Some science articles, June 14th

Cosma Shalizi reviews Flynn The Domestication of the Savage Mind Vis 2quarksdaily.) I rarely read articles about IQ tests. This one is probably the first. Excerpt:
"I am committed to the kind of culture IQ tests favor, as I suspect are most of the readers of this review. Progress of many kinds is difficult or impossible without scientific knowledge and the habits of abstract thought that go with it. Spreading this kind of thinking is a Good Thing, and worth great efforts. Yet it’s also true that thinking this way presupposes a specific kind of culture, and it is a mistake to confuse our favorite mental exercises with intelligence as such.

That mistake is particularly tempting because of how we use IQ tests. Up through the 19th century, members of elites mostly viewed democracy with emotions that ranged from ambivalence to terror, even in France and the United States. They saw the masses as incapable of thinking, let alone leading. Meritocracy was a later compromise with democracy: There would still be elite leaders, but they would be chosen on the basis of talent rather than birth. This ideal helped institutionalize IQ testing and reliance on that modified IQ test, the SAT.

Flynn’s arguments suggest that these fears and hopes were at most half right. The masses were not bad at thinking, or at managing their own affairs; they were just bad at thinking like intellectuals. Meritocracy, as Flynn says, is an incoherent ideal—even if we agreed on “merit,” and allocated rewards on that basis, the winners would use some of their resources to give their children unfair advantages. But spreading educational opportunities and opening up positions of influence to broader peaceful competition has been widely beneficial.

If Flynn is right, knowing how many picture-puzzles different cohorts of Dutch teenagers could solve is actually a window through which we can see a momentous change, the “liberation from the concrete,” not just among a few clerics and scribes, but as the common condition of humanity. It would almost be damning this book with faint praise to say that it’s a valuable addition to the IQ debate (although it is); it’s an important take on what we have made of ourselves over the past few centuries and might yet make of ourselves in the future."

Holes of Silence(via Economist's View). Excerpt:
"We have created the analogue of a black hole in a Bose-Einstein condensate. In this sonic black hole, sound waves, rather than light waves, cannot escape the event horizon."

From a discussion in 'Evol. Psy. Discussion group'. Robert Karl Stonjek's first response to The Problem With Selfish Gene Theory (the first link may be available to only members of the group):
"A gene is where most intergenerational information is stored. Other information storehouses are RNA and there are epigenetic vectors. Prions are also candidate information storehouses, but to a very limited degree.

As a storage device it can be read, modified, added to and subtracted from. The agent of this change is entirely outside the gene, but the selfish gene analogy assigns agency to the gene itself, even if by analogy alone. Even so, selfish gene advocates continue the agency analogy far to readily and freely in my opinion.

By analogy, would we claim that the journal entry is the goal of science and that papers are the agent of scientific change? Clearly the aim of science is not to be stored in journals but to be expressed in the environment. Evolution is the same - expression is the goal, the purpose and the function of evolution. Sure, information needs to have intergenerational storage.

And we must give credit to what was once called 'junk DNA' for the regulatory role it is now known to perform, though this area of genetics is relatively new.

Thus the position of the gene is now one of being the most prominent known agent of intergenerational storage of certain kinds of information. We also known that there are more genes than can be stored in a single individual and so the replicator of the genes of a species is a population. It has long been known that it would be incredibly difficult to breed a population of a just about any species of animal from a single genome ~ one some clonal insects appear to have achieved this trick and their species footprint appear to be limited (few older than the last ice age, for instance).

Dawkins certainly drew our attention to the importance of thinking from the perspective of the gene and this continues to be an important perspective to take. But it is just another tool in the evolutionist's toolkit and by no means should it be the only perspective ever taken."

From The recent sequencing of the bovine genome will dramatically transform more than just the cattle industry(Seed Magazine):
"...“What’s special about the bovine genome is that it maintains protein similarities to the human sequences that are greater than those found in mice and rats. So it provides a better window for human biology.” And because the cow diverged from the human branch so long ago, analysis of its genome makes it possible to identify which human traits are well-conserved: These are the portions of the genome that haven’t changed much over hundreds of millions of years of evolutionary constraint and are thereby most essential to fitness (i.e., not junk DNA).
....
Over the last 100 years, 17 Nobel Prizes have been won on the backs of farm animals such as cows, sheep, horses, and pigs. A rural English doctor, Edward Jenner, revolutionized immunology in 1796 when he discovered that injecting people with the crusts of lesions from cows infected with cowpox provided immunity to human smallpox. (The word vaccine in fact comes from the Latin root for cow, vaca.) “That’s how the smallpox epidemic plaguing Europe in the 18th century was stopped in its tracks,” says Lewin. Cryopreservation of sperm for artificial insemination was first performed in cattle in the 1940s before the technology was applied to humans in the 1950s. And since 1960, hundreds of thousands of pigs and cows have provided valves to pump the blood of human hearts.
....
Being strictly herbivores, cows derive most of their protein from the bacteria residing on the grass they eat. These microbial populations live in the ruminant’s gut and are very efficient at breaking down complex cellular structures like cell walls in plants. Lewin predicts that mimicking this cellulytic process and understanding the cow’s microbial degradation process may prove vital in producing biofuels. "