Mendelian inheritance

It is known that Mendel ordered 40 reprints of the paper that described the results of his now classic experiments, "Experiments on plant hybrids" published in the transactions of the Natural History Society of Brünn in 1866.

He sent these out to scientists he thought would be interested (possibly including Darwin). Only a single scientist responded and, unfortunately he steered Mendel completely wrong.

Karl (or Carl) von Nägeli, of the University of Munich, had previously experimented with hawkweed, a plant that follows an obscure asexual reproductive method. Mendel started experimenting with hawkweed, and began to question his findings from studying peas. He finally gave up all experimentation when he became abbot of the monastery, though he continued to dabble in ornamental horticulture.

Although very few of these 40 reprints survive, in a strange story last year Mendel's original manuscript has surfaced and has become the subject of an inheritance dispute (seriously): A Family Feud Over Mendel’s Manuscript on the Laws of Heredity

In the light of evolution

Posting to a blog every day is an interesting exercise. I'm reluctant to say it has made me a better writer but it has certainly helped me overcome a degree of writers block and procrastination. It also tends to permeate everything I do so I'm constantly on the look out for relevant items to post. Sometimes they just fall into my lap though. Like this article I found on the NCSE website whilst looking for something else. It's an excerpt from a forthcoming book In the Light of Evolution: Essays from the Laboratory and Field. Because the book is a series of chapters by different authors this chapter, by the science writer Carl Zimmer, can be read on its own. It makes a perfect follow up to our lecture on Darwin.

Darwin Under the Microscope: Witnessing Evolution in Microbes by Carl Zimmer

Bad commute

I think I very briefly mentioned in class that a single person, Willi Hennig, is pretty much solely responsible for developing phylogenetic systematics, or what we now call cladistics.

You can read more about him at the Willi Hennig society pages. As well as having helped modern biology take a big leap forward he also seems to have suffered the commute from hell. From 1947 to 1961 he worked, and was in fact director, of the German Entomological Insititute in Berlin. However because of the post-war division of Berlin Hennig ended up living in the American sector and working at the Institute which was in the Soviet sector.

This required 4 hours duration for the way there and returning back home, each day! This situation persisted until 1961 when the Berlin wall was built and hermetically cut off both parts of Berlin from each other.


He had to quit his position when the Berlin wall was constructed though because his commute turned from bad to impossible. Moving to East Germany was not an option because of his anti-communist views and he settled in West Germany. This might have been a good move since the Hennig Society article reveals:

It has recently become known from documents of the East German Secret Service that an official operation of the DDR administration was initiated against WH in 1961 with the final aim to imprison him or take other comparable measures because of his attitudes against the communistic system.

Names and places

Whenever we go to CCBER it reminds me of all the buildings on campus named after people and that I don't have a clue who most of them are. I recently came across the website of The University of California History Digital Archives. This is a great site containing masses of information and you can read about many of the names you see around campus: Vernon Cheadle, Preston Cloud, John Snidecor, Herbert Broida, and many others.

The best stats you've ever seen

I used this video in a different class but I think everyone should see it, and it is relevant to our discussion about human population growth.

You've never seen data presented like this. With the drama and urgency of a sportscaster, statistics guru Hans Rosling debunks myths about the so-called "developing world."

And the best part about it is that the software is now available at the Gapminder website so you can play with it yourself and look at changes through time of all sorts of environmental, social and geographical parameters.

Carrot power

Many people believe that carrots are good for their eyesight. There is a germ of truth in this in that carrots are indeed a good source of vitamin A, and vitamin A is required for, among other things, correct functioning of the visual system. However just because they are required for correct functioning does not necessarily mean that eating more of them will improve your vision. The origin of the myth that carrots are good for your eyesight dates back to World War II and the Battle of Britain that occurred in 1940 and marked a turning point in the war. The Battle of Britain refers to the air battle between the German and British air forces for air superiority. A German victory would have permitted a cross channel invasion of England.

Although the principles of Radar had been known for a long time it was British scientists who produced the first working system, enabling ground controllers to direct British planes to intercept German planes in poor visibility and at night. In order to maintain their advantage the British spread the rumor that their pilots were being successful because of their extraordinarily good eyesight. A feat that was achieved by the mass consumption of carrots. This rumor affected both the Germans and the British. Due to the blackout at night and the frequent requirement to move to air-raid shelters people were keen to improve their night vision and carrots were readily available from allotments and gardens.

I do not know whether the Germans fell for this story. There are a few suspicious parts to it that may not have been fully understood at the time. Or maybe this was a sneaky part of the plan, to encourage German pilots to poison themselves with large amounts of Vitamin A. As Claudia pointed out today, if you want to propose ingesting large amounts of a vitamin you might be better off picking one that is water, rather than fat, soluble. As vitamin A is fat-soluble, disposing of any excesses taken in through diet is much harder than with water-soluble vitamins B and C. As such, vitamin A toxicity can result. This can lead to nausea, jaundice, irritability, vomiting, blurry vision, headaches, muscle and abdominal pain and weakness, drowsiness and altered mental status. Too many carrots will also cause you to turn orange from the accumulating beta-carotene. Another good source, in fact a much better source, of vitamin A is liver. Too much liver is even worse and can kill you quite quickly as Arctic explorers who were reduced to eating polar bear and sled dog liver discovered. Polar bears have very high concentrations of vitamin A in their liver and the native Inuit were well aware of this fact:

After killing a bear, the Inuit ate the meat and used the fur to make warm trousers for men and kamiks for women. An average polar bear would yield three pairs of trousers and one kamik. The only part of the bear that was not used was the liver. This was immediately thrown out, as it could make even the sled dogs violently ill.
From Polar Bear International.

Controversy Over World’s Oldest Traces Of Life

ScienceDaily (Feb. 28, 2009) —
The argument over whether an outcrop of rock in South West Greenland contains the earliest known traces of life on Earth has been reignited, in a study published in the Journal of the Geological Society. The research, led by Martin J. Whitehouse at the Swedish Museum of Natural History, argues that the controversial rocks "cannot host evidence of Earth’s oldest life," reopening the debate over where the oldest traces of life are located.

Featured

Today's featured article on Wikipedia is the History of Evolutionary Thought which looks like it is a pretty nice article. Although there are numerous books on this subject and I'm sure some of them are maybe better, the beauty of Wikipedia is in the hyperlinks and this article is exceptionally well linked.

Despite the warning contained in the article in the previous posting, there is no doubt that Darwin was a fascinating chap.

A wonderful resource is the Darwin Correspondence Project. Darwin was a prolific correspondent (almost 15,000 of his letters survive!) and the website has the full text of 5,000 of them online and searchable. As well as containing some interesting pages (eg. Six things Darwin never said - and one he did), the website also allows you to simply browse and read the letters. Take a dip, meet Darwin the man.

Bone Wars

Today's featured article on Wikipedia is 'Bone Wars' -

...the name given to a period of intense fossil speculation and discovery during the late 1800's marked by a heated rivalry between Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh. Each of the two paleontologists used underhanded methods to out-compete the other in the field, resorting to bribery, theft, and destruction of bones. The scientists also attacked each other in scientific publications, attempting to ruin the other's credibility and cut off his funding.

Cope and Marsh were financially and socially ruined by their attempts to disgrace each other, but their contributions to science and the field of paleontology were significant, and it provided substantial material for further work—both scientists left behind many unopened boxes of fossils after their deaths. The efforts of the two men led to over 142 new species of dinosaurs being discovered and described. The products of the Bone Wars resulted in an increase in knowledge of ancient life, and sparked the public's interest in dinosaurs, leading to continued fossil excavation in North America in the decades to follow.

Blast from the past:
High-performing males have underachieving daughters

Darwin in National Geographic

A South American gray fox (Lycalopex griseus) yawns as dusk falls on Chile's Torres del Paine National Park. In Voyage of the Beagle, Darwin chronicled his first encounter with another member of the same genus, Darwin's fox (Lycalopex fulvipes): "I was able, by quietly walking up behind, to knock him on the head with my geological hammer. This fox, more curious or more scientific, but less wise, than the generality of his brethren, is now mounted in the museum of the Zoological Society."

National Geographic has a couple of nice Darwin articles this month (of course). Nice light reading but the photos are amazing and you always learn something interesting eg:

Just two weeks before he died, Charles Darwin wrote a short paper about a tiny clam found clamped to the leg of a water beetle in a pond in the English Midlands. It was his last publication. The man who sent him the beetle was a young shoemaker and amateur naturalist named Walter Drawbridge Crick. The shoemaker eventually married and had a son named Harry, who himself had a son named Francis. In 1953, Francis Crick, together with a young American named James Watson, would make a discovery that has led inexorably to the triumphant vindication of almost everything Darwin deduced about evolution.

• Darwin's First Clues: He was inspired by fossils of armadillos and sloths.
• Modern Darwins

A lost art

Although Darwin's Origin of Species book contained only a single illustration, some of his other books contained many more. In those days photography was not an option and so naturalists were, almost by necessity, fairly competent artists.

Those that were interested in the landscape were often quite talented artists, trying to capture scenes with great accuracy and attention to detail, especially in color and light.

The first depictions of the Arctic and Antarctic were made by explorers with some artistic training. You can view an online gallery of some of them here and an interactive slideshow here.

The Ice Dwellers Watching the Invaders (around 1875) by William Bradford.

American degeneracy

Welcome to the CCS blog. Or welcome back as the case may be. Note that all the posts from last time the class ran are available and are still relevant, entertaining and useful - or at least as relevant, entertaining and useful as they ever were. You can use the labels on the right hand side to pull up the posts about a particular topic.

In lecture today I briefly mentioned Jefferson's desire to find a mammoth to refute the assertion that America was in some way degenerate. It's an interesting story and the Academy of Natural Sciences has a nice series of webpages entitled 'Buffon's Degeneracy'. To make this even more relevant to lecture you can also read about Buffon's disagreement with Linnaeus (see the footnote on page 1)

"In America, therefore, animated Nature is weaker, less active, and more circumscribed in the variety of her productions; for we perceive, from the enumeration of the American animals, that the numbers of species is not only fewer, but that, in general, all the animals are much smaller than those of the Old Continent."
George Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon (1707-1788)

Others would take this further:
"One must be astonished that America has not yet produced one good poet, one able mathematician, one man of genius in a single art or a single science."

Read page two for the American response.

The anteater with a splendid classical background is from Buffon's Histoire naturelle, thirty-six volumes of which were completed during his lifetime and another eight published after his death from material he had prepared.