My life has become increasingly about the details of my thesis - I'm at the point that I wake up in the night wondering about the wording of a paragraph, the best way to present the data in Figure 2-4 and whether I really need another table. That's left this blog pretty quite, but for the Sunday Spinelessness posts.
That's fine, but a couple of tweets from Physicist for the Stars Sean M. Carrol put me on to a way of talking about science that fits my schedule a little better than blogging. Someone asked Sean to explain M-theory, the 11-dimensional version of string theory, over twitter. A lesser scientist would have balked at such a challenge, but Sean stepped up to the task:And he didn't stop there, with M-theory dealt with he moved on to explaining what the Higgs boson everyone is excited about actually is, and how quantum field theory works. Both of which he detailed on his blog
3tweets | Cosmic Variance | Discover MagazineIt started with an innocent, and possibly joking, request on Twitter: "Can you explain M-theory?" Having previously been asked to defend the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics and various other topics, I didn't take it very seriously. But upon further reflection - why not?Biology doesn't have 11-dimensional maths, or concepts as strange as quantum mechanics - but there are plenty of biological ideas that are very hard to grasp (or, worse yet, easy to get wrong). My research is about species - what they are, how we know we have one and where they come from. So, I thought I'd have a go at explaning that, betraying a little physcis envy in the process:
A couple of people seemed to like that, so I tried another one. How does evolutionary change happen? (Which ended up more non-adaptationist than I thought it would...)
- And finally, I though I'd tackle the hardest concept we teach to undergraduate genetics students here at Otago. What does 'heritibility' mean.
That one really is hard to get, it's one of the subjects I never really understood before I started teaching it (which is a great way to learn something). So, I might add the example I use when students struggle to grasp the concept:
Imagine you baked a cake, and the batter rose 7 cm. What percentage of that rise was because of the heat you baked the cake at, and what percentage was because of the baking powder? That's obviously a stupid question - you required each to get the cake to rise. But, if you baked a hundred cakes varying the temperature at which you cooked them and the baking powder you added to them you might be able to get a feel as to how, within that sample, changing each of these factors contributes to the differences you see between cakes.Heritability works the same way, it's an estimate of the degree to which genetic differences in a population explain the biological differences you see between members of a population.And that's that. It's really quite fun trying to pare a difficult concept down to a concise explanation - if you have a go at one let me know about it.
theatavism
David Winter
Geek of many colours, PhD student in evolutionary biology who doesn't quite understand how anyone can do science without wanting to tell the world about it
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