Snow Bits

Via Paper Rad

Der Bus nach Nirgendwo

Some great modern art presented this past weekend in Süddeutsche Zeitung

The Lord's Encyclopedia

I should know enough to not bother, but somethings are just to unbelievable to be true.

From Spiegel Online:

Wikipedia for Christian Fundamentalists

How you call something based on ignorance and outright bias any kind of encyclopedia (see Conservapedia and CreationWiki) is beyond me, but at least you know to take everything with satire right from the onset.

You don't have to look long to find erronous. From CreationWiki:

Evolutionism is the belief(1) in the theory that life on Earth is simply the result of random, natural processes, and ultimately attempts to explain the existence of humans by means other than divine creation(2).

1) Evolution is not a faith, no belief is required. In fact if scientists told you to simply believe them, nothing would get published. Those kinds of scientists don't last long.

2) Science is not concerned with proving things for the purpose of negating religion. They may find it depressing to hear that Science is actually not concerned with Religion, the relationship is a bit one-sided.

Is there some hope? Well at least EvoWiki has been up and running for some time, and for anyone who is willing, there is a multitude of information discussing what Evolution actually is, and is freely available though libraries, online and open access journals.

PersonalDNA

If you ever thought that DNA wasn't useful enough, welcome to your personalDNA.

So apparently I'm an Animated Creator:

• You are outgoing, comfortable with others, and up for anything, which makes you ANIMATED

• Your imagination, confidence, willingness to explore, and appreciation of beauty make you a CREATOR

Bio Machines

Yesterday I heard a good, and information filled, talk by Dustin Penn, a mainstay in the MHC world. He described analyzing the scent of families in secluded Swiss villages. One point was that it was not possible to distinguish familial from nonfamilial individuals. The point of technological thresholds came up in the discussion period and Penn of course pointed out that a dogs nose is much more sensitive than the best machines available to chemists today. I thought, but isn't that why we're Biologists then?

New Millennium Evol'n

Here an interesting older review that I stumbled across: James A Shapiro: A 21st Century View of Evolution: Genome System Architecture, Repetitive DNA, and Natural Genetic Engineering. It describes new ways of thinking "about genomes as sophisticated informatic storage systems and about evolution as a systems engineering process"

From an organizational point of view, distant effects of repetitive element dosage tell us that the whole genome is a single integrated system, regulated both in cis- and trans- by networks employing DNA repeats.

The emphasis here on repetitive DNA means to take into account centromeric and telomeric regions, and other dispersed repeats (which contain signals for transcription, chromatin organization and nuclear localization of DNA itself. That's a big portion of the genome that is included in this. While a number isn't given for this classification, transposable elements, which are most likely included here, comprise 40% of the human genome (and more of the mouse) alone. In other words, we are talking about a huge amount of the genome that has a role in regulation. Regulatory evolution just got a whole lot bigger- and messier.


Another interesting point:
...bioinformatics is far more than the application of contemporary technology to large data bases. Bioinformatics has the potential to lead us to novel computing paradigms that may prove far more powerful than the Turing machine-based digital concepts we now use.

There are many different analogies people have tried to use to make sense of biological systems. At the end of the day they all fall somewhat short. One of the things this statement is eluding to is that thinking about biological systems on their own terms is the best way to understand them. There is not analogy that can summerize fundamental biological processes.

The most exciting point for me is:
Significant evolutionary changes can result form altering the repetitive elements formatting genome system architecture, not just from altering protein and RNA coding sequences.

In other words, understanding genome architecture is fundamental to understanding Evolutionary changes and part of the key lies in repetitive elements. This and many papers that have been published since point to the declining emphasis of SNPs in evolutionary study and a shift to other sources of (random) variation.