And Slaters Go Plop

(If you love to ‘tweet’ and this raises your ire, please don’t leave me angry comments, k thx bye)

The lecture lasts around 40 minutes and the rest is questions and answers.

In our bodies we contain two different types of DNA. There is the bog-standard (or, nuclear, because it’s in the nucleus) DNA which is a combination of half of your mother’s and half of your father’s DNA which you inherited when one of your father’s sperm fused with one of your mother’s eggs. And then there is Mitochondrial DNA which is different to nuclear DNA in that we inherit it directly from our mother alone as a part of the egg which is swarming with hundreds of thousands of mitochondria . Nuclear DNA fulfils the role of building our bodies and mitochondrial DNA provides the means for mitochondria to generate the energy a cell needs to do the things it does (i.e. dividing or making stuff). When cells divide they make a duplicate of your DNA and, inevitably, the mitochondria end up dividing themselves up between the newly-formed cells where they will recombine with each other to keep the numbers up.

If you are a mushroom, a plant, or an animal (from jellyfish to wetas to elephants) you will have mitochondrial DNA and if your species uses sex for reproduction you will likely have inherited it from your mother.

Every time nuclear DNA is recombined during procreation and every time mitochondrial DNA is recombined within the cells of your body little mutations can occur. Most of these mutations are neutral in that they don’t inhibit or enhance the functioning of the DNA.

What this means is that, while our nuclear DNA will pick up on average 128 mutations (out of ~3,000,000,000 base pairs) during sexual reproduction, mitochondrial DNA have more mutations (out of only ~17,000 base pairs in mammals) without the added complication of sexual recombination and this makes it much easier to compare mitochondrial DNA between people and, therefore, make reasonably accurate predictions for just how closely maternally related they are by comparison of their mitochondrial DNA alone.

Let’s say we take your mitochondrial DNA and compare it with your sibling’s. We will find that the two samples are almost, but not quite, identical. This is because there have been a handful of mutations in the time that you’ve had your mitochondrial DNA to yourselves. Now if we take your sample and compare it to a maternal cousin (i.e. you mother’s sister’s children) you will find that, while still almost identical, a few more changes will have crept in. You will notice a pattern of increasing change occurring as you compare the mutations of maternal second cousins, third cousins, fourth cousins and so on and so on.

Now, once you have established what rate of change you can expect between maternal relatives you can go ahead and test your neighbour. If you find that your neighbour’s difference in mutations are only about those of, say, your maternal second cousin then you will be able to fairly confidently predict that you have just met a previously unknown second cousin. If, however, you compare you neighbour’s mutations and they are larger than what you would expect from a close relative you should be able to make a prediction for how many generations ago it was that you shared a common grandmother based on the rate of change.

You may have heard before of a ‘mitochondrial Eve’ that was talked about a few years back. They got to this conclusion by testing as many diverse people in the world as they could think of and compared their mitochondrial DNA to see what was the greatest difference they could find. It turns out that the most remote common maternal ancestor they could identify lived around 8000 generations and perhaps 170,000 years ago. The exact numbers are, understandably, still hotly disputed but the fact of the genetic relationship is sound.

Some people have taken this to mean that this ‘Eve’ was actually the first human but they’ve missed the point. We could have done a ‘mitochondrial Eve’ analysis for just the people of a particular village in South America and found that their mitochondrial Eve was only 50 generations ago. Conversely, we could have done a mitochondrial Eve analysis of humans and chimpanzees and discovered that they are around 250,000 generations and 7 million years ago (as, indeed, they have found).

There are many other ways to measure the relatedness between animals including the Y chromosome (which is passed exclusively from father to son) and a plethoria of nuclear DNA comparisons. But I’ll leave those explanations to people who actually know what they are talking about. If this kind of stuff interests you like it does me, I wholeheartedly recommend The Ancestor’s Tale by Richard Dawkins.

Back in August 2006 a company called Steorn took out a full-page advert in The Economist claiming they had developed a free energy device – charmingly called an Orbo – and were looking for qualified scientists to be a part of their validation process. Steorn is based in Dublin, Ireland and is headed up by a guy called Seán McCarthy.

The claim of free energy is a big one. Many people have attempted it – even Da Vinci tried his hand at it – but so far no one has succeeded. Free energy isn’t the same as solar energy or wind energy, it’s an entirely different beast. There is a law in physics called The Conservation of Energy which says that the energy contained within a closed system will remain constant. This is not a law to be trifled with as it has an enormous amount of strong scientific evidence to support it and, so far, not a shred of evidence against it. Some physicists have even said that a violation of this law “would undermine not just little bits of science – the whole edifice would be no more”.

What Steorn are claiming is that they have a device which, isolated from any external energy source, will produce more energy than it requires to run. This is huge. This would solve all of the world’s energy problems. Imagine it; hook this thing up to a 9 volt battery and it will produce more than 9 volts which you will be hook up to another Orbo (or even back into itself, thus removing the need for a battery in the first place) and so on, giving you potentially infinite energy.

So, should we believe them? After all, scientific knowledge is continually being added to and there have been plenty of times in the past where the ‘scientists’ of the day have scoffed at a new idea. Could this be the next major development in our understanding of the universe? A whole new paradigm? They seem like really genuine people and qualified engineers have been singing their praises. There doesn’t seem to be any overt financial scam going on either.

What we should do is be sceptical (or, ‘skeptical’ if you live in the US). This simply means that we should demand good evidence before believing the claim. And there are some strong warning signs that we should heed as well:

1. So far there have been thousands of claims of free energy but none have succeeded
2. The most alluring of these claims have involved magnets, the Orbo does too
3. We have not heard back from their panel of science validators
4. Good science is usually done in the public domain where peer review is encouraged rather than by going directly to the media
5. They attempted a demonstration in July 2007 but it was a complete failure
6. They have provided no explanation for how they have been able to achieve free energy
7. So far all we have is anecdotal evidence
8. It goes against some of the best-established science

My thoughts are that they probably genuinely believe in what they are doing (I like to look for the good in people) but that they are either accessing an external source of energy they hadn’t considered or that they are subconsciously allowing themselves to overlook another critical issue in their excitement. I’m deeply suspicious given their reluctance to demonstrate the technology and their unconventional approach of avoiding the public rigour of the scientific community and instead choosing to talk to the media (who are much more gullible).

I would love for them to have broken a strongly-held law of physics, especially given the potential benefit our world could gain. But I’m going to need some very strong evidence before I’m convinced.

I’ll leave you with Robert Park’s Seven Warning Signs of Bogus Science:

1. The discoverer pitches the claim directly to the media
2. The discoverer says that a powerful establishment is trying to suppress his or her work
3. The scientific effect involved is always at the very limit of detection
4. Evidence for a discovery is anecdotal
5. The discoverer says a belief is credible because it has endured for centuries
6. The discoverer has worked in isolation
7. The discoverer must propose new laws of nature to explain an observation

Huh.

Saying “WWW” requires the use of nine syllables.

Saying “World Wide Web” only requires three.

Welcome to the Internet.

Yes, yes, we all know that blogging is really quite sad and self-indulgent. It’s bad enough that we all get to babble our opinionated nonsense to the world in a way that wouldn’t be possible if we required a paying audience like times gone by. But what’s with this disturbing trend to blog about blogging and the obligatory monthly stats-round-up of your own position among your fellow bloggers? C’mon.

(I realise the delicious irony that in order to make this comment I also am forced to do it. I apologise.)

According to a recent survey of 1000 New Zealanders by researchers from the Department of Communication, Journalism and Marketing at Massey University 40% of respondents claim no religious affiliation. 17 years ago this number was just 29%.

53% claim belief in God but half of this number express doubts.

60% would like children to have religious education with most of them preferring the teaching of all faiths. As an atheist myself, I’m strongly in favour of teaching religion in schools; particularly if it is taught in an even-handed and factual manner. (In the words of cultural anthropologist Dr. David Eller, “Nothing is more destructive to religion than other religions; it is like meeting one’s own anti-matter twin.”)