A Slew of New Ceratopsians
I just found out that the past week has been a busy busy week for ceratopsian discoveries. Ceratopsians are among the last wave of magnificent herbivorous dinosaur groups to emerge in the late Cretaceous.
This is Coahuilaceratops magnacuerna (Koh-WHE-lah-SARA-tops mag-NAH-KWER-na) which is the first horned dinosaur unearthed in Mexico. Its latin name means “great horned face from Coahuila”. The most unique feature of this species which lived 72 mya is that it had horns up to 4 feet long, which is longer than any other ceratopsian.
The 1 metre long Ajkaceratops kozmai is small in stature but it represents the first ceratopsian discovery in Europe. In the late Cretaceous, Europe was an isolated island landmass and this find is evidence of island dwarfism and the migration of ceratopsians from Asia. This ceratopsian is probably a protoceratopsid related to Magnirostris.
Sinoceratops zhuchengensis is another important discovery because before this ceratopsids have been exclusively found in North America. This late Cretaceous dinosaur also blurs the distinction between 2 subfamilies of ceratopsids, the chasmosaurines and the centrosaurines.
This fearsome looking creature from southern Utah is appropriately named Diabloceratops eatoni (Latin for devil horned face). At 80 million years old, it is also one of the oldest ceratopsids. Has to be one of the coolest frill horns in the dinosauria.
Last but not least is this stunning specimen from the Montana-Alberta border. Christened Medusaceratops lokii for its curved, snakelike frill-horns which resembled the head of Medusa, as well as its arching brow horns which are reminiscent of the Norse God Loki, this beast lived 78 million years ago and grew up to 20 feet long.
The Secret Powers of Time
This is a really enlightening talk by American psychologist Phillip Zimbardo, who is perhaps most famous for his Stanford Prison Study. In this captivating animated talk he outlines his idea on how time perspectives define human culture and conflict.
So are you present-hedonistic or future-oriented? 
The Cell Which Was Made By A Computer
You’re looking at 2 colonies of a bacteria called Mycoplasma mycoides. The center of the colony is blue because this bacteria contains a gene for an enzyme called beta-galactosidase. When a special substrate is added to the medium, beta-galactosidase will convert it into an insoluble blue dye. But these are no ordinary organisms. Genetic sequencing will reveal that its genome is unlike any other living bacteria of its kind. If you cracked it genetic code, you may find the names of 46 scientists as well as 3 poignant quotes:
“To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life,” from James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
“See things not as they are but as they might be,” from American Prometheus
“What I cannot build I cannot understand.” by Richard Feynman
This is because the genome of this unusual colony of bacteria has in fact been synthetically created by the computers of leading scientist Craig Venter (whom you may have been familiar with if you’ve read about the Human Genome Project). Using a computer to specify the genes, artificial DNA was synthesized in a sequencing machine. This DNA was then transported into the hollow corpse of a related bacterium, Mycoplasma capricolum. Then, scientists watched as the DNA expressed itself in the empty shell of the host. Physiological processes booted up, and the synthetic cell came alive ala Frankenstein. Not only is the artificially created bacteria functioning, it can also replicate to form the colonies seen above.
What are the implications of this landmark experiment? Contrary to public fears, this synthetic bacterium has had its genes for virulence deleted, meaning it is highly unlikely to cause disease. Other bacteria may soon be synthetically created in order to serve humans. Bacteria with the ability to produce biofuels such as hydrogen or absorb greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide could become a reality.
Should Medical Students Study Evolution?
It was Russian Orthodox Christian and evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky who famously said in 1973 that “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution”. Today, evolution is undeniably the keystone of almost every biological science. It is therefore shocking to know that one vital field seems to have been left behind. Where in the science of medicine is evolution?
To those uninitiated with evolution, the human body is often regarded as a perfect creation. Why then, do we get sick? Why for example, do we get heart attacks? When I read about a disease in a medical textbook I expect to find the following:
1. The signs and symptoms of the disease
2. The etiology or pathophysiology of the disease
3. Diagnostic criteria
4. Management
Hence, medical science tells us how heart attacks happen and which kinds of people are most at risk. But does medicine tell us why human beings get heart attacks at all? How can it be that this most basic of questions goes not only unanswered by medicine, but largely ignored?
In 1994, “Why We Get Sick”, a groundbreaking book by Randolph Nesse and George C. Williams ushered in public awareness of evolutionary medicine. To put it simply, it is the application of the principles of evolutionary theory to understand health and disease.
We are already familiar with the concept of antibiotic resistance but current medical education seems to downplay the role of evolution by scarcely mentioning it. Humans and pathogens engage in an evolutionary arms race that can be succinctly explained with a quote from Lewis Carrol’s novel “Through the Looking Glass”. In it the Red Queen says:
“It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place”
Hence humans and pathogens are waging an arms race, with each side making small improvements via natural selection in order to maintain its biological fitness. This is known as the “Red Queen hypothesis“. The question posed by the book is this : Could human conditions and sickness be explained by evolutionary principles?
Firstly, human beings are susceptible to some kinds of diseases via our genetic makeup. You may ask why would a defective gene that causes a disease such as sickle cell anemia continue to persist? Shouldn’t natural selection have eliminated it? Unfortunately this isn’t the case because genes don’t care about how happy or healthy we are, it has no purpose but to make sure it gets transmitted to the next generation. Anything that increases the chance of a gene being passed on will be present in future generations. Scientists have discovered that although homozygotes with both copies of the defective sickle cell gene develop sickle cell anemia, heterozygotes with one copy of the defective gene have an increased resilience to malaria.
Sometimes a gene that causes disease has no disadvantage in reproductive output, some have hidden advantages while others still are quirks that only present with disease in a novel environment. Why does a deadly neurodegenerative disease such as Huntington’s disease occur? Because it typically has a late onset in life, whether a person has Huntington’s doesn’t affect how many children he or she will have, and the gene that causes Huntington’s will continue to propagate for generations.
It is also important to understand the environment in which humans evolved in the first place – the African savannah. Imagine now the environment we live in today. We sit on our butts most of the day and load ourselves with a diet rich in “nutrients” that use to be much rarer : salt, sugar and fat. Could it be that “modern” diseases such as lower back pain and heart attacks are actually a result of our bodies having not enough time to evolve and adapt to a new and novel environment?
The budding field of Darwinian medicine can have huge consequences on how we understand disease and how patients are treated. Yet evolution is curiously absent from the medical curriculum. What do we do with the evolutionary hypotheses proposed on disease? We need them to be scientifically tested and thus more research needs to be done in a field that could revolutionize medicine as we know it. Only then can we make sense of why we get sick.
I highly recommend Nesse and Williams’ “Why We Get Sick : The New Science of Darwinian Medicine”, although it is a little old.
http://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Get-Sick-Darwinian/dp/0679746749
Web Resources on evolutionary medicine
1. http://www-personal.umich.edu/~nesse/ – Randolph Nesse’s website
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_medicine
Leokl
