Cheshire

Cheshire Lives! Read me at the new home!

2008-12-13T10:05:00.000-08:00

Okay...I'm really late getting to this. Unfortunately, I've not been working from things on this blog as I should. I now have a new blog that you can visit here.

I wanted to wait until I finished the sericulture biocontrol article until I posted the redirect.

I've been busy, though. Enjoy :)

The article will be posted tomorrow sometime.

Keep this in mind when voting

2008-11-01T09:07:00.000-07:00

I think the lyrics to this song pretty much sum this election.

I'm not going to go into a political rant because I feel this should mostly be a blog about science, but since the election's coming up I'll just tell you that I'm reluctantly voting Obama.

I liked McCain in the 2000 election, when he was denouncing Robertson and Falwell. Instead, he now looks like a Bush-clone.

Palin is what pushed me over, though.

That's it for politics for roughly the next half-decade.

Best of youtube #6: The Guild

2008-10-21T12:00:00.000-07:00

If you're a fan of Joss Whedon, you'll certianly recognize Felicia Day.

It's a series about a group of people who are addicted to a World of Warcraft type game.

Announcement

2008-10-17T12:32:00.000-07:00

As of late, I've become...dissatisfied with the way this blog is working out. There are a handful of good reasons, but mostly it's the blogspot layout.

I'm going to start to work on a new version, but it's going to take time. I've been nosing around the labs here at ISU, looking for research opportunities and such so I don't have as much time for writing as I used to.

I'll be launching a new blog here shortly. I'm going to post one more article and after that, I'll be launching a new and improved version of this very same blog next month.

Expect some changes. in both layout and content...all of them good.

Best of Youtube #5: 2 AM

2008-10-14T23:52:00.000-07:00

Yeah, I'm probably going to lose my reputation as a badass by posting this. But I love Anna Nalick. Her music is poetry and even though it sounds like a standard pop song if you listen to her lyrics, I think you'll find they're actually very poetic. I love her voice, too. And she's hot.

Totally made of win.

Sericulture Biological Control Part One: The Background

2008-10-10T07:21:00.000-07:00

The production of silk (also known as sericulture) is a huge worldwide business which supplies millions of people with jobs every year and produces billions of dollars worth of imports and exports every year. In 1997, the US imported about $ 2 billion in silk products. Although silk makes up about a fifth of a percent of the global textile trade, its importance cannot be understated because raw silk fetches about twenty times more per weight than raw cotton.

Silk is unique among the textile world in that it’s a naturally produced fabric that comes from an animal. Many animals produce silk, mostly larvae of various moths as well as some arachnids (most notably spiders, but also mites). The vast majority of silk on the market comes from the silkworm moth Bombyx mori which is a species which is believed to have been cultured from Bombyx mandarina sometime about 5,000 years ago. It’s an interesting evolutionary story, but one we’ll have to explore another time.

B. mori was first domesticated by the Chinese sometime around 5,000 years ago and as the new millennium dawned, sericulture began to spread around the world as a result of the demand for silk prices and industrial espionage. This meant many new opportunities for people trained in the art of sericulture, and unfortunately those new opportunities for people also meant new opportunities for parasites. If we’ve learned anything from cockroaches it’s that if we give insects an inch in the form of a semi-habitable habitat with strongly reduced predation they’ll take a mile and refuse to let it go no matter how many nerve gasses we bomb them with. Unfortunately, the types of pest sericulture attracts are a lot more bothersome-and gruesome than cockroaches.

Life as a caterpillar is tough. You rarely make it to adulthood. If you’re lucky, you get eaten by a bird. If you’re not lucky, you fall prey to a parasitic wasp or a tachinid fly. Sure it sounds odd that I’d consider being ripped apart by a bird a decent way to die, but if you’re eaten by a bird at least it’s quick. If you happen to be attacked by a parasitic wasp or fly, you’re eaten from the inside out over a period of about two weeks. Remember the movie Alien? Yeah.

Exorista bombycis (also known as ujifly or uzifly) is a tachinid parasitoid which attacks either Bombyx species. The female who finds her victim by smelling it’s poo (or frass, as entomologists call it) lays eggs on the outside of the silkworm, usually in folds of skin. The thing to remember is that if you’re a silkworm, you’re pretty much a bag of fat reserves with a pair of mandibles. You can try to whack the fly as hard as you can, but the fly is a whole hell of a lot more mobile than you are so unfortunately, you can put up a hell of a fight if you want…you’re still pretty much defenseless. Fifteen hours to four days later (development depends on temperature), the egg hatches and the fly maggots begin to burrow into you and eat you from the inside out for about a week or so. The larvae are actually pretty big…about half an inch or so and there are more than one per host. They burrow out of you and turn into a pupa about half a day later in some nice, secluded area.

This fly is actually a pretty serious pest. Each female can lay between 100 and 1,000 eggs, so as you can imagine, things will get out of control very quickly during an infestation. Unfortunately, people don’t inspect their silkworms as much as they need to and that’s how this pest spreads. E. bombycis was first recorded as a pest in the north-eastern sericultural regions of India and was best known in Bengal and Assam. As a result of poor inspection of transported animals, the pest was carried all the way to the Karnataka province and first recorded in 1980. Two years later, an across the board average of 40% losses were recorded and many silk producers faced almost an 80 to 90 percent drop in silk production. Many were also put out of business by repeated destruction of their silkworm crops.

Silk producers face a unique challenge from the standpoint of pest management because this environment is unique to pest control. Their main product is an insect which is reared indoors, so they can’t exactly spray an insecticide on their field like my neighbor occasionally does. Insecticides aren’t entirely out of the picture…ovicides have been developed and used with success and there’s a bacterium (a strain of Baccillus thuingiensis) which is pathogenic to the ujifly. Sericulturalists do their best to fly-proof rooms with nylon screens and install fly-proof window screens to block the flies from rearing facilities. Sterile releases (remember this post?) have also been tried, and workers try to remove infected silkworms, as well as any E. bombycis maggots and pupae they find. They also try to use various attractants to lure the flies to their deaths, but they still keep on coming.

So what’s a silkworm farmer to do? You can’t use pesticides…you’ll kill your crop. You have some luck with the ones you can use, but they’re definitely not enough. You’ve done your best to block the pest from your facilities…but let’s face it. They’re flies. No matter how hard you try to keep them out of your house during the summer, you eventually find one dead on the window screen or running into a window, trying to get out. Tachinids are good at finding their hosts. They’re parasites…it’s what they’ve evolved to do. You need something which is good at finding tachinids. You need a parasitoid that parasitizes your parasitoid and nothing else. You need a hyperparasitoid.

T.K. Narayanaswamy, R. Govindan (2000). Mulberry Silkworm Ujifly, Exorista Bombycis (Louis) (Diptera: Tachinidae) Integrated Pest Management Reviews, 5 (4), 231-240 DOI: 10.1023/A:1012982030848

Best of Youtube #4: Bacillus thurigiensis

2008-10-07T12:00:00.000-07:00

Bruce Tabashnik explaining how B. thurigiensis is used to kill insects.

B. thurigiensis is kind of a cool bacteria. It's found on plants and in the soil and it's evolved to cover it's spores in a highly toxic protein that dissolves the gut of the poor insect that happens to eat it. Once the insect is dead, the bacteria can feast to their heart's content until the food supply runs out. At this point they form spores and the cycle starts over again. Each strain is adapted to different species of insects. There's a few different strains which go after butterfly, moth and beetle larvae and even one that infects parasitic flies. Each strain has it's own very narrow host range and none effect humans.

Many crops, corn and cotton to name two, have been genetically modified to produce this toxin within it's tissues. However, some have evolved resistance to the toxin. Fortunately, the mutations which grant resistance to BT have so far been recessive alleles and easily controlled by introducing susceptible variants to spread their genes amongst the immune genotypes.

New Sciency Stuff Coming Soon...

2008-10-05T06:19:00.000-07:00

I'm actually working on a few things right now. Both about parasitoids...expect them soon.

But let's review exactly what a parasitoid is. A parasitoid has characteristics of a predator and a parasite. They live within their host, taking nutrients from them kind of like a parasite. However, very much unlike most parasites, they eventually kill their hosts as well.

Let's take a tapeworm, for an example we can use to contrast between a parasite and a parasitoid. The dumbest thing a tapeworm could do is to kill it's host. Why would it? It's got it made-nice safe environment in the gut of some animal that keeps it safe. All the food it could ever want delivered to it...it doesn't have to chew, that's done by the host. All it's had to do to survive is evolve into an inside-out intestine and become hermaphroditic.

Remember this scene from the movie Alien?

You know, the creature that emerges from Kane at about 2:00 in?

That's what a parasitoid is. A bit of a greusome example but to me, parasitoids are only beautiful because they're so damn ugly in the way they live their lives. All parasitoids are larvae. They're either hymenoptera or diptera...wasps and flies, respectively. There's a few butterflies and beetles which are parasitoids as well. Even though parasitoids are extremely different from one another, they all have an adult stage that's free living. This is why they can afford to kill their hosts.

True parasitic relationships in the insect world are rare. The only example that immediately comes to mind is Strepistera...twisted-wing parasites which live inside wasps. They actually do some really cool things, like extend the lifespan of their host.

They come in two flavors...idiobionts, which eat their host as-is and don't allow it to grow or moult any further and koinobionts which benefit from the extended development of thier hosts, usually not killing their hosts until they pupate. Parasitoids can either live inside or outside their hosts. If they live on the outside of their hosts, they're called 'ectophagous parasitoids'. Ecto = outside and phagous = eating. Parasitoids that live inside their hosts are called endophagous parasitoids, which means 'inside-eating'.

Parasitoids that parasitoids parasitoids are hyperparasitoids. Parasitoids that parasitize parasitoids that parasitize parasitoids are 'tertiary parasitoids' so on and so forth. It's confusing as hell, but that's what I'm here for.

So...why do I love parasitoids so much?

Well, they violate everything we hold sacred. They violate the body by burrowing inside it and consuming it from the inside-out. They violate the mind by taking control of their hosts. They violate this absurd notion that life is sacred by using their host until it can't give any more and then killing it. Any notion that we might lose our spot at the top of the food chain is absolutely horrifying to us...and Hollywood plays on those fears in many big and low-budget movies. It's definitely not a bad thing...I'll be comparing parasites to various Hollywood monsters in many of my posts.

Parasitoids have some really cool adaptations to compete amongst themselves and to subdue their hosts. Some are neurosurgeons, and I've mentioned that some take over their hosts. Some fight wars inside their hosts, and some produce their own viruses. Some parasitize other parasitoids and some parasitoids even parasitize themselves.

So. Yeah. Parasitoids are really cool. They really are miniature real-life horror movies. Because, you see, we have creatures almost exactly like the creature from Alien here on Earth...it's not a unique creation of Hollywood.

Critters which are known as bee-flies (Family Bombyliidae) actually resemble the creature from Alien even more than the hymenoptera (parasitic wasps) it's generally associated with. Remember how Kane first got acquainted with the critter from alien?

Well Bombyliidae actually have a similar manner of host location, where the larva finds the host after the adult lays the egg. The first instar larvae of these guys kind of have legs and actually look for their hosts. When the larva finds a suitable host, the larva burrows into it, moults into a maggot that looks a bit more familiar, feeds and then exits it's host as parasitoids do. Then it pupates and emerges as something which looks a lot like a bumble-bee.

So Alien isn't exactly a new creation...we've had something like it for a few million years or so. It was just a little bit smaller than we expected.

Oh, Ray Comfort says he's not a prophecy buff...

2008-10-03T17:32:00.001-07:00

...but you just know that when something goes awry, he's praying for the world to end.

Just in case you've lost track of the score, here's where we stand:

Yup...instead of overhauling the US bank system, we need to start hoarding food and preparing for the four horsemen.

Just out of curiosity though...if this is a sign of the coming apocalypse, why didn't the world end in 1929?

So I'm horrible at this whole blogroll thing...

2008-10-02T11:42:00.001-07:00

...and I've finally started one.

Check them out in my profile.

New Sciency stuff coming real soon. I'm switching gears a bit because I have a major case of ADD, but I think y'all are gonna like it.

I'll return to the whole history of entomology thing soon-ish. I still need to go over what happened when Koeble landed in Hawaii...the story isn't over.

But I'd like to go through some parasitoid basics first...some extremely odd aspects of their different lifestyles and how they're used in biocontrol.

We'll begin with exploring exactly what parasitoids are, then adelphoparasitism and then explore biological control with hyperparasitism before careening into tachinid metamorphosis.

You ready?

Best of youtube #3: Parasitic Nematodes

2008-10-01T10:00:00.000-07:00

Parasites do some really cool things.

I'm writing an introduction to parasitoids right now. I tend to change focus quite a bit...but don't worry. I'll get back to the biocontrol articles soon. There are some pretty good stories in the literature...triumph and tragedy.

Environmentally Friendly Pest Control: The Vedalia Beetle and Cryptochaetum iceryae

2008-09-25T12:00:00.000-07:00

Biological control is exactly what it sounds like in a nutshell...that is, the practice of using organisms to control organisms. It's cheap and effective quite a bit of the time. Biological control depends on the density of the pests to be effective. The more dense the pest population, the easier time that whatever control organism used (predator, parasite, pathogen, etc.) will have finding it's victim. We have quite a few exotic pests that reach incredible population densities quickly such as the soybean aphid, the gyspy moth and the fire ant. All of these are susceptable to biological control (and I'll be working on articles detailing methods to control them with bacteria, nematodes, parasitic flies, wasps and ants at a later date ;)). However to explore biological control fully in context, we first need to go back to the beginning. The very first case where biological controls were investigated, implimented and showed results. We must also investigate a spectacular failure. We'll do both in the coming weeks.

Agriculture has always been important to the US economy. I live in Iowa and my hometown is surrounded by countless miles of cornfeilds. Currently, I really do live next to a cornfeild. Many of my classmates grew up on farms. Agriculture isn't just a cornerstone of the US economy, it's a cornerstone of the world's economy. After all, we need food to live.

Unfortunately for us, many insects love agriculture as well. And why wouldn't they-we grow big plants and pump as many nutrients into them as we possibly can. There aren't a whole lot of insects that can substist in an environment such as farms that almost completely dissapear every year and begin anew the following year. So most insects aren't actually pest species. However, there are about 600 (out of a few million or so) which become regular problems in the US.

Some of the most major pests are in the Homoptera. These insects have mouthparts which peirce the plant and suck sap out of it. Aphids are an example. It's not exactly the damage which most people associate with insects...most people think of insect damage as the skeletonization and bite marks we associate with japanese beetles or catterpillars. The damage isn't exactly dramatic or even obvious, but large numbers of these insects will remove enough nutrients to stunt growth and reduce yields.

So...back to agriculture. Back to the olden days of the 1850s. The California gold rush really helped to populate California. However, as the gold mines stopped producing people switched to agriculture. They experimented with nearly everything, including pesticides in an era when pesticide development was still in it's infancy.

Unfortunately as mentioned earlier, when you start growing large amounts of crops insects aren't far behind at all. And due to the fact of international trades, sometimes we have pests show up and we have no clue where they came from. These are the worst types of pests because many native pest levels are controlled by so-called natural enemies. Things like predators and parasitoids.

The specific pest which showed up was a bad one. Not just pain-in-the-ass bad...I'm talking large, prolific, armored and potentially apocalyptic for the then-fledgling citrus industry in California. The pest was called Icerya purchasi. It's a kind of scale insect...kind of like an aphid, but not.

Like an aphid, scale insects have the sucking mouthparts and damage plants in a similar manner. Unlike aphids, they're hermaphrodites...but they self-fertilize so males aren't really neccessary. The adults have a thick, waxy covering which can make control with pesticides difficult. Their young are mobile and the adults are sedentary. The young, known as crawlers, look for a nice place to hunker down and suck sap. The adults keep producing crawlers who can then spread by wind or by crawling from tree to tree.

The scale insects were devastating and threatened to wipe out the California citrus industry in it's entirety because they were so difficult to control. By this time, many entomologists were well aware of the fact that many of our pests were exotic. As far back as the late 1850s, Asa Fitch and Benjamin Walsh suggested using natural enemies to control exotic pests, however they weren't exactly vocal about the practice.

Charles Valentine Riley, a student of Walsh's was the Chief of the Division of Entomology at the USDA. He wasn't exactly a popular figure because of his aggressiveness and ambition. He traveled quite a bit, taking frequent trips to Europe which resulted in congress passing appropriations legislation to prohibit him from traveling.

So you need to find a solution to the exotic pest threatening the extinction of an entire industry, but you can't travel because you can't get the $2,000 to fund your expedition. What do you do?

Well, first you need some ecology 101. You need to know where to look and what to look for. Everything has parasites. Usually multiple parasites. Everything. Grasshoppers are parasitized by nematodes and tachnid flies. Aphids are commonly parasitized by parasitic hymenopterans. However, most parasites/parasitoids are pretty specific; they have evolved to feed on either one species or a narrow range of species. There are also predators that eat a narrow range of insects. Ladybird beetles (Coleoptera: Coccinellidae) are an example. But if you want to find these guys, you need to look for them in their native habitat because that's where these types of relationships will evolve. Many of our exotic pests here in America are not native to our country. They evolved elsewhere, got imported and then began to spread. C.V. Riley was almost certian I. purchasi came from either Australia or New Zealand because it was described in 1878 feeding on Acacia (yay taxonomy-I'm currently eyeing taxonomy as my feild of study...either that or insect evolution).

So...you've hit the books and you know that the populations of this pest are kept in check by natural enemies. You need to get around this whole travel thing. How do you do it?

Well, you ask help from the people you're trying to help. In that day and age, the citrus growers were wealthy, powerful and understandably desperate. Riley knew that he would need about $2,000 for his venture-and back in the day, this wasn't a small sum of money. But thankfully when rich people are desperate, they'll do almost anything to keep their lifestyles intact.

The fruit growers adopted a resolution in favor of sending someone of Riley's choosing to Australia to look for predators and parasitoids. They put pressure on their representatives, who used an international exposition in Melbourne as a way around the troublesome appropriations legislation.

Riley sent Alfred Koeble to look for I. purchasi in it's natural habitat and he eventually found two promising natural enemies-a tachnid fly called Cryptochaetum iceryae as well as a coccenelid which we now know as Rodolia cardinalis that fed exclusively on I. purchasi.

Back in those days, overnight USPS shipping didn't exist. I can tell you from experience (I raise tarantulas) that you should expect casualties when shipping things over long distances even when you're only using overnight to three day shipping. Most invertebrate dealers won't guarantee three day shipping. In this instance we're not talking about a three day journey on an airplane, we're talking about a cross-ocean voyage on a ship. Koeble constructed mini-insectaries on the deck of the ship and housed citrus trees infested with I. purchasi with the vedalia beetles to get them across.

Koeble sent about 12,000 of the tachnids and only 129 R. cardinalis. The tachnid flies proved to be less effective in controlling the beetles everywhere except in cooler climates. R. cardinalis, however turned out to be a voracious and effective predator. Those 129 specimens turned into about ten thousand, and then exploded to millions within a few years. Imports of citrus out of California nearly tripled, from 700 carloads per year at the peak of the infestation to 2,000 carloads per year. Not too bad for $1500.

To this day, the beetles and flies still do a pretty good job of keeping I. purchasi in check despite the fact they're competitors. The flies don't parasitize the beetles and the beetles don't eat scales infested with flies. The immature stages of C. iceryae are resistant to cold weather, which means they become active sooner. This also means that they can control I. purchasi in places like coastal California, where the vedalia beetle doesn't go through as many generations in a year due to the cooler temperatures. In the hot desert areas, the vedalia beetle is the dominant predator and in interior areas like Riverside, the vedalia beetle and C. iceryae switch off between spring and summer with the fly being the dominant natural enemy during the cooler parts of the year and the vedalia beetle being dominant during the warmer seasons.

L E Caltagirone, R L Doutt (1989). The History of the Vedalia Beetle Importation to California and its Impact on the Development of Biological Control Annual Review of Entomology, 34 (1), 1-16 DOI: 10.1146/annurev.en.34.010189.000245

A lot of shit to get in for a couple ball pythons...

2008-09-24T04:53:00.001-07:00

...I sincerely hope the tarantulas were rare.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/asiapcf/09/24/snakes.spiders/index.html

Exotic pet smuggling is a problem for both hobbiests and environmentalists. Some of the worst ecological disasters result from introduced species of plants and animals. The people who regulate shipping into and out of countries know this, and this type of thing gives a bad rap to people like me who love to keep spiders.

I do keep spiders. I have about 50 or so. The species on my profile is called Phlogellius vulpinus (I believe it's now synomized with Selenocosmia vulpina, but I don't keep up on my taxonomy as well as I should). It's incredibly rare...less than 10 were in the whole US the last time I checked so that gives you an idea of what my collection is like.

I only buy captive bred. And there's a huge movement within the hobby for captive breeding programs for most species. Nowadays, mature adults are only imported a few times and then bred until it becomes uneconomical to import full grown adults.

Unfortunately, it looks like this package was headed for Sydney, Austraillia. Even though they have some of the coolest animals on the planet...pretty much everything endemic (including the spider in my profile pic). Unfortunately, this is a continent that has been hit hard in the past by introduced species and any action they'll take is pretty much justified in my eyes.

Just checking in...

2008-09-19T06:42:00.000-07:00

Hey...I know I said I was going to be gone for awhile, but I just wanted to log in and make sure everything's posting OK. Looks like it is, so I'll just be on my way after a quck update.

My tests went OK. I don't think either went spectacular, but that's to be expected for the first tests. I have two more next (not this coming) Tuesday.

I also have a paper about the biocontrol of the Uji fly (Exorista bombycis -it's a tachinid parasitoid that attacks silkworms) with hyperparasitic hymenopteran parasitoids (hyperparasitic = noms parasitoids). Unfortunately, I can't find any info on host searching or specificity (although they use M. domestica pupae to rear them in the laboratory) in two of the species currently being investigated. I still haven't exhausted all avenues of approach, though. Still need to search the databases for more recent information than I might be able to find on google scholar.

It's really at times like this that I really wish ID were a legitimate science. I can't find any information on how these specific hymenopterans find their hosts and it would be totally awesome if I could just write a paper on that using the standard ID argument from ignorance.

I mean, really. If we don't know how they identify, locate and determine if that host is of suitable size or has already been parasitized...can't we just assume that they're guided there by lesbian faeries? I mean...really. Think about the implications for biological control. ID would totally revolutionize the field.

There are, however other things I could write about so it's not like the assignment is in danger. I just happen to love hyperparasitoids so I just wanted to do a paper on them as a challenge to myself. Expect me to post it when it's done...sometime around the 30th.

Anyways...a few things I thought were kind of interesting happened in the past few days. Every year, we have these guys who come and hand out bibles in areas of the ISU campus where the areas of highest traffic are. They don't preach fire and brimstone and don't disturb anything because they really don't talk to anyone. They just kind of take up space. They're not anything like Tom Short so I don't have a quarrel with them...other than taking up space.

However despite their misguided attempts to convert the heathen masses, they did actually have an idea that I can get behind 100%. Surprising, I know. But true, nonetheless.

I saw this right outside the building where they hold the lecture for the evolution course:

You know...atheists and christians disagree on quite a bit. Apparently, we both agree that religious texts should be recycled. Global warming and all.

I gave religion up about the same time I stopped believing in Santa. Many of the people I went to high school with stopped believing in their respective deities when they stepped outside their families and started learning about the world. Who knows...when I become a professor, I might even keep one of these babies in my office for shits and giggles.

Anyways, after those guys had allowed people to fill our trashcans with bright green bibles the political fundies came about. Election season is right around the corner and they want you to vote, damnit.

Unfortunately, they're a bit smarter than the bible thumpers. Come about noon, there comes out a bevy of beautiful women holding clipboards. They sidle up to you, flash their killer smile, talk politics and ask you if you've registered to vote.

Needless to say, I've registered to vote five times this week. Once as a republican, twice as a democrat and twice more as an independent. And I don't even live in Ames.

Bible thumpers, take note.

Youtube Gems: Katy Rose

2008-09-18T12:21:00.000-07:00

I have a science post coming up on Friday, thanks to the 'schedule post' function so I figured I'd do a music post this week.

This song is called Catch My Fall by Katie Rose and you can find the lyrics here.

The clips in the background are from the movie Thirteen which is about a young teenage girl (played by Evan Rachel Wood) who discovers drugs, sex, crime and numerous other bad things through the help of the 'popular girl'. It's a coming-of-age clique story, but it's the fucked-up version which shows the things you'll never see in a Lindsay Lohan film. It deals with drug addiction, depression and shows cutting as well as a handful of other things I remember seeing a couple of my friends going through back in my early high school days. The movie deals with it's themes bluntly and honestly without trying to glorify or euphamize anything which happens during the course of the movie.

I guess the honeymoon is over...so much for the afterglow.

2008-09-12T08:34:00.000-07:00

So after an entire summer of waiting, I have my first round of tests this week. And another custody battle to go through.

So my next week is going to be a blur of bugs, chemistry, ecology, lawyers and dealing with all sorts of people I don't really want to see.

Anyways, I have a post scheduled to post on 9/21 and I've decided to start doing a weekly Best of Youtube post when I don't have a science related post to offer. So you'll have plenty of bug related shiny objects to keep you occupied until I return.

The first Best of Youtube, a video from the documentary Planet Earth about a parasitic fungus called Cordyceps.

Larry Fafarman, AIG, The ICR and Poe's Law

2008-09-09T10:14:00.000-07:00

The idiocy of creationists and people like the Discovery institute never fails to amaze me. Or amuse me.

I mean, they've peddled the same bullshit for decades without ever realizing that their arguments are, in fact bullshit.

Of course, they cover it up with dishonesty, bad arguments (specified complexity, anyone?) and just ad-hoc reasoning in general.

Of course, one of the most prevalent things that I've noticed is that they'll take any excuse to attribute their own faults to athiests.

The latest example is Larry Fafarman. You'll be familiar with him if you post over at scienceblogs. He's a persistant pest in the blogs of anyone who writes about evolution.

Anyways, it seems that Fafarman doesn't realize that The Onion is a fake newspaper that runs satirical articles.

http://im-from-missouri.blogspot.com/2008/09/pilgrims-worship-darwins-image-in-wall.html

He cites an article where athiests supposedly flocked to a stain that beared a resemblance to Charles Darwin. The article is meant at ridecule, but people frequently flock to the images of the Virgin Mary, Jesus and such. Rank hypocrisy.

It's bad enough that Answers in Genesis seems to think that every bigfoot hoax is proof against evolution. Even the ICR falls for things like April fools jokes.

The reason they do this is because they're simply not interested in honest debate. When they do actually participate in one, they generally get crushed under the weight of the evidence.

Ever wondered what happens when an insect sheds?

2008-09-05T09:49:00.001-07:00

Quite a bit of what I blog about is going to come from my entomology class notes. To me, blogging is a way to help me understand various papers by forcing me to read them and then regurgitate the information in a form that's easy for people to understand. This is no different.

Before I go into all the hormoney goodness that is the moulting process, first we need to understand exactly an insect grows and how it's body is set up.

An insect is covered in a shell called an exoskeleton. It doesn't look like it, but insects are basically wearing suits of armor. All the time. It's actually pretty cool, and it's great protection. In some cases, especially ironclad beetles but sometimes velvet ants, entomologists actually have to drill holes in the insect before pinning it.

The whole exoskeleton thing is great...but there's a problem. It's too damn good. The insect actually can't grow because the exoskeleton can't expand with the insect. The insect solves this problem by changing it's clothes. Here's an example. A larval cicada looks something like this:

Yes...the pictures suck. I know. Blackberry needs to make a cellphone camera with a macro function.

So what, exactly is this exoskeleton made of? It's a polymer, kind of like plastic (but not). It's made of proteins and chitin. The insect's epidermis ('skin'), only a few cells thick, sits beneath it and is more or less attatched to it.

So...what makes that little bug turn into one of those things which scream for ladies at the tops of trees?

Well first specialized cells in the brain, called neurosecretory cells secrete a substanced called 'brain hormone'. The brain hormone then circulates in the insect's bloodstream, where it ends up in a gland at the front of the thorax (prothoracic gland). This gland then secretes another hormone called ecdysone (ecdysis=moulting). Ecdysone is the hormone that directs the various activities related to moulting.

The cells in the epidermis start rapidly dividing in response to ecdysone and becomes closely packed. The exoskeleton then seperates from the epidermis in a process called apolysis. At this point, a substance called moulting fluid is produced.

Moulting fluid contains all sorts of proteases and chitinases (protease=noms proteins, chitinase=noms chitin) which digest almost all of the old cuticle. The digested cuticle is then reabsorbed and recycled by the insect.

While the old cuticle is being digested, the new cuticle starts growing. There are several layers that are formed, but the important thing is that the outer layer is resistant to enzymes. When everything from the old cuticle is absorbed and when the new cuticle is complete, the insect actually sheds it's skin.

The whole thing is initiated by a hormone called eclosion hormone which is secreted by the brain. When the insect moults depends on the species. Some insects just moult when they find a nice, cozy place and some moult at specific times of days. Either way, the actual process is pretty similar through all insects.

The insect swallows air or water and raises it's blood pressure and this causes the exoskeleton to split along already weakened lines. The insect just kind of squeezes out, usually head and thorax first. After this happens, the insect expands it's cuticle by again swallowing air or water and using blood pressure to expand the cuticle. At this time, the cuticle is pale and soft and the insect is vulnerable. It soons hardens and becomes pigmented again. This process is controlled by another hormone called bursicon.

These hormones, and others are sometimes used in pest control. I'm sure I'll eventually write a post about those hormones, as well.

Here's what that little bug turns into, by the way:

Here's a time lapse video of the same thing:

Pedigo, Larry P., Rice, Marlin E. (2009). Entomology and Pest Management (6th ed). New Jersey: Pearson Education

Environmentally Friendly Pest Control: An Overview of The Sterile Insect Technique

2008-08-29T12:53:00.000-07:00

In many cases, we can use the insects themselves to aid us in their elimination. One method, called the Sterile Insect Technique (SIT) involves using sterilized insects to drive the population down.

First, insects are raised in rearing facilities to adulthood. Then, males are singled out with a variety of methods (which I won't go into here...feel free to dig up the sources via google scholar), sterilized and released into the field in droves. This is preferable to pesticides because the technique is generally very environmentally friendly and species specific-no chance innocent bugs getting caught in the crossfire or people accidentally being exposed to pesticide.

This technique has been used with great success against the tsetse fly of Africa and on the screw-worms of North America. The tsetse flies (Glossnia ssp.) are best known for transmitting trypanosomaisis, or sleeping sickness as it's commonly known. It's a horrible disease, and some of the treatments are fatal about 10% of the time. The disease is usually fatal in most people who remain untreated. Fortunately, we can control it's vector. If we control it's vector, it can't pass from person to person. If it can't pass from person to person, the disease dies out. Screwworms aren't disease vectors for humans...and don't really affect us but their effects on cattle are even more horrifying. Adults are attracted to open wounds, where they lay their eggs. The larvae hatch, start eating the living flesh, and the scents released while they feed attract more female screwworm flies. At the very least, the cattle lose value and lose weight. Infestations resulting in death weren't uncommon before the measures were taken to eradicate the pest.

In controlling trypanosomiasis and screwworm flies, scientists use radiation (usually Cobalt-60, but also X-rays) to sterilize male flies and release them on the wild population so they mate with females. Many insects mate only once, and this would cause the female to lay infertile eggs or in the case of tsetse flies whose larvae develop internally, expel dead larvae. This causes a drop in the population of the target insect species, and the process is repeated for the next generation. Sooner or later, the number of sterile males outnumber the wild-type fertile males and eventually the population goes extinct.

Unfortunately, there are some drawbacks to this procedure. For example, one has to know that there will not be much migration into an area. If outside females who have already mated can immigrate into an area on a regular basis and reproduce, this tactic only becomes good for suppression. One of the biggest drawbacks is the fact that it's simply not economical. It has to have backing from a wealthy country like the US or United Nations in many cases and it is very labor intensive. This technique has been used for some agricultural pests (pink bollworm and the Mediterranian fruit fly to name a few), but would be ineffective for parthenogenic sawflies and aphids because they do not rely on males to reproduce. So it's not a silver bullet...but for many species which reproduce sexually, it's definitely effective. Many areas of Africa are now free of tsetse flies because of this technique, and the US hasn't seen an infestation since 1966

Many times, the flies are sexed manually when pupae by trained professionals. Other times, insects may be genetically modified with a gene coding for insecticide resistance on the Y chromosome. After this, they need to be carted into packages, refrigerated and dispersed around the habitat...sometimes by air. Of course, the biggest problem is when the equipment breaks down. In one case, a facility using the SIT had it's irradiation equipment fail and accidentally released millions of fertile male screwworms into the environment. These types of mistakes would simply set the project back awhile, but not render it ineffective.

This technique creates a lot of waste in terms of insects. Only about half the insects produced by any given facility can be used for two reasons. One reason is that in many cases, it's the female and only the female who can transmit disease. A female with non-working reproductive parts can and will take blood meals, which means they can still be disease vectors. The second reason is that mixed releases are simply inneffective. The goal is to get the males to spread throughout the area. Unfortunately, male insects have the 'dude in a nightclub' mentality-they won't spread out if they're released with females.

Why go prowling if you can get laid right at home? I've stayed in many a crappy nightclub for no other reason than because I was having success with the women there...and the same principle applies here.

http://www.ars.usda.gov/is/pr/2002/020828.htm

Alphey, L. (2002). Re-engineering the sterile insect technique. Insect Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, 32(10), 1243-1247. DOI: 10.1016/S0965-1748(02)00087-5

Pedigo, Larry P., Rice, Marlin E. (2009). Entomology and Pest Management (6th ed). New Jersey: Pearson Education

Vreysen, M.B., Saleh, K.M., Ali, M.Y., Abdulla, A., Zhu, Z., Juma, K.G., Dyck, A., Atway, M.R., Mkonyi, P.A., , . (2000). Glossnia austeni (Diptera: Glossinidae) Eridicated on the Island of Unguja, Zanzibar Using the Sterile Insect Technique. Journal of Economic Entomology, 93(1), 123-135.

Book Review: Only A Theory

2008-08-22T13:36:00.000-07:00

When I was shopping for textbooks, something caught my eye. It was this:

One of the professors decided to make the book Only a Theory by Ken Miller required reading for the class. I've been wanting to read something by Miller despite the fact that I can't seem to find Finding Darwin's God in any of my local bookstores. So I decided to read this to see what I thought of it.

First off, I am an athiest under most definitions of god. I don't believe in any gods, but I don't see the need to spout on and on about it. I'm more interested in seeing how the real world works. However, I was afraid that most of the book would amount to an explanation of theistic evolution. Even I find this one of the more innocuous forms of religion, I still don't think it has a place in biology class.

However, considering all of the hullaballoo over creationism and intelligent design-especially here at Iowa State, I can certainly understand the decision.

A few years back, a professor by the name of Guillermo Gonzales attempted to get tenure here at ISU. He had a good study group and before he came to ISU, he had published quite a bit of research. However, he wrote a book called The Privileged Planet and devoted most of his efforts to Intelligent Design. As a result, he didn't publish much research and for this reason was denied tenure.

You can find out more about Gonzales and his book elsewhere online, I'm only mentioning this for background. Iowa State is one of the battlegrounds over ID, and it certianly makes sense that Iowa State would want to include reading material from a devoutly religious man who has spent much of his career defending evolution. Miller helps to cut through the stereotype that evolution is only accepted amongst athiests and helps to destroy the false dichotomy they try to create. In fact, the producers of Expelled were quoted as saying that Miller would 'unnecessarily confuse the audience'.

In the book, there were a lot of things I agreed with him about and many that I didn't...and not just about religion.

He begins the book by sharing some of his experiences defending evolution. He rightly points out that much of the opposition to evolution is based in religion and emphasizes that it is an emotional opposition at it's very core.

I've noticed this while speaking to crowds about why I don't believe in god. Religion is held sacred to many and I believe that the reason many religious people dislike athiests is because, in reality, they're afraid of us. They're afraid that we can disprove something they want to believe in. This is also why they're so afraid of evolution. I'll get to this later.

Next, he explores the many claims of the ID movement...many of which appeared in the 2005 Kitzmiller VS Pennsylvania trial. These include the flagellar/type III secretion systems, blood clotting pathways, information theory and such.

The examples he cites and explains are very good. The flagellum is undeniably the posterboy for ID, and any claim of irreducible complexity is quickly refuted by Miller. Same with the eye and blood clotting pathways. The explanations he gives are really quite good. And damning to ID.

However my one gripe about the examples he chose is that anybody who reads up on the subject (especially as much as me) will already be intamitely familiar with them. It's certainly not a bad thing. I know Miller didn't write the book for people like me who follow the literature or who have read every single page of the transcripts and decision of the trial (I'm such a nerd...). He wrote it for the laypeople who might be on the fence. And to laypeople, those examples are very good. Besides, the Cdesign Proponentists would just accuse him of 'ducking the punches' if he did.

So it's not really even a flaw...just something that annoyed me.

However, the one thing I really didn't agree with is that he thinks the reason for the prevalence of ID and creationism here in America is due to our rebellious nature.

The reason I don't agree with it is because I grew up knowing many people from Britian and Australia...young people like the type who become enamored with ID. They were just as rebellious as I was. Furthermore, the 2005 riots in France should lay his hypothesis to rest...especially for European culture. Suspicion of those who are in positions of authority is simply a part of human nature. Being American has nothing to do with it, although I'll agree with him that we like to think we're a renegade culture.

He believes that Americans want to look at the literature and decide for themselves. However, the literature is pretty conclusive in favor of evolution. Any amount of research on the Discovery Institute or Answers in Genesis reveals almost immediately that they are undeniably intellectually bankrupt and have nothing to offer.

Instead, I believe that it's not that Americans want to decide for themselves...it's that we as a culture tend to believe whatever we want to believe. There's a marked difference.

Young Earth Creationists have to overlook the fact that there are nesting sites of terrestrial dinosaurs in the strata they claim were underwater during the 'Noacean Deuluge'. They have to ignore most of physics to assert the universe is a few thousand years old and they have to overlook the fact that pathologists need to use the same techniques to study diseases such as Community Acquired MRSA (which according to any of the AIG bacterial resistance articles, should not exist)...amongst other things. People who want to decide for themselves should see these as fatal flaws-nay-falsifications of the young-earth hypothesis.

I think that for many people, the various forms of creationism lack abandonability. They simply equate them with religion and hold it sacred...willing to overlook the flaws in their worldviews because they're unwilling to abandon them or view things in a different light.

I wouldn't consider our culture really all that rebellious. Much of our so-called rebellion in popular culture is packaged up in the form of pop-punk bands and singers like Avril Lavigne and Sum-41 and marketed to the masses.

Instead, I think that the problem is the way science is taught in the US. Science, when properly taught as Miller points out, is nothing more than common sense laid out. It builds on itself, sure...but once you get the basics down there's not a whole lot that's not easily understood. Unfortunately, as Miller also points out, this is where the Cdesign Proponentists are winning. They're making evolution too controversial (even though I don't really believe it is) and the officials who are elected by popular vote are hesitant to teach it for fear of being replaced.

If it's not properly taught, or taught in an over-simplistic form, students don't develop the understanding needed to reconcile their beliefs with science. Their beliefs lack abandonability and the cycle starts over and over.

The rebelliousness of American society is a major theme in the book...and it's one that I don't agree with at all. Other than that, however I think the rest of the book is perfectly solid. It is...and should be required reading for all incoming biology major freshmen.

Buy Only a Theory from Amazon.com

Bacterial endosymbiont is a major causative agent of morbidity associated with filarial nematode infections.

2008-08-15T10:40:00.000-07:00

Wolbachia is one of my favorite bacteria, I've actually given it it's own label on the blog. It does all sorts of strange things, like dictate the gender of the host’s offspring. Wolbachia lives in the eggs of it’s insect hosts, being passed on from mother to daughter. If they end up in a male, they dead-end because they cannot be passed on through sperm. Instead, they kill any potential male offspring the female has or makes infected males unable to have offspring with uninfected females depending on what species they infect.

However, Wolbachia is actually a somewhat common endosymbiont in insects and nematodes. Although it’s famous for the effects on insects I mentioned earlier, Wolbachia actually has a major role in medicine despite not actually being a human pathogen.

200 million people around the world suffer from a disease called river blindness. This disease is spread by parasitic flies through the bite. When a fly bites a human, it injects nematode larvae in it’s saliva. Once inside the body, these nematodes form nodules under the skin. They mate and then produce larvae which migrate through the skin, looking to be taken up again by a Simulium host.

The larvae when alive don’t really cause a whole lot of damage. Being a parasite, they’ve evolved ways to become invisible to the host’s immune system. The damage from river blindness comes from when the nematodes die. When they die, they become visible to the host’s immune system which subsequently responds, with many different responses but inflammation is the response responsible for the damage that causes the blindness. If the larva happens to be in the eye when this happens, then this can be very serious.

However, the nematode’s body isn’t the only thing that causes the immune response. Scientists studying Onchocerca volvulus have discovered that the effects of the dying larvae are greatly excasterbated by their Wolbachia endosymbiont.

Scientists took extracts from nematodes, nematodes treated with an antibiotic and nematodes that didn’t harbor Wolbachia and injected them into the eyes of mice. Nematodes treated with the antibiotic doxycycline as well as nematodes which don’t harbor Wolbachia triggered less of an immune response than did nematodes who had Wolbachia endosymbionts. To the scientists, this indicated that something in the Wolbachia cells and not the nematode cells caused the inflammation and other immune responses.

But what in the Wolbachia cells could trigger a response?

Wolbachia are a gram-negative bacteria, which means that a major portion of their outer cell wall is formed from a macromolecule called bacterial lipopolysaccaride (LPS). A receptor called Toll Like Receptor 4 (TLR4) is a major part of response to bacterial infection. Since TLR4 responds to LPS, it was a natural candidate for testing.

To test the link between the Wolbachia LPS and the immune response, the researchers used mice with a mutation in the TLR4 gene that made them less sensitive to LPS to determine if this was the cause. Once again, extracts containing Wolbachia were injected into the mice and their immune responses measured.

As one would expect, those mice with an underresponsive TLR4 receptor displayed less severe symptoms than did mice with a normal TLR4 gene. This means that instead of the nematodes causing the inflammation and other immune responses associated with river blindness, it’s actually their endosymbionts that cause those types of problems.

This opens up a whole new avenue of potential research into new treatments for river blindness. Since we now know that it is not the larvae that cause river blindness we can focus on the real culprit, Wolbachia. The Wolbachia are vital endosymbionts-the nematodes don’t properly develop without the bacteria in the system. This means by focusing our efforts on Wolbachia we not only prevent the LPS from the Wolbachia being released when the filarae die, we drastically reduce the numbers of said filarae because without the Wolbachia the nematodes are unable to reproduce.

Saint Andre, A.V., Blackwell, N.M., Hall, L.R., Hoerauf, A., Brattig, N.W., Volkmann, L., Taylor, M.J., Ford, L., Hise, A.G., Lass, J.H. (2002). The Role of Endosymbiotic Wolbachia Bacteria in the Pathogenesis of River Blindness. Science, 295(5561), 1892-1895.

Hymenorrhaphy

2008-08-11T20:18:00.000-07:00

This blog is mostly an entomology/evolution/general science blog because political/human rights bloggers are a dime a dozen, but I do dip into culture and politics every once and awhile. I'm also not a medical blogger, so this is also kind of new for me. Aside from reading about science, I also read up on human rights and such. The rights of women are important to me and they should be important to anyone who reads this.

One of the things that's always puzzled me about religion is the concept of virginity until marriage. I've always lived in a culture where it was considered unrealistic. According to the CDC, well over half of people are sexually active by their twenties. And here in America, it's usually considered a surprise if you're a virgin when you exit high school. If you're a male, it's considered a dishonor.

It's always struck me as just a way for men to stake their territory. While great significance is placed a woman's virginity, a male's virginity is considered a burden. Examples of double standards abound and there's no reason to expound on them.

Virginity is a very important part of many cultures in the world, but nowhere else is it more important than the Mideast. Women who have sexual relations before marriage risk being disowned by their families, or worse.

In many parts of the world, women are still treated as nothing but property...and little valued property at that. Nobody would beat their motorcycle because somebody has ridden it, however in many parts of the world women are beaten to death for precisely this reason. There have been cases in middle eastern countries where women were beaten to death for talking to westerners. Women have been beaten to death for standing up to or leaving their abusive husbands.

As late as 1994, virginity tests for schoolgirls were still common in Turkey.

Usually, virginity is determined by inspecting the hymen. The hymen is a thin, collagenous membrane that covers the vagina at birth. Many people believe that the hymen breaks during the first insertion, however this may not be necessarily true. It can break from trauma, strenuous physical activity such as gymnastics or biking or a multitude of other things. Some women may be born without one.

This creates a problem for women in cultures similar to the examples I mentioned previously. Women in Europe experience less stringent sexual norms than we have here in America, and since the population of Muslim families is increasing this results in women who may feel like they're caught between the worlds of their family and the culture they know. Similar pressures are felt by women in America who hail from places in Central and South America.

If the hymen breaks, either through excersize or intercourse, this could create a problem for women in hyper-conservative cultures. They risk dishonor, violence and death. In some cultures, this will go so far as to force the women to marry her attacker to maintain her honor.

Fortunately for them there is a solution in the form of hymenorrhaphy, or 'hymen reconstruction' in laymen's terms. This surgery, in some parts of the world, can literally save the lives of women in many cases.

The surgery is a relatively minor procedure. Patients may remain conscious after being given a local anesthetic or may be unconscious during the procedure after being given a general anesthetic.

In many cases, the hymen is barely damaged and can be reconstructed by simply stitching the remnants together with dissolveable sutures. In surgeries such as this, gelatin capsules may be inserted to simulate post-coitus bleeding.

In other cases, a flap of the vaginal lining may be used to create a new hymen. In this case, the new hymen will have it's own blood supply and the capsule will not be needed.

In many countries, these procedures are banned because they're viewed as dishonest. Many feminists also scoff at the notion of procedures used to restore the appearance of virginity. Moreover, these procedures aren't cheap...the cost can be between $2,000 and $4,000 in Europe.

Works cited/more information:

http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSL2532025120070430
http://www.tcclinic.com/hymen-restoration-toronto.php
http://www.miklosandmoore.com/hymen.php
http://www.obgyn.net/english/pubs/features/presentations/hennawy13/hymenorrhaphy.ppt

2008-05-29T07:31:00.000-07:00

So I'm walking into Wal*Mart the other day and I see this video for sale on one of the displays.

Now, if that wasn't odd enough it's location puzzled me even more. It just so happened to be right next the complete Poison Ivy trilogy, which is basically a soft-core porn flick.

Almost made me wonder if this was some sort of odd fetish I've not heard of yet.

What are fundamentalists most afraid of?

2008-05-22T20:01:00.000-07:00

1. Are you concerned that our country on a whole is abandoning biblical values?
[89] Yes [1] No [10] Undecided

2. How dangerous are the following to the spiritual health of America?
Very/Somewhat/Not very
The ACLU and similar groups 96 /3/ 1
Pro-homosexual indoctrination 95 /4 /1
Abortion 93 /6 /1
Islamic terrorism 91/ 8/ 1
Hollywood 89 /10 /1
News Media 87/ 12/ 1
Darwinism/evolution 85/ 14/ 1
Cults and false religion 82 /16/ 2
Atheism 82 /16/ 2
Courts 81 /18 /1
Apathetic/uninformed Christians 79/ 20/ 1
Colleges and Universities 78 /21 /1
Public education (K-12) 69 /29/ 2
Congress 63 /35 /2

Source

You know as an Athiest, I'd have figured that I'd have landed somewhere above other religions but I also figured I'd rank below education.

Maybe education is only a threat if it doesn't involve threatening people with fire and brimstone?

Still working on the fruit fly post. We'll see how things work out on Sunday.

I really hate to defend Barack Obama but when people this stupid speak out against him, I really have no choice.

2008-05-17T09:00:00.000-07:00

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7403386.stm

I actually saw this on MSNBC this morning on my way to the Disney Channel so the kid could watch some Saturday morning cartoons.

Now...I hate Obama probably as much as any republican. I'm not going to deny this for an instant...however, I really have to say that some of the right wing people here are complete idiots.

First off, I really think that Bush's comment was aimed at Obama. McCain really is the weaker candidate out of the pair...whether you want to admit it or not.

I really am fighting the bile raising in my throat while writing this at having to be forced to defend Obama...however, it seems that some of the right-wing hosts have no idea what appeasement is.

Nevelle Chamberlain conceded part of Czechoslovakia to Hitler.

The Iran Contra affair is another example of appeasement.

I am currently working on a blog about some of the more interesting dynamics of fruit fly reproduction...namely the evolutionary aspects of gamete competition in fruit flies. However, it seems there is nowhere for me to park on the ISU campus during the summer. There's about half a dozen papers I need to look over and none of them I currently have access to.

Expect something next week at the very earliest.

Ben Stein...on the money?

2008-05-09T20:23:00.000-07:00

So by now, we're all familiar with the documentary Expelled which was produced by Premise Media and Rampant productions. It's been in the theaters for awhile and as everyone expected, it was lauded by groups like the Discovery Institute and Answers in Genesis while being panned by...well, just about damn near everyone including some very prevalent biologists like Kenn Miller, himself a devout Christian and Christopher Heard who is a devout Christian Bible Scholar at the university where Expelled was filmed.

It also seems the movie was wildly unpopular with the users of IMDB, where it seems a transparent attempt to stuff the boxes in this movie's favor didn't quite work out earning the movie a rating of 3.7. To give you an idea of how bad this is, check some of the ratings of the top 2007 Raspberry award nominees. Norbit managed a rating of 3.7, I Know Who Killed Me scored a rating of 3.8, while Catwoman earned herself a rating of 3.2.

Of course, there are also various negative reviews from more well known reviewers but consensus isn't a fact based exercise. Pointing out what the public thinks of the movie simply doesn't constitute a valid argument against the movie's premise.

Now to maintain honesty and integrity, I will admit I haven't seem the movie yet. There are many reasons for this, the first and foremost one being that it was released right smack in the middle of my finals and I refuse to take time out of my study sessions to see it.

I will try to see it sometime soon, provided it stays in the theaters. However, this movie is something that interests me because it involves Guillermo Gonzales...who is a well known ID advocate from Iowa State University and because of this, I've been reading pretty much everything I can.

Even though I haven't seen the movie, I've been watching Ben Stein make his media rounds and watching those very intently so I can kind of figure out what exactly is likely to be in the movie. For example, let's take the Glenn Beck segment above. I'm quite fond of Beck because he tends to say exactly what those who can't think are thinking.

Of course, Stein goes straight into the standard ID Proponent points...like trying to stretch evolution to cover something it clearly wasn't meant to cover. For example about a minute and a half into this video, he tells us that evolutionary biology can't explain the origins of life.

And this is true...evolution cannot explain the origins of life just like how Issac Newton's law of universal gravitation can't explain where gravity comes from. Issac Newton's law of universal gravitation tells us that the gravitational force two objects exert on one another is directly proportional to their mass and inversely proportional to the square of their distances but makes no mention of gravity's mechanisms (which are still poorly understood). Similarly, evolution tells us how life changes and diversifies over time but does not explain how it began. It's not meant to.

The question dealing with the origin of life is called abiogenesis. If you break the word up a=without, bio=life and genesis=start. The start of life from a non-biological source.

We'll touch on abiogenesis later, but once you have that cell then you have the possibility for diversification through mutation and natural selection. Stein is really saying nothing at all by pointing out that the cell is complicated. Even though it's complicated we know that it's parts can change and be modified through chance mutations and the effect of those mutations on the cell (or organism)'s ability to compete for resources in it's environment.

It's unclear to me why Stein argues that Darwin was unable to point out any species that originated from evolution. Darwin points out in The Origin of Species that many domestic animals are not found in the wild but have wild counterparts which are nearly identical to them and hypothesizes that domestic animals may be descended from those wild counterparts. He does the same for crops. Brocolli, Kale, Kolhrabi, Cauliflower and Brussels sprouts all come from plants which have descended from the wild mustard plant.

Even Young Earth Creationist website Answers in Genesis does not argue with the descent of Canis lupus familiaris from Canis lupus. There is a wide amount of variation within this one subspecies alone. Furthermore, there is no doubt in my mind that if we did not know the origin of many breeds of dog...I'll just use the Chihuahua as an example...that they would be classified as an entirely different species.

However, even so there is no reason for Stein to cite Darwin. According to the inside cover of the copy I currently have sitting at my side, this book was published in 1859 and a whole lot of work has gone on since then.

Biologists generally define species as two groups which cannot interbreed with one another. There are various other species concepts (going to school to be a taxonomist requires me to be familiar with these), but for the sake of brevity I will just use this very strict definition.

In a paper published February of 1966, Theodosius Dobzhansky and Olga Pavlovsky reported a speciation event in their laboratory which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. To identify the incipient species of the Drosophila paulistorum superspecies, one must cross various strains to see what can and can't hybridize. In the Dobzhansky paper, they identified a group of species through this means. However, five years later they found it was unable to produce viable offspring with the group which had originally identified it. This is a classic example of speciation via the biological species concept.

Furthermore, there's a recent example of a species of insectivorous lizard adapting to a plant based diet...and this adaptation requires a massive reworking of the intestinal tract. Of course, genetic testing will tell us more.

However, Stein's claim is false. We have seen species diverge in laboratory settings. Here is a well cited article about species concepts and some more observed instances of speciation from TalkOrigins.

Then he goes on to say that there hasn't been any progress in evolutionary biology since Darwin...this, too is false. Laughably so. In 2007, there was evidence found that Velociraptor had quill knobs on it's bones...knockout evidence for feathers. Tyrannosaur proteins also sequence very similarly to those of modern birds...also very good evidence.

On chromosome #2 of all humans, there is a vestigial centromere as well as a vestigial set of telomeres on the chromosome. This is very strong evidence to support that H. sapeins had a genetic predecessor which had 48 chromosomes and which was 97% identical (this includes identical viral insertion sequences) to the rest of the Hominidae family.

Numerous feathered theropods such as Caudipteryx and Shenzhouraptor have filled in the missing phylogenic pieces between birds and dinosaurs...blurring the lines much further than Archaeopteryx already did. Many of these have been discovered within the past 10 years.

Acanthostega and Ichthyostega blur the lines between fish and amphibians...and there is almost a full gradient between the two groups from fish like Panderichthys and Tiktaalik.

We know all the intermediate steps in the evolution of horses, as well.

Needless to say...evolution hasn't stagnated over the past 150 years. It's exploded. These are all lies which crumble upon even the slightest investigation.

And then, onto abiogenesis. Stein asserts that scientists say that life is the result of 'lightening striking a mud puddle and producing Hoyle's 747' and this is a strawman at it's finest.

I've always wondered how much damage you could do to Intelligent Design by applying this argument to Intelligent Design. They claim that all complex life appeared on Earth perfectly formed with the biochemical pathways that Behe et. al marvel at already there in their entirety with no intermediates. However, if you look at the course of human invention even we have not accomplished this type of one-step invention. We've grown in bits and bounds. We did not invent the internal combustion engine and then go straight to the black-hawk helicopter. We did not invent fireworks and then leap straight to guided missiles. Our first computer wasn't nearly as powerful as the wafer thin calculators of today. In the course of human inventions, we have employed a similar trial and error process that evolution does with chance mutations.

The thing which made me ask this question is a paper by Mark J. Pallen and Nicholas J. Matzke which describes the evolution of the flagella:

Many new flagellar systems have been
discovered through genome sequencing —
a trend that is likely to increase with time.
For example, over three hundred flagellin
sequences were obtained in a single
sequencing project that focused on samples
from the Sargasso Sea17. By even the most
conservative estimate, there must therefore
be thousands of different bacterial flagellar
systems, perhaps even millions. Therefore,
there is no point discussing the creation or
ID of ‘the’ bacterial flagellum. Instead, one
is faced with two options: either there were
thousands or even millions of individual
creation events, which strains Occam’s razor
to breaking point, or one has to accept that
all the highly diverse contemporary flagellar
systems have evolved from a common
ancestor.

It seems ID suffers more from Hoyle's fallacy than does evolution...or even abiogenesis because both of the aforementioned theories do not assume that everything came here perfectly formed, rather they assert (using biochemical, genetic and fossil evidence) that organisms developed over a gradual process into what we see today. Hoyle's fallacy actually resembles intelligent design more than evolution...ID proponents claim that whatever designed the universe did so in one big sweep akin to inventing a 747 in one big leap.

However, let's get back to the point.

First, we need to discuss exactly what defines something as being alive...any discussion is useless without a definition of key terms. Many biology textbooks will tell you that life needs to maintain homeostasis, it needs to undergo osmosis or some other form of water regulation, reproduce, utilize energy through some sort of metabolic process, respond to stimulus and adapt.

First, we need to look at the experiments of Stanley Miller and Harold Urey who were the first to synthesize amino acids (amongst other important organic chemicals) by cycling water through electric currents and UV lights and a highly reducing atmosphere of hydrogen, ammonia, carbon monoxide, methane and other chemicals. There are conditions where amino acids can polymerize as well. Furthermore, liposomes will spontaneously form a bilayer and undergo osmosis-like processes because of their selective permeability. Many protobionts meet the various definitions listed above...just not all of them. However, we do see some processes which resemble the processes of life in organic chemicals.

Now...granted, abiogenesis still has a long way to go. It's not nearly as developed as evolutionary theory, but it still warrants further research. It's quite a bit more complicated than lightening and a mud puddle. We have been synthesizing organic compounds for just over 50 years, so this is still a relatively young phenomena. We shouldn't abandon the pursuit because an economist with a monotone voice doesn't think it's viable. Some fields progress faster than others and scientists should be just as free to dabble in this area as any other.

More information on protobionts from Cornell

From TalkOrigins

Of course, Stein assumes that early life would be somewhat similar to modern life...and this cannot be reconciled through logical reasoning. The very first cell was most likely even more simple than anything we'd recognize today instead of the massively complex structure of even the simplest eukaryotic or prokaryotic cell.

Dismissing the entire field through a straw man is nothing but an argument from ignorance and incredulity. More research is needed and the results of that research will eventually speak for itself.

Then, Stein goes on to pull the persecution card and claim that these guys are merely ignored but it's hard to see his point when it's easy for a biology undergraduate student to look at his claims and show them to be vacuous.

In fact, since he's managed to rack up about five pages of bullshit in about five minutes I have no qualms about saying that I would have no apprehension about debating Stein on the subject of evolution in front of an audience of biology researchers who have PHDs.

For example, Scott Minnich will tell you that the bacterial flagellum has 30 parts which aren't homologous to anything else in the cell. However, the peer reviewed literature will tell you that there are only two parts which have no homologues. Furthermore, further research will reveal that most of the flagella's precursors are found in cells today.

Even further examination will reveal that there are many, many types of bacterial flagella...not just the H+ ATPase based flagella they use as an example. Besides finding flagella based around sodium and potassium ATPase, one will find that many flagella are actually missing parts Minnich deems vital to the workings of the flagella or flagella which are wildly different than the one model system they use. The Archaea flagella is a great example of this.

Then, Stein makes the most puzzling comment out of his entire tirade. He asks us to let the ID people talk and then blow them out of the water. This is exactly what is happening in the public circle with groups like the National Center for Science Education and people like PZ Meyers, Richard Dawkins, Ken Miller, Francis Collins and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

However, a system similar to the one Stein calls for is already in place. It's called the peer-review system and more information can be found here.

Scientific journals are not as much about free speech as they are about evidence and good scholarship. To be published in a scientific journal, the author has to demonstrate that their discovery increases the amount of knowledge we have in a certain field and show that they can produce a large amount of evidence backing up their claim.

ID does neither. They do not give proof to back their claims up, they only try to disprove already standing theories and claim victory by default. In science, you do not win by default. You win by showing the evidence to back your theory up because any untested theory is just as valid as any other untested theory until the evidence shows otherwise.

To answer a question, ID proponents simply replace one unknown with another which raises more questions and which also fails to answer the original question.

Let's take the abiogenesis question, for example. Science doesn't have a great answer for how life began, but if we ever synthesize a cell under natural conditions our answer will be testable, repeatable and useful. There will be applications.

Where is the application for ID? How is it tested? How is it replicated? How is it verified?

What's it's use? What does it explain?

Intelligent Design says that all animals were put here by a un-named being (assumed to be the Judeo-Christian God judging by it's main advocates) through a process which has yet to be attempted to be described by any ID advocate. Furthermore, they will not make any comment on who this designer was, how it created or where it came from and how it was created. In the video above, Stein laments about science not being to answer the same questions...without realizing that ID merely provides an answer without an explanation. Science seeks to explain the world through empirical testing, open observation and methodological naturalism. Because ID cannot meet a single one of those criteria, ID has no place in the field of science.

The answer which relies on the fewest assumptions is generally going to be the answer that explains the most. They cover up an unanswered question with an answer that is more palatable to them and back it up with faulty logic, horrible examples and outright lies and propoganda while creating a false dichotomy between science and religion.

Answering a question with the words 'I don't know' gives much more credibility than answering the same question with something which cannot be tested, verified, replicated or even used. It's an honest answer and one which gives a lot more credibility than simply invoking Russell's teapot.

If the majority of the ID claims can't stand up to an entomology undergraduate with access to google scholar, one has to wonder exactly how well they would stand up to a peer-review panel.

Of course, in one interview Stein shows his scarier side by saying this:

He picked a very interesting way of delivering this message...using a telecommunications system which is the end product of hundreds of years of research in the fields of physics and chemistry.

It's a serious and scary thing to claim that science kills people. In the 20th century, the proceeds of scientific research has saved billions of lives. It wouldn't be a completely unrealistic assertion to say that antibiotics, anesthesia, water sanitation measures, the Haber process (synthesizes ammonia for fertilizer), insecticides and the Sterile Insect Technique have each saved millions of lives. Together, they've probably saved the lives of billions.

Of course, I doubt any of the above technologies would go against Stein's narrow and sectarian religious views. Even though this clip has no (or little) context to go with it, I have no doubt that the exact field of science he was talking about was that of evolutionary biology.

In other televised interviews, you can see Stein equate Athiesm with Social Darwinism through a very, very misinterpreted and screwed up view of evolution.

It's no secret that one of the main premises of expelled is Stein trying to connect Hitler to Darwin. Looking any of Stein's Fox News interviews up will tell you this.

However, he takes the classic ID/Young Earth Creationist stance of claiming that Hitler was an atheist inspired by Darwin. Once again, this claim fails the most basic investigation.

In Mein Kampf, Hitler makes great use of religious rhetoric and at one point says that he is acting in accordance of a creator. The Concordant Between the Holy See and the German Reich was published in 1933 and this completely crushes the claim that the blood Hitler spilled did not end up on the hands of religion. Furthermore Hitler's biggest influence was Martin Luther, and it is well known that Luther is one of history's biggest anti-Semites.

I want to take a minute and point out that I know that the views shared in the hyperlinked texts above are not shared by the majority of Christians. I know they do not embody the philosophy that many Christians try to follow and I am not trying to say anything otherwise. However, to avoid our past mistakes and avoid repetition, we must not only learn from our past but face it and confront it. Stein is attempting to re-write history and demonize a group of people he simply doesn't like by raising the emotions stirred by the Holocaust. This is a cheap emotional tactic and often, the emotions raised by the Holocaust will cloud an issue so much that it makes rational discussion difficult.

As proof, I offer an excerpt of a letter that Richard Dawkins recently received.

Now I truly understand who you atheists and darwinists really are! You people believe that it was okay for my great-grandparents to die in the Holocaust! How disgusting. Your past article about the Holocaust was just window dressing. We Jews will fight to keep people like you out of the United States!

You can read the full article here.

To counter the Holocaust claims that Stein makes in his various interviews (as well as in Expelled most likely), one has to realize that Hitler's preferred mode of extermination would have been nothing more than artificial selection.

We already know that artificial selection works. Humanity has known this for years. Our domestic livestock, crops and pets are all products of artificial selection.

Artificial selection is just one usage of evolution and we've been practicing this for thousands of years with crops, dogs, cats and domestic livestock. Anybody who has ever eaten knows how effective this has been...manipulating wild mustard into broccoli, kale, kohlrabi and such. Charles Darwin took a look at domestic plants and animals and theorized that the artificial selection taking place amongst domestic crops and livestock which was directly responsible for the diversity of those organisms could also have a naturally occurring counterpart. Natural selection as been observed in action and nobody in the scientific community disputes that this does take place in nature.

Saying it's not factually correct because it can be used for evil things is like saying that the sudden combustion of a mixture of potassium nitrate, carbon and sulfur won't push a projectile out of a metal barrel at high speeds because it can kill people.

Just because something has uses which could potentially be used to do evil things, doesn't mean that the process is incorrect. It also doesn't mean that scientists would necessarily approve of the process being applied to humans. I think that nearly everyone in the world agrees that a selection process designed for the sole purpose of creating human suffering is wrong because it creates human suffering. Almost any evolutionary biologist (myself included as a perspective evo-biologist) would agree with that...and I wholeheartedly hope that every sane human would agree with that.

Our natural desire to alleviate the suffering of our fellow humans makes the study of how most animal communities act in the wild that much more important (even...no, especially if you make the invalid stereotype of evolutionary biology the way Stein does)...it shows us how not to set up a society by being the antithesis of everything a successful society is.

Natural selection is different than Social Darwinism because Social Darwinism is simply racism and nothing more. Social Darwinism is not based on biology, it is based on value judgments made solely from cultural and socio-economic prejudices. Natural selection is based on observations in the wild such as this experiment involving Daphnia, midge larvae and Notonecta.

I'd venture to guess that your average Intellegent Design Proponent would counter my point by telling me that natural selection demands that individuals be selfish. This is simply not true.

As an entomologist, I have come to admire a group of the most successful insects in the world...the Hymenopterans. More specifically, the family that I call Formicidae but which most people know as ants.

To deny that ants are successful would be futile...and one of the things they share in common with us is that their tendency to work together for their common goals is the main reason they are so successful as a group.

The thing I find so very fascinating about ants is the fact they're willing to lay down their very lives for the good of their society. If a colony of Solenopsis invicta is intruded upon by any intruder...in this case, let's say a camera strap belonging to a 220 lb. entomology undergraduate student from Iowa on a trip to Texas to observe centipedes in their natural environment...the ground will swarm with soldiers ants willing to defend the colony against the intruder.

The intruder, on the other hand, now has to figure out how the hell to get his camera back from the ants without getting further injury. The reason for their success is their ability to work together.

We also see this in bees:

If anybody is wondering how the thermal heating thing could have evloved...the wings of bees vibrate so fast that they generate heat. This is why bees are usually the first insects people see in the spring after winter and the last insects you see during fall. It is this exact mechanism that allows the bees to defend themselves in this manner.

Also in mammals:

Naked mole rats:

Meerkats:

As you can clearly see, the tendency of some animals to work together is clearly beneficial. This is why giving back to your community is so important...it makes reaching our common goals so much easier.

War, murder, racism...these things all weaken our societies and as sentient beings in the age of knowledge we are above this.

The second line of logic Stein takes in his interviews is actually self-invalidating. What makes Stein unique is that he admits in some interviews that there is a long history of Jewish persecution that spans thousands of years before Darwin. However, he says that Darwin's work made killing people acceptable and was necessary for the Holocaust.

However, his observations that there is a long line of Jewish persecution which predates Darwin by thousands of years simultaneously invalidate his claim that Darwin made the Holocaust possible. People were rationalizing ways to murder groups they didn't like long before Darwin came along and religion, politics or land were often the largest precipitating factors.

If you look at the political beliefs of evolutionary biologists you'll see that they're quite liberal as a general group, often preferring methods of running governments which are the polar opposite of social Darwinism such as Social Security, free health care...stuff like that.

In the reply to Mr. J, Richard Dawkins put it quite elegantly...and my beliefs are similar. I believe that Darwinism (~survival of the fittest) explains how animals do act in the wild. I do not believe that Darwinism has any say in dictating how people should act or even how we should set our society up.

I believe that everything we do should be in an effort to reduce the suffering of our fellow humans any way we can.

This is why so-called creation science scares me. Many creationists (mostly of the Young-Earth flavor) will repeatedly assert that there is no such thing as a beneficial mutation. When antibiotic resistance is brought up, they will assert that the adaptations that grant antibiotic resistance also decrease fitness which is true in some cases.

However, we are constantly watching MRSA (Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus) pop up in settings that are in no way attached to hospitals. These community-acquired resistant strains must have some ability to compete with those vulnerable bacteria. We know that secondary mutations can compensate for loss of fitness incurred as a result of antibiotic resistance.

They make these claims not out of any understanding, but out of fear. Many Christians (as well as other religious people) believe that accepting certain aspects of science requires them to give their faith up. ID proponents will point to the rhetoric that people like PZ Myers, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris feel towards religion in an attempt to build this dichotomy.

What many people need to realize is this is because there are people like Ben Stein who seek to demonize atheists out of a misunderstanding or a pure hatred.

However, I feel that Athiests and People of Faith can work towards a common goal...and this goal is to understand the universe and create a strong, peaceful international society where our differences simply don't matter.

I point to a recent example at ISU where a preacher by the name of Tom Short visited the campus. He was your standard hate mongerer whose idea of free speech was to silence anyone who didn't agree with him with a shiny red whistle.

He drew an audience, which I was a part of. The entire day turned into a hate speech against homosexuals and on the second day when we were discussing (well, as much as he would allow) the Genesis flood, I was told by him that all non-Christians deserved to die.

Immediately, one girl spoke up and said 'I'm a Christian and I don't believe that'. One young man even sat down and made a sign which announced 'Ask me about Christianity'...and he started some very relevant conversations about religion as a result.

I am an Athiest. I do not believe in Gods. I do not believe in Allah, Yahweh, Zeus, Thor, Odin, Ra, Apollo, Ares, Mars, Aphrodite or any other deity you can name. I generally do not view religious people as the enemy, although I will speak out against people like Tom Short with a fiery passion. I will speak out against people who demonize myself and the scientific community out of fear and ignorance. I will speak out against people like Ben Stein who try to twist religion into a weapon. I will speak out against those who attempt to use passages from a book meant to teach peace and understanding to justify hatred.

However, I will also reach out and attempt to befriend those who are religious and swap philosophies because I believe that everyone has something to learn from each other if we simply try.

I have many friends who are pro-science and believe evolution is how God chose to work.

I believe that evolution is an un-guided process.

However, this is the beautiful thing about science. It's based on open observation and experimentation of the real world and this is what makes it open to anybody regardless of faith.

There is no dichotomy between science, evolution and religion.
http://www.med.nyu.edu/rcr/Fordham/Dobzhansky.pdf
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=23404
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/23/national/23believers.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2008/05/08/trouble_ahead_for_science/
http://www.pepperdine.edu/pr/releases/2007/november/milleraudio.htm