In the 1950s and ’60s, several villages in the Oceanic country of Papua New Guinea began to see an odd disease. Villagers of the Fore people in the Eastern Highlands - predominantly women and children - would show an array of frightening symptoms that rapidly worsened over about six months: muscle tremors, uncontrollable laughter, slurring of speech and finally an inability to move and swallow. In the 1960’s, European scientists began to study people with the disease, called kuru for the Fore word for “shiver,” and made two astonishing discoveries. First, that kuru represented a new kind of infectious disease that caused the brain and nervous system to degenerate. Second, that kuru probably resulted from people eating their dead relatives.

Yeah, that’s not a typo. Before the Fore people of Papua New Guinea were known for kuru, they were known for “mortuary feasts,” where villagers would mark the death of a family member by consuming him or her. And not just a nibble here or there - according to a 1979 book by anthropologist Shirley Lindenbaum, “meat, viscera, and brain were all eaten.” That’s a good way to spread a disease caused by prions - the mechanism for kuru eventually discovered by Daniel Carleton Gajdusek in research that won him the 1976 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Now, kuru continues to fascinate the scientific community, as a new medical paper presents how the savage disease caused rapid natural selection in Papua New Guinea, selecting for a gene variant that may offer clues to how to treat prion diseases with no known cure.

Prions are also the culprit behind bovine spongiform encephalopathy, better known as Mad Cow Disease, which is thought to have broken out in Britain due to cannibalistic feeding practices in cattle. In short, prion diseases are caused by misshaped proteins that are a bad influence on native prion proteins present in all species, causing them to change shape, clump together, and eventually kill the cell. So when a prion disease enters a person’s nervous system - by, say, eating a person with a prion disease - it tends to wreak havoc in the brain, producing the odd symptoms of kuru or BSE.

At the height of kuru, 1 out of 50 people in some Fore villages succumbed to the untreatable, fatal disease. Women and children tended to die more often from kuru, likely because they usually were given the brains to eat while the men got the good, meaty parts. But what about those who participated in the mortuary feasts, but never contracted the disease? Was there something genetically different about them that made them resistant? Sounds like a case for…evolution!

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A sleeping zebra finch (courtesy of Margoliash lab)

One of the repeated themes of the Darwin/Chicago 2009 meeting two weeks ago was the history of the anti-evolution movement, a resistance that has actually changed form, even *cough* evolved, quite a bit since The Origin of the Species. At the opening night event in Rockefeller Chapel, science historian Ronald Numbers talked about differences between the anti-Darwinists led by William Jennings Bryan in the 1920’s (immortalized in the Scopes Monkey Trial and Inherit the Wind) and today’s intelligent design supporters and creationists. Surprisingly, Bryan and his followers were considerably less extreme than today’s anti-evolutionists, as Numbers explained that most who railed against Darwinism in the early 20th century were fine with the evolution of animals over billions of years, they merely could not abide that humans also evolved.

The evolution vs. creation debate has obviously become a lot more complicated since then, but Bryan’s primary objection has lingered - the core of most people’s opposition to evolution is the idea that humans must be somehow separate and different from the rest of the natural world. One “proof” of this uniqueness is the complexity of human language, a form of communication that, to the casual observer, appears in an entirely different league from the songs, gestures, or simple noises that animals use to share information. The assumption that the more complex forms of human language are unique is even held by some in the field of linguistics and psychology, including the legendary Noam Chomsky, who argued as much in a 2002 Science paper with cognitive psychologist (and Darwin/Chicago speaker) Marc Hauser.

That assumption is a handicap to the study of language, argue University of Chicago’s Daniel Margoliash and Howard Nusbaum in a recent issue of the journal Trends in Cognitive Science. The idea that human language is biologically unique, and thus the kind of “hopeful monster” geneticist Richard Goldschmidt coined to describe the sudden appearance of a new feature in evolutionary history, walls off language from the world of biology. Perceiving human language in its proper evolutionary context, and thus exposing it to the tools of comparative biology, will allow scientists to fully understand how language works and where it originated, Margoliash and Nusbaum conclude.

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Daniel Dennett chatting with Robert Richards at the Darwin/Chicago 2009 conference. Credit: Jerry Coyne

The philosopher Daniel Dennett looked slightly puzzled as Robert Richards finished his Oct. 30 talk at the Darwin/Chicago 2009 meeting, on the subject of “Darwin’s Biology of Intelligent Design.” Dennett and Richards have spent years writing about Darwin and the historical significance of his ideas about evolution. But Richards’ talk challenged a central theme of Dennett’s influential book, “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea” - that Darwin revolutionized modern thought by showing that a mindless, mechanical process can give rise to complexity and minds capable of understanding their origins. In fact, Richards argued that Darwin did not always envision evolution as mindless or mechanical. Richards cited out passage after passage in Darwin’s notebooks and early published writing, showing that he thought of humanity as “the great object for which the world was brought into its present state.” He didn’t talk about an intelligence guiding evolution, but he was comfortable - at least before the 1860s - with the idea of an intelligence behind natural laws.

In other words, Darwin once believed that we are the ones evolution was waiting for.

I walked up to Dennett after Richards’ talk and briefly asked what he thought. Dennett shrugged and shook his head. “I don’t believe it,” he said.

He’s not alone. The question is, why should anyone care? What does it matter if a 19th-Century naturalist thought a higher intelligence might have planned out evolution in some vague way? Lots of Darwin’s other notions got jettisoned along the way (blending inheritance, anyone?), so why should this one be different?

In part it may be because of the unusual - and possibly unhealthy - role that Darwin has assumed in debates about biology and human nature. He is an especially potent figure for creationists and atheists alike, because in many ways he made modern atheism possible. It muddles the picture if, as Richards said, Darwin’s theory “was formulated under the idea that an intelligent cause formulated the laws of nature.”

But it’s also clear that Darwin believed in that “intelligent cause” less and less as he got older. He’s still an important author of modern materialism, though perhaps a mushier one than we often imagine. Dennett admitted the possibility in his talk - “It would be wonderfully ironic, Bob, if the person we honor for having the best idea ever didn’t understand his own idea,” Dennett said. “But I don’t think that’s the case.”

4:15 p.m. - Of Mice and Mammoths

The last talk of the day (for me, as I had to leave before the final, final talk) made for a great reminder of how far the field of evolutionary biology, wrapped in a relatively simple story told engagingly by Hopi Hoekstra of Harvard. Hoekstra described her research quest as “the hunt for genes that make a difference,” and she uses a really nice model system - the oldfield mice of the southern United States. These mice typically are brown in color, but they have migrated in the recent (meaning thousands) of years to the gulf and atlantic coasts and taken up residence, like a retired couple, on the beach. But a brown mouse on a beach is a target, and their predators, which include birds and coyotes, find it all to easy to locate their brown fur on white sand and make a beachside snack out of them.

Cue natural selection - soon you have brown oldfield mice inland, and predominantly white oldfield mice that live on the beach. Hoekstra tested whether the fur color really does construe an evolutionary advantage with a simple experiment - make a bunch of clay mice colored brown or white, and leave them out on the beach. Sure enough, the brown clay mice quickly showed divots and bitemarks left by attacks from (presumably very frustrated) predators.

That would have been a fine experiment for the 1959 conference, but Hoekstra’s next step was pure 2009 - she took examples of brown and white mice back to the lab, bred them, and searched for the genes that determined fur color. Her laboratory narrowed the gene candidates down to three genes, and in one of them - a receptor called Mc1r - the substitution of a single amino acid flipped the switch from brown fur to white fur. Amazingly, when another group of scientists sequenced the genome of extinct mammoths in 2006, they found the same amino-acid substitution in the same gene, implying that mammoths, like the oldfield mice, came in different color varieties.

After so much high theory and methodological complexity, Hoekstra’s experiment sent all of us (or at least me) home with a warm feeling - not only was her experiments a beautiful example of evolutionary biology that would have been impossible in 1959, it was a great example of teachable science, the kind of story that a 3rd-grader could wrap their head around and begin to see the truth of evolution. The cloud hanging over Darwin/Chicago 2009 was the uneasy feeling that all this scientific progress was still losing out in the arena of public opinion, but Hoekstra’s work and charismatic speaking style (on the heels of similar ambassador figures Neil Shubin and Michael Shue) chased away some of the pessimism, and left me confident that the more examples we find of Darwin’s elegant theory at work in nature, the easier it will be to convince the world that it is true.

And with that, we’re finished. Happy Halloween to those of you who have followed me this far, and thanks very much for reading and perhaps linking to the posts. I’ll be back Monday with a digest post to help navigate the coverage of the last few days, and Jeremy Manier will be here Tuesday with his own thoughts on the conference.

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5:00 p.m. - Biomedicine and Bracketology

Here’s the final report from today’s session, join us again tomorrow for a full Halloween day of evolutionary science and philosophy! Also, continue to follow PZ Myers of Pharyngula and Skip Evans of Wisconsin Citizens for Science for their reports on the conference.

Both talks in the final session of the day focused on how the incredible advances in gathering genetic information over the last decade have done much to shake up the worlds of genetics and evolutionary biology. As we’ve written about previously, the 1959 conference helped solidify what’s known as the modern synthesis of evolution that incorporated the then-new information about DNA, genes and molecular mechanisms of inheritance, an arrangement that forever married the two fields. Well, could the participants in that conference have predicted that 50 years later we would have a reasonably complete genome for humans, not to mention 43 other vertebrate species? And did they know how much trouble it would cause?

Eric Lander, who was one of the leaders of the Human Genome Project, said he felt slightly out of place at a conference about Darwin, but the modern synthesis marriage sometimes makes strange bedfellows! Regardless, Lander’s talk was a great primer on how the dogma of genetics has been forever altered by what we learned from the HGP and the genomes of other animals: that we have far fewer genes than we thought (~20,000 vs. previous estimates of 100,000), that much of what is handed down between generations is “non-coding” DNA that doesn’t make proteins, that those “non-coding” sections may create important regulatory elements that help organisms develop. Lander, who described himself as a biomedical scientist, said much of what has been found since the explosion of genetic data has been bad news for medical geneticists - many disease-associated alleles have been found, but most have very marginal effects on the probability of a person developing that disease. But Lander said it was a glass half-full/half-empty situation:

“Those people who want to do personal genomics - take your DNA and tell you your risk of diabetes - they’re in trouble. This is not going to be the best way to do that,” Lander said. “But if I want to understand what diabetes is about…I start to get clues to the pathways that matter to diabetes.”

The final talk of the day covered how genetics has caused a similar reshuffling in the field of phylogeny - the science of organizing life into “trees” that show the evolution and relationships of species. Philip Ward, from UC-Davis, talked about the durability of the “Tree of Life” simile, which Darwin readily used in Origin of Species - the only figure in the book is an early phylogenic tree. Modern phylogeny produces beautifully complex trees that look like 10,000-team basketball tournaments run in reverse, with the winner being life’s common ancestor. But as biologists have turned to genetics to build these trees, they’ve found that they lead to completely different trees than the ones built from morphology, the physical characteristics of organisms.

One reason for this is a tricky effect called convergence - two species that are not closely related and live continents apart could form a resemblance because they evolved in similar environments. Ward studies a type of ant that is found in both Asia and America, and morphology would suggest that they are closely related species despite being so far apart geographically. However, genetic data showed the ants were more distantly related than previously could have been estimated from their looks, suggesting they evolved to look similar due to their similar environments, without a recent common ancestor.

But the Tree of Life remains a strong structural model, Ward said. So strong, in fact, that it has been adopted by creationists, who describe an “orchard of life” of animals that evolved after Noah’s flood. As with most mentions of creation “science” at the meeting, Ward’s slides about these theories drew mostly giggles from an audience decidedly on the side of Darwin, even as genetics reveals a world more complex than he ever could have imagined.

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We’re only a few hours away from the start of Darwin/Chicago 2009, 2+ days of the world’s leading evolutionary biologists discussing the past and future of the field. Come back to this space tonight at 6:00 pm Central time for live-blog coverage of the opening event at Rockefeller Chapel, and keep coming back all day Friday and Saturday for frequent updates from the conference.

Before things get into full swing, I wanted to play armchair Linnaeus and organize the conference’s 30-some talks into a few major themes. So much is packed into Friday and Saturday, with two simultaneous programs covering “biological sciences” and “history and philosophy,” I won’t be able to see everything, but the list also contains what I’m hoping to prioritize in order to get at least a representative sample of the event.

Evolution Goes to Church

Rockefeller Memorial Chapel, the looming gothic structure on the southeast side of campus where convocations and communion services are held, has been the site of Darwin discussion before - as mentioned yesterday, Sir Julian Huxley gave a speech predicting the end of religion at the 1959 conference. Thursday night’s trio of speakers both follows that agnostic tradition and nicely previews the main threads of the more tightly-packed Friday and Saturday schedules.

Addressing the renewed vigor of the evolution vs. religion debate, Ronald Numbers of the University of Wisconsin will recap the historic path of these conflicts, emphasizing that the “young earth” element of today’s creationists is a relatively new development. Harvard’s Marc Hauser, meanwhile, will pull the rug out from under one of the main creationist arguments - that morality could not have developed under natural selection and must have been given to humans by a supernatural power. But lest you think evolutionary biologists are too distracted by the external debate to do the hard work in their own field, legendary geneticist Richard Lewontin will open the night’s proceedings talking about the challenges of directly determining how genes contribute to an organism’s fitness.

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Sir Julian Huxley speaks in Rockefeller Chapel, 1959

As discussed yesterday, the Darwin/Chicago 2009 conference marks not just the anniversary of Darwin’s birth and most famous book (The Origin of Species) but also 50 years since a landmark evolution conference was held at the University of Chicago. Like this year’s gathering, the 1959 conference was meant to both look back at Darwin’s life and ideas and look forward to the future of the field his theory created: evolutionary biology.

To commemorate this historic conference, the University of Chicago’s Regenstein Library has put together a great web exhibit with video and audio from the Darwin Centennial conference in 1959. Encylopedia Brittanica Films produced a film of the conference, and you can watch several video clips from that film and listen to audio excerpts from three presentations - in addition to songs from the Darwin musical commissioned for the meeting.

From the film footage available on the website, you can see that the style of the conference in 1959 was very different from what will occur this weekend. Instead of individual talks and Powerpoints, the scientists participated in panel discussions on topics such as The Origin of Life and Man as an Organism - the latter of which was held on Thanksgiving Day. One clip shows overflow crowds that couldn’t get into Mandel Hall (where the panels were held) sitting in other University buildings and staring off into space as they listen to the audio of the conference. This weekend’’s overflow crowd will be able to stare at their computer and follow along right here on the blog, if you’ll forgive the plug.

Then again, some things weren’t so different between 1959 and 2009. Tension between evolution and religion was intact: Sir Julian Huxley, the renowned zoologist considered to be one of the main architects of the modern synthesis of evolutionary biology, gave a lecture in Rockefeller Chapel entitled The Evolutionary Vision which, according to Regenstein librarian David Pavelich, “proposed that religion, being subject to the laws of evolution, was fast becoming obsolete and would eventually evolve itself out of existence.” The religious opposition to Darwin’s theories was acknowledged by University of Chicago chancellor and professor of philosophy Lawrence Kimpton, who likened Darwin to John Stuart Mill as advocates of free thought and liberty:

“Darwin, in his own sphere and his own action, produced an independent defiance of the pressures of his day, challenging the rigidity of thought and temper with a naturalistic theory shocking to the entrenched supernatural explanation of biology. The outrage and the distortions that erupted immediately, persisting well into this century and even in this country, are measures of Darwin’s independence.”

Also in audio clips:

• Sir Charles Galton Darwin discussing his grandfather’s legendary voyage observing and collecting specimens on the H.M.S. Beagle, including a reading of what Darwin wrote in his journal the first time he ate a banana.
• Archaeologist Louis Leakey on the search for fossils of human ancestors - “You hear people say ‘what has Africa created to the human race?’ It contributed the human race.”

In lighter fare, check out the songs from the Darwin musical, Time Will Tell, premiered at the conference. They are very 1959, and are probably the only songs you will ever hear with lyrics such as “this gastropod has quite an odd phylogeny” and “Alas, to his sorrow, he generally finds/That pre-conceived notions of various kinds/Have already helped them to make up their minds/And the facts will only confuse them.” I could see that as the theme song for quite a few evolution blogs, actually.

There has certainly been no shortage of attention on Charles Darwin this year. With the dual landmarks of Darwin’s 200th birthday and the 150th anniversary of The Origin of Species, virtually every scientific publication, museum, conference and institution has taken the opportunity to pay tribute to the life and work of the man who gave us the theory of evolution. But now that the celebrations are (mostly) over, it’s time for the field of evolutionary biology to move forward, capitalizing on new technologies and discoveries that were only a dream when Darwin drew upon decades of observation and thought to craft his revolutionary book.

That same challenge faced evolutionary biologists in 1959, when they gathered at the University of Chicago to observe the 150th and 100th birthdays of Darwin and his book. Brought together were many of the 20th century’s greatest thinkers on the subject of evolution, including legendary biologists Julian Huxley, Theodosius Dobzhansky, and Ernst Mayr, Darwin’s grandson Charles Galton Darwin, and John Scopes of Scopes Monkey Trial fame. And according to Robert Richards, professor of the history of science and medicine at the University of Chicago, the discussions that took place at that conference helped solidify what we now think of as the “modern synthesis” of evolutionary theory, the merging of Darwin’s ideas about the gradual effects of natural selection with the then-new field of genetics.

Darwin/Chicago 2009, which begins Thursday night at the University of Chicago, will try to recapture that spirit and make a similar impact upon the path of evolutionary biology. Once again bringing the field’s brightest lights to Hyde Park for an exchange of ideas, Richards and the conference’s other organizers hope that the event will do more than merely acknowledge a triple anniversary, but will instead re-evaluate evolution science in light of a world much different from the 19th century environment that shaped Darwin’s thoughts. Here, with Richards’ assistance, are three reasons why now is a great time to talk about Charles Darwin and evolution.

1) New technologies

The 1959 conference took place only six years after James D. Watson and Francis Crick published their landmark paper on the double-helix structure of DNA. And it wasn’t until 1957 that the “central dogma” of biology - that DNA encodes for RNA which encodes for proteins - was enunciated by Crick. So the ‘59 conference took place at the dawning of the genetic age, when the biological substrate that Darwin’s natural selection acts upon was finally understood.

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And so Neuroscience 2009 comes to an end, and it’s time to put away my badge, rest my weary feet and note-taking hand and think about biology below the neck again. Here’s the final installment of our live coverage, but come back tomorrow for a roundup of the conference with highlights, loose observations and links to other people’s thoughts on the conference. Thanks for reading!

2:30 PM - The Final Talk

The schedule may say that Neuroscience 2009 runs through the end of the day today, but judging by how many suitcase-toting scientists were jumping in airport cabs this afternoon, a small portion of the 30,000+ attendance makes it to the very end. Indeed, even the main stage ends its conference early, shutting down after a talk by Mt. Sinai School of Medicine’s Eric Nestler, an expert in the field of molecular psychiatry.

Nestler’s research focuses on the gritty details of how drugs of abuse change the expression of a person’s genes - yes, it was another addiction talk, and the former addiction researcher that I am, it was great to see the topic getting so much attention this year. In the addiction press conference I attended yesterday, Nestler hinted at a bombshell idea - frequent users of addictive drugs such as cocaine, heroin or alcohol may change the mechanics of their genes so permanently, the modifications could be passed on to their children. This “inheritable addiction” has already been observed in lab rats, Nestler said, mirroring similar results seen with the offspring of obese rats (which I talked about on Monday).

But that data must be too fresh for mass consumption, despite Nestler telling a roomful of reporters about it the day before. His talk today focused on the steps leading up to that discovery, carefully examining how repeated cocaine increases or decreases the activity of hundreds of genes in the reward pathway of the brain. Those long-lasting changes, which can cause cells of the reward pathway to actually grow and change shape, help explain why addiction is such a difficult condition to treat - it may require a complete re-re-structuring of the brain.

Much of the addiction research I’ve talked about this week has taken place in animals, but before Nestler’s talk, I came across a rare experiment that looks at the behavioral effects of a commonly-used drug in humans. It might seem strange that we know a ton about the specific genes that are up or down-regulated by cocaine, but not so much about its effects upon humans, but that’s due to procedural reasons - it’s quite hard to get approval for a study that gives illegal drugs to humans.

Michael Ballard, from the University of Chicago laboratory of Harriet DeWit, was trying to fill in at least one of those gaps in the research by testing the effects of THC (the active ingredient in marijuana) to presumably eager volunteers. Ballard then tested the subjects’ ability to judge facial expressions and determine the emotional content of pictures and personality trait words while they were under the influence of the drug. Interestingly, higher doses of THC caused the subjects to misjudge the facial expressions they were shown, suggesting an effect of the drug on social perception. The other tests were normal during the drug effect, but when brought back to the laboratory a week later, the subjects showed a decreased ability to remember neutral and negative personality traits, possibly indicating that their memories of the drug effect were biased toward happier stimuli. Ballard hopes to continue that research into other drug types - he’s currently testing amphetamine - to give the field of addiction research much-needed, laboratory-controlled human data to make sense of the flood of animal experiments.

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As described on Monday and hinted at all week, this weekend marks the start of Neuroscience 2009, the annual mega-conference of more than 30,000 neuroscientists. After years of staging the meeting in areas with distractingly nice climates such as New Orleans, Orlando and San Diego, this year should be all business with the rainy chill of Chicago keeping people indoors. But there’s still a lot of fun to be had, with big-time speakers, immersive poster sessions, the never-ending hunt for the best vendor knick-knack giveaway and the night-time socials. Because of Neuroscience’s massive size, there are a million different ways to navigate a path through the science, but here’s a quick extremely long guide to what I’m looking forward to experiencing. Remember to tune in to ScienceLife all weekend (and through Wednesday) for coverage.

Saturday: Magicians Were the First Neuroscientists

Each year one of the most interesting lectures falls under the sober heading of “Dialogues Between Neuroscience and Society,” which basically means “we invited someone from outside of neuroscience to talk about neuroscience.” At previous meetings I’ve attended, that meant hearing public figures such as the Dalai Lama and Frank Gehry offering their own perspective on the brain, the mind and thinking - necessary reminders that the microscopic neurons those 30,000 scientists are concentrated on actually add up to some pretty amazing things in practice. 

This year’s Dialogues speakers are neuroscientists of a different sort: magicians Apollo Robbins and Eric Mead. Even though I saw a local version of this talk earlier this year with Robbins and neuroscientist Susana Martinez-Conde (which I wrote about it for the Tribune), I’m excited to see it again, because it really is a neat demonstration of how magicians have used the brain’s limitations to produce convincing illusions. Robbins, whose act is centered on his considerable abilities as a pickpocket, is a master of using diversion to direct a person’s attention one direction while he slips off their watch from another angle. As Robbins and Martinez-Conde explained back in January, this deceptively simple trick actually says a lot about how the brain shifts attention from stimulus to stimulus, and how a normal brain is “tricked” may help us learn about the neurobiological process that underlie an attentional disorder like ADHD. You can watch a video of a similar symposium organized by Martinez-Conde back in 2007 called “The Magic of Consciousness” - which includes Teller of Penn & Teller in a rare speaking role.

Also Saturday: We’re only two weeks away from the University of Chicago’s big Darwin conference, but I still will probably take in at least part of the symposium on Evolution of Brain and Behavior. Harvard’s Elizabeth Spelke caps off the day with a lecture on how the brain processes math - thankfully, it’s scheduled early in the conference, before my own brain will surely grow too tired to handle such a heavy topic.

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(photo courtesy of Nature)

Bruce Lahn knew that his 2005 papers on the recent evolution of brain genes might stir up some controversy. In the journal Science, the University of Chicago professor of human genetics and his colleagues studied two genes involved in regulation of brain size during development. Intriguingly, they found variants of these genes that are favored by natural selection and are more prevalent in some geographic groups than others. Despite caveats about the complex, multi-dimensional nature of genetic differences, Lahn expected that people on the fringe might twist his research to justify racist beliefs. But he was  surprised at the degree of controversy, particularly the negative reaction from other scientists who distorted his conclusions to make straw-man arguments and even questioned the worth of doing such research in the first place.

That experience, Lahn says now, made him wiser about the way that human genetics research is interpreted by the public and even his scientific peers. But rather than shy away from the type of research that provoked such hubbub, Lahn decided that scientists needed a new moral framework to deal with rapidly growing information about how genes differ between individuals and groups. In an opinion piece published in the journal Nature today, Lahn and co-author Lanny Ebenstein argue that scientists and society at large must embrace the idea of genetic diversity, rather than persist in the more palatable assumption, increasingly disproven by science, that there are no meaningful genetic differences between geographic and ethnic human groups.

“I think the danger really is in the moral attitudes of the people themselves,” Lahn said when we discussed his essay earlier this week. “Instead of trying to suppress the science we should try to build a moral consensus that is constructive to the overall well-being of the species. I think that’s what’s important.”

“The truth about human diversity cannot be changed, but attitudes can change,” he continued. “I think it’s better to change attitudes than to hide factual truths.”

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Whenever I see a drawing of Tiktaalik like the one above, I always think “Man, that walking fish sure looks snooty.” But Tiktaalik roseae, discovered in 2004 by University of Chicago evolutionary biologist Neil Shubin and his team in the Canadian Arctic, is worthy of its haughty air. For one thing, the “fishapod” had a neck, a feature you don’t typically find on a fish, and the explanation for its stuck-up posture. Tiktaalik’s limbs were even more unusual and exciting, as Shubin found bones that were more like fingers than the tiny bones typically seen in fish fins. These structures meant Tiktaalik held a very important place in the tree of life, one of the elusive transitional species (in this case between fish and amphibians) that evolutionary biologists dream of discovering.

Shubin’s book about Tiktaalik and how it demonstrates the process of evolution, Your Inner Fish: A Journey Into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body, was released almost two years ago. Perhaps it takes scientists a while to squeeze in some non-journal reading time, because the book (now in paperback, cough plug cough) was today named as the 2009 book of the year by the National Academy of Sciences. Here’s what they said:

Neil Shubin for his delightful, intellectually challenging view of evolution from primitive fish to humans by a scientist who finds fossils in the most uncomfortable places and chronicles it all in Your Inner Fish: A Journey Into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body (Pantheon Books).

Your Inner Fish was also on the shortlist for this year’s Royal Society Prize for Science Books, in the esteemed company of science writers such as Carl Zimmer, Leonard Mlodinow and Ben Goldacre.

UPDATE: You can read an online excerpt from Your Inner Fish, thanks to University of Chicago Magazine!

Shubin is as good a public speaker as he is a writer. As probably the only fish paleontologist who teaches anatomy to medical students (here at the Pritzker School of Medicine), Shubin uses evolutionary theory to explain the stranger features of the human body. I caught an excellent lecture from him at the AAAS Meeting this past February (my favorite quote: “When I look at a human being, what I see is a giant, morphed-up fish.”), and he came off like a seasoned television pro on the Colbert Report. If you’d like to see Shubin live and in person, he is one of several speakers at the star-studded Darwin Conference taking place October 29-31 at the University of Chicago to celebrate the 150th anniversary of The Origin of the Species.

For a little teaser, here’s some video taken by Jeremy Manier earlier this year of Shubin talking about how cartoons and toys mischaracterize the process of evolution.

Decades of research advances have made depression less mysterious and less stigmatized in most circles, accepted as a neurobiological disorder rather than a more abstract (and untreatable) entity. But some news about depression remains surprising, at least to people outside the realm of psychiatry. Tuesday’s newspaper had one such example: a new study out of Washington University in St. Louis following a group of clinically depressed and young – very young – children, between the ages of 3 and 6.

Diagnosing a preschool child with major depressive disorder was a new concept to me. But it turns out that it’s relatively old news to psychiatrists, who have been studying the diagnosis and treatment of early childhood depression cases since at least the mid-1980’s. Prior to that, even practitioners  had trouble grappling with the idea of toddlers and kindergartners suffering from a traditionally “adult” disorder like depression, said Sharon Hirsch, section chief for child and adolescent psychiatry in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience at the University of Chicago Medical Center.

“People used to have a different concept about kids,” Hirsch said. “They figured, from a developmental point of view, that if you didn’t understand abstract concepts – if you only knew right and wrong, black and white – you didn’t have to worry about the larger concepts in life. Therefore, you weren’t really capable of becoming depressed, because you were only focused on food and basic necessities, which are all provided for you, so what is there to get depressed about?”

But as theories of depression focused less on psychoanalysis and more on neurochemical causes, researchers began asking whether the brains of very young children might be vulnerable to mood disorders such as depression. They found that depression does strike kids, but it takes distinct physical and emotional forms.

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There are a lot of reasons to be disturbed by the revelation, covered by the New York Times on Wednesday, that at least 26 published review articles in medical journals were ghostwritten by a medical communications company. But I’m not sure all of those reasons are obvious at first glance or fully addressed by the article. Sure, it’s ethically questionable for doctors to affix their names to a review article (which typically summarizes dozens or even hundreds of separate research articles into a cohesive statement about a medical or scientific topic) that they didn’t write. But it also raises serious questions about other, less overt ethical violations that beset the field.

The story has its origins in the controversy over hormone replacement therapy (HRT), which was found in 2002 to elevate risks of heart disease, stroke and some cancers. Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, as one of the leading sellers of hormone replacement therapy, has become one of the biggest targets for litigation: the Times piece counts roughly 8,400 lawsuits filed against the company by women claiming illness caused by HRT. As a result of those court cases, documents were released last week revealing that Wyeth paid DesignWrite, a medical communications company, about $25,000 per article for 26 articles advocating the benefits of HRT and published in prominent scientific journals. Though written by DesignWrite employees, who may or may not have medical or scientific training, the authors eventually listed for the articles were MDs.

Reprehensible? Sure. Unique? Hardly. Other companies, marketing other drugs, have also been forced to disclose similar arrangements in court. But the Times article and other online commentaries haven’t mentioned that this particular case is merely an especially egregious example of questionable practices that threaten scientific integrity.

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One of the best chroniclers of last week’s hyping of the 47 million-year-old Darwinius masillae fossil has been Carl Zimmer, the talented science writer and New York Times contributor, who detailed the overheated publicity campaign here, here and here. (Our own Jerry Coyne’s blog has also been on the case.) Carl found that the scientific paper had been withheld from most science journalists until the start of the press conference unveiling the find - an awful strategy if the goal was to get informed and nuanced coverage, but not so bad as a way of generating buzz for the uncannily timed book and History Channel special. Carl concluded:

science writers who were trying to do their job well and responsibly were actively hindered. Those who declared ridiculous things, such as claiming that human origins were now solved once and for all, were not.

That astute analysis made it all the more jarring today when I checked out the print edition of the Science Times, where Carl’s fine work often appears, and found a prominent, section-front ad for the Darwinius book, titled “The Link.” The ad claims breathlessly, “The History of Evolution Has Just Been Rewritten,” calling Darwinius “our earliest ancestor,” and predicting, “she’s about to change everything we know about the origins of humanity.”

To be clear, reporters like Carl Zimmer bear no responsibility for the ads that a publication like The New York Times chooses to run. Yet the irony here is pretty thick. Carl painstakingly traces and helps debunk the overblown claims being made for this nice fossil, only to see his employer provide a prominent forum for those very claims on the front of the Science Times.

The least they could do is give Carl equal space to rebut his own paper’s ad.