Entries in "other people's research"
February 13, 2007
Unmentionables
I read a rather depressing article this morning: Evolution by Any Other Name: Antibiotic Resistance and Avoidance of the E-Word. The paper presented a [not exhaustive, but reasonably convincing] survey of articles about the phenomenon of antibiotic resistant pathogens, in which the authors found a striking difference between the use of language in the 'evolutionary' literature versus papers in the 'biomedical' literature.
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February 12, 2007
Visualising a cell
Just a short post to draw attention to something I was too impressed with to leave it on the linkblog only:
A group at Harvard has put together an amazing animation of the inner life of the cell. There are also narrated versions here (all the Inner Life links; the 'speed' refers to the connection speed they're targeted for), and a mostly-complete text description of what's going on here.
Picked up from Livejournal user plantae, via tylik.
January 26, 2007
Biological clocks as a model system
I've just read an impressive paper—Evolving Biological Clocks using Genetic Regulatory Networks—from ALife X. Above all, I was struck by the choice of model system—biological clocks—because it's something I wish I had thought up myself, and it's a very neat illustration of the kinds of phenomena I find most interesting in biology.
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June 12, 2006
Disappointing
Because I found Aspects of Plant Intelligence so interesting and strange (as I wrote about 2 weeks ago), I've been looking up some of the references from it. So far I've found two errors: one probably a typo, one quite significant.
The minor error is that one of the references (ironically, to a paper by the same author) had the wrong date. Minor, but had the author had a more common name I might not have been able to find the paper.
The important error is that one of the cited papers—Volatiles from Different Barley Cultivars Affect Aphid Acceptance of Neighbouring Plants—doesn't say what Trewavas claims it does. I was particularly eager to read this article, because it was purported to be about inter-plant communication—specifically warnings of aphid attack—which is not something I was aware of plants doing. It turns out to have been nothing of the sort: it's about indirect effects on one barley variant of being near another; regardless of any particular stimulus triggering a signal. In fact, none of the 'signalling' plants in the study were under aphid attack.
Most disappointingly of all, this was obvious from reading the abstract, so Trewavas must have either meant to reference a different paper, or not bothered even looking at the abstract, or been outright dishonest. This makes me suspicious of other claims in the citing article, but I neither have the time nor the journal subscriptions to check out every claim, so I'll probably just have to assume this isn't a reliable source.
June 01, 2006
Plant Intelligence?
Today I read a particularly thought-provoking paper—Aspects of Plant Intelligence
by Anthony Trewavas—arguing that we should recognise plants as exhibiting intelligent behaviour. I'm not convinced, but there are some very thought-provoking things in the paper, so I thought I'd summarise my reactions here and see if anyone else has a response.
The general message of the paper was that while plants don't locomote like animals do, their growth patterns are highly selective and adaptive to their environment, and they do exhibit some temporal behaviours in response to environmental changes (such as the opening and closing of stomata). Trewavas argues that these are just as validly described as intelligent as the animal behaviours we normally describe as such; they just happen on a slower timescale. The paper reviews a wide range of evidence for this argument, some parts of which I found more persuasive than others.
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May 26, 2005
Why are we falling for the 747-by-random-search fallacy?
The fallacy to which I refer is a favourite argument of intelligent design advocates. Its basic structure starts with pointing out that the odds against a 747 being spontaneously assembled by a chance alignment of components (let alone atoms) are so immense that it's obvious the thing was designed, and then making the false leap to claiming that therefore the equivalent is true of a human being. It's a fallacy because evolution is actually an ordered, structured process rather than simply a random sampling of all possible permutations.
In the light of this, it's disappointing to see quite how much evolutionary robotics work seems to be basically trying to evolve 747s from scratch.
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May 18, 2005
The trouble with science journalism
The trouble with science journalism is that for various reasons—including, but not restricted to laziness—it tends to uncritically accept the claims made in a paper. A case in point was an article that I picked up on recently because it's about work in my field, and I remembered the research in question from a conference last year.