needed by a living organism to direct its correct growth and function.

But how does DNA, simply a collection of just a few different types of atom, actually store information? To answer this question, we need to consider the structure of DNA in a little more detail. DNA is like a long, thin chain – a chain that is constructed from a series of building blocks joined end-to-end. (In fact, a molecule of DNA features two chains, which line up side-by-side. But we only need to focus on one of these chains to be able to understand how DNA stores its information.)

There are only four different building blocks; these are represented by the letters A, C, G and T. (Each building block has three component parts; one of these parts is made up of one of four molecules: adenine, cytosine, guanine or thymine. It is these names that give rise to letters used to represent the four complete building blocks themselves.) A single DNA molecule is composed of a mixture of these four building blocks, joined together one by one to form a long chain – and it is the order in which the four building blocks are joined together along the DNA chain that lies at the heart of DNA’s information-storing capability.

The order in which the four building blocks appear along a DNA molecule determines what we call its ‘sequence’; this sequence is represented using the single-letter shorthand mentioned above. If we imagine that we had a very small DNA molecule that is composed of just eight building blocks, and these blocks were joined together in the order cytosine-adenine-cytosine-guanine-guanine-thymine-adenine-cytosine, the sequence of this DNA molecule would be CACGGTAC.

The biological information stored in a DNA molecule depends upon the order of its building blocks – that is, its sequence. If a DNA sequence changes, so too does the information it contains. On reflection, this concept – that the order in which a selection of items appears in a linear sequence affects the information stored in that sequence – may not be as alien to us as it might first seem. Indeed, it is the concept on which written communication is based: each sentence in this blog post is composed of a selection of items – the letters of the alphabet – appearing in different sequences. These different sequences of letters spell out different words, which convey different information to the reader.

And so it is with the sequence of DNA: as the sequence of the four building blocks of DNA varies, so too does the information being conveyed. (You may well be asking how the information stored in DNA is actually interpreted – how it actually determines how an organism develops and functions – but that’s a topic for a different blog post.)

You may be wondering how on earth ju

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By Jonathan Crowe

It began with the sound of a tyre rim grinding on the surface of the cycle path I’d been travelling along, and a sudden sensation of being on a bike that was moving through treacle rather than through air. My rear tyre had punctured and, not for the first time of late, I found myself resenting the seeming futility of life: of having the bad luck to get the puncture, of having to spend time and effort buying and fitting a new inner tube – of my life being enriched not one iota by the whole experience.

As I trudged home that evening, wheeling the now-useless bike beside me, I reflected on the many situations we encounter that mirror this experience – when we find ourselves having to invest energy, only to be no further forward, in real terms, having done so.

Why is it that we have to invest energy merely to maintain the status quo? Why do we find ourselves running, effectively only to stand still? The answer lies in an intrinsic property of all matter, a universal truth so fundamental to our existence that it is captured by its own law: the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This law tells us, in a nutshell, that we are living in a perpetual downward spiral, in which things just get worse. A cheery outlook on life, if ever there was one. But it is an outlook from which there is no escape: the universe, and everything in it, is gradually crumbling into a state of ever-increasing disorder.

This property of all matter – this collapse into disorder – is given a name: entropy. Things that are disordered have greater entropy than things that are relatively more organized. A glass of water, in which the molecules of water itself can move around relatively freely, is more disorganized – has greater entropy – than a block of ice, in which the molecules of water are trapped into a rigid, organized array.

A process that increases disorder, with its associated increase in entropy, is a spontaneous one: one that happens without having to do work to bring it about. This fact has one important corollary: a decrease in entropy – a move towards a more organized state – requires us doing work to bring it about. This is arguably why housework feels like a chore: a living room doesn’t spontaneously tidy itself. We need to invest effort to reverse the spread of disorder, and bring order to whatever degree of chaos had befallen our living space since we last made the effort to tidy up. We are essentially swimming against the natural tide of entropy, with disorder setting in the moment we take our foot off the pedal.

When we look at life at the scale of the molecules and cells of our bodies we continue to see an ongoing battle with entropy: a tussle between order and disorder. Consider proteins, the molecular machines that carry out many important functions in the cell. As they are first being manufactured (or ‘synthesised’) in the cell, proteins exist as elongated chains of conjoined amino acid subunits, much like links of sausages as they are extruded from a sausage-making machine. However, these elongated protein chains must fold into specific three-dimensional shapes to function correctly. This folding represents an increase in order, and hence a decrease in entropy. As we note above, though, swimming against the tide of entropy comes at a cost: the cell must do work to drive such a process forward.

This battle against entropy is essentially why we must eat on a regular basis: to give the cells of our body the energy they need to drive forward those processes that won’t happen spontaneously.

Even the very continuation of life is a battle against disorder. Successful reproduction relies on the passing of biological information from one generation to the next. Every time a cell divides, it must pass on a copy of its

My friend Misha Angrist, a former geneticist and the author of Here is a Human Being At the Dawn of Personal Genomics, answers some of my questions about DNA research at The Awl.

Holy crap, Misha, you’re making your entire genome public! Are you nervous?

It’s already done. All of my data are here. Frankly I don’t think anything in my DNA could be as embarrassing as this kelly green shirt that continues to taunt me from the interwebs.

I spend a lot of time worrying about the long-term consequences of opening the Pandora’s box just by joining 23andMe.

Hmmm. What is it you’re worried about exactly?

Well, in addition to being an enthusiastic neurotic, I’m a hypochondriac with health problems, and I guess I’m anxious that I won’t be able to get insurance coverage in my old age, and I’ll end up being yelled at and bossed around in some grannies’ ward with rows and rows of beds, like in Memento Mori

True, although I suspect that those types of stories are rare. But even if they’re not, I believe that one way of combating/preempting that sort of behavior is by having a cohort of people putting it all out there and seeing what happens. I am fairly well convinced that if an insurer or employer used a Personal Genome Project participant’s data to discriminate against him/her, the personal genomics hive would raise holy hell and quickly create a PR nightmare for the perpetrator.

Ah, so participation is actually a kind of insurance of its own! Where do I sign up?

Yeah, if you fuck with me, then you fuck with all of the public genomes and arguably the entire biomedical research enterprise.

More here, and we continue the conversation at McNally Jackson tonight, at 7 p.m. Join us if you’re free.

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By Jonathan Crowe

What links a queen honeybee to a particular group of four atoms (one carbon and three hydrogen atoms, to be precise)? The answer lies in the burgeoning field of epigenetics, which has revolutionized our understanding of how biological information is transmitted from one generation to the next.

The genetic information stored in our genome – the set of chromosomes that we inherit from our parents – directs the way in which we develop and behave. (We call the attributes and behaviours exhibited by an organism its ‘phenotype’.) Traditionally, the genetic information was thought to be encoded solely in the sequence of the four different chemical building blocks from which our DNA is constructed (that is, our genome sequence). If a DNA sequence changes, so the resulting phenotype changes too. (This is why identical twins, with genomes whose DNA sequences are identical, look the same, but other individuals, whose genomes comprise different DNA sequences, do not.) However, the field of epigenetics opens up a strong challenge to this traditional view of our DNA sequence being the sole dictator of phenotype.

So what actually is epigenetics? In broad terms, epigenetics refers to the way that the information carried in our genome – and the phenotype that results when this information is ‘deciphered’– can be modified not by changes in DNA sequence, but by chemical modifications either to the DNA itself, or to the special group of proteins called histones that associate with DNA in the cell. (It’s a bit like taking a book, with a story told in the author’s words, and adding notes on the page that alter how the story is interpreted by the next person to read it.)

But what has epigenetics to do with the group of four atoms, the one carbon and three hydrogen atoms mentioned at the start of this blog post? These four atoms can combine to form a methyl group – a central carbon atom, with three hydrogen atoms attached; the addition of methyl groups to both DNA and histone proteins in a process called methylation is a primary way in which epigenetic modification occurs. For example, the addition of a methyl group to one of the four chemical building blocks of DNA (called cytosine, C) either when it appears in the sequence CG (where G is the building block called guanine) or the sequence CNG (where N represents any of the four chemical building blocks of DNA) appears to result in that stretch of DNA being ‘switched off’. Consequently, the information stored in that stretch of DNA is not actively used by the cell; that stretch of DNA falls silent.

But what of our queen honeybee? Where does she fit into our story? A queen honeybee has an identical DNA sequence to her workers. Yet she bears some striking differences to them in terms of physical appearance and behavior (amongst other attributes). These differences are more than just skin-deep, however: the pattern of methylation between queen and worker larvae differs. Their genomes may be the same at the level of DNA sequence, but their different patterns of methylation direct different fates: the queen honeybee and her workers develop into quite distinct organisms.

Things take an interesting turn when we consider the cause of these different methylation patterns: the diets that the queen and workers experience during their development. The queen is fed on large quantities of royal jelly into adulthood, while worker larvae face a more meager feast, being switched to a diet of pollen and nectar early on. It is these diets that influence the way in which the queen and worker bees’ genes are switched on and off.

It is not just the queen honeybee whose genome is affected by the environment (in her case, diet). Mice exposed to certain chemicals during pregnancy have be

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By Bram Vermeer

Science can create a better world. We are no playthings in the Earth’s fate. Here are my personal top 10 breakthroughs that are badly needed to ensure our future.

1. Smart irrigation

When farmers irrigate their land, they usually water it 100 percent of the time. But isn’t it silly for farmers to ignore the rain? Often they have no alternative, as reliable rain forecasts are not available. Ethiopia, for example, has only a dozen weather stations that report online. But nowadays many farmers own a cell phone. Google.org came up with a simple, yet brilliant idea: let farmers text their own weather observations to a central computer. That will allow experts to make a forecast and text an irrigation advice to the farmers. This is only the beginning for how information technology can revolutionize farming.

2. New energy from the earth

This century we will probably say goodbye to oil. I have great hopes for deep geothermal energy, but it doesn’t feature in many energy scenarios. Planners usually base their ideas on existing technologies. A breakthrough may make it possible to tap the heath of the Earth. If we can really learn how to drill 5 to 10 kilometers through hard rock, we can make many artificial geysers. That would make large amounts of energy available within the next 20 years. A few trials are already underway. If they succeed, we’ll have to completely revise our energy future.

3. Solar cells printed on rollers

For solar energy to provide 5 percent of the world’s energy needs, we would need to cover a surface as large as California with solar cells. We have no way of doing that with current solar cell technology, except if we start using plastic or other thin materials that can be processed on rollers. That means you can use printing techniques, which allow for faster production. Plastic solar cells have progressed over the past decade from a scientific curiosity to a promising breakthrough technology. But we need to improve their lifespan and efficiency.

4. A factory in a shoebox

Size matters. Modern electronics makes it perfectly viable to minimize the size of a chemical plant without sacrificing efficiency. So why not reverse the trend of sizing up installations and start shrinking the equipment? You can miniaturize all the vessels, pipes, and distillation columns that make up a chemical plant—down to the size of a shoebox. The local supermarket could produce your washing powder. No logistics required.

5. Personal genetic profile

Long before 2030, all parents in the US will probably be able to afford to have their baby’s DNA sequenced. Knowing the details of the DNA will make it easier to predict the effects of pharmaceuticals. And it will generate a mass of significant data for scientific research, which will further accelerate progress. Probably we’ll learn that nurture may compensate for our genetic nature. When DNA tells us where our weaknesses lie, we’ll probably start training to improve on that. Learning from DNA will make us less dependent on our genetic fate.

6. Fertilizer factories in Africa

Africa currently imports most of its fertilizers. So why not produce them locally? This would reduce the hassle of transportation on bad roads and connecting to international markets. It would bring the benefits of the Green Revolution to rural communities. Technically, we ‘would have to scale down the chemical installations to meet the local requirements, but new developments in chemistry will make that possible.

7. Antidote for the real pandemic

Not much happened in the 2009 pandemic. But we learned that 85 percent of the world’s population has little

An exciting new website is RomanceUniversity.org. Billed as a place where friends are made and dreams are realized, it is proving to be the place to go for not only romance writers, but writers in general, and readers of all genres. Check it out. There is something for everyone.

One of the entries pays tribute to Kate Duffy, long time acquisition editor of romantic literature. While her last stop was with Kensington, her involvement with the romance genre is a pedigree many aspire to attain. Please take a moment to read.

Back at the ranch - er - the Windy City RWA ranch that is, our guest speaker this week is Joe Welk and his topic is Forensic DNA Analysis. Whether you're a CSI junkie or just fascinated by all things forensic, this talk is for you. He is quite impressive. Go to http://www.windycityrwa.org/ for more info. I'm the program coordinator for our group and I'm always excited when I find a Subject Matter Expert (SME) such as Joe who can present a hard-to-understand topic in a way that let's the rest of us in.

Reports continue to emerge from Publishers Weekly regarding the various regional results of the book industry. Go to http://www.publishersweekly.com/ and search on great lakes for one of the regional reports.

In the midst of so many writers conferences folding, we at Love Is Murder want to entice everyone out there to stay tuned to our annoucements regarding our 2011 Annual Love Is Murder Con held the first weekend in February 2011. Our website will be updated soon with all the exciting new details.

Also, I'm spearheading a new adventure called Writers in Support of Heroes. The idea is to honor all our heroes in society. The group description is as follows:

"A group of writers, whether published or not, who support all kinds of heroes including the brave members of our armed forces to those on the front lines in hospitals, fire stations, police departments, schools, and so much more. Our support ranges from donating books, supporting literacy efforts, and helping those who face danger and difficult challenges to explore their experiences through the power of telling their story."

Please go to http://www.meetup.com/ and signup if you aren't a member already and join me in celebrating and raising money for all our heroes.

Take care and have a happy writing/reading day, and remember the power of your story is just plain powerful!

Image via Wikipedia

In this article, 10 ways of saving time while getting ready in morning is mentioned. The ideas are very stupid and horrible. I hope you enjoy it. They are as follows:

1. Do not sleep at night. Hence, you do not have to worry about getting up early in morning and to rush for job.
2. Do not take shower rather use deodorants and perfume to avoid public embarrassment.
3. Use the top and the bottom part simultaneously. I mean that eat and excrete simultaneously. However, if you think it is an obnoxious idea, then do reading rather than eating.
4. Brush your teeth while taking bath.
5. While sleeping, wear your shoes, this will save time in morning.
6. If possible, wear your office dress in night.
7. Hire servants who will do everything for you.
8. Wear your clothes while traveling.
9. Buy a car.
10. Finally yet importantly, do not leave your office in evening. Therefore, you will not have to worry about coming back.

You might be thinking that these ideas are unrealistic, but the fact is that many people try these ideas more often than anyone can think. So, go ahead and try them out. Other wise, just relax.

For more of my funny articles, click following links:

1. The Best Prank Articles in Triond: Here is information about the best prank articles ever posted on Triond, along with their links.
2. The 10 Most Stupid Reasons Why Not to Go to Sleep: Warning: reading this topic can make you bald so enter at your own risk.
3. Funny Science Story 1: DNA as Mafia Boss: A funny way to teach DNA replication.
4. Funny Science Story 2: Enzyme: A funny way to teach enzyme substrate interaction.
5. Five Simple Games Which Can Increase Mobile Sales Tremendously: Check out five simple games which every mobile company must consider if they want to boost their sales.

Image via Wikipedia

In this article, 10 ways of saving time while getting ready in morning is mentioned. The ideas are very stupid and horrible. I hope you enjoy it. They are as follows:

1. Do not sleep at night. Hence, you do not have to worry about getting up early in morning and to rush for job.
2. Do not take shower rather use deodorants and perfume to avoid public embarrassment.
3. Use the top and the bottom part simultaneously. I mean that eat and excrete simultaneously. However, if you think it is an obnoxious idea, then do reading rather than eating.
4. Brush your teeth while taking bath.
5. While sleeping, wear your shoes, this will save time in morning.
6. If possible, wear your office dress in night.
7. Hire servants who will do everything for you.
8. Wear your clothes while traveling.
9. Buy a car.
10. Finally yet importantly, do not leave your office in evening. Therefore, you will not have to worry about coming back.

You might be thinking that these ideas are unrealistic, but the fact is that many people try these ideas more often than anyone can think. So, go ahead and try them out. Other wise, just relax.

For more of my funny articles, click following links:

1. The Best Prank Articles in Triond: Here is information about the best prank articles ever posted on Triond, along with their links.
2. The 10 Most Stupid Reasons Why Not to Go to Sleep: Warning: reading this topic can make you bald so enter at your own risk.
3. Funny Science Story 1: DNA as Mafia Boss: A funny way to teach DNA replication.
4. Funny Science Story 2: Enzyme: A funny way to teach enzyme substrate interaction.
5. Five Simple Games Which Can Increase Mobile Sales Tremendously: Check out five simple games which every mobile company must consider if they want to boost their sales.

Not a Chimp: The hunt to find the genes that make us human is an exploration of why chimps and humans are far less similar than we have been led to believe. Genome mapping has revealed that the human and chimpanzee genetic codes differ by a mere 1.6%, but author Jeremy Taylor explains that the effects of seemingly small genetic difference are still vast. In the post below, he looks at cases of domesticated chimps turning on their owners and argues that humans must learn to keep chimpanzees at arms’ length, literally and intellectually.

Jeremy Taylor has been a popular science television producer since 1973, and has made a number of programmes informed by evolutionary theory, including two with Richard Dawkins. You can visit his blog here.

In the first chapter of Not A Chimp I tell the blood-thirsty and cautionary tale of how two male chimpanzees attacked a middle-aged American couple and savaged the husband to within an inch of his life. I wanted to highlight the strangely ambivalent world of chimpanzee-human relations which can turn on a sixpence from anthropomorphic domestic bliss to berserk savagery. Sadly, but not surprisingly, attacks on humans by chimpanzee pets are not rare. Earlier this year, a young chimp called Travis, who had lived happily and docilely at home with a Connecticut woman, suddenly showed his dark side and mauled her friend, terrified the neighbourhood, attacked a posse of policemen who had rushed to the scene, and was dispatched, Dirty Harry style, by an officer’s fire-arm. One minute you can be sitting peacefully with your simian chum, both sipping Budweisers while watching a baseball game on TV, the next minute he’s biting a neighbour’s fingers off and causing havoc.

There are over 200 chimpanzees kept as domestic pets - companions - in the United States, where their owners feel compelled to disregard the fact that chimps are immensely strong, emotionally labile, and potentially highly dangerous wild animals, in favour of the comfy tea-and-slippers notion that they are so like us humans in terms of genetics, behaviour and cognition, that they are, quite literally, one of the family. Not so long ago we were thought to have diverged from the line that led to chimps a massive 25 million years ago, and had since evolved unique cognitive powers that set us apart from them. Now we know that chimp and human ancestors diverged a mere 6 million years ago, and that, over many stretches of the DNA in our respective genomes, we appear to be almost 99% identical. Although hotly contested, a good number of cognitive psychologists contend that the mental lives of chimps and humans are also closer than we once thought, and that chimps can empathize, deceive and manipulate each other because, like us, they understand that other individuals have mental lives in which their actions are governed by beliefs, desires and knowledge - rather than acting like unconscious lumbering robots.

Our lay persons’ ability to anthropomorphize our pets - in this case chimps - plays into the hands of what I call the “chimps are us” industry where scientists who should know better accentuate the similarities and trivialize the differences between chimps and humans such that humans, as Jared Diamond so memorably dubbed us, have become perceived as the “third chimpanzee”. But these scientists are simply behind the times, reading from a genetic script festooned with cobwebs. Over the last 10 years or so, thanks to increasingly powerful means to investigate the genetic structure and DNA sequence, we now know that chimpanzee and human genomes are nowhere near as similar as we have been told; that there are crucial differences between the timing and rate at which near-identical genes work in humans and chimps, particularly in the brain; and that there are a host of exotic structural differences between chimp and human genomes, caused by copy number variation of genes, multiple duplications of enormous sections of DNA, insertions, inversions and deletion of genetic code, and many more mechanisms, all of which serve to reduce the similarity of chimp and human DNA.

I am not quite sure what the best explanation is for this persistent over-stressing of the similarity between us and chimpanzees, apart from a need to anchor us more firmly to the animal kingdom by abolishing the speciesism that has, in the past, held us apart, above, “better than” all the other great apes. Something unique. Perhaps this idea of cognitive uniqueness, an unbridgeable cognitive gap between us and chimps, sniffs too suspiciously, and dangerously, of religion - the perpetual assault on conventional evolutionary biology by creationists. We use science to close the ranks between us and the other great apes for fear that God will get a foot in between us and replace Darwinian origins with divine ones. Certainly, what similarity there is between us and chimps has been used to bolster our sense of affinity with them, the better to urge us to conserve them in a world in which their habitats are becoming rapidly decimated. Indeed, we are perilously close, in my opinion, to the philosophical insanity of widely using the concept of human rights to protect and conserve chimpanzees. Here the concepts of cognitive and genetic proximity are used to argue that chimps are “virtually human”, or even worse, that they are as human as little children or the feeble-minded. Though why we need to be persuaded to save chimps because they are nearly genetically identical to us, when we need no bidding through shared genetics to try to save the rainforest, the green-flowered Helleborine orchid or the Javan rhino, is beyond me.

Even if, over parts of our respective genomes, chimps and humans are 99% identical this does not mean that chimps are 99% human or alternatively that we are 99% chimp. We must learn to keep chimpanzees at arms’ length - literally and intellectually - while still being capable of thrilling to their complex social intelligence and using them as an essential scientific tool to find out how we evolved from something that very probably looked and behaved quite like them. Chimps are NOT us!

A novelist is the sole parent of an immaculate conception. Despite the midwifery of the editor, the baby is all yours. An illustrated book is a very different matter. It has two parents – writer and artist. I’ve just corrected the first proofs of a story that will be out later this year, and seen the pictures in colour for the first time. It’s always exciting to see the other half of the book-baby’s DNA. Sometimes there are surprises – ‘Ooh, look at that lovely ginger hair!’, or ‘I didn’t expect him to like cheese’, or ‘Doesn’t she live in a big house?’ Sometimes, as with a real child, there is a feature you’d rather not see in the offspring – that ugly nose, or the sullen scowl. Occasionally one of your own features stares out at you, horribly: do I really use semi-colons like that?

Sometimes, a writer and illustrator work closely together, and the offspring has two parents intimately involved with each other – an ideal situation in publishing as in life. This book, though, is the product of IVF by donor. I had some say in the choice of co-parent, checking the agency website and looking at his portfolio, and the black and white roughs showed there were no horrors lurking. But the first colour proofs are the moment of truth.

A good picture book is an organic whole, with words and pictures inseparable. The writer needs to leave scope for the illustrator’s imagination, and the book is richer for having someone else’s take on the story. As a writer, you can learn more about your own story from the way the illustrator has interpreted it. It can be hard to step back and give the other parent space, but it’s as essential in picture books as in families. You might not like your co-parent letting the baby stay up late, and you might not like pictures with quite so much brown in, but you both have equal rights over the progeny and the mother/writer is not necessarily always right. Even so, I still wish he didn’t have that nose and dress sense, and I don’t like the way his mouth goes when he does that thing. Must be his dad’s fault, because I don’t do that.

2009 is the year of Darwin, celebrating the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth, and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his most famous work On the Origin of Species. BBC Radio 4 has recently been running a series of programmes called ‘Dear Darwin’, which invited five eminent thinkers to write a letter to Darwin, and to read it on air. One of the contributors was Jerry A. Coyne.

Jerry Coyne is a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago and author of Why Evolution is True, which is published in the UK by OUP and in the USA by Viking. Below is the text of his letter to Darwin.

My Dear Mr. Darwin,

Happy 200th birthday! I hope you are as well as can expected for someone who has been dead for nearly 130 years. I suppose that your final book, the one about earthworms, has a special significance for you these days. Are the worms of Westminster Abbey superior to the ones you studied so carefully in the grounds of your home at Downe in Kent? They’ve certainly mulched some distinguished people over the years!

But enough of the personal questions: let me introduce myself. I am one of thousands – maybe tens of thousands – of professional biologists who work full time on your scientific legacy. You’ll be happy to know that Britain remains a powerhouse in what we nowadays call evolutionary biology, and your ideas now have wide currency across the entire planet. I work in Chicago, in the United States of America. But even the French have finally reluctantly relinquished their embrace of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, whose misguided evolutionary ideas you did so much to discredit.

Your Origin of Species turns 150 this year. I just re-read it in your honour and must say that, though you did not always have the snappiest turn of phrase, it really is a wonderfully comprehensive and insightful work. It is remarkable, considering what you did not know when you wrote it, how robust the book has proved over the years. The findings of modern biology, many of them inconceivable to you as you beavered away in your Down House study, have provided ever more evidence in support of your ideas, and none that contradicts them. We have learned a huge amount in the past 150 years, but nearly all of it still fits comfortably into the framework you outlined in The Origin. Take DNA, for example. This is what we call the hereditary material that is passed down from generation to generation. You knew nothing about it – remember how you wished you understood more about how heredity works? Now we have full DNA sequences from dozens of species, each one a string of billions of the four DNA letters—A, T, G and C—each a different chemical compound. What do we find when we compare these sequences, say between a mouse and a human? We see the DNA equivalent of the anatomical similarities – as mammals – that you noted mice and humans share because they are descended from a common ancestor, an early mammal. Strings of As, Gs, Cs, and Ts tell precisely the same evolutionary story as traits like lactation and warm-bloodedness. It is absolutely marvelous that your 150 year old insight on common ancestry should be so relevant to the very latest discoveries of the new field we call molecular biology.

In The Origin, you gave very little evidence for evolution from the fossil record, wringing your hands instead about the incompleteness of the geological record. But since then, the labors of fossil-hunters throughout the world have turned up plenty of evidence of evolutionary change, and many amazing “transitional” forms that connect major groups of animals, proving your idea of common ancestry. You predicted that these forms would exist; we have found them. These include fossils that show transitions between mammals and reptiles, fish and amphibians, and even dinosaurs with feathers—the ancestors of birds! Just in the past few years, paleontologists have unearthed an astonishing fossil, called Tiktaalik, that is intermediate between fish and amphibians. It has the flat head and neck of an amphibian, but a fishy tail and body, while its fins are sturdy, easily able, with slight modification, to give them a leg up when they left the water. The fossil record has given us a direct glimpse of an event of great moment in the history of the planet: the colonization of land by vertebrates. And we have evidence just as convincing for the recolonization of the sea by mammals: the group that gave rise to whales. In The Origin, you were correct in suggesting that whales arose from land animals, but you got it wrong on one point. You thought they may have come from carnivores like bears, but we now know this is not true. Instead, the ancestral whale came from a small hooved animal rather like a deer. And in the last thirty years we have discovered a whole series of intermediate fossils spanning the gap from those ancient deer to modern whales, showing them losing their hind legs, evolving flippers, and moving their breathing hole to the top of their head. Both Tiktaalik and these ancestral whales put paid to the objection, which you yourself encountered, that no transitional form between land and water could possibly have existed.

Perhaps the most remarkable set of intermediate fossils, however, come from an evolutionary transition rather closer to home. In 1871, you more predicted that, since humans seem most related to African great apes, gorillas and chimpanzees, we would find human fossils on that continent. And now we have them—in profusion! It turns out that our lineage separated from that of chimpanzees, our closest living relatives, nearly 7 million years ago, and we have a superb series of fossils documenting our transition from early apelike creatures to more modern human forms. Our own species has become an exemplar of evolution. And we know even more: evidence from our hereditary DNA material has told us that all modern humans came from a relatively recent migration event—about 100,000 years ago—when our ancestors left Africa and spread throughout the world.

The idea you were proudest of was natural selection. That too has had a good 150 years, holding up well as the main cause of evolution and the only known cause of adaptation. Perhaps the most dramatic modern example involves bacteria that are now known to cause disease, including the scarlet fever that was such a plague upon your family. Chemists have developed drugs to cure diseases like this, but now, as you might well predict, the microbes are becoming resistant to those drugs—precisely in accord with the principles of natural selection—for the most drug-resistant microbes are the ones that survive to breed. There are hundreds of other cases. One that will especially please you is the observation of natural selection in the Galápagos finches you collected in the Beagle voyage—now called “Darwin’s finches” in your honor. A few decades ago, zoologists observed a great drought on the islands that reduced the number of small seeds available for the birds to eat. And, just as predicted, natural selection caused the evolution of larger-beaked birds within only a few years. These examples would surely be a centerpiece of The Origin were you to rewrite it today.

All told, the resilience of your ideas is remarkable. But that is not to say that you got everything right. On The Origin of Species was, admit it, a misnomer. You described correctly how a single species changes through time, but you came a cropper trying to explain how one species splits into two. Speciation is a significant problem, because it underpins the branching process that has yielded the tree of life – that extraordinary vision you bequeathed us of the natural world as one vast genealogy. Speciation is the key to understanding how, starting with the very first species on earth, evolution has resulted in the 50 million species that are thought to inhabit our planet today.

You once called speciation the “mystery of mysteries,” but it’s a lot less mysterious these days. We recognize now that species are separated one from another by barriers to reproduction. That is, we recognize different species, like humans and chimpanzees, because they cannot successfully interbreed. To modern evolutionary biologists, studying “the origin of species” means studying how these barriers to reproduction arise. And now that we have a concrete phenomenon to investigate, we are making remarkable progress in understanding the genetic details of how one species splits into two. This is in fact the problem to which I’ve devoted my entire career

I wish I could end this letter by telling you that your theory of evolution has achieved universal acceptance. As you well knew, evolution has proved a bitter pill for religious people to swallow. For example, a large proportion of the American public, despite access to education, clings to a belief in the literal truth of Genesis. You will find this hard to believe, but more Americans believe in the existence of heavenly angels than accept the fact of evolution. Unfortunately, I must often put aside my research to fight the attempts of these “creationists” to have their Biblical views taught in the public schools. Humans have evolved extraordinary intellectual abilities, but sadly these are not always given a free rein by their owners. But this probably won’t surprise you – remember the Bishop of Oxford and his attempt to put your friend Thomas H. Huxley in his place?

You wrote in your introduction to The Origin of Species that

“No one can feel more sensible than I do of the necessity of hereafter publishing in detail all the facts, with references, on which my conclusions have been grounded; and I hope in a future work to do this.”

It seems that, distracted by other projects, you never got around to it, but my own effort along these lines is represented in a book (which I enclose) called Why Evolution is True. It goes further to describe the evidence supporting you than a letter this size ever could, but it’s just one book at just one moment in the history of biology. When I myself am as long gone as you are, somebody else will certainly need to write an update, for the facts supporting your theories continue to roll in, and I wager they will continue to do so.

So, rest in peace, Mr. Darwin, and here’s hoping that the next hundred years will see a steady evolution of rationality in a troubled world.

Your most humble servant,
Jerry Coyne

By Cassie Ammerman- Publicity Assistant

Richard Dawkins is the bestselling author of The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion. He’s also a pre-eminent scientist, the first holder of the Charles Simonyi Chair of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford, and is a fellow of New College, Oxford. Called “Darwin’s Rottweiler” by the media, he is one of the most famous advocates of Darwinian evolution. His most recent book is The Oxford Guide to Modern Science Writing, a collection of the best science writing in the last century.

This is the first in a series of podcasts we’ll be running from an interview with Richard Dawkins. In it, Dawkins talks about the different scientists he chose to include in The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing. In this selection, Dawkins talks with Dorian Devins about James Watson and Francis Crick, the two men famous for discovering the structure of DNA.

Transcript after the jump.

DORIAN DEVINS: Francis Crick is one of the people in here, and I know you…

RICHARD DAWKINS: Yes, I met him a couple of times. I know Jim Watson rather better. Francis Crick died a couple of years ago. He was of course the other half of Watson and Crick, and they were both indispensable. It’s a wonderful illustration of how two people coming together seem to make something that’s greater than the sum of their parts. Francis Crick has written a number of books. He’s always very thoughtful, very stimulating. It’s impossible for him to say anything that isn’t interesting, and he was one of the great, possibly the greatest, intellects of the molecular biology revolution, which started with Watson and Crick in 1953, when they were both young men. But Crick went on to in a way dominate the field. I mean, in the elucidation of the genetic code, the fact that it’s a triplet code, for example, he played a leading role in that. So he became a kind of elder statesman of molecular genetics, and then rather later in his life, he switched completely to a totally new field, which was the study of consciousness. And he was never really a proper neurobiologist, but he sort of somehow managed to well, use his eminence in the field to open doors to talk to neurobiologists. And once again, he was a very, very thoughtful, stimulating figure in that field, as well as his own field of molecular genetics.

DEVINS: Whereas I guess Watson, more or less, stuck to genetics, although he did…

DAWKINS: Yes he did stick with genetics, and Watson was pretty much involved in initiating the human genome project. He didn’t stay in the human genome project, but he was largely responsible for getting it started in the first place.

DEVINS: And their writing styles are so different. It’s interesting.

DAWKINS: Yes, well, that’s right. Watson’s writing style is amazingly readable, but very odd. I mean, it’s…any teacher of English would blue-pencil it straight away. He had a most weird tendency to stick strings of adjectives before a—not so much adjectives, more phrases that count as adjectives—so he’ll say, if he wants to say he walked by, well quite close to here is Keble College (which is the Victorian building designed by Butterfield), Watson will say “I walked by the Butterfield-designed Keble College.” Sticking an adjective, making a phrase into an adjective, and then sticking it before the noun. And it’s an odd way of writing, but for some reason, it’s very readable, and I find that his books are page turners in a way that any teacher of English would sort of veto.

DEVINS: It’s funny how the personalities come out in the writing sometimes.

DAWKINS: Yes, that’s true. I think it’s part of the personality, and I think it’s because Watson writes in such an irresponsible way. He doesn’t mind who he offends, and so you’re always kind of turning the page, waiting for the next bit of scandal really.

DEVINS: As he is in life.

DAWKINS: Yes.

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The first thing I'd like to draw your attention to is Becky's fabulous interview with Linda Urban, author of A Crooked Kind of Perfect:

A Crooked Kind of Perfect is about a girl who dreams big—really big. What were your dreams at age eleven? Did you ever want to play the piano?

I wanted to be like the heroine in whatever book I was reading at the time. It seemed to me that my favorite books were about girls who were unappreciated or underestimated but were eventually recognized for being the most beautiful or talented or magical or whatever. I did, at one time, think that playing the piano might be that thing for me, but I really was no musician. And besides, we had that organ.