Superbugs: A Battle of Wits

We as humans like to think we're pretty much at the top of the evolutionary tree. We have our enormous brains cased up in the sleekest bodies this side of those cats with no hair. And we made those cats ourselves; through literally years of forced breeding we created a cat breed in our own grossly hairless image. Truly, we are princes among the paupers represented by the lesser species. We even invented (read: stole from fungi) a substance to destroy all bacteria, intelligent life's implacable foe. The only problem is that the more we use it, the better the bacteria become at not being sporting enough to be killed by it. Bacteria, you see, have the advantage of evolving horrifically quickly. Killing them is like punching smoke. As soon as we come up with a new antibiotic, they're already evolving their way around it. It is apparent that a new approach is needed.
Bacteria, worryingly, can communicate. Like tiny little board members, bacteria will not attack a target unless they have a quorum. This allows them to be fairly confident that they have the strength to prevail in the upcoming conflict. Although the idea of bacteria chatting away is profoundly disturbing, it may just provide a new method for producing resistance resisting antibiotics. The signals are conveyed between bacteria via chemicals, and scientists are working on ways to break down these chemicals before they reach other bacteria. The idea is that each bacteria will think it's on its own, and therefore not attack the host. It is gratifying to know that humans, the nominal peak of 3 billion years of evolution, could be on the brink of outsmarting our most distant, unicellular cousins.
Source: AP

The Etymology of Spectrometry

It's life or death. You're looking down at a mess of wires connected in varying combinations to a sturdy looking array of explosives. A red LED clock ticks the seconds down. 10, 9... In your hands is a pair of wire cutters. The radio stutters to life, "Cut the blue wire!" your temperamental commander shouts. You remember your dead partner and realise that after the events of the last two days, death would be a welcome change. You reach out and cut the wire. The universe skips a heartbeat before the clock flickers and dies. You saved the city, Seargeant, or should I say Captain. Unless you happen to be Welsh, that is.
In Welsh, as in a number of other languages, the word for blue encompasses green. Does this mean that, because they lack a mental label, they are unable to distinguish between the two colours? Colours are just words which have been invented to describe different sections of the visible electromagnetic spectrum from short-wavelength violet light to long wavelength red light. In this article from the Economist, two viewpoints among psychologists are identified. One states that human brains are hardwired to recognise and separate the 6 basic colours you might find in a cheap children's painting set. The other states that the spectrum is arbitrarily chopped up into segments based on social and linguistic factors. As always with these kinds of nature-nurture debates the answer probably lies somewhere in the middle; my personal bias tends towards the latter. Another recurring feature of these kinds of debates is that anyone can weigh in and sound like an expert, which makes it something ideal to save up for your next dinner party or night at home alone with your thoughts and a bottle of red. Or is that yellow?

Why can we ask who we are?

The source of our concept of self, the seat of the soul if you're that way inclined, is one of the great mysteries. What is it about humanity which allows us to feel that we are conscious, to have a sense of ourselves? In 2000 Edge.org posted an essay by V S Ramachandran entitled "Mirror Neurons and imitation learning as the driving force behind the "Great Leap Forward."" He was referring to the great leap that humankind has made, far outstripping the rate of progress of any other observed species. The essay was about the so-called "mirror neurons." In experiments on apes, it was found that specific groups of neurons fired whenever the apes performed voluntary tasks such as button pushing or reaching out for food. This is not particularly interesting in and of itself; the interesting part is that a small subset of these neurons fired when the apes merely watched other apes performing the task. Ramuchandran speculated that the presence of these mirror neurons in humans permitted us to learn by imitation, sparking the great leap which allowed the sharing of knowledge about how to replicate useful events which would otherwise have occurred only once.
Now, nearly 7 years later Ramuchandran has extended the theory in the new issue of Edge. He speculates that it is these very neurons that allow us self awareness by allowing us to imagine ourselves performing an action as if we were someone else. That is a gross oversimplification, so if you have any interest at all I would suggest that you read the full text of his surprisingly concise essay.

Battle of the sexes

It's tough being a guy in a Darwinian world. Sure, you can sit back and let the female bear many of the costs of childbearing: producing costly eggs filled with precious nutrients, or even carrying them to term within their own bodies. Sure, there's that, but males face a wholly different challenge: how can they know if the hatched babies they're helping to care for are their own?
Cuckoldry is rife in the animal kingdom (and not just in the animal kingdom); is there any better strategy for gene propagation at minimal cost than letting some other poor schmuck look after your kids while you swan off to mate with other females? It is predicted by theory, then, that males would have developed strategies to counter this and, indeed, many of these have come to light. For instance, the first thing a male lion will do on taking over a new pride is to kill off all the cubs, as it is really not in his best interest to raise somebody else's genetic progeny, or to allow his new harem to do so at the expense of raising infants with his own genes. It has even been speculated that we look like our parents so our fathers can be sure of their, um, involvement. A recent study, however, has documented behaviour which really takes the cake: A species of fish in Indonesia is actually more likely to cannibalise children, which are at least in theory his own, if he is unsure of his claim. The likelihood of this happening is, predictably, predicted by the number of males present at spawning.
Nature is nothing if not unrelentingly, horrifyingly efficient.

What has natural selection ever done for us?

Pictured left is the goddess Parvati, consort of Lord Shiva. In the Hindi pantheon she represents feminine attributes desirable by Hindi tradition. She is depicted in art as buxom, wide of hip, narrow of waist and bounteous of bosom. She's a porn starlet for the 12th century. In a 2003 lecture Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, the director of the Centre for Brain and Cognition at the University of California at San Diego, suggests that this form was found by amplifying the differences between male and female to create a kind of uber-femme, a body fit for a goddess. Everything down to the posture is throwing femininity in the viewer's face. When westerners arrived in India they saw the images in a different light. Seen through the lens of a lifetime's exposure to classical and renaissance art, the image looks unrealistic and cartoonish; it was declared primitive and unworthy of consideration. In this case, cultural conditioning had overcome the natural reaction that viewing this almost scientifically derived expression of ultimate womanhood would be expected to have caused.
As an analogue, when a woman is caught by surprise in a state of undress in the US, she covers her breasts and genitals with such unthinking rapidity that it could be taken to be a universal human trait. In Arab countries, however, the natural reaction would be to cover her face, and in Samoa the startled woman would rush to cover her navel. In every case culture is the dominant force in the nature of the reaction.
What biological natural selection has done for us is well documented by now; in the light of the frenetic speed of cultural evolution, maybe the real question is: What has it done for us recently?