Forms Most Beautiful

My hometown paper reports today that scientists, including PSU biochemist Stephan Schuster, have sequenced 80% of an extinct Siberian mammoth. Even more incredibly, we might be on the verge of an Ice Age version of Jurassic Park.

Three years ago, Japanese scientists said they planned to find frozen mammoth sperm and impregnate an elephant and raise the offspring in a safari park in Siberia. But using genetics to engineer a mammoth makes more sense, Schuster said.

Anthropology professor Hendrik Poinar of McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, said he no longer considers such ideas impossible. Poinar, who wasn't part of Schuster's study but consulted on the movie Jurassic Park, said director Steven Spielberg may have had it right when he told skeptical scientists: "This is the science of eventuality."

For those of us who unabashedly love Jurassic Park, this sounds so cool I want to jump out of my seat with joy. But let us not forget Ian Malcom's chidings. To paraphrase, just because you think you can engineer extinct animals doesn't mean you should stop yourself from considering whether you should engineer extinct animals.

But Jurassic Park dreams aside, the coolest thing in this is that we are learning about evolutionary rates.

Elephants and mammoths - comparable in size at about 8 to 14 feet tall - diverged along evolutionary paths about 6 million years ago, about the same time humans and chimps did, Schuster said. But there are twice as many differences between the genetic makeup of chimps and humans as those between elephants and mammoths.

"Primates evolved twice as fast as elephants," Schuster said. But some animals such as rodents have had even more evolutionary changes, indicating that it might have to do with size or metabolism, said study co-author Webb Miller.

Another interesting finding is that in the 50 or so species with mostly mapped genomes, there are certain areas where the genetic code is exactly the same in all the animals - except the mammoth.

Pretty cool stuff. With each new finding we see more and more of the tree of life through deep time up to the present.

I haven't done a metal post in a while. So why not go with a death metal classic like Obituary? Only great reasons exist for listening to music so brilliantly mindless and bone-crushingly violent. If there is a band that sounds like a backhoe digging up your great grandmother's grave so that the kids at the youth center can play catch with her bones, it's Obituary.

Obituary is one of the original Florida death metal bands with the likes of Death, Cynic, Deicide, and Cannibal Corpse (who totally suck!). The band's signature style comes from a combination of tuned down ultra-distorted guitars that sound like a Tiger tank outside of Stalingrad in 1942, a tendency towards very slow tempos, simple driving repetition, descending chord progressions, wailing whammy bar dives and strangely chromatic solos, and John Tardy's growl. I'd venture to say that Tardy (pictured at right) has perhaps the most distinctive growl in all of death metal. He has this fantastic ability (no doubt aided with some production) to fade in or out from a growl with fantastic control. A T-Rex would be envious.

The lyrics are generally unabashedly awful. Song titles paint the picture for the most part: "Insane," "Chopped in half," "Slowly We Rot," "Cause of Death," "Like the Dead," "The End Complete." They tend toward the horror genre of returning from the dead, dying, destruction, unleashed minions of evil, and the like. This is bad horror movies come to music in the great tradition of Black Sabbath, the Misfits, Venom, and Slayer but at slow tempos. From time to time though we get a sneak of sentimentality as on "Final Thoughts," a song that bemoans the death of a friend, presumably by suicide.

What I like about bands like Obituary, is that they give free reign to that part of me that is quite simply morbidly fascinated. What social commentary there might be embedded in a band fixated on teenage interpretations of H.P. Lovecraft and our reptilian fears. There really is just something primally appealing in it. Its seeming stupidity - its baseness, callousness, obsessive grotesquery - make it genius somehow. 

The National Center for Science Education (whose new website is very snazzy if you haven't seen it yet) is reporting that the Florida science standards might be put up again for vote. This past year, evolution was finally and correctly represented as a "fundamental concept underlying all of biology." But there might be a glitch as language arts, social studies, math, and science might need to be revised so that they are sufficiently under the umbrella of the "Next Generation."

Florida Statute 1003.41 seeks to create the "Next Generation Sunshine State Standards that establish the core content of the curricula to be taught in this state and that specify the core content knowledge and skills that K-12 public school students are expected to acquire." Here we have the law of unintended consequences at work. As in all of policies, the words "Next Generation" are fuzzy enough to allow legislators, advocates, and lobbyists to define whatever their particular agenda item as part of the "Next Generation" and that their opponents' ideas are antiquated. How could this affect evolution education in Florida?

All of these new standards need to be adopted by December 31, 2011. These could include the evolution standards that some legislators, school board members, parents, or lobbyists like Disco 'Tute attorney Casey Luskin and his fellow creationists could lobby the state government to change. We know that this is already a possibility. Florida Citizens for Science report that Brian Moore, member of the Joint Administrative Procedures Committee (JAPC which works with Florida Department of Education to work out the Deparment's rules), "opined that the standards that were revised and approved prior to the passage of SB 1908 are not “Next Generation” as required by the new law."

Over at EdWeek, they report that Moore:

wasn't making any judgment about the scientific merits of the new standards. His only interest is what the law requires, and in this case, it appears that the new science standards are out of compliance, given the requirement that such documents be approved as "Next Generation" standards. So they'd have to be approved with this designation by 2011.

It's unclear what happens next. It's possible, Moore explained, that Florida's commissioner of education could seek to have various experts certify that the recently approved science standards comply with the Next Generation law. But it appears likely that new standards would have to be re-approved in some form by the state board of education.

It seems that procedural rules within the Florida 1003.41 might simply require that all standards passed before it came into effect on July 1, 2008 will need to be passed again to reach consensus on whether standard X (evolution for example) is sufficiently part of Florida's "Next Generation."

This is, I think, quite unfortunate and perhaps also necessary. The science standards that passed in the last year took an enormous effort and overcame a lot of resistance from creationists supported by the Disco 'Tute and others. Following their adoption, Rep. Rhonda Storms tried to get one of the oh-so lovely "academic freedom" bills (SB 2692) through the legislature. Thankfully, it died. I'm afraid that the fight will renew if the science standards come up for review under the new definition. It may not happen if the JAPC committee member's judgement is not held widely. But this is politics and it's worth being cautious and skeptical, especially when the Disco 'Tute and other creationist opportunists are on the march.

"Democracy demands that the religiously-motivated translate their concerns into universal rather than religion-specific values. What do I mean by this? It requires that their proposals be subject to argument and amenable to reason."

How about it? Vive common law!

Now if we could just convince him that faith-based initiatives are a bad idea.