Science online, urban evolution edition

Freddie Fungus and Alice Algae have no likin' for prions. Photo by 0olong.

• Genetically determined, except when it isn't. The evolutionary context of misogyny.
• Queering evolution? The new frontier for evolutionary biology may be tracking adaptation to human-built environments.
• Mad lichen disease? Some lichens can apparently break down prions.
• Really, where would it have gone? That big underwater plume of oil spilled into the Gulf of Mexico is still there.
• No surprise to field scientists, I suspect. Commercial GPS systems have some downright dangerous issues with their databases for rural and wilderness areas.
• "This was the original peer review: immediate and open" The increasing use of online platforms for post-publication peer review may be taking scientific discourse back to its Enlightenment-era roots.
• Guess I'd better get some more gel packs. Carbohydrate supplements during exercise do, in fact, help you work longer. 
• I'm sure that if/ I took even one sniff/ It would bore me terrifically, too ... Pair-bonding with a mate seems to make voles less prone to amphetamine addiction.
• Time to revise the bat "pollination syndrome." A bat-pollinated tropical vine has leaves that collect and reflect its pollinators' echolocation signals.

Of mice and men, making a living in rarefied air

High-elevation populations of deer mice have evolved "stickier" hemoglobin to cope with the thin atmosphere. Photo via Animal Diversity Web.

It's easy to walk through the woods and fields of North America and never spot Peromyscus maniculatus, the deer mouse, but you've probably heard them scampering off through the leaf litter or under cover of tall grass. They're exceptionally widespread little rodents, found in forest undergrowth and fields from central Mexico all the way north to the Arctic treeline. In all this range, they look about the same: small and brown, with white underparts and big, sensitive ears.

That apparent sameness is deceptive, however.

A big, varied range presents lots of different environmental conditions to which a widespread species must adapt. And when that big, varied range includes the Rocky Mountains, one of those environmental conditions is as basic as the air itself. At high altitudes, atmospheric pressure is lower, which means lower partial pressure of oxygen, the gas that makes life as we know it work.

The fundamental problem at high altitude is to pull more oxygen from thinner air. Natural selection is good at solving problems, and it has multiple options for adapting a mammal to thinner air at high altitudes, to the extent that these traits are heritable. Selection could favor individuals who more readily respond to thin air by breathing faster and deeper, pulling in more air to make up for its lower oxygen content. Or selection could favor individuals who produce more red blood cells, so that a given volume of blood pumped through their lungs picks up more oxygen. Or, at the most basic level, selection could favor individuals whose individual red blood cells are better at picking up oxygen, via a new form of hemoglobin, the oxygen-binding molecule that packs every red blood cell.

Concerning pseudonyms

A pseudonym is an identity.

It may not be the identity with which the pseudonymous person was born, but it's an identity nevertheless. Far more excellent writers than I write online under pseudonyms, building up reputations around those not-given-at-birth names that are every bit as valid as whatever praise or contempt I've earned under my given-at-birth one.

Furthermore, there are some excellent reasons (see under "Bosses, not with it" and "Stalkers, online and otherwise" and "Crackpots, fielding endless e-mails from") that given-at-birth identities can be risky online, and potentially disproportionately risky for women. Which is to say, disproportionately risky for, um, half of everyone everywhere.

Which is why it's frankly rather silly and shortsighted of Google+, the hot new social network of the moment, to be closing accounts registered under pseudonyms. I mean, I understand that the big G would consider identities associated with, e.g., actual credit card accounts and consumer behaviors, to be strongly preferable. But if I were building a social network, I think I'd probably want Scicurious in it, because even if I can't get useful consumer behavior data out of her pseudonymous profile, I'll bet there are people who would join a not-quite-baked social network if it meant yet another opportunity to watch the fun when Sci puts on her ranty pants.

Which is to say, if you're trying to get people to join a club, you really don't want to kick out all the cool kids.

So, hey, there's a petition you could sign, if you think maybe Google should know they're being a mite dense about this whole thing. It is, as they say, the least you can do.

Science online, certified organic breakfast edition

This organic breakfast may not be "chemical free," but it could change your brain. Photo by lauren glanzer.

Special congratulations this week to Ed Yong, who is officially a full-time freelance writer as of Wednesday. I can only imagine what he'll achieve now that this science writing thing isn't restricted to his spare time.

• Please note that "direct" experiments ≠ clearer results. Groundbreaking experiments that would be ethically impossible to conduct.
• Pre-emptive incest? Hermaphroditic scale insects impregnate their offspring just after conceiving them.
• In other words, bugger off, Senator McCain. Why would you want to sample bears' DNA? Because bears are actually pretty important, for starters.
• No word on whether they also dance quadrilles. Teeny-tiny lobsters buzz to scare off predators.
• The first one alone may cause a spit-take. Four myths about organic agriculture may surprise you quite a bit.
• Or, less likely to draw, anyway. You're more likely to win at "rock-paper-scissors" if you play blindfolded.
• "Ooooh, changes in grey matter." Scicurious soft-boils a study purporting to show that eating breakfast changes your brain.
• Population control. When doing observational research on humans, the way you group people into populations may make a big difference.

This is my Senator

It's nice to be living in a blue state. I just wish that it wasn't necessary to move halfway across the country to finally acquire a Congressional delegation that actually reflects my values.

Post arising: Anole vs. anole vs. predators

A brown anole, with dewlap extended. Photo by jerryoldnettel.

Last June, I discussed a study with big ambitions: to experimentally compare the effects that competition and predators have on island populations of brown anoles, Anolis sagrei. Now the current issue of the journal that carried that study, Nature has a brief communication from the godfather of anole evolutionary ecology himself, Jonathan Losos. Losos and his coauthor Robert Pringle raise some serious questions [$a] about the results of that experiment.

The authors of the original study [$a], Ryan Calsbeek and Robert Cox, concluded that competition was more important than predation because natural selection acting on anoles was stronger on experimental islands with higher anole population density, while the presence or absence of predators on those islands made no difference in the strength of selection. Losos and Pringle object that anole population density is entangled with other factors that may make Calsbeek and Cox's results uninterpretable.

Pacifism as the conservative position

Via The Dish, which I haven't read in ages: Bryan Caplan distills pacifism into a comparison of E[benefits of war] and E[costs of war]. That is, we know wars are expensive and awful, but we have much less assurance that they're going to be worth it:

Of course, "Fight when it's a good idea, make peace when it's a good idea" counts as a philosophy. And you might think that this case-by-case approach has to yield better results than pacifism. But that's only true with perfect foresight. In the real world of uncertainty, case-by-case optimization is often inferior to simple rules.

Which is why I tend to think of pacifism as a small-c conservative position: simple risk-benefit analysis, and a little honest evaluation of history.

Science online, indirect costs of royal jelly edition

A queen bee, indicated with a red dot of paint. Photo by reway2007.

• Not so much explanation as warning, really. The intricacies of indirect costs in grant funding, explained.
• Motivation is key. Anoles demonstrate learning ability in an experiment that has them playing find-the-worm.
• Paging Doctor Pangloss? Bats might be most active at night because flying is hot work.
• Long live the queen! The specific protein in honeybee "royal jelly" that makes bee larvae develop into queens has been identified [$a], in part by giving the protein to fruitflies to make "queen" flies.

So what does it take to strike Stephen Colbert speechless?

I'm super late to this one, but ... holy blithering wow, man.

Dan Savage—nationally syndicated advice columnist, It Gets Better co-founder, serial contributor to This American Life, and all around alpha-gay—was on the Colbert Report to discuss the recent New York Times profile about his views on monogamy, which views may be briefly summed up as why ruin a perfectly good marriage by insisting on complete sexual fidelity? And about midway through said interview, Savage drops a line which, while requiring no censorious bleeping whatsoever, stops Colbert dead in his metaphorical and satirical tracks and had me just about on the floor in laughter and/or amazement. I'm frankly still a mite breathless, and in full-on Wallace-esque run-on mode as a result.

And, well, you probably don't want to see it if you're not particularly cool with Savage's aforementioned feelings about monogamy, but if you are in fact generally on board or at least don't get the howling fantods after reading my summary or obliquely contemplating what I shall delicately call the mechanics of love, and if you are even later to this than I am* you really ought to right now.

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Dan Savage
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog Video Archive

All of which is a rather long way to go to say, gods (or whoever) bless Dan Savage and Stephen Colbert.


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*Which probably means you didn't have an internet connection till this evening, in which case let me take this footnote to say, welcome to the World Wide Web!

Choosing your partner is only as helpful as the partners you have to choose from

Picking teammates. Original photo by humbert15.

When you need partners for some sort of cooperative activity—say, teammates for a game of kickball—you'd probably like to have a choice among several candidates. That lets you weigh considerations about kicking strength and running speed—and who promised to give you his dessert at lunch period—to build a winning team. However, if the other team captain snaps up the good players first, the fact that you have a choice among the others might not make much difference.

Plants and animals looking for mutualists face a similar situation. Being able to choose among possible partners should allow the chooser to work with helpful partners and avoid unhelpful ones, but a new study suggests that in one widespread mutualism the process of choosing between partners can leave the chooser worse off than if it had no choice at all [$a].

Coauthors Erol Akçay and Ellen Simms focus on the effects of partner choice in the mutualism between plants and nitrogen-fixing bacteria—the interaction I'm studying in my current postdoc position, as it happens. All living things need nitrogen, but only some strains of bacteria are able to collect nitrogen from the atmosphere and "fix" it into a form that other organisms can use. Many plants, particularly members of the big and diverse bean family, have evolved to allow nitrogen-fixing bacteria to infect their roots—the plants form a nodule of root tissue around the infection and supply the tissue with sugar for the bacteria to feed on as they fix nitrogen. Eventually the nodule dries up and dies off, and the bacteria are freed into the soil, having multiplied many times over thanks to the food supply from the host plant.

Science online, socially un-contagious edition

You probably won't catch bad eating habits at that cocktail party. As long as you go easy on the canapés. Photo by rocketlass.

Big blogging news this week: Bora Zivkovic and the team at Scientific American have launched a big new network of science blogs, sweeping up a large chunk of my RSS subscriptions, including Kate Clancy, Eric Michael Johnson, Christie Wilcox, Krystal D'Costa, Kevin Zelnio, Jason Goldman, and SciCurious. And just like that, SciAm is the center of the science blogosphere. Congrats to everyone involved!

• When the press release precedes peer review, check your wallet. A whole series of studies proposing that behaviors from divorce to overeating are "contagious" via social ties may be bunk.
• Hoisted on their own statistical petard. A study of dinosaur morphology data using statistical methods invented by Creationists ends up confirming descent with modification.
• Solution: either more funding, or fewer deaths. US Federal funding for research into solutions to infection by drug-resistant Staphylococcus comes to less than $600 per MRSA death.
• Darwin was polite even in pencil. Robert Krulwich examines Charles Darwin's marginalia.
• They're elephants with wings! Why you should never piss off a crow.

Programming note

Chicago! Photo by jby.

No new science post this week. Partly that's because I spent the long holiday weekend in Chicago, which was all sorts of not-staring-at-my-laptop fun, for evidence of which see above.

However, it's really more because I'm thinking that a posting pace of once every other week will be more compatible with my offline schedule for the foreseeable future. Said schedule includes concentrating on the whole new postdoc thing, but also things like getting to know a shiny new hometown while it's not buried in snow and reading the last new David Foster Wallace novel ever.*

Hopefully this will result in less rushing to write posts, maybe even better posts. But don't get your hopes up, Dear Readers.


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* At least one of these activities may be directly responsible for more footnotes in my posts. So you've got that to look forward to.

In which sloppy scientific reasoning inspires weak attempts at humor

Photo by Status Frustration.

Apropos of nothing much:

How many evolutionary psychologists does it take to change a lightbulb?

None. Millions of years of sexual selection have adapted us to navigate in total darkness by tripping over furniture.

And in the interest of balance:

How many evolutionary biologists does it take to change a lightbulb?

Only one—but, you know, if we wait long enough, we strongly expect non-deterministic processes to change the bulb for us.

(Confidential to Guillaume: I, for one, would love to hear an adaptive hypothesis to explain the origin of an academic field heavily devoted to making up hypotheses without ever testing them. Perhaps it's some sort of honest signalling mediated by h-scores?)

Carnival of Evolution, July 2011

Fireworks. Photo by Creativity+ Timothy K Hamilton.

It's Independence Day in the U.S. To celebrate, let me suggest the latest edition of the Carnival of Evolution, which is hosted this month by 13-year-old evolution blogger William. (He's dedicated the Carnival to some other patriotic holiday, but we'll overlook that.) The monthly roundup of online writing about evolution and all its scientific, cultural, and historical ramifications includes posts by John Wilkins, Zen Faulkes, and Byte Size Biology among many others. Go check it out while you're waiting for the barbecue coals to heat up.

Science online, chocolate milk snake oil edition

Leave the chocolate milk. Take the espresso. Photo by confusedbee.

• So counterintuitive, it's counterfactual. The "chocolate milk diet" thoroughly and painstakingly debunked.
• Proof that baby crows are smarter than the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal. A cool new study documents the development of object permanence in crows.
• First step: piss off Richard Owen. How the giant squid was finally accepted as non-mythical.
• Maybe it ain't so, Stephen Jay. Was the mismeasuring of mismeasurement in Gould's Mismeasure of Man itself ... incorrectly assessed?
• Gray's position did not make leaps. How Charles Darwin slowly convinced the botanist Asa Gray to ditch creationism, though not Christianity, simply by asking him questions.
• Paging Dr. Pangloss. A clever, but almost entirely untested, hypothesis proposes that our fingers wrinkle up when wet to improve our grip.
• Hope you like pasta. Over at his shiny new blog Science-Based Running, Dave Munger reassesses carb loading.
• In case you missed it. D&T closed out Pride Month by hosting the Diversity in Science blog carnival.
• Go do this right now. Pitch in a few bucks to help Sarcozona attend ESA, so she can write up the international ecology conference.