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Melville on Science vs. Creation Myth

From Melville's under-appreciated Mardi: On a quest for his missing love Yillah, an AWOL sailor...

Non-coding DNA Function... Surprising?

The existence of functional, non-protein-coding DNA is all too frequently portrayed as a great...

Yep, This Should Get You Fired

An Ohio 8th-grade creationist science teacher with a habit of branding crosses on his students'...

No, There Are No Alien Bar Codes In Our Genomes

Even for a physicist, this is bad: Larry Moran, in preparation for the appropriate dose of ridicule...

Michael White

Welcome to Adaptive Complexity, where I write about genomics, systems biology, evolution, and the connection between science and literature, government, and society.

I'm a biochemist

Coffee Break Science Browsing

May 22 2009 | comment(s)

That first early morning cup is wearing off; it's time for more coffee zen and a dose of science browsing to bring the day back into equilibrium:

Who knew bugs could be beautiful? Bug Safari is one of the most enjoyable blogs in my reader. Cindy has a fine eye for a world that is invisible to most of us - head on over and see for yourself.

Morning Science Quote

May 22 2009 | comment(s)

Ignorance is not just a blank space on a person's mental map. It has contours and coherence, and for all I know rules of operation as well.

- Thomas Pynchon, Slow Learner, p. 15

Old News: Biology is more than the sum of its parts

May 22 2009 | comment(s)

Systems biology is a trendy field right now, but, despite the fact that it's hyped as some amazing, new, holistic approach to biology, the questions systems biologists are asking aren't new.

Check out this paper from 1985: a model of an extremely simple biological system that, in spite of its simplicity, senses its environment and makes decisions - lambda phage, a virus that infects bacteria.

Morning Science Quote

May 21 2009 | comment(s)

It is true that if we look at a glass of wine closely enough we see the entire universe. There are the things of physics: the twisting liquid which evaporates depending on the wind and weather, the reflections in the glass, and our imagination adds the atoms. The glass is a distillation of the earth’s rocks, and in its composition we see the secrets of the universe’s age, and the evolution of the stars. What strange array of chemicals are in the wine? How did the come to be? There are the ferments, the enzymes, the substrates, and the products. There in wine is found the great generalization: all life is fermentation. Nobody can discover the chemistry of wine without discovering, as did Louis Pasteur, the cause of much disease.

Fluctuations Matter In Cell Suicide

May 21 2009 | comment(s)

You're sitting in a room filled with a gazillion air molecules - how likely is it that most of those air molecules will spontaneously end up in the corner of the room opposite of where you're sitting?

Most likely you're not too concerned about this scenario, because something like that, a massive fluctuation in the distribution of air molecules in the room, is extremely unlikely, to put it mildly.

When you have zillions of air molecules bouncing around in a room (zillions here being on the order of 10^28 molecules of the various gases that make up air), the fluctuations away from the average distribution are miniscule.

Morning Science Quote

May 20 2009 | comment(s)

There are very few lovers of truth, for truth's sake, even amongst those who persuade themselves that they are so. How a man may know whether he be so in earnest, is worth inquiry: and I think there is one unerring mark of it, viz. The not entertaining any proposition with greater assurance than the proofs it is built upon will warrant. Whoever goes beyond this measure of assent, it is plain receives not the truth in the love of it; loves not truth for truth's sake, but for some other bye-end.

- John Locke Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book IV, Ch. 19