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FRIDAY REPORT OF 10/21/05

The Most Direct, Frequent Link to Knowledge Workers in the Eastern Forest Economy

“OWLS OF PROTEST”
by Kimberley A. Strassel, senior editorial page writer

Our title and quotes are from THE WALL STREET JOURNAL of 10/19/05:

“In 1990, he [Dean Hurn] was the owner of a successful family shake and shingle business, operating six mills and employing 200 people around Washington state. By 1993 it was all gone, the last mill closed, his people unemployed, all thanks to a little predator known as the Northern spotted owl…

“Two things are combining to make the spotted owl story relevant again. The first is the growing evidence that this was a terrible mistake, and that it wasn’t necessarily logging that landed the owl on the endangered species list…

“According to a congressional committee, the spotted owl protections resulted in at least 130,000 lost jobs, after more than 900 sawmills, pulp mills and paper mills closed in the mid-’90s. Many of these were family businesses and the effect on small communities was severe. Divorce rates shot up; men committed suicide…

“But at least we have the owls, right? Wrong. Scientists are struggling to explain why, more than 10 years after a halt of logging on the ‘old growth’ trees in which spotted owls are supposed to thrive, the bird’s population has continued to plummet – declining by 7% a year in Washington. The answer, biologists are beginning to admit, is . . . another owl. Barred owls migrated into spotted owl territory decades ago, and have a nasty habit of killing the smaller birds, driving them out of their homes, or mating with them – producing impure offspring…

“What makes this so galling is that it isn’t news. Back in 1992, Bush Agriculture Secretary Edward Madigan publicly admitted that barred owls might be a big problem. His comments elicited howls of protests from environmental groups opposed to logging in principle. The Clinton administration came to office and swept away any talk of rival species, proceeding with plans to further shut down timber-cutting. Many scientists still insist that forestry is the cause and will at most say that they don’t know just ‘how big’ a problem are the barred owls. Yet even this is an admission that the government eviscerated an industry on the basis of unknown science…

“What is clear is that those in Congress who oppose reform bear the burden of explaining how a law that currently fails both species and humans can possibly be justified.”

We say “Hurray” for both WSJ and Ms. Strassel.

“TURNED ON,
A revolution in the field of evolution?”
by H. Allen Orr

Our title and quotes below are from The New Yorker of 10/24/05:

“…Evo devo, punk-band-inspired slang for ‘evolutionary developmental biology,’ holds the promise of a radical new way to look at life’s evolution. Its central thesis is simple. Organisms show two kinds of change through time: during the lifetime of a single animal (you don’t look much like the egg you started as) and during the evolutionary history of a biological lineage (you don’t look much like your three-and-a-half-billion-year-old) ancestor. Evo devo’s key claim is that the first kind of change can provide important insights into the second…

“Sean Carroll, a professor of biology at University of WisconsinMadison, and a leading evo-devo researcher, surveys the state of the field for a general audience in his book ‘Endless Forms Most Beautiful’ (Norton; $25.95)…He does an admirable job of explaining…how DNA builds organisms.

“DNA is the stuff that gets passed from parent to child, and one of its main jobs is to tell cells how to make proteins, the molecules that we’re basically made of. A stretch of DNA that makes a protein is called a gene. Biologists usually say that a gene ‘codes for’ a protein, by which they mean that the gene’s DNA sequence instructs a cell to build a specific kind of protein; a slightly different DNA sequence might yield a slightly different protein. One of our genes, for example, codes for insulin, a protein that helps cells absorb glucose…

“Evo devo’s first big finding is that all animals are built from essentially the same genes…All animals have Hox genes, and nearly all animals use their Hox genes to determine which appendage should go where along the axis that runs from head to tail. Given that the major animal groups, among them arthropods (now including insects), mollusks (snails), annelids (worms), and chordates (human beings), were in place at the start of the Cambrian period, Hox genes must be at least half a billion years old…

“…Carroll calls these the ‘tool kit’ genes, and they’re the central characters in his story. Nearly all tool-kit genes are present in all animals, and they do much the same thing in all animals. The same gene, for example, that triggers eye development in fruit flies also triggers eye development in mice…Similarly, a gene that affects pigmentation in birds like the chicken and the bananaquit also affects pigmentation in mammals like the jaguar and you. Indeed, changes in bird-plumage color often involve the same gene that causes red hair in humans. This surprising genetic conservatism across nearly all animals is evo devo’s key empirical finding: swans, swallowtails, and socialites are all built from the same genes…

“The real excitement about evo devo, however, has to do with its third claim. Carroll and others have taken the next, and by far the most radical, step and argue that evolution is mostly a matter of throwing these switches.

“Evo devo’s emphasis on switch-throwing represents a profound departure from evolutionary biology’s long obsession with genes. Animal evolution works not so much by changing genes, Carroll maintains, but by changing when and where a conserved set of genes is expressed. In the lingo, evolution is regulatory (involving patterns of gene expression), not structural (involving the precise proteins coded by genes). You can think of this distinction in terms of those light switches. Imagine two houses that were built from the same blueprint and that were initially identical. But now, years later, we notice that they look different at night. In one, the first floor is bright and the second floor is dim; in the other, the opposite is true. This difference could have arisen in two ways. Maybe the houses new feature different lights; the owners of the first house might, for instance, have replaced bulbs on the first floor with brighter ones; the other owners might have done the same thing on the second floor. But maybe – and this is the evo-devo picture – the owners of the first house have switched on most first-floor lights and switched off most second-floor lights; the owners of the second house might have done might have done the reverse. Evo devo tells us that animal species look different not because their structural bits and pieces have changed but because they switch on and off the same old bits and pieces in different combinations. Roughly speaking, then, penguins and people differ for the same reason your pancreas and eye differ: they’re expressing different genes…

“Vertebrates, including human beings, carry only around twenty-five thousand genes (before the genome was decoded, scientists typically guessed that there would be around a hundred thousand); most animals carry even fewer. How does nature squeeze so many kinds of creatures out of such a modest genetic endowment? The answer, according to evo devo, is combinatoric explosion. Although thousands of genes might not sound like enough to explain the most unimaginable diversity of what are, after all, the most sophisticated machines in the known universe, the number of combinations in which these genes can be expressed (gene 1 with gene 2, but not with genes 3, 4, 5, etc.) is nearly boundless…

“For the first time, we have a good understanding of how particular changes in DNA cause particular changes in embryos, which, in turn, cause particular changes in species. The point is that not all significant science turns our world upside down. Despite the nearly irresistible romance of the scientific revolution, the history of evolutionary biology might look a lot more like evo devo’s own history of the animal kingdom: a few radical innovations early on, followed by some intensely interesting tinkering.”

To read the complete nine-page article, click on http://www.newyorker.com/critics/books/articles/051024crbo_books1

“BIRD FLU: THREAT OR MENACE?
Why avian sniffles need not ruffle our feathers…too much”
By Ronald Bailey, REASON’s science correspondent”

Our title and quotes below are from REASON’s 10/19/05 Internet page::

“An avian flu pandemic could kill 2 million Americans and 150 million people worldwide. Claims like that certainly get your attention…The advent of this new bird influenza virus, the H5N1 strain, is what’s provoking these alarums…Today, around 36,000 Americans die of influenza and its complications annually. So far, while the H5N1 strain of avian flu has killed tens of million of birds, it has infected only 116 people, killing 60 of them. Nearly all of the infected people got the disease from intimate exposure to poultry…”

To read the complete article, click on http://www.reason.com/rb/rb101905.shtml

“GAS PRICES FACT OR FICTION: A PRIMER ON SUPPLY AND DEMAND”
By Tom Lehman

Our title and quotes are the numbered high points of an article posted by Mises Organization:

“(1) Gas prices are controlled entirely by wholesalers and big refinery oligopolists who illegally collude and profiteer at consumer expense. FICTION.

“(2) There is a loose connection between the world price of crude oil and the price of gasoline, and the rising price of crude oil in recent years can partially explain the rise in gasoline prices. FACT.

“(3) Markets work fine under normal circumstances, but fail under crisis situations. Government must regulate prices and impose price controls during a crisis (such as after a hurricane) to stabilize markets. FICTION.

“(4) There is no rational reason why retail gas prices at the local pump should skyrocket before a hurricane or immediately after a natural disaster, since the retail gasoline at the pump was purchased in a previous period and at a lower wholesale cost. That retail gas prices do rise during such events is merely more evidence of price gouging and exploitation. FICTION.

“(5) Fuel conservation and calls for less driving by a jawboning president are unnecessary and unwelcome. FACT.

“(6) Reducing or temporarily suspending gasoline taxes will help to ‘stabilize’ gas prices. FICTION.”

To read the complete seven-page article, click on http://www.mises.org/story/1936

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