31.3.08

The Happiness of Non-identity

Before I moved to Germany, I liked to think I was moving to a country inhabited by a common people. Like all groups of common peoples, they would be nationalistic and rejoice in their glory days, lament at their waning power on the global scene and exhibit how their culture was the greatest thing that ever happened to civilization. Well it didn't take long to figure out that if they do any of those things, its somewhat more subtle than the American drama that Canadians are used to having played out year after year for them.

After I moved to Germany, but in the recent months, to be more precise, I came to the realization that I do indeed like this country and I found myself wondering where that came from. I think I understand now that Germany and Canada are very similar in important ways, most notably the lack of any real identity.

Although both countries are home to large immigrant communities, ideas about what immigration is and the role of immigrants in society are worlds apart. In Canada the immigrant composition of the population plus the short history of the country, make little occasion for forging a national identity. Although many are "proud" to be Candian, we are not a nation of flag-wavers and patriot party-bangers. We are more subtle, we are happy, nee content even. In Germany, there is a long tradition of not having a German identity, it goes back to the original unification and was only reinforced after the war when it was a discrace to be proud of being German. The idea of a German identity doesn't exist in the same way it does for the French, English or Americans, much like it doesn't exist fo Candians either.

Maybe that is one reason why I like the country so. I am as much a piece of a large non-identity here as I was in Canada.

New Genomes Evolving

OK, here's something I didn't get a chance to blog aobut last week. Carl Zimmer has an article on Slate about "Spinach, Lettuce, and the Limits of Bioterrorism". It's about the e.coli strain O157:H7, of past widespread gastrointestinal problems. He discusses a paper reporting widespread genome rearrangements in this strain compared with other non-pathogenic strains. Sure enough Zmmer is good on his reading but he seems to draw some conclusions that leave many, including this reader, in doubt. At the end of the article he writes:

Even if a government built a giant lab just for the purpose of
stumbling across a new pathogen, it might take centuries or millenniums
to hit on something like the spinach strain.


That's the limit of bioterrorism part. The thing I am not so convinced about is that we don't need to sit around waiting for mutations to happen. Geneticists have been inducing mutations on a wide scale since they started calling themselves that name, it's just a matter of shifting though the rubble. Shoot first and ask questions later is the motto of Forward Genetics (point and shoot being the motto of Reverse Genetics). One only need to induce enough translocations, deletions and duplications whilst selecting under the right conditions. The trick of course is figuring out how to induce enough of those large scale mutations and how to select for those that you want to keep, but that hardly seems a limit to bioterrorism.

22.3.08

Comix Online

Great artists including PaperRad members and new Manja at PictureBox Inc.


Stuff!

“Our enormously productive economy . . . demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption . . . we need things consumed, burned up, replaced and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate.”

Victor Lebow (Retailing analyst) in Journal of Retailing, quoted in Durning, How Much is Enough? (1992)


I just found out about this amazing web-site: The Story of Stuff. It is similarly motivating to WorldChanging, but I think somehow more practical and inviting. The center of the web-site is an animated video with a somewhat friendly host bordering on preachy but still entertaining enough to be watchable. The two major problems I can see is that she is preaching to the converted and that the video, which will be the most dessiminated part of the web-site, focuses heavily on the negative aspects of over-consumption, leaving only the possible individual resolutions to the last minute (of 20 total). the response to over-consumption is not asceticism, but it may be hard to get people to understand that at the onset and initially people are turned off.

21.3.08

This Line is Busy...

There is was too much going on with the protests in Tibet and I haven't been able to really keep up with all of it. Basically I have been totally swamped in the lab trying to get my curent love-child off to the presses. Spiegel had a nice piece about the protests and the Chinese reaction, stating that the only way to settle the disaster is to make concessions for the Dalai Lama to return to Tibet. When I hear the Dalai Lama speak here in Germany last year he made the point of how many Chinese are not settled in the so-called Tibetan Autonomous Region, a point that was echoed by the Spiegel piece. It is clear that China has no interest in diplomacy in the issue and one can only hope that further boycotts of their coveted Olympic games has some impact on the admin. In the end it is a blessing that Toronto lost the bid for the games to Beijing. Not only because the games would bring more trouble than good to Toronto but because they will likely do just that for China.


Got Soy?


“I was totally open with the band and my family and my friends and
certainly the people I was sleeping with. I thought it was pretty
obvious,” Stipe said. “Now I recognise that to have public figures be
very open about their sexuality helps some kid somewhere out there.”
(Yes, let’s hope the people Stipe was sleeping with understood he was
gay.)



7.3.08

The coolest thing I bought in a long time

Think Fluorescent




Evolution Video and Meeting Bonanza!

There are way too many Evolution and Genetics meetings happening in Europe this year!

  • The Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution (publishers of MBE) will have their annual int'l meeting in Barcelona in May
  • The 20th Genetics Congress is being held in Berlin in the Summer and has some great Evol'n based sessions
  • The European Society for Evolutionary Biology (ESEB) also has their bi-annual Evo-Devo Conference this summer and...
  • The 12th Evolutionary Biology Meeting in Marseilles round out the season in September
Oh, and to begin the big season we at the MPI Evolutionsbiologie kick it off next week with two days choc full of wild house mouse evolutionary genetics! Our dedicated post-doc Meike Teschke has organized a great collection of people in our field (including Nachman, Foreijt, Bonhomme, König, Penn, Payseur, Tucker, Sage, Hoekstra, Pialek, Klingenberg, Bursot and others even!!).

The video part is thus: the 2007 Marseilles meeting is posted online for all to enjoy.