And Now For Something Completely Different

...or maybe not. Honestly, I'm a math major, but whenever interesting research comes up, it's about biology (heck, this is the first post on my blog that even has the "math" tag). Is it that the barrier to entry for interesting math research is way, way too high for me? Probably. I could post about how interesting I find the Twin Prime Conjecture and the Riemann Hypothesis and infinitely differentiable Riemannian manifolds (Bozhe moi), but I'd just be doing a vaguely boring rehash in most cases. Oh, exception: I find it really neat that the Cantor set contains an uncountably infinite number of points (and the proof of this is really neat, too, and illuminates the name 'Cantor ternary set'), that these points are arranged in segments, and that it still has measure 0 (that is, if you add up the length of all the segments in the set, it sums to 0). Fractals = mindscrew.

This brings me neatly to the subject of evolution. No, really. Woese and Goldenfeld claim that collective evolution, mediated by lateral gene transfer, should dominate our understanding of the formation of genetic novelty in early life. I'd try to give a better summary the way I did last time, but the topic is too big and the paper is too small and I just don't know enough. Upshot: I need to start taking biology again next semester. Oh, and there's a new paradigm of understanding biological innovation and all that.

Query: I seem to recall that some 5-8% of the human genome is sourced from endogenous retroviral DNA...in light of that, how should the collective view of evolution described above influence our understanding of the interaction between extremely complex organisms (like us) and extremely simple ones (like the virii)? Also, can I use virii as a word? Some things to look into.

Biology is Weird

...and that's one reason why I like it. Consider: the selective inefficiency of complex organisms like mammals is one reason why we become more complex, according to a recent paper published in Genome Research. In simple, rapidly reproducing organisms like our single-celled cousins, gene duplications get eliminated reasonably quickly because they're a resource drain. But in complex organisms that tend to have smaller populations and longer generation times, these redundant paralogs can survive, and this often leads to specialization as paralogs diverge via mutation. I mean, it's not all that surprising to consider gene duplication as a significant mechanism for introducing variation and complexity (once you realize that it happens, anyway), but the idea that these occurrences depend on our poor selection is kind of a mind-bender.

...on an unrelated note: looking at this post, I realized that I'm falling prey to sesquipedalian loquaciousness, i.e. I'm using more big words than I need to. That's not good, even for my writing seminar--I bet profs get annoyed by roundabout expressions and overly complex language just as much as any other reader. Time to cut back. (...I think it's working!)

One More Rule for the Internets

For every stupid idea you can think of, there will be a Youtube video depicting exactly that - and sometimes a full-on movie.

How this saw the light of day is beyond me. And what's with the ridiculous outfit? It gives Ben Stein that child-in-man's-clothing appearance - I suppose it's an appropriate metaphor for ID trying to fit into the scientific framework, though.

For those who don't understand the title reference...