ABOUT THAT PENIS SPINES PAPER. One of the more interesting facts about the paper, published this week in Nature, is that it wasn't only about penis spines. But you wouldn't know it from much of the blogging and its accompanying lubricious snickers.
It was really a comparative genomics paper looking at more than 500 stretches of DNA that are highly conserved in other species – in short, important – but that Homo sap has lost. In short, important. Perhaps revealing things we would really like to know about our differences from other animals. And making the unusual point that, in genomics as in architecture and interior design, less can be more.
The deletions are nearly all in non-coding regions of DNA. That means they don't make proteins; instead, they are enhancers that govern behavior of the genes that do. Many also cluster near two specific regions of the genome, one involving steroid hormone signaling and the other brain structure.
The researchers have established that one such deletion, the one that's so snicker-producing, modifies the androgen receptor gene so it no longer produces the barbs or spines present on the penises of many mammals, including most primates. A theory about the function of the barbs is that they speed up copulation and so provide a competitive mating advantage. Their absence in Homo sap, the researchers hypothesize, could be one of several human traits – concealed ovulation is another – that strengthen pair-bonds. Spinelessness, they argue, prolongs copulation.
The data don't really support that notion, paleoanthropologist John Hawks points out at his eponymous blog. The prosimian galagos, aka bushbabies, have penises covered with long spines, but their sexual encounters can last two hours or more. Gibbons have the spiniest penises among the apes, but are pair-bonded and monogamous. Hawks observes
Let me just say that the comparative data don't convince me of an adaptive model for loss of penile spines in humans.
I'm sorry to say that Hawks is not entirely snicker-resistant.
If we could turn on the gene at the right time, replacing the function of the enhancer, we can still grow penile spines. Just saying – there may be a market there. Maybe the "male enhancement" companies will hit that next. I can only imagine what the wrapper on the NASCAR circuit will look like.
A couple other respectable posts from salacity-skirting bloggers: John Timmer at Nobel Intent and Ed Yong at Not Exactly Rocket Science. Yong includes interviews and ruminations about where these comparative studies are headed.
To be completely fair to science writers, the paper itself discussed the penis barb findings at greater length than its second finding about brain growth, and so did the PR blurb that the journal sent to journalists under a hed that also shaped the discussion: "How the penis lost its spines." The title of the paper itself was entirely sedate: "Human-specific loss of regulatory DNA and the evolution of human-specific traits." It would be refreshing (and perhaps sometimes even illuminating) if writing approaches were less often shaped by what a journal says about a research finding.
It is a fact, though, that on the whole, penis spines swamped the second finding the paper reported, which is that the other missing enhancer removed a constraint on brain growth. It permitted our brains to get bigger. And not just any old part of our brains: the all-important cerebral cortex. Seeing as how brain size, especially cortical size, is awfully central to Homo sap behavior, good and bad, I find that neglect kinda stunning. The findings about the brain seemed a lot more intriguing, and potentially far more consequential.
At least to me. But of course I have one of those, and I don't possess the other thing.
MICROBES IN METEORITES. Not. If you want to catch up on this nonstory, which Fox News broke over the weekend and bloggers and the MSM broke to smithereens quickly thereafter, Charlie Petit has rounded up some links in a couple of posts at the Knight Science Journalism Tracker. Get started here.
But see also Larry Moran at Sandwalk and Ian Musgrave at Panda's Thumb and Keith Cowling at NASA Watch.
And, most productively, see the magnificent Rosie Redfield at RRResearch, who can show us all a thing or two about how to read a paper. She has also posted an illuminating response from a NASA astrobiologist. You will recall that it was Redfield who led the debunking charge against that so-called alien arsenic microbe late last year. Her weapon was again a very detailed analysis of the paper. A bonus this week: she's live-blogging the International Human Microbiome Congress in Vancouver.
J0NATHAN EISEN RIDES AGAIN. Last week we spent some time with evolutionary biologist Jonathan Eisen, who had discovered that genome sequencing papers in Nature, which were supposed to be open access, weren't.
It looked, briefly, as if the problem was inadvertent and had been fixed. But the problem was not fixed after all. Eisen now reports that at least two more genome papers are not freely available. He notes:
They really need to fix their system so that this stops happening. So I am going to keep at them. A bit tongue in cheek I have called this #opengate but perhaps I should call it Openomics?
Once more a Nature spokesperson promises relief in the Comments, stating "we are working on a permanent fix." Eisen says:
I realize of course some things take time, but I cannot imagine it is that hard to restore free access to all papers reporting genome sequence data.
One thing that may speed the process: Eisen has called for Nature to return all the money it made from articles that were supposed to be free.
SCIENCE WRITING AS INDIVIDUAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP. Merrill Goozner writes mostly about health care at Gooznews. This item isn't that. Still, what Goozner calls involuntary entrepreneurship is of consuming interest to many science writers. Meaning, in our case, science writers who are freelances not because they love the untethered life but because the staff jobs they would much rather have simply don't exist.
Goozner discusses a new report from the Kaufman Foundation showing that self-employment is now growing faster than at any other time in the 15 years it's been tracked. But, he points out, this is not the job-creating individual entrepreneurship so beloved of the Administration – the start-ups that will eventually employ others. It's truly individual entrepreneurship: reluctant sole proprietors plugging away on their own, mostly earning much less than a job would pay and creating no work for others. Thanks for the tip to Laura Newman, who writes, "HUGE ISSUE!"
THERE'S ANTIMONY, ARSENIC, ALUMINUM, SELENIUM, AND HYDROGEN AND OXYGEN AND NITROGEN AND RHENIUM. You may well be too young to know the work of mathematician Tom Lehrer, and if so, you're the poorer for it. But David Bradley and I remember it.
Lehrer's witty highbrow lyrics, often wickedly satirical and sometimes just plain wicked, enlivened the last century – especially since they first burst into view almost accidentally soon after mid-century, years when enlivenment, to say nothing of wit, was in short supply. Today it would be said that Lehrer went viral.
One of Lehrer's best-known lyrics is his musical list of the elements in the Periodic Table, set to the tune of Gilbert & Sullivan's Major-General's Song. If you don't know it, watch the video and read the masterful lyrics before visiting David Bradley's ScienceBase post described below.
David has been worrying about materials security and shortages and dwindling element resources. So he has posted a revised version of Lehrer's "Elements Song" lyrics
redacted to take into account the fact that supplies of some elements are under serious or increasing threat this century because of socioeconomics, political machinations and plain old chemistry. Of those not redacted in the revised lyrics sheet, the majority are radioactive elements and some may be endangered but there is not enough information to say one way or the other.
Rather an alarming number.
You can distract yourself from the peril here implied with videos of Lehrer works; here's a list. And of course Wikipedia will tell you more than you probably want to know about Lehrer's too-short satirical lyrical career.
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