Contemplation

I love evolution.

But…I have, as of yet, no solid clue as to what I want to devote the rest of my academic career (read: the next 80 years of my life) to.

My passion for my work stems from a love of knowledge/truth in general, and an adoration of animals in particular.

Like all young bucks (or does, I guess if we want to get gender specific) I started off thinking that I would go out and save our furry compatriots from extinction, only to be dissuaded by the corruption and not very scientific ways of conservation biology.

However, if not for an evolution seminar I took in my senior year I would still be an ecologist I guess. Instead I now hungrily study evolutionary genetics, about the dullest thing I could have imagined back in my panda-hugging days, but the most mentally stimulating thing to my mind these days.

I do think that ultimately I want my love for evolutionary genetics to blend back in with my desire to save my favorite animals though – so I’ve been contemplating the evolutionary genetics of conservation recently. Specifically, what factors promote adaptation to novel environments and what factors accelerate extinction.

Between running experiments, analyzing data, writing papers, preparing for conferences and my administrative duties for the grad students union it’s hard to imagine when I’ll have time to paint a pretty research plan. Moreover, there’s the usual extracurricular stuff that seems to pile up as though out of thin air sometimes. Like last Saturday I hopped around to four different parties in one night. And although my agenda was nearly blank on Sunday, it is now completely full with promises of beer and fun times or non-evolutionary academic adventures.

In my wildest dreams I’ll have an entire week to sit outside in the sunshine with birds chirping, cups of tea, and a notebook to think with no other distractions. Reality is another matter I think – and sadly the truth of the matter. Now that I have NSERC though maybe I’ll feel more encouraged to take some time off.

Futility – it seems that that word pops into my mind vocabulary occasionally these days, and just appearing at all is more than I would like. In a perfect world I would slash that word and banish it from existence. In the meantime I’ll do what I always do – which can only be best summarized by this picture I leave you with below…

The case of the female orgasm: evolutionarily adaptive?

This year marks the 150th anniversary of my buddy Charles Darwin’s publication of his legendary “The Origin of Species”. In celebration, the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto has organised a conference entitled “150 years after Origin: Biological, historical, and philosophical perspectives” which began today.

Having been offered the chance of attending this conference free of the registration fees, and being partial to philosophy and obviously Darwin, I jumped on the conference wagon. I have to say that my high hopes were somewhat thwarted – mainly because I found that the presentations lacked focus, and that most presenters literally read their pre-prepared speeches from pieces of paper. However, there was one speaker who did manage to keep me interested – but of course, when the subject involves female orgasm, who wouldn’t be interested.

Here is an excerpt (from Elisabeth Lloyd’s website):

“Women come in all these different flavours of whether they’re very orgasmic or whether they’re not orgasmic at all. That kind of variation, that range of variation is just what you would expect if the trait of orgasm were not serving an evolutionary function, because if female orgasm were under the pressure of selection, then those women with orgasm would have relatively more children and over many generations, the population would consist of more and more women being orgasmic and women who did not have orgasm and women who rarely did would become extinct, but that’s not what we find.”

Essentially, she argues that the scientific community has historically tended towards more adaptationist explanations of the female orgasm (that the female orgasm is purposefully evolved i.e. the sperm upsuck account that claims that the female orgasm functions to aid the sperm in travelling through the uterus) both because of a) a bias towards adaptive explanations of evolution in general and b) a male-centric view of orgasm. Turns out, much of the evidence supporting adaptive views of female orgasm are seriously flawed in terms of both experimental design and in statistical analysis of results.

Instead, most of the observations seem to point to the fact that traits associated with female orgasm are much too variable to conclude selection on the trait i.e. clitoral length is 3 times as variable as penile length; an even distribution across the population of females experiencing 0-100% frequency of orgasms etc.

Her conclusion is that rather than evoking an adaptive evolution, the existence of female orgasm can just as easily be understood when taking into account that fact that male and female embryos share the same basic body plan during embryological development. Hence, like the male nipple, female orgasm can exist simply as a “byproduct” of developmental patterns. Males need penis’ and the ability to orgasm to reproduce successfully, and because the penis and its female counterpart, the clitoris, are laid down in the basic body plan early on in embryological development, females get them as well!

I’m not entirely convinced of her theory yet since I’m not aware of the methodological vigor in which the data was collected, but there you have it ladies, lets just be thankful that we have this “fantastic bonus” as Elisabeth Lloyd calls it. I wonder whether men will stop bothering with female orgasm when they find out this little tidbit?

But seriously, clitoral length is 3 times as variable as penile length – that’s both crazy and scary!!!

 

but my dear, you know it’s just a capitalist world

I have a new experiment in the works in which I will be supervising/collaborating with an undergraduate student. It’s sort of a follow-up study on the parent-of-origin effects (how much an individual is effected by a deleterious mutation depends on whether it inherited that mutation maternally or paternally) we found in our recently published experiment.

My supervisor and I had discussed doing this project before but it got put on the back-burner due to my inability to come up with an idea to “sell” the experiment i.e. sure it might be cool but why should we care?

Now that we have both an undergraduate and a selling point (of course, turns out my supervisor had something in mind all along), however, the project is a go.

Which brings me to the point that science today is not merely about making an observation, coming up with a testable hypothesis and executing the experiment.

So much of the time the experiments we end up conducting are limited to those for which we are able to come up with a complete story for that is of interest to the general scientific community.

And it doesn’t even end there, because even after finding some exciting result, you then have to be able to really convince your colleagues, editors, the general public, that your work is credible and applicable.

While all of this makes sense, it is still somewhat discouraging because it just adds another level of complexity to succeeding in academia. Sometimes, I barely trust my scientific mindedness – and now I have to get my business gears in motion as well? Me? The girl who never felt comfortable handing out flyers?

Ah academia, I knew when I chose you that I would have to sacrifice hours of my life, but that I may have to sacrifice my integrity as well…obviously, it’s not quite the same as clearly, at least I truly believe in my work, but nevertheless, there have definitely been times that I’ve felt like a scientific peddler.

All in a days work.

in the December issue of American Naturalist

Selection, epistasis, and parent-of-origin effects on deleterious mutations across environments in Drosophila melanogaster

Abstract:

Understanding the nature of selection against deleterious alleles is central to determining how populations are affected by the constant influx of new mutations.  Important progress has been made in estimating basic attributes of the distribution of selection coefficients and gene interaction effects (epistasis).  Although most aspects of selection are likely to be context dependent, little is known about the effect of stress on selection and epistasis at the level of individual genes, especially in multicellular organisms. Using Drosophila melanogaster, we measure how selection on 20 mutant alleles is affected by direct and indirect genetic factors across two environments.  We find that environmental stress increases selection against individual mutations but reduces selection against combinations of mutations (i.e., epistasis becomes more positive).  In addition, we find a high incidence of indirect genetic effects whereby the strength of selection against the alleles carried by offspring is dependent on the genotypes of their parents.

http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/645088