Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

via oursin, something I found interesting: We still don't understand family resemblance, and some of what we thought we knew is mistaken, or might be.

This article describes research that used data from almost a million people: every Norwegian student who took a standardized test from 2007-2019.

Quoting the article: "The resemblance of twins cannot be reconciled with any model....The resemblance of adoptees cannot be reconciled with any model."

Adjusting a model to account better for twins makes it a poorer match of adoptive relationships, and vice versa. Any attempt to account for one of these moves the model away adopted siblings makes it fit twins less well, and vice versa.
( cut for length )

A new study shows that coelacanths are long-lived and have the longest gestation period of any known animal.

The previous estimate was a lifespan of 20 years, which this study corrects to a century. The estimated gestation period is five years. The previous record-holder was the frilled shark, with a gestation period of about three and a half years; the mammal with the longest gestation period is the elephant, which carries its young for two years.

These are all estimates based on museum specimens (as was the previous number), but the new values fit better with what's known about other fish that live in similar habitats.

Here's a paper arguing that the Catholic church's intense* concern with incest, eventually defined broadly enough to include distant cousins and "spiritual kin," explains large parts of WEIRD** culture and psychology: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/366/6466/eaau5141

The correlations, and maybe causality, seems to be that changing the rules on who could marry weakened kinship ties, and that in turn reduced conformity and obedience to elders, and increased individualism and "impersonal prosociality," which seems to mean the tendency to trust and try to help strangers as well as family and friends.

This jumped out at me as "unintended consequences" because the short article in *Science* talked about the Catholic Church's "Marriage and family program," with the implication that this was the result of a deliberate, unified policy--but that phrasing but that turns out to be the authors' coinage for long-term policies against marriages to create alliances between families, and then discouraging second, third, and even sixth cousin marriages and arranged marriages, and encouraging or requiring newly married couples to set up their own households.

Whatever the intentions of the people who created those policies, I'm confident that their goals did not include increasing individualism and independence, while reducing conformity and obedience.

* compared to most other cultures and religions, including other forms of Christianity

**a great acronym, for "Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic"

In an admittedly small study of the effects of probiotics after a course of antibiotics, the gut microbiome took longer to return to normal than in people who didn't take them.

What did help was autologous fecal microbiome transplantation (aFMT), but I'm fairly sure that would cost more, because of the work involved, and require some advance planning: it's not likely to be available to the person whose doctor says "you have pneumonia, I'm calling in an antibiotic prescription."

The lead researcher told the BBC that future probiotics would have to be tailored to individual patients.

sovay pointed to an article saying that butterfly fossils prove that the proboscis evolved a full geologic period before flowering plants did, and asked "So what were they eating with them?" One possibility is carrion. I got curious and googled: The full paper is online. No, they haven't found a fossilized butterfly or moth proboscis: what they have are microfossils of different kinds of scales, pushing the earliest date for Glossata, the moths and butterflies which have those mouth-parts, to the end of the Triassic, way before the evolution of flowering plants.

The authors of the paper think those proboscises evolved originally to drink water, and some butterflies and moths then started using them partly to get nectar from horsetails. So, maybe those long mouthparts drove the evolution of flowering plants, rather than the other way around. There's also an offhand reference (as to something that people in the field already know) to "increased herbivory" of insects, with specifics about leaf-eating.

Meanwhile, the Scientific American article also quotes people saying "maybe not" about significant ancient diversification of Lepidoptera, and one who calls the authors' interpretation "widely speculative"; everyone seems to agree that this is a good area for approach for research, and more microfossils would be useful.

Astronomers studying the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) have found that about 30 dwarf galaxies are orbiting in a single plane, rather than in unrelated orbits as expected.

For several decades, astronomers have used computer models to predict how dwarf galaxies should orbit large galaxies, and every time they found that dwarfs should be scattered randomly over the sky. Powered by supercomputers, these efforts have resulted in simulations of ever-increasing fidelity. None of these computer-created universes have generated dwarfs arranged in a revolving plane like that observed in Andromeda.

“It is very exciting for my work to reveal such a strange structure,” said Anthony Conn of Macquarie University, whose research proved key to this study. “It has left us scratching our heads as to what it means.”

(via The Zingularity)

Whatever else is true, the TSA is demonstrably lying about the safety of those backscatter machines. A large part of their claim is that the radiation penetrates clothing, but not skin.

Their own sample images prove this false: leg bones are clearly visible.

compilerbitch's post also discusses different kinds of radiation, and how little is known about the effects of some of them. (Comparisons of the relative danger from those machines and from cosmic rays are meaningless if we don't actually understand the danger of cosmic rays.)

My friend daystreet is proposing a scale for popular science presentations, to combine complexity with how likely the material is to be new to a general educated lay audience. He points out that it's easy to find introductory, intermediate, or advanced classes in Spanish or ballroom dancing, and that people taking any of those classes appreciate knowing which they are.

In the absence of such a scale, it seems that almost everything defaults to level 1, leaving people bored or frustrated because they get the same material over and over, even from different science popularizers and venues.

The platypus genome has been sequenced.

My current project is editing an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink manuscript, one of those things where they want us to review all of high school science.

Every state has slightly different standards for these things. Mostly, that's not a big deal: North Carolina wants a lot more on hydrology and rivers than most other states, and Texas has more on oil. Sometimes it's utterly maddening--there are states whose standards require the students to learn things that are objectively false. (Not every planet has a circular orbit--this isn't just that none is a perfect circle, this is how eccentric Mercury is--and tongue-curling is a really horrible example to use in Mendelian genetics, because it fails the identical-twin test.) And sometimes it's interesting, because we get to sit there and try to figure out exactly what they want, and why the author didn't look at the standard before reusing existing material.

I spent much of the day cutting irrelevancies, and writing sections to fill in what the author didn't realize was needed. Some is minor--for the section on predicting natural disasters and minimizing risk, the state wants landslides, and I decided that blizzards would fit well. Some is just weird--I think the author is either really fond of seismographs, or just learned about them, but the details she provided are way beyond the scope of a brief description of earthquake prediction. And some is weird and interesting because, well, what would you do with a standard that expects students, given a description of an organism, to predict its ecological niche? What I did included a brief discussion of wolves having teeth, legs, and digestive tract suitable for a predator, and the statement that knowing what wolves eat, you would predict that coyotes are predators, not grazers. (That gives an easy lesson review question on dingoes.) Then I talked about honeybees, mentioning that they live with a lot of close relatives and share their food supply. So you might reasonably expect another organism that digs burrows and shares them with hundreds of its very close relatives to also share food. No, not ants: I ntroduced the naked mole-rat. May as well give them something new and weird. (I didn't discuss naked mole-rat breeding, but the analogy holds, and some of the students may decide to look them up.)

I may not finish this manuscript by the original deadline. My supervisor came by this afternoon to ask how it was going, and I explained that it's going well but slowly, because writing takes longer than editing, and that I'll want her to look at the evolution chapter, since I've written about half of it, and even a good writer needs an editor. We agreed that she'll check with me again tomorrow and see how it's going. When she first gave me the book, she told me that she wasn't sure the deadline was realistic, so she's neither surprised nor unhappy with me on this.

This is a lot more interesting than proofreading.