Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
As reported at Asia Trail, a fishing cat female named Electra gave birth to two kittens just 13 days ago at Washington D. C.’s National Zoo. Fishing cats (Prionailurus viverrinus)are rare and endangered, and births in captivity are also rare—this is only the second in a U.S. zoo. I’ve posted about this species before, and be sure to click on the link there to hear their strange cries.
Here’s mom and one baby:
And the real excuse for this post: here’s a photo (from the DCist) of the kittens being weighed last week in a cup. Weight: 446 grams, just about a pound:
Photo courtesy of the National Zoo
I’d do just about anything to play with that kitten.
Of course this report from today’s New York Times demonstrates the righteous indignation of Muslims at all the French boots on the ground in the Middle East. Surely reports of the “prayer” and “religious ideology” are greatly exaggerated. After all, think of all the attacks on civilians that Lutherans commit after saying the Nicene Creed. (My emphasis in the report below.)
PARIS — The French police on Wednesday arrested a 21-year-old man described as a convert to Islam who they said had confessed to stabbing a French soldier on Saturday in a Paris suburb.
Interior Minister Manuel Valls said in a statement that the man was arrested Wednesday morning in the Yvelines region, just west of Paris. The soldier, Pvt. Cédric Cordiez, 25, was stabbed in the neck with a short-bladed knife in La Défense, a shopping mall and underground transportation hub west of Paris. He was treated at a military hospital and released Monday.
Officials initially said that the stabbing seemed to echo an attack last week on a British soldier, who was hacked to death on a London street by two men the British authorities have identified as radicalized British Muslims. On Wednesday, the Paris public prosecutor, François Molins, said investigators believed that the suspect had indeed “acted in the name of his religious ideology,” given the character and timing of the attack, after the London killing, as well as a “prayer” he said shortly before it.
The man, whom Mr. Molins identified only as Alexandre D., confessed to the police officers who arrested him, Mr. Molins told reporters. He is believed to have targeted Private Cordiez, one of a small group of soldiers on an antiterrorism patrol, as a “representative of the state,” apparently intending to kill him, Mr. Molins said.
Mr. Valls urged caution and said, “I cannot talk about radical Islam.” Investigators want to know more about the suspect’s motivation, background and family environment, Mr. Valls said.
That penultimate sentence is a killer (I’m speaking metaphorically, of course). He can’t talk about radical Islam because it’s politically incorrect to do so.
And, by the way, I’ve just finished No god but God, Reza Aslan’s bestselling book about the history of Islam. It’s educational and well written, though I think he does do too much of a whitewash on Mohammed, trying to say that The Prophet was pretty much perfect (Aslan is an observant Muslim) but his teachings have been corrupted ever since. An example: of course Mohamed married a nine-year-old girl named Aisha (some people say she was six), but that’s okay because Mohamed didn’t deflower her until she reached puberty, “which is when every girl in Arabia without exception became eligible for marriage.” (p. 65).
But that aside, Aslan says this when summing up how the history of Islam played out in the 9/11 attacks (p. 248):
Despite the tragedy of September 11 and the subsequent terrorist acts against Western targets throughout the world, despite the clash-of-civilizations mentality that has seized the globe and the clash-of-monotheisms reality underlying it, despite the blatant religious rhetoric resonanting through the halls of governments, there is one thing that cannot be overemphasized. What is taking place now in the Muslim world is an internal conflict between Muslims, not an external battle between Islam and the West. The West is merely a bystander—an unwary yet complicit casualty of a rivalry that is raging in Islam over who will write the next chapter in its story.
As we know, most religiously inspired violence committed by Muslims is against other Muslims, and that includes killing women and gays.
Matthew Cobb, who, like pastrami, is on a roll, called my attention to a live FalconCamin Sheffield. The nest of peregrines is atop, of all places, St. George’s Church, and the chicks are well along. But they’re still at that awkward age when they have down. Here’s a screenshot:
If you love peregrines as much as I do, you’ll want to check in from time to time.
I love the “trigger warning” at the top of the page:
Here’s the information supplied by the website:
A nest platform was placed atop St George’s Church in early 2010. In 2012 it was finally confirmed that the pair of peregrines using the platform had bred successfully for the first time.
Phil Riley, Energy Manager in the University’s Department of Estates and Facilities Management, recently installed this webcam near the nest. The webcam not only acts as a security camera to ensure the nest is not tampered with, but will allow the University to make high quality images of these beautiful wild birds available to the public.
Peregrine Falcons have previously been an endangered species, but their population has steadily increased since the 1970s because of better legal protection and control of pesticides. The birds are usually found around the sea coast but have recently been seen in more built up areas.
Professor Wood from the University’s Department of Hispanic Studies and Chair of the Sheffield Bird Study Group: “Peregrines are one of the most spectacular species in Britain, traditionally associated with remote sea cliffs and inaccessible sites, and to be able to see them in urban Sheffield is an absolute privilege. I know they have brought a great deal of pleasure to local residents around St George’s and beyond, as well as to me personally.”
Phil Riley said: “The success has been a University-wide effort. I worked closely with Professor Wood, Jim Lonsdale and other colleagues in the University’s Department of Estates and Facilities Management to ensure a suitable nest box was constructed and appropriately located. I am delighted that all our hard work has been rewarded.”
Yesterday I had the privilege and pleasure of spending 45 minutes in conversation with J. D. Watson, who, as you all know, is the co-discoverer with Francis Crick of the structure of DNA. The working out of that structure, which immediately gave clues to not only how the genetic material replicated, but how it coded for the structure of organisms, is—unarguably—the greatest biological discovery of the 20th century. (See Matthew’s post below on the second of the two 1953 Watson & Crick papers.)
It’s been 60 years since that pair of papers, and Jim is now 85 (it’s hard to believe how young these guys were when they did their Nobel-prize winning work), but he shows no signs of slowing down. His mind and memory are as sharp as ever—and his opinions as strong—and we had a lovely conversation. By “conversation,” I mean, of course, that Jim talked and I listened, for this was a rare opportunity for me and I wanted to get his take on a number of things. I can’t report them all here—there were, for instance, salacious tidbits on the carnality of famous scientists—but we covered many topics. A sampling is below. But first, the obligatory vanity photo (does that shirt make me look fat?):
Do I need to say that Watson is on the right? We’re seated in the “Lillie Room” directly below my lab. Watson took classes in this building as an undergraduate. On the walls are photos of faculty in our department who are no longer here; it’s a veritable panoply of greats, which will someday include a picture of yours truly as a lesser fish.
The idea for the DNA sequence as a “code” for building bodies. Matthew, who is writing a book on the history of the genetic code, asked me to ask Jim this question (it’s relevant to Matthew’s post from this morning):
In the second 1953 paper with Crick they wrote this amazing sentence: “the precise sequence of the bases is the code which carries the genetical information”
This was the first time this idea had been stated explicitly, and it changed the way we think about life.
Does Watson recall any discussion about this? Did either of them read, or discuss, Shannon’s book on Information Theory, or Wiener’s Cybernetics, or was it just something in the air?
I asked most of this question, though I didn’t get to the Shannon/Wiener stuff (I doubt that either Watson or Crick had read it). Jim told me that W&C had this idea very early. As he said, “Francis and I both knew this the very first time we had lunch together in Cambridge.” They didn’t know exactly how the code worked (that was to come in a few years with the discovery of messenger and transfer RNAs and the finding and deciphering of the triplet code, as will be described in Matthew’s next book), but both W&C realized that it was the sequence of nucleotide bases itself that would somehow be transformed into the sequence of proteins. And that, combined with the on-and-off control of DNA translation, was indeed the “key to life.”
When I asked Jim who wrote that bit about the code, he said that both he and Crick had written both 1953 papers, but Crick had probably contributed more prose because “he was older and a better writer.”
Why didn’t Watson pursue the logical next step in this research program: working out exactly how DNA coded for proteins? After the great successes of 1953, Crick continued to pursue the problem of how DNA made proteins, eventually formulating what is known as the “Central Dogma” that is expressed thus DNA → RNA → Protein. That is, DNA produced (messenger) RNA, which is then translated into the amino acid sequence of proteins, which are truly the molecules of life. While there are exceptions—some viruses containing RNA as their genetic material and there is also “reverse transcription,” in which DNA is synthesized from an RNA template—the Dogma is by and large an accurate description of how DNA yields bodies through a largely unidirectional flow of information.
Watson, however, became interested in less obvious issues, like the physical structure of messenger RNA and viruses. When I asked him why Crick took the more obvious path, Jim replied that he felt the need to separate himself intellectually from Crick, and because he also felt, wrongly it turned out, that the physical structure of messenger RNA would provide vital clues to how DNA coded for protein.
Why “Watson and Crick” rather than “Crick and Watson”? If you’ve read The Double Helix(1968), Watson’s terrific first-person account of how he, Crick, and others worked out the structure of DNA, you’ll know that his work with Crick was a true intellectual partnership, with each complementing the other’s expertise. Watson brought up himself, while musing over old times, the topic of why his name appeared first on both of the 1953 papers. While he said “Well, I got the bases, you know” (that is, he realized that the G-C pairing was about the same size as the A-T pairing, a realization that led immediately to the molecule’s structure), he also said that he thought that he and Crick had simply flipped a coin for authorship order on the two 1953 papers. (By the way, The Double Helix was originally, and unwisely, called Honest Jim, a reference to Kingsley Amis’s novel Lucky Jim.)
What happened to the Nobel Prize medals? Jim brought this up himself. You gets two medals when you win the Big Prize: a gold one and a bronze one. You’re supposed to display the bronze one and, as did both Watson and Crick, put the gold one in a safe-deposit box. Crick’s medal went for $3 million to a Japanese buyer (I don’t know whether this was after Crick’s death), and Jim said he was going to sell his gold medal as well, using the proceeds to finance either scientific or humanitarian work.
Our Darwin statue. I also learned during this conversation that Jim had given money to the University of Chicago to have a statue of Darwin erected by Botany Pond (the lovely pond outside our building). Apparently the University had suggested erecting a statue of Watson, but he rejected that idea in favor of putting up Darwin, something that I think Jim did at Cold Spring Harbor as well.
The University of Chicago and Watson’s switch to molecular biology. As I noted yesterday, Watson was here as an undergraduate, and was first interested in ornithology. He said his interests changed when he read Erwin Schrödinger’s 1944 book What is Life?, which inspired many biologists to work on the molecular basis of inheritance. I asked if he read the book in an undergraduate course, and Watson said no, he read it because it was reviewed in the Chicago Sun-Times, a local paper. If you’ve read Horace Freeland Judson’s fantastic book The Eighth Day of Creation, you’ll know how influential Schrödinger’s book was; it could be seen as the book that inaugurated the revolution in molecular genetics beginning in the 1940s.
After graduating from the University of Chicago, Watson then went to Indiana University to get his Ph.D. in molecular genetics with Salvador Luria.
The best geneticist of the 20th century. Most of the revelations in this post weren’t uncovered by my questions; rather, Jim just uttered them as asides when he was talking. When I asked him if he ever met A. H. Sturtevant (a Drosophila hero of mine) when visiting CalTech, Watson said “yes,” but added that H. J. Muller (1890-1967), who was also part of T. H. Morgan’s Drosophila group, was actually a far greater geneticist. Watson said, in fact, that Muller was probably the greatest geneticist of the last century. And indeed, I’d have trouble contesting that.
I once went to Indiana University (where Muller resided when Watson was getting his Ph.D.) to look at Muller’s papers. Actually, I was trying to find the note Muller wrote before he made an unsuccessful suicide attempt, because the reasons for that are unclear and the note, while apparently in his papers, has never been revealed. I wanted to learn, out of pure curiosity, whether the attempt reflected Muller’s feeling that he was unfairly denigrated by Morgan and his group. Indeed, Muller (once a vocal Marxist) never got a permanent job in academia until after he won the Nobel Prize! At any rate, the librarians wouldn’t let me see the suicide note, but I had a wonderful time poring through Muller’s “papers,” which often consisted of very complicated genetic crosses diagrammed on the back of postcards and bits of hotel-room stationery. The man lived, breathed, and ate genetics.
The status of scientists. Watson said that science and scientists are respected far less now than ever before in his lifetime. When I asked him why, he claimed it was because “there were no great scientists left” whom the public could look up to. And to this he imputed public rejection of scientific findings like anthropogenic global warming. Jim opined that scientists could now make a greater contribution to the public welfare by acting as moral leaders than purely as scientists. He also said that the quality of the clergy, both rabbis and priests, had declined over his lifetime, and I floated the idea that that’s because science had largely supplanted the intellectual advances that clergy and thelogians once purported to offer.
Religion. I did want to ask Jim about religion, and got the chance when he said that his mother was religious, but had a heart condition that kept her away from church except for two visits per year. I asked him if he was ever religious, and he immediately dismissed this idea as ridiculous, adding a few choice words about the perfidy of the Catholic church. What I found most interesting was Watson’s claim that both he and Crick were partly driven to find the structure of DNA as a way to dispel the religious notion that life could not be explained through a materialist and reductionist paradigm. In fact, he said that Crick was explicit in hoping that discovering how DNA worked would “lessen religion’s appeal.” I don’t think this was so much a reflection of their desire to “prove” atheism as to show that materialism could explain what was once considered explainable only by God.
Crick, as you may know, was a “militant” atheist, and you can read about that at Wikipedia:
Crick once joked, “Christianity may be OK between consenting adults in private but should not be taught to young children.”
In his book Of Molecules and Men, Crick expressed his views on the relationship between science and religion. After suggesting that it would become possible for people to wonder if a computer might be programmed so as to have a soul, he wondered: at what point during biological evolution did the first organism have a soul? At what moment does a baby get a soul? Crick stated his view that the idea of a non-material soul that could enter a body and then persist after death is just that, an imagined idea. For Crick, the mind is a product of physical brain activity and the brain had evolved by natural means over millions of years. Crick felt that it was important that evolution by natural selection be taught in schools and that it was regrettable that English schools had compulsory religious instruction. Crick felt that a new scientific world view was rapidly being established, and predicted that once the detailed workings of the brain were eventually revealed, erroneous Christian concepts about the nature of humans and the world would no longer be tenable; traditional conceptions of the “soul” would be replaced by a new understanding of the physical basis of mind. He was sceptical of organized religion, referring to himself as a skeptic and an agnostic with “a strong inclination towards atheism”.
In 1960, Crick accepted an honorary fellowship at Churchill College, Cambridge, one factor being that the new college did not have a chapel. Sometime later, a large donation was made to establish a chapel and the fellowship elected to accept it. Crick resigned his fellowship in protest. [JAC: Watson also told me that Crick had also sent a donation in protest to Winston Churchill, asking for it to be used to be used to found a brothel at his eponymous Cambridge college, since “sex was better than religion.” I have no way of verifying this story!] [UPDATE: In the comments below, reader Michael verifies the existence of Crick’s letter and links to it (here and here). Indeed, Crick did send Winston Churchill 10 pounds to finance a brothel at Churchill College! Watson said that Churchill returned the money.]
In October 1969, Crick participated in a celebration of the 100th year of the journal Nature. Crick attempted to make some predictions about what the next 30 years would hold for molecular biology. His speculations were later published in Nature Near the end of the article, Crick briefly mentioned the search for life on other planets, but he held little hope that extraterrestrial life would be found by the year 2000. He also discussed what he described as a possible new direction for research, what he called “biochemical theology”. Crick wrote, “So many people pray that one finds it hard to believe that they do not get some satisfaction from it”.
Crick suggested that it might be possible to find chemical changes in the brain that were molecular correlates of the act of prayer. He speculated that there might be a detectable change in the level of some neurotransmitter or neurohormone when people pray. Crick may have been imagining substances such as dopamine that are released by the brain under certain conditions and produce rewarding sensations. Crick’s suggestion that there might someday be a new science of “biochemical theology” seems to have been realized under an alternative name: there is now the new field of neurotheology. Crick’s view of the relationship between science and religion continued to play a role in his work as he made the transition from molecular biology research into theoretical neuroscience.
He asked in 1998, “And if some of the Bible is manifestly wrong, why should any of the rest of it be accepted automatically? … And what would be more important than to find our true place in the universe by removing one by one these unfortunate vestiges of earlier beliefs?”
In 2003 he was one of 21 Nobel Laureates who signed the Humanist Manifesto.
Watson appears to share many of Crick’s strong opinions against religion, though he hasn’t been as vocal about it. But I did find this bit in Watson and Berry’s book, DNA: The Secret of Life (I reviewed this book ten years ago in The New York Times); and Berry, who is my pal, told me that this is pure Watson:
Watson also told me that everyone working on this problem thought that the “secret of life” would come from a reductionist approach, but that “Linus [Pauling] thought it would come from chemistry and Delbrück [Max Delbück, a geneticist] thought it would come from physics.” He said Pauling turned out to be right (DNA), and Delbrück had to concede he was wrong by signing a written admission of chemistry’s success.
I will add here that all the great advances in unraveling the molecular basis of inheritance have come through materialism and reductionism; as usual, religion has added not a jot or tittle to this knowledge. And that is why scientists, especially the good ones, very often abandon belief in God. In our attempts to understand the universe, we’ve come to realize that, like Laplace, we never need the God Hypothesis to explain anything. And so we let it go, eventually becoming philosophical naturalists from our experience rather than from an a priori commitment to atheism. After thousands of years of lucubration, and endless pages of wasted ink, theologians have come no closer to understanding the universe than they did in the Middle Ages, despite many religion resting firmly on empirical claims. Contrast how much more we’ve learned about God since 1953 with how much we’ve learned about the molecular basis of inheritance. /soapbox
Finally, I asked Watson to autograph a copy of the new annotated and illustrated edition of The Double Helix edited by Alex Gann and Jan Witkowski. It’s a lovely production, and I already have Watson’s autograph on a first edition). Here’s what I got:
Many thanks to Jim for being so obliging and to Andrew Berry for digging out the quote.
Sixty years ago today, an article appeared in Nature that used a form of words that was completely novel and which changed the way we think about life:
‘‘it therefore seems likely that the precise sequence of the bases is the code which carries the genetical information’
The authors of the article were James Watson and Francis Crick, but this was not their article on the double helix structure of DNA – that theoretical article appeared six weeks earlier, accompanied by two data-rich articles from Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin.
This is the second article written by the pair, entitled ‘Genetical implications of the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid’. (The first article has been cited around 4700 times; the second article ‘only’ 1400 times, and yet it is arguably the more important of the two, in conceptual terms.)
In this second article Watson and Crick explore the consequences of the precise pairing of the four ‘bases’ (A, T, G, C) in the double helix (A on one strand is always complemented by T on the other, and G with C). The principal consequence related to how the DNA molecule could copy itself. But Watson and Crick were also interested in what genes actually do, hence this powerful phrase.
It had been previously suggested by researchers such as Dounce (1952) and Caldwell and Hinshelwood (1950) that the order of the bases might in some way enable a gene to synthesise proteins, probably by acting as a physical template (Dounce even argued that three bases would correspond to a particular amino acid, which turned out to be right, but not for the physico-chemical reasons that Dounce argued). In 1950, Erwin Chargaff had suggested that a single change in a base could lead to a mutation, but again he viewed this in terms of a physical change to the DNA molecule.
The great step forward made by Watson and Crick in their second paper was to take these pre-existing ideas and reshape them in a less literal form. The sequence of bases was no longer seen in terms of a physical template for protein synthesis, but as something far more abstract – a code carrying genetical information.
Watson and Crick with their model of the DNA molecule. Crick is pointing with a slide-rule. Note the sketch of the double helix, by Crick’s wife Odile, pinned to the wall.
What is intriguing is where this novel interpretation came from. The first person who explicitly suggested that genes contained a ‘code-script’ was the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, in 1943. Although his ideas were widely-read, there were few attempts to explore the idea of a ‘code’, because the physical nature of the gene was unknown.
The importance of ‘information’ as an abstract concept – so widespread in our modern view – was a direct product of war-time work on electronic transmissions by Claude Shannon, and on the development of control systems to guide anti-aircraft guns carried out by Norbert Wiener. In 1948, these two mathematicians each published a popular book – Information Theory and Cybernetics, respectively. (For best-sellers they contained a surprising number of mathematical formulae. Maybe people were more maths-savvy back then. Or more tolerant of things they didn’t quite understand.)
There were a growing number of meetings at which physicists, mathematicians and biologists tried to see how they could forge a new way of looking at life (the cyberneticians were particularly bold in this respect). In the end, nothing came of these attempts, but at some point along the way, the idea of seeing that genes contain ‘information’ seeped its way into Watson and Crick’s thinking, leading them to explain the implications of the double helix structure in this radically novel way.
How exactly the pair came up with the idea is not known (that’s why yesterday I asked Jerry to ask Watson this question when they met – we should get a post on this later today). We know that Crick wrote most of this article, in a terrible hurry. Did either of them read Shannon or Wiener? Or were these just terms they heard floating about on the Cambridge air, or idly discussed in the corridors at conferences? Whatever the case, today it is impossible to think about genes – or evolution – without using this powerful metaphor.
Further reading:
This is the topic of a book I am writing about the history of the genetic code, to be published by Profile Books. It should be out on both sides of the Atlantic at the end of 2014.
If you want to know more about the relation between genetic codes and information, then the best book (until mine comes out!) is Lily E Kay’s brilliantly-titled Who Wrote the Book of Life: A History of the Genetic Code (Stanford University Press, 2000). Beware, it is tough going in parts. If you want a great popular read about the ideas linked with information theory, then James Gleick’s The Information (2011) is for you.
And of course, everyone should read the original papers, which are available free from Nature. This collection includes the 1944 article by Oswald Avery, Colin MacLeod and Maclyn McCarty which shows that in pneumonia bacilli, an inherited character is composed of DNA. The conceptual and stylistic gaps between Avery et al.’s paper from 1944 and the second Watson and Crick paper give some indication of the amazing progress that was made in such a short period of time.
EDIT: Reader Pyers Symon points out that the famous picture of Watson and Crick by Antony Barrington-Brown reproduced above was not published for ten years and is just one of a number taken that day. There is an excellent article by Soraya de Chararevian about this photo session. (Soraya de Chadarevian (2003), ‘Portrait of a Discovery: Watson, Crick, and the Double Helix’ Isis 94:90-105 – PDF available here.).
Barrington-Brown was killed in a car crash in 2012. He was a student at Cambridge when he took the photo, and he later recalled:
An undergraduate friend of mine aspiring to be a journalist sought out stories on his own account. One day he gave me a tip-off that someone at the Cavendish Laboratory had made an important discovery, so could I take a picture to go with his story which he wanted to offer to Time magazine? So it was that I set off on my bicycle towing a two-wheeled trolley which carried my tripod and lights. I dragged the trolley up several flights of stairs and knocked at the door of one of dozens of similar rooms where research students worked.
I was affably greeted by a couple of chaps lounging at a desk by the window, drinking coffee. “What’s all this about?” I asked. With an airy wave of the hand one of them, Crick I think, said “we’ve got this model” indicating an array of retort stands holding thin brass rods and balls. Although supposedly a chemist myself it meant absolutely nothing to me and fortunately they did not expose my ignorance by attempting to explain it in terms I might just have comprehended. Anyway, I had only come to get a picture so I set up my lights and camera and said “you’d better stand by it and look portentous” which they lamentably failed to do, treating my efforts as a bit of a joke. I took four frames of them with the model and then three or four back with their coffee.
My ‘snaps’ came out well enough and my friend fired them with his story off to Time, but they never used it and sent me half a guinea (52p) for my pains. Several historians have spent a lot of effort trying to establish when the pictures were first published, but I have never known.”
I sure don’t now what this is, and neither does a reader in Lafayette, Indiana (home of Purdue University), who sent me this photo she took on her patio.
Help her out and tell us what it is. (Note: this is not a joke!)
Just for fun, here’s a specimen of one kind of comment I get regularly. You don’t often see them, as I just put them in the bin, but from time to time I’d like readers to come face to face with someone like this. Here goes:
EVILution is as much a religion as Creation is. It cannot be conclusively proven as a fact, so therefore it is as much conjecture as is Creationism. I think both should be taught equally alongside one another and the student should be allowed to intelligently make up his or her own mind on the subject having both sides represented intelligently and logically! Otherwise what you have is censorship and that is supposed to be illegal! Oh, and before you get upset at my changing evolution to EVILution let me explain why I do! It is evil to lie! And EVILution is one of the biggest lies in this modern age because too many of you EVILutionists claim that EVILution is the only theory backed by scientific fact when in fact your theory is just that, a theory!
the·o·ry
/?THē?rē/Noun
1.A supposition or a system of ideas intended to explain something, esp. one based on general principles independent of the thing to be…: “Darwin’s theory of evolution”
2.A set of principles on which the practice of an activity is based: “a theory of education”; “music theory”.
According to the dictionary EVILution is just a supposition. Thank you for your time and God bless!
I love the “God bless!”
Do you suppose that if Fantazunique Brown read my book, he/she would show that evolution is a fact, even if not “conclusively proven” as a fact (because, of course, science isn’t in the business of conclusively proving anything)?
In less than two hours (9:30 a.m. Chicago time), I have a half-hour to talk with J. D. Watson (b. 1928), who was of course the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, probably the most famous scientific finding of the 20th century.
Watson is here to attend and introduce the Watson Lectures in Molecular Evolution, a yearly talk that he endowed to our department in the name of his mother. (This year’s speaker is Rich Lenski from Michigan State University.) Some of you may know that Watson was an undergraduate at The University of Chicago, which is how the lecture series came about (that’s a long and funny story that I’ll relate another time). Wikipedia says a bit about Watson’s career here:
Thanks to the liberal policy of University president Robert Hutchins, [Watson] enrolled at the University of Chicago at the age of 15.After reading Erwin Schrödinger’s book What Is Life? in 1946, Watson changed his professional ambitions from the study of ornithology to genetics. Watson earned his B.S. degree in Zoology from the University of Chicago in 1947. In his autobiography, Avoid Boring People, Watson describes the University of Chicago as an idyllic academic institution where he was instilled with the capacity for critical thought and an ethical compulsion not to suffer fools who impeded his search for truth, in contrast to his description of later experiences.
Anyway, I have purchased The Double Helix so I can get it autographed, and I’ve thought of a few things I’d like to ask him. But I’m interested in what others would ask as well, so if you have questions for Dr. Watson, put them below (there’s no guarantee I’ll use any of them, of course!). But please, no questions about why Rosalind Franklin was ignored, for Watson has already spoken to that, and it won’t make for pleasant conversation!
