Popke - Blog

Biological Revolutions: Viva Protistas

2012-02-12T01:01:00.000-05:00

Why I don't like the Tea Party

2012-02-09T11:48:00.000-05:00

Succinct and to the point. From here.

Biological Revolutions: Abiogenesis Part 2

2012-02-05T01:00:00.010-05:00

(Picture from here.)

This is the follow on to the abiogenesis entry I did here. There we talked for probably much too long about containment and how crucial it was to derive modern organisms. Today we're going to talk about the subject dear to our hearts: Okay. We've got a sack for the protoplasm. What the heck are we going to put in it.

Remember the four prerequisites we said we needed to overcome to get to life as we know it today:

Containment: creating the enclosed environment in which the chemical processes can occur. Living systems use a cell for this.
Metabolism: deriving additional material by using energy producing chemical reactions to power energy requiring chemical reactions. Living systems use proteins and, to a limited extent, RNA to do this.
Inheritance: one chemical system has to be able to drive the creation of other chemical systems. Living systems do this by reproduction involving DNA.
Coupling: This joins containment, metabolism and inheritance into a package. Inheritance doesn’t do any good if you’re not inheriting the ability to metabolize. The whole DNA to RNA to Protein complex is how living systems do it.

We talked about containment last time and we can't talk about coupling until we talk about metabolism and inheritance. So. Now we'll talk about metabolism and inheritance.

There are essentially two approaches to abiogenesis models. These are called metabolism first models and replication first models. Historically, approaches to metabolism were first proposed and more recently replication has been making the rounds. We'll start with metabolism.

Metabolism First

J. B. S. Haldane was the first one to suggest that the prebiotic oceans would be significantly different from modern oceans. But in 1952, the Miller-Urey experiment brought it home. In short, Miller and Urey brought together a mixture of water, hydrogen, methane and ammonia and cycled it through a system that periodically sent sparks through it. In short order, they found various interesting biochemical compounds, notably amino acids, were present. This gave experimental heft to the idea. Consequently, several biochemical models of metabolism were then proposed.

Metabolism is, in short, the reproducible extraction of energy from high energy sources (chemical, light, etc.) to produce complex organic molecules. Plants use light to take CO2 and turn it into hydrocarbons that can be used by the plants. Some archae use sulfides produced by geochemical reactions. We take the products of plants or other animals and use them as our high energy sources and produce our own organic molecules. While the high energy source is variable, what must be done is fairly clear. We need to get to a metabolism of sorts and from that metabolism to our metabolism.

All living systems use variants of fermentation and the Kreb cycle to get energy from high energy carbon sources. Plants and sulfur loving bacteria add the step of grabbing a CO2 to get the energy but once they get that high energy carbon compound they use it in a similar fashion.

Any origin story of metabolism has to start with the building up of organic molecules as a consequence of chemical reactions come from a non-biological origin. The problem to be overcome by all of these models is to create long chain molecules that don't automatically self-hydrolyze back to their constituents. By analogy, spinning a disk doesn't help us since the disk can spin in both directions. What we need is a ratchet that only spins one way. Or, at least spins in one way statistically.

There are a lot of models but I'm only going to talk about three: Eigen's hypercycle model, the iron-sulfur world and thermogenesis.

A hypercycle is a collection of interacting chemical cycles, each of which operate independently. Each of the chemical cycles is self-reinforcing loop and the aggregate represents a net gain in chemical complexity. (Eigen and Schuster's 1978 article is here.) The target of a hypercycle is a quasispecies. This is a collection of cycles that reproduce themselves. In this case, while the metabolism is inherited what we normally think of as reproduction doesn't apply. A hypercycle in a microsphere that grew large enough to break apart into two microspheres, each of which had a full complement of the hypercycle would satisfy the concept.

One way to visualize a hypercycle is as a collection of differently shaped and sized gears. Each gear represents its own little cycle. But the output of one is the input of another. The problem with Eigen and Schuster's original hypothesis was that they had to use nucleotides and protiens to create the process.

Enter Günter Wächtershäuser and the iron-sulfur world.

Wächtershäuser proposed that the pioneer organism lived in a volcanic hydrothermal flow. He suggested that mineral based catalytic chemistry could produce all of the polymerization required by abiogenesis. Note that the environment had an abundance of energetic iron and nickel as well as possible cobalt, manganese, tungsten and zinc.

For a moment iron, manganese and zinc are all dietary trace elements in modern systems. Tungsten and cobalt are not. But Tungsten is in Chromium's column in the periodic table so there is some chemical similarity. Cobalt is not used by us but it is used by bacteria in vitamin B12 synthesis.

Wächtershäuser postulated that a sulfur based cycle that resembled the Krebs cycle was possible. Carbon monoxide, ammonia and hydrogen sulfide would pass over catalytic metal compounds under high heat and pressure. This results in the formation of catalytic metallic peptides. Which then can catalyze more interesting compounds. Several of these reactions have been demonstrated experimentally. In addition, it has the added advantage that many of these reactions can occur without cellular containment.

Imagine, for example, if these reactions were occurring in the wall of a hydrothermal vent. Possible in the pores. Possibly in an organic slime. At some further date, the reactions can be encapsulated in a microsphere.

Karo Michaelian went one better. He suggested that we are looking at living systems backwards. He wanted to analyze them on the basis thermodynamics. From that point of view, living systems are unit producers of entropy-- not a surprise, right? Since everything produces entropy. Starting there he suggested that entropy isn't just a byproduct of their chemical reactions; it's the reason for their existence. Living systems arose because they were more efficient at producing entropy than their competition. According to him, nothing much beyond thermodynamics was necessary to cause living systems. They were as natural in their environment as any other chemical reaction. (The original paper is here.)

As an example, he pointed out that RNA and DNA would have existed as chemical compounds pretty much as soon as the temperature of the ocean cooled enough. He pointed out that RNA and DNA both absorb and dissipate UV with a wavelength of about 200-300nm. Which, coincidentally, was the wavelength of UV that fell on the prebiotic earth.

Such absorption and dissipation would raise the surface temperature of the water substantially. The temperature of the surface would change on a day/night cycle. RNA and DNA would absorb light in the daytime, heating the water around them enough to cause local denaturation. Then, at night when the temperature dropped polymerization would occur using any remaining single stranded molecules as a template. While Michaelian's chemistry isn't exactly metabolism, it isn't exactly replication either. But it serves as segue to the replication first models.

Replication First

It was long felt that metabolism had to come first since 1) the reactions were less complex and 2) they didn't need RNA or DNA to operate. Both RNA and DNA are problematic. They're complex molecules that are fragile and finicky. It was thought that a more robust system could then incorporate replication later.

That was then. The RNA world is now.

The RNA world hypothesis proposes that the form of life that existed prior to the current form of life was based on ribonucleic acid. The RNA world is based on the proposition that while some nucleotides bind together and break apart, some combinations had catalytic properties that lowered the required energy of their chain's creation. This meant that when these bonds occurred, they were less likely to break apart. This manifested in polymerization of the nucleic acids into RNA. The most efficient molecules were those that best catalyzed their own creation-- opening the opportunity for natural selection of chemical systems. Such catalytic compounds have been found. They are enzymes of a sort and are called ribozymes.

Over time, competition between ribozymes can foster cooperation. Some develop catalytic properties that cause peptides to bind together into small proteins. Proteins are much more efficient enzymes than ribozymes at this and any RNA compound that can synthesize itself and an enzyme out of the soup would certainly have a selective advantage.

One step in protein synthesis, aminoacylation of RNA, has been demonstrated in a short RNA segment. Aminoacylation is one of the chemical reactions used in transfer-RNA and modern protein synthesis.

Coupling Replication and Metabolism

It's a common fallacy among people that there is a single source of things from which all other things derive. Scientists (who are human regardless what some may think) share this fallacy. Sometimes the fallacy is productive-- such as the long pursuit of a unified physics. Other places, such as biology, it often hurts our understanding. If we know anything about living systems and their chemistry it's that if something can be done it probably was. It's a sort of biological analogy of rule 34: if it can happen it did and there's probably porn for it.

So I suspect all of these models and hypotheses occurred at one point or another. Iron-sulfur thermongenic hypercycles ran for millions of years in the RNA world. My bet is on the RNA world since there appears to be a coupling mechanism that occurs as a side effect of a known reaction. But I have a soft spot for iron-sulfur. Just because the idea of all that chemistry in an undersea smoker is very very cool.

We do know is that it changed at some point to the world we now live in. If we had an RNA world it had to change tothe DNA one. So what happened.

Enter Patrick Forterre and his Biology of Extremophiles Laboratory. (Sounds like a band, doesn't it?)

Forterre has suggested that viruses were critical in the push from RNA based life to DNA based life. His hypothesis is that the Last Universal Common Ancestor was RNA based in a world of RNA viruses. Further, that some viruses began using DNA instead of RNA and were selected for given the inherent stabilities of DNA vs. RNA and the fact that the RNA world would only imperfectly defend itself from a DNA virus. But things Go Wrong and some of the DNA remains intact inside a cell filled with RNA and protein machinery.

Thus the prokaryote was born.

But that is a topic for another time.

Profiteering on Cancer

2012-02-02T08:17:00.003-05:00

Check out these articles on the Susan G Komen foundation. Then punt the pink ribbon.

Big Business of Breast Cancer

Komen drops funding Planned Parenthood breast exams

Gin and Tacos entry

Biological Revolutions: Abiogenesis Part I

2012-01-29T01:00:00.002-05:00

(Picture from here.)

I had planned to have a single blog entry on abiogenesis. But, it’s too big a subject. So, I’m just going to start here and we’ll see how it goes.

Abiogenesis is the process of living systems arising from a non-living environment. We know it happened at least once—since we are, in fact, here. Since there are no fossils of life prior to life, we have to speculate. Luckily, speculation is fun.

At its heart, abiogenesis is process by which complex chemistry that does not involve living systems generates the complex chemistry that does involve living systems. We are chemical systems. The same physical laws that apply to non-living chemistry applies to the chemical reactions that occur inside of us. Glycine derived from lightning striking an oil slick is the same glycine produced by a tomato. The chemical processes in the two cases are different but the end product is the same.

We begin with the nature of the pre-biotic earth. Water. A bunch of organic molecules. Enormous amounts of energy but not too much. There are a lot of volcanoes but the earth is no longer molten. A lot of sulfur, carbon monoxide and cyanide. Things that would kill us quickly and painfully were we to suddenly show up in our time machine.

And most importantly: no oxygen.

Oxygen is great for living systems already here. But it’s absolute poison to any of the self-organizing chemical reactions that might have led to living systems. Free oxygen is a product of living systems. We’ll be talking about that in the entry on the prokaryotic revolution.

Our pre-biotic world is hot, dismal and poisonous.

So: given what we know about chemical processes and the pre-biotic earth, how did we get here?

What is here anyway?

We know what living systems are in that we can point to living systems all around us. While there are a lot of definitions of life floating around, I’d suggest that to get to our sort of living system takes a few pre-requisites:

Containment: creating the enclosed environment in which the chemical processes can occur. Living systems use a cell for this.
Metabolism: deriving additional material by using energy producing chemical reactions to power energy requiring chemical reactions. Living systems use proteins and, to a limited extent, RNA to do this.
Inheritance: one chemical system has to be able to drive the creation of other chemical systems. Living systems do this by reproduction involving DNA.
Coupling: This joins containment, metabolism and inheritance into a package. Inheritance doesn’t do any good if you’re not inheriting the ability to metabolize. The whole DNA-> RNA->protein complex is how living systems do it.

Once you have the package all together natural selection can drive refinement towards an efficient system.

In my opinion, it all starts with containment so that’s where we’ll begin.

Containment doesn’t need a cell. It doesn’t even need a physical barrier. The problem with most of the chemical reactions used by living systems is that without some mechanism to constrain the possibilities the reactions drive away from the goals of living systems rather than towards them. Combinations of nucleic acids tend to hydrolyze as do peptides. These reactions have to occur in an environment where the path is, for example, from nucleic acids to the polymerized RNA or from amino acids towards proteins.

There are a number of interesting speculations on how containment occurred.

(Picture from here.)

Living systems use cells. The three great domains of living systems solve the problem of building cells in two different ways. All use phospholipids, long chains of carbon that have a phosphate group at one end, but use them differently.

In bacteria and eucaryotes cells are enclosed in a phospholipid bilayer. The phosphate group is hydrophilic—it binds easily with water. The long carbon chain is hydrophobic and likes to bind with molecules that are not water such as fats, oils or other long carbon chains. Think of a drop of oil on water. The two keep to themselves.

Phospholipids tend to line up with their hydrophilic end collecting together and their hydrophobic end collecting together. A bilayer membrane is two sheets of phospholipid resulting in phosphate-hydrocarbon on one side binding to hydrocarbon- phosphate. Like a quilt, cloth on both sides but batting in between.

Instead of two layers, Archae have a single layer membrane that have phospholipids at both end. Again, it serves the same hydrophilic-hydrophobic-hydrophilic construction but with a single molecule instead of two.

It turns out that phospholipids will spontaneously form membrane enclosed microspheres called micelles. Phospholipids can be abiotically created given the right starting materials and heat. (See here.)

We need to get pre-biotic systems to this sort of cell structure but containment doesn’t require them. Anything that enables to sequestration of chemical reactions will serve. For example, Sidney Fox took amino acids in solution and let them dry out—like the drying out of a pool. Surprisingly, the amino acids self-organized into long thread-like molecules now called “proteinoids”—essentially, polymerized amino acids. He also found that under the right conditions, these proteinoids would also organize into microspheres: contained bubbles. The bubbles could swell and deflate and even replicate.

Fox found these microspheres in Hawaiian volcanoes. It started another area of speculation involving pumice rafts. Pumice has many pores and tiny chambers. These pores could be partially sealed to provide the environment for early chemical reactions that led to life.

These sound a lot like nanobes or nanobacteria. Both are very small, appear to have reproductive capabilities and are not likely to actually be living systems. They are, however, candidates for protobionts: chemical systems that predate life.

We can, then, have containment with cell structures without actually being cells. This gives us the opportunity for contained chemical reactions without cell membranes. Given, again, that we can get cell membranes spontaneously from phospholipids, what do we put in them?

That's for next time.

Lies of the Salamander

2012-01-24T09:06:00.002-05:00

The salamander won South Carolina.

I'm no fan of Romney. I think Santorum's an idiot and while I have a fondness for Paul it doesn't make up for any shortcomings of his batshit insane ideas.

But the salamander is a flat out liar.

He's always been a liar. He is lying to you right now. You can tell because his lips are moving.

FactCheck.org is kind to say he's distorting the truth in this ad. But let's call it what it is: lies. Flat out lies.

So: on the Republican side we have a liar and a cheat, a mediocre and fairly unscrupulous liar, an idiot and a crazy old man.

On the Democratic side we have a guy who's failed at being on the left and has signed into law a bill that should have shamed Dubya.

Hm. Tough choice. But I think I'll stick with the failed lefty.

In Defense of UFOs

2012-01-20T01:00:00.000-05:00

UFO bashing is fun and not terribly injurious to one's health, provided the UFOlogists are behind you or in large groups.

But it is terribly convenient.

For my own part I'm in Bill Hicks' camp. Why the Hell would they come thousands of light years and then come down to kick back in Fife Alabama or some such. (See the Relentless clip here.)

Then, I thought. Gee. If we postulated a civilization that had the ability to cross interstellar space, would we even know if they came? After all, it took us thirty four years and millions of dollars to get Voyager up to our own interstellar doorstep. Somebody who could zip down to us for a visit would have presumably much better technology than we do.

So, why is it dismissed so out of hand?

Part of it is, of course, the company the idea keeps. Most UFOlogists would have trouble playing Find Your Foot. But so what? The ideas held by fools need not necessarily be foolish. It wasn't so long ago that the idea of human space flight was considered foolish. And not so long before that the idea of humans being able to survive speeds of a normal train ride was in doubt.

So let's think about it.

Let's say we have a group of aliens, or their envoys, have come here to investigate us. They figured out we have life. They heard the incredible noise we produce. Like the Christmas poem, they've metaphorically sprang to the window to see what was the matter. They don't know us. So they want to check us out.

Granted it's a low probability. We have trouble conceiving the utility of visiting the moon. Anyone that might want to take decades to check us out is beyond our understanding. But we're talking aliens here and their motivation need not be ours.

So they get here. They hide for the same reasons biologists set up blinds: they want to study organisms in their natural habitat. Maybe they take samples. Maybe some of those samples are human. I'd hope they'd figure out that it's unethical to take human samples but since by getting here they've shown their motivations are not ours, it's unreasonable to think their ethics would be like ours either.

Why wouldn't that idea be worthy of investigation?

Imagine, if you will, a grant submitted to the NSF that says something to the effect, "to investigate if there exists possible evidence of earth visitation by extraterrestrials." Would you expect that to be treated fairly? Or better, would you expect it to not be laughed out of the committee?

I could even see possible avenues of research. Let's presume that aliens are bound by the known laws of physics. This means that to visit us they'd have to accelerate to a significant percentage of light speed and then decelerate. That takes energy. A lot of energy. A level of energy usage we can't even approach. So one area of research would be looking for evidence of such energy utilization. Indications of heat or velocity that is of astronomical in scope but local to our region.

Or we could examine transitory phenomena observed in space that doesn't fit what we know-- meteor tracks that don't follow expected trajectories.

We could scientifically evaluate abductees. If these people were abducted and examined, there might be contamination. Even if ET uses similar biology to ours-- DNA and the like-- it won't be identical. Perhaps they use right handed amino acids rather than left. Perhaps start and stop codons don't resemble ours.

I would expect failure of evidence since I don't think we've ever been visited. What bothers me is how we dismiss the idea out of hand without consideration. As if ideas were tainted by those that handled them, housed in a sick bed and ignored ever after.

Great Moments in Writing

2012-01-19T13:07:00.001-05:00

Loren Eiseley's Darwin's Century by way of Faye Flam:

Time, as Humanity had never dreamed lay across that world. It was a world where water wore away the shapes of mountains, and the great bones and carapaces of vanished beasts lay hoar and rime-frosted in deep crevices and canyons.

Much Ado about Methane

2012-01-18T09:05:00.003-05:00

Real Climate article Much Ado About Methane gives a real analysis of the methane release in the arctic.

But if you want to see lakes explode, check this video here.

Book View Cafe News

2012-01-17T15:56:00.001-05:00

Irene Radford re-releases her master-work series Merlin's Descendants through the Book View Cafe

Beginning with Guardian of the Balance 978-1-61138-138-2 $4.99 $3.99

Exclusive to the Book View Café, an introductory price reduction

Caught between her beloved father, the Merlin of Britain, and Arthur Pendragon, the old ways and the new, Wren must find a way to balance the forces of Chaos with peace. She nurtures the land and the people, creating a haven for anyone displaced by the turbulence. And for the safety of all she must guard her heart against the deep love she shares with Arthur, a married king who holds the future of all the Britains in his hands and his sword.

Biological Revolutions of the Mind: An animal perspective.

2012-01-15T01:01:00.004-05:00

(Picture from here.)

I've been thinking about the long view recently. Specifically, the age of life on this planet. Wikipedia's timeline of evolution is interesting but it compresses as it approaches us, in effect giving the same weight of the rise of complex cells to the rise of insects. This tends to trivialize the magnitude of complex cells.

I think we can consider a few points in the timeline as truly revolutionary:

Abiogenesis revolution: the rise of living systems. Most of these are likely extinct.
Prokaryotic revolution: bacteria and the like. About 3.8 billion years ago.
Eukaryotic revolution: complex cells such as found in amoebas and human beings. Say, 2 billion years ago
Multicellular life: About 1 billion years ago.
Neurozoan revolution: Anything with a nervous system. This allows integrated system response to local stimulation. Somewhere between 1 billion and 600 million years ago.
Cognozoan revolution: Centralized response driven life forms. Life forms with brains or central nervous systems (CNS.) Say 600 million years ago.

Neurozoan appears to be the invention of John Opie (2010.) Lots of animals have nervous systems and no brain-- hydras, for example.

Cognozoan is my own. Do you like it?

I do not use the term "revolution" lightly. While nothing really compares in scale to the abiogenesis revolution, each of these so-called revolutions changed the landscape of earth. Once we had prokaryotes we had the ability have true inheritance via DNA and variability in metabolism. We got photosynthesis and an oxygen atmosphere. Once we had eucaryotes we could have fungi-- which pretty much created something called "soil." All complex life forms from trees to sea anemones are multicellular. I suspect the roles of predator and prey, as we know them, originated here.

Neurozoans: all free living animals. Period. Full stop. End of story.

Once we introduce cognozoans, we have abstract behavior. Mating dances. Specialized predator/prey strategies. Fish. Crabs. Beetles. Starfish. Squids. Anything with a CNS. Most animals past the size of mesozoans have a brain. One could venture a guess that a central processing system is required beyond a certain level of behavioral complexity.

While this is an animal centric perspective I may be addressing some plant concerns as well.

I'm going to be going over these revolutions in the next few weeks and talking about them one at a time. Each of them is worth a blog entry of their own.

This is going to be fun.

Arisia Schedule

2012-01-12T20:27:00.001-05:00

I'm doing Arisia this year. Here's my schedule:

Friday 7pm: The Future of Bioetichs as Portrayed in Film, Alcott
Sunday 10am: Trash to Treasure! — Fast Track 1
Sunday 4pm: A "Self" or "No Self?" Neuroscience in SF, Independence (3E)

How Taiwan views the University of California

2012-01-09T09:29:00.002-05:00

James Fallows has it here.

A New Solution to the Fermi Paradox

2012-01-09T08:06:00.001-05:00

See here.

Anatural Selection

2012-01-01T01:00:00.001-05:00

I've been talking about "natural selection" a lot. Natural selection is defined to be the differential success of reproduction between related organisms based on the context of that organism's reproduction.

I use the word "context" precisely here. We like to think about natural selection by way of success in foraging or in evading predators or being predators. But differential reproduction covers a lot of ground. The context of the peacock is how pretty that male's tail looks to Lady Peacock.

Biologists like to talk about how such secondary sex characteristics show fitness but it ain't necessarily so. "Fitness" is a long term view of things-- it's a biological form of "Mister Right." But Lady Peacock isn't so much interested in Mister Right enough as much as she's interested in Mister Right Enough.

For example, let's consider bettas, or Siamese Fighting Fish. Male bettas display to one another to show dominance and to get the attention of females. A common biology demonstration is to create a model that stimulates bettas to display. It's not hard by alteration of color and shape to get a model that triggers a stronger display in a female or a male than an actual male betta. Betta display is costly in that it takes energy to display and fight and bright displays attract predators. So bettas are in a continuous mini-max race to woo their mates and not cost their own life while doing so.

Consequently, as long as the display does not impair their ability to reproduce it helps it. You could argue a "fitness" representation to this but I think it's reaching.

However, selection happens everywhere: politics, palate, fashion. The survivability of the apple is based on how well it tastes to humans. The success of dogs and cats depends on how much they engender caring emotion from us. The prolific triumph of raccoons, rats and cockroaches in the urban environment rests solely on their amazing success in exploiting what we choose to cast aside.

But this is not limited to organisms. Objects, too, can be selected for or against. Religion, car styles, hairdos, family size, presidential politics, all respond and change over time. They survive or don't based on the our ability to adapt them to changing cultural shifts of context.

These cultural artifacts are called memes and selection and modification of memes have been demonstrated. They "evolve."

I think memes are analogous to viruses in that they are packaged bits of information that have an affect to a target system.

(You can extrapolate from that idea that I don't think viruses are alive and you would be right. I think of viruses as biochemical systems that can undergo selection but are not, in and of themselves, alive. I think of it more as complex biochemical poisoning where the poison catalyzes the production of more poison.)

Virus reproduction is extremely interesting. For example, some viruses bring along their own polymerase to enhance the environment where they are produced. Some don't. Replication of living systems have mechanisms to prevent error. Viruses depend on error to introduce variation-- they are indiscriminate in the assembly of the virus product allowing selection to weed out those virus fragments that are not infective.

As I talked about in the Signs of Life entry, living systems have a certain constancy level required for viability. Viruses also dance to this constancy/variation tune. Some are quite constant, one generation to another, some are quite variable, some have parts that are variable and constant in the same virus. You can have two related viruses attack a single cell at the same time and the resulting virus has DNA from both.

Ideas and institutions have similar behaviors.

Even small ideas can have significant staying power if they can be abstracted beyond the context of their birth. There are scores passed on emails that talk about the excesses of congress or the president or Wall Street. They sound just plausible enough to be passed on. I have read emails talking about Obama that were originally credited to the Carter administration. I've read emails dissing congress I'm convinced were originally popularized by Mark Twain. These memes have thoroughly transcended the original context of their birth.

As viruses require living organisms to propagate, memes recombine. I have seen religious rituals in Mexico that clearly derive from both the original Mayan religion and the Catholic tradition. The Christmas tree does not originate from Christianity though it has been associated with the Christian holiday.

There are natural boundaries to memes that consist of such things as culture and language. Memes that have shed enough of the original context down to the bare essentials have managed to cross these barriers. Hatsune miku, for example, is a Japanese phenomenon I spoke of a while back. It has not crossed the walls of culture terribly efficiently. Pokemon, however, did.

One of the interesting things about memes is how we modify them intentionally. Pokemon is a good example of that. But nothing compared to Bill Bright 's Four Spiritual Laws. Bright boiled down Christian theology into four principles: 1) God loves you 2) Man is sinful and separated from God 3) Christ is the bridge between holy God and sinful Man 4) You need a personal revelatory experience with Christ to bridge the gap.

By abstracting the evangelical problem to its most simple term, Bright created an elegant evangelical solution: present the dilemma, propose a solution and explain the solution's implementation. This meme was simple enough and divorced enough from its original context it could easily jump cultural and language barriers-- though not without its detractors.

Like viruses, memes require active human participation to be reproduced and transmitted. An idea unpropagated is no different from a crystallized virus: inactive and unchanging.

The evolution of memes can proceed quickly or take generations. "All your base belong to us" came, went, came back and is now pretty much gone. Lolcat has a surprising longevity. Zoroastrianism had a good run of close to 2,000 years. Christianity and Hinduism are with us yet, though I think neither of them reflect their original founders all that much.

A question I hear about biology a lot is why is it so complex? Physics and chemistry are complex but nothing like biology.

One of the reasons I think is that in physics and chemistry fundamental laws and principles have been established and verified. Atomic theory covers most of chemistry and physics rounds out the rest. In physics, there are a collection of basic principles that govern such things electrical and mechanical phenomena. While there is much we do not know, we would be inordinately surprised to find fundamental conflicts. E.g., the OPERA neutrino experiments.

We do not have the fundamental laws and principles of biology. We know some things. We understand the principles of selection. We know that heritage shapes the subsequent modifications of organisms. But we have no mathematical model that can predict these things. Without the underlying model we fall back into studying individual examples and hope from them to discover the fundamentals.

Given the apparent resemblance of principles between, say, selection of inherited traits and selection of inherited religious principles, I think we might find out more than we expect.

Depression Wednesday

2011-12-14T09:44:00.002-05:00

Found this quote from Bruce Bartlett, a former Reagan advisor and a Treasury official under Bush. Here's where I found it.

Here's the quote.

Basically we’re still stuck in the situation we were three years ago and we haven’t made any progress at all except that our problems are much worse because of political reasons, because we now have a crazy party in charge of one of the Houses of our Congress and they won’t allow anything to happen because it’s in their vested interest to make things worse,” Bartlett explained in his typically exasperated way. “Plus they have a theory that is completely nuts…. I’m very depressed. I’d love to see some program like this [paper] enacted. I see zero chance of it happening. The most we can hope for is that a complete crazy person like Newt Gingrich gets the Republican nomination, the Republicans lose so badly that they lose control of the House and don’t get control of the Senate and then maybe in a year we can finally talk about doing something rational such as what is discussed in this paper.

What might be over there

2011-12-11T01:00:00.004-05:00

(Picture from here.)

The news last week, among other things, is Kepler-22b, a planet about 2.4 times the radius of Earth orbiting a G-type star, Kepler-22.

Kepler-22 is about 600 light years from her. Kepler-22b appears to be orbiting in the habitable zone: the orbit around the start that gets enough sunshine to neither turn water to steam nor to freeze it utterly. It is/may/possibly be/we wish it were liquid water.

Why? Because liquid water is one of the prerequisites for our kind of life. Not that life that isn't ours isn't possible on some of the other planets found by Kepler. Just that with only a sample number of 1 we don't have much to compare it to.

We don't know the mass of the planet simply because of the way Kepler finds things. It looks for a blink in the star it's looking at to determine that something passed in front of it. Hence, we have an idea of Kepler-22b's size but not what fills it.

There's a good article over at Life Unbounded that discusses what it might be. It might be pure rock, pure ice, pure iron or a mix-- like our lovely home. If it is like our planet, things are going to be much heaver. Volume, and hence mass, is a cube function not a linear one. An increase of radius of 2.4 doesn't make the mass 2.4 times earth. If Kepler-22b were only made of rock and ice, it's gravitational pull would be about 5 times earth. A mix of ice and rock gets you 10 times earth. If it were like earth the pull would be better than 40G! But for arithmetic convenience, let's postulate it is of the composition that there are only 10Gs on the surface. Your average couch potato American Super Bowl watching male will weigh 2000 pounds, not 200-- more than a Holstein or a small rhinoceros.

Let's wax speculative for a moment. Let's say mammalian life evolved on Kepler-22b. That would mean a relatively modest size animal, such as a human, would have to have skeletal and musculature systems beefed up to be comparable to cattle. It's certainly possible-- cattle do quite well. But what would that mean?

Think about land vertebrates. They would have to either evolve these load bearing structures early or they'd never get on land. Let's start with salamanders, an early land vertebrate. If you look at a salamander the arms come into the body structure at nearly right angles. Earth's really huge salamanders would have required significant musculature around the shoulders to lift themselves off the ground. Or they could have just dragged themselves around.

Now, take that ancient 200 pound salamander and make it 2000 pounds. It's not moving, dragging or otherwise. I have a strong suspicion that land based animals would have significant difficulty. Flight might well be evolutionary impossible. I suspect verticality would be problematic-- humans would be on all fours and not have much chance to develop hands.

But that line of speculation only suggests that the evolution de novo of such structures on land would be difficult. Not impossible-- living systems manage many things. Just our kind of mammalian life being so suited to the conditions that birthed would have difficulty evolving the same sort of adaptations under such heavier gravity.

But let's go to the ocean.

Two things immediately leap to mind for ocean based life on Kepler-22b. For one thing, the gravity problem drops away. Archimedes pointed out that buoyancy is a function of how much water something displaces. If you displace 1 gallon of earth water you get a buoyancy of 8 pounds. If you displace 1 gallon of Kepler-22b water you get a buoyancy of 40 pounds. Of course, there's 5 times more pressure on that empty gallon jug so it would need to be stronger. But water is incompressible. That's why fish can go up and down the water column easily.

We can presume that we have aquatic life if there is any life at all.

Pressure changes would be much more rapid. On earth, we get about 33 feet/atmosphere. That means if you go down 99 feet you are under 4 atmospheres of pressure: 1 from the surface + 3 for the depth. On Kepler-22b that would be much more rapid: 1 atmosphere every 3.3 feet. However, that's an earth atmosphere. About 14.7 psi/atmosphere. I would expect surface atmospheric pressure on Kepler-22b would be significantly greater. I don't know how much.

Regardless, the pressure gradient in the ocean would be significant. This would completely change the ecology and physiology of marine life. We know there are some pretty strange animals living down about 5000 feet. On earth, that's about 152 atmospheres. Light does not penetrate down that far so animals have two big issues to face: no photosynthesis and pressure issues.

On Kepler-22b we get the same pressure at 500 feet. Much, much closer to the surface. Many animals on earth manage quite nicely migrating from the surface down to that depth and return, though whether they'd be able to withstand the pressure gradient on Kepler-22b is open to question.

Kelp can grow as deep as 200 m-- around 180 feet. This relationship between depth and growth is purely defined by how much light is received by the organism and is independent of pressure. We can imagine that our Kepler-22b kelp beds are surviving under 56 earth atmospheres of pressure rather than a little over 5.5.

So, Kepler-22b's attempt at vertebrate life would give us some surprises. Ocean life, maybe not so much.

We can forget marine mammals, icthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, seals and sea otters. All of those animals started on land and made the return. If a land animal actually evolved and returned to the sea, it would carry with it the characteristics that made it successful on the land. Kepler-22b's dolphins aren't going to look like ours if they happened at all. There would be too much differing heritage.

But advanced organisms can evolve in the sea. We have cuttlefish, tuna and octopuses, all of which are very bright. If/when we get to Kepler-22b we might find cultures based around them.

My money's on the cuttlefish.

Cat vs. Laser Pointer

2011-12-09T14:47:00.003-05:00

R. K. Milholland of Something Positive said it best. Picture from here.

Consideration of Works Past: The Green Rain

2011-11-27T01:00:00.001-05:00

Usually, I talk about science every two weeks. But the turkey tryptophan is still coursing through my veins and I can't face it. So I'll wax literary for a bit.

Over the past few years I've been re-reading works that I found interesting and provocative back when I was a mere babe. (You can read previous ruminations here, here, here and here.)

The Green Rain was published by Paul Tabori back in 1961. It's a short book-- barely 70,000 words, if that. It's premise is simple: there's a mistake with a chemical missile and something goes wrong. The chemical seeds the clouds. It rains and the result is that everyone caught in the rain turns green. General hilarity ensues.

Well, only if you count political destruction, death and riot as hilarity. Perhaps I have a skewed sense of humor.

There were a lot of odd books written in the sixties and seventies, many of them better known. The Muller-Fokker Effect by John Sladek, for example. Adam M-1 by William C Anderson. Rally Round the Flag, Boys! by Max Shulman. Most of these works were fairly light even though they might be handling fairly dark material.

The Green Rain reads like a bitter, eloquent Ron Goulart at the height of his powers. It opens with a quote from one of the characters, a bitter old professor named Pelargus, who says "Something goes wrong. It always does." Then, it wanders over to a satyric biochemist who has created "chlorophylogen", a chemical precursor to chlorophyll. It has the property of generating plant like behavior upon contact with light. NASA (the ISS in the book) decides to send a rocket to the moon to make it earth like. It fails in launch and returns to earth, seeding the rain with chlorophylogen. Something happens to the chemical in the return. It's no longer simple chlorophylogen, it turns human beings green.

You can't change the color of people's skin without dealing with race. Tabori does. You can't change skin color without political repercussions. Tabori gleefully traces the downfall of the cold war. You can't change skin color without religious overtones and you can't have a religion without con artists-- at least not in southern California. Tabori wanders over there, too.

It's a romp. Or, at least it is in the beginning.

Things go dark about half way through. It's not like Shulman or Anderson. There's no easy, happy ending. The bitter Pelargus may have the last laugh after all.

This is what fascinated me when I first read it long ago and it fascinates me still. Though the science is dated and the political world is different, there's a lot that still rings true in this book. There's a scene where a young actress discovers herself pure green and comes out screaming and then faints. When she wakes up her first words are "I'm going to sue for a million bucks!"

And we're off and running.

What's curious about this book, and some of the others mentioned, is how thoroughly vanished they are in popular culture. Certainly you can find them. All of the above books are mentioned in wikipedia and you can get used copies at Amazon. The internet never forgets anything.

The impact at the time of Sulman and Anderson was considerable. Tabori, less so, but he was well known. Almost none of these names are mentioned now.

It's what I call the Bret Harte phenomenon. If you've taken an American lit course, you've ran across the name. He was a contemporary of Mark Twain. However, now we remember Mark Twain and Harte is barely remembered. Now, I'm not saying Harte was as good a writer as Twain-- he was not. But he was worth reading and popular for a time. You can make a similar statement about William Saroyan or my own favorite author, John Dos Passos. Both brilliant writers and rarely read these days out of literature courses.

The Green Rain is a lovely little science fiction book that will make you think. Don't take my word for it. Go over to Amazon here and buy it. Read it.

We'll bring these guys back eventually.

Happy Thanksgiving

2011-11-23T09:43:00.002-05:00

I'll be too busy preparing to, doing and recovering from stuffing my face for the next couple of days to put anything up.

But never fear. The Oatmeal is here.

Notes from FactCheck.org

2011-11-22T01:00:00.000-05:00

Lies in the South Carolina Debate

Huntsman SuperPAC lies

Many Lies from Crossroads GPS and one from the League of Conservation Voters

Repeated lies from Pat Boone

Lies from Rick Perry and Mitt Romney

Lies about the deficit

UC Davis Spraying

2011-11-21T08:55:00.002-05:00

I have nothing to say about this that hasn't been said. It's an outrage. I am reminded of setting dogs on protesters in the south in the 1960s.

However, if you want a real analysis of it go to James Fallows articles, here, here and here.

Simple Solutions

2011-11-21T08:42:00.001-05:00

Gordon over at Gordon's Notes has an interesting discussion on handling ICU complexity: the checklist.

Welcome to the Monkey House

2011-11-20T12:00:00.003-05:00

I've been avoiding getting too political here. My last foray into that realm was back in 2008. Sure enough, both my readers were turned off.

But there's just too much crap being thrown around.

One nice place to read about is Wonkblog, Ezra Klein's recurring articles in the Washington Post. Unlike so many blogs he actually cites where he gets his facts and figures.

I like Klein's work. So let's look at them.

Paul Ryan's inequality plan increases inequality: This should not be a surprise to anyone above the intellectual level of a starfish since the Republicans appear to have a vested interest in such inequality. But, like Captain Renault in Casablanca, some people are shocked-- shocked!-- that it could occur.

Bush tax cuts are tripping up the supercommittee: ...and the Republicans are lying about it. What a surprise. What's interesting is his graph. If you look closely it and notice the debt without the tax cuts and the wars, the debt actually begins to decrease or stay the same, depending on how you look at it. But like a giant orange slug, the tax cuts crawl over everything.

Rick Santorum is right about Europe: In which we discover that in this country there's a tightly coupled relationship between father's earnings and son's earnings. This translates into the US have less upward mobility than, say, Finland or Canada. So much for the American Dream.

The corporate income tax in two charts: Corporate taxes range at close to the lowest point ever.

Land of Missed Opportunity: Little points along the way that we could have salvaged something. Anything.

The benefits of doing nothing: If congress does nothing, the deficit drops by $7.1 trillion over ten years. Deadlock now has my vote.

Go enjoy.

Frank Miller, RIP... Sort of

2011-11-19T09:16:00.002-05:00

Frank Miller was a mover and shaker in the comics world back in the 80s with The Dark Night Returns. TDNR was the equivalent of William Goldman's amazing Robin Hood film Robin and Marion.

Go to the link to learn about TDNR. The quick synopsis is that Bruce Wayne is 50+ and Batman is retired. He returns but given his age and the times it is purely a last hurrah. It was brilliant and strange. Age usually doesn't touch superheroes and it paved the way for several treatments of the superhero genre that included the passing of time.

Probably the purest legacy is Mark Waid's Kingdom Come.

Miller then went on to create the Sin City series which I found initially interesting. But graphic violence can only take you so far and I lost interest.

Well, Frank Miller has officially entered the community of Old Farts.

Miller put out this screed about the Occupy Wall Street movement. He thinks they are protesting the War on Terror.

You can criticize OWS for a lot of reasons but they are not attempting anything against the War on Terror. That is, unless you conflate the WOT with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The two are not the same except in those who are either poorly misinformed or reflexively jerk up the flag like a frog in an electric current whenever they feel threatened. I suspect Miller falls in both categories.

I'm sad but unsurprised. Miller falls into that group of people who praise individual action as long as it doesn't happen. You can see this throughout his work: iconoclastic men who take matters and the law into their own hand when they see injustice. But when somebody actually does this it upsets the status quo and these same people are terrified. Miller goes so far as to suggest the OWS protesters join the military to fight terror. Which is fine if it had anything to do with what the OWS is trying to do. Anything at all.

I wonder sometimes if artistic success such as has been enjoyed by people like Frank Miller or Tom Cruise or others makes people a little psychotic. They get such enormous positive feedback they lose the ability to correct themselves and go off the rails.

A very good critique of the screed is by Tony DiGerolamo here.

I don't quite understand why the OWS movement pushes the buttons it does. I find it fairly hopeful if inarticulate. I hope it will make the transition from inchoate movement to political action much as the Tea Party did. The Tea Party was every bit as incoherent and odd as the OWS but it had an inherent authoritarian organizing principle that pleased some big money people who then co-opted them.

Where's George Soros when you need him?

Neat TED Talks

2011-11-19T01:00:00.000-05:00

Some very cool TED talks came across my desk recently:

A robot that flies like a bird

The story of the Norden bombsight

I kiss so hot: a flirtatious aria

The real reason for brains

Mike Tyson as Herman Cain

2011-11-18T01:00:00.000-05:00

Go enjoy it here.

Hitler was a Creationist

2011-11-17T07:40:00.004-05:00

There's a really good analysis of Nazism, Creationism and Darwin here by Coel Hellier. Hats off to Jerry Coyne for the link over at Why Evolution is True.

The article specifically destroys the pernicious lie that either Hitler or the other Nazis embraced Darwinism or were atheists.

This spectacular untruth is spouted constantly by those who also lie about Christian persecution in this country.

Christians are not persecuted in this country. There is no evidence of it save in the tormented minds of the chronically paranoid.

Signs of Life

2011-11-13T01:01:00.002-05:00

(Picture from here.)

I apologize for this post being late. There were... technical challenges that had to be overcome.

Throw your mind back to any Star Trek or similar movie or television. The ship approaches a new planet. The captain says to whatever passes for a science officer: "What's down there?"

The SO replies: "Life signs, Captain."

Just what does that mean? What are signs of life?

We know there is something different about biochemical systems that are alive versus biochemical systems that are not alive. We don't necessarily have a good idea of what that difference is.

Can we in fact recognize it when we see it?

Martin Hanczyc has a TED talk here that talks about the line between live and non-life. He makes any good points including that living systems have to have containment and metabolism.

(Hanczyc rightly points out that living systems are hard to define and brings up the bugaboo about viruses not fulfilling the definition of life. My own feeling about viruses is that they are elaborate biochemical systems that parasitize living systems. I don't think they can be called alive. What they can prove is that natural selection can occur with biochemical systems that have independence from the underlying living systems. But that's another discussion. I think for our gross purposes we can neglect them.)

The National Research Council tried to derive some idea about how life can be identified that bears no relationship to our own. They came up with the following criteria: (This is all in the TED talk, BTW.)

The system has to be in non-equilibrium: energy is absorbed by the system, used and waste materials/energy discarded. Living systems are, in effect, a turbine on the downhill slope of energy. If the turbine isn't moving the system is dead.
Life needs to be in liquid form. Materials in the living system must be mobile. I quibble with the word "liquid" here. I think the mobility implied by liquid is what's necessary. Solvents allow materials to come in intimate chemical contact with each other, allowing chemical activity.
The making and breaking of chemical bonds.

These are extremely general qualities and one could easily see a designed system meeting them. I would personally add in the susceptibility to natural selection but that may be quibbling.

We divide chemistry into two worlds: organic chemistry, based on carbon, and inorganic chemistry, everything else. This is sort of like the archaic view of life: vertebrates and everything else.

Lee Cronin is a chemist (TED talk here) that is interested in inorganic biology. He's posited three basic questions:

What is life?
Is biology special?
Is matter 'evolvable'?

Where he gets interesting is that he's turning the process backwards and starting with question three: Is matter 'evolvable'? By this he means can chemical systems be induced to present the opportunity for natural selection.

Cronin believes that the physics of life is encoded into the rules of the universe in the same way as the physics of stars. He refers to life as a "flame in a bottle."

Cronin starts with the idea of contained chemical systems. He's been repeating Miller-Urey's experiment with multiple interconnected compartments with some interesting results. Now, though, he's been attempting to make synthetic biological systems without carbon. (See here and here. Paper here.)

He calls these "cells" iCHELLS: inorganic chemical cells. iCHELLS have membranes to contain chemical reactions. They have chemical processes and the ability to store electricity. He's interested in creating evolvable matter-- which, to his mind and my own, is the essential definition of life. In place of carbin he is using polyoxometalates. These are molecules made up of multiple metal atoms bound together by oxygen.

These compounds can form complex structures. Cronin points out that competition between molecules is also possible. If you have two compounds that can polymerize or otherwise form complex structures and those two compounds require the same root materials to do their magic, they are, in effect, competing for those resources against one another. The more efficient compound under the current conditions will "win." Changing the current conditions, such as changing temperature or pressure, can modify the selective advantage of one molecule over another.

This isn't life. But it does suggest that natural selection for biological systems may be a intrinsic reflection of the chemical selection between molecular systems. Cronin believes he may have "life" in two years. I think he's dreaming but we will see.

An interesting side effect of his work may be the creation of microscopic engineered complex systems. These won't be nanomachines but may be something I suspect will be more useful: micromachines: machines that operate in cell size domain.

So, if we subtract carbon from the equation, what's left? How do we detect life?

Enter Christoph Adami. (TED talk here.)

Adami is a professor at the Keck Institute of Applied Life Sciences. He's interested in simulating evolutionary biology with digital organisms. From this sprang Avida, a system that allows artificial organisms to compete with one another for resources. The organisms can change over time, allowing selection to occur and allowing the organisms to evolve.

Adami was approached by NASA to help them determine how to look for life. He boiled down the concept of life to ideas that were completely divorced from chemistry.

The TED talk is great. Please go watch it. In a nut shell, he had his little software organisms evolve and "metabolize" and then looked at the resulting environment outside of the organism.

Think about earth 4.6 billion years ago. It had a primordial soup containing concentrations of various chemicals. However, once life began the life forms exploited those chemicals, translating them to other chemicals. In a fairly short time the chemistry of planet earth changed.

Similarly, the resource environment of the artificial organisms could also be expected to change once life began.

The simulation he used had a built in mutation rate that could be tuned up or down. So if the "mutation rate" was tuned to maximum there was no retention of changes and nothing could be evolved. Consequently, the resource environment remained in the "non-living" state. As the mutation rate was dialed down, at a particular point "life" happened and the resource environment make a wild shift in a very short time.

Now, being an ex-biologist, I think he was looking at the effect of the inverse operation from mutation. He was dialing up or down the persistence of traits. Once that persistence reached a threshold level, life spontaneously occurred. This is an underlying concept in Cronin's work, too. Once the conditions are right chemicals become available to natural selection and once that happens they are alive.

The signature of life, then, is a recognition of a resource pattern that is not attainable without a living system, be it artificial, organic or made up of metal salts.

From the point of view of detecting life on other planets, this is both encouraging and disheartening. It's encouraging because it is an unequivocal sign of life: physical resource observations that can't occur without living intervention.

But it's disheartening, too. We could, for example, look at earth from some distance and figure out that it's not in equilibrium. The chemical signature of earth couldn't happen without living systems. However, that's not because there's anything special about earth. It's because we have enormous understanding and data about how earth works. We have vastly less knowledge about planets in our own solar system and almost no knowledge at all about exoplanets. Heck, we're seeing planets right now that we thought couldn't happen. How could we possibly look for an abnormal resource signature without knowing what a normal resource signature is?

For example, there's the problem of methane on Mars. Methane in the Martian atmosphere can only last about a year. Yet we see significant amounts of it. That means that something on Mars is making methane. On earth, we'd say that was the signature of a living system. That's where methane comes from here. But on Mars? We don't have a clue.

But life may be an inevitable quality of matter under the right conditions. Cronin said it as a hypothesis: is matter in and of itself evolvable?

I hope it is.

Insult Diplomacy

2011-11-11T01:00:00.000-05:00

There's been a lot of yelling in Europe but you can't tell your insults without a scorecard.

Here's your scorecard.

Scrat in Africa

2011-11-10T01:00:00.000-05:00

You remember Scrat from Ice Age. Well, here's an independent film of Scrat in war torn Africa.

This one is strange. I'm not sure what to make of it.

Stupid vodka-shooting cat!

2011-11-09T01:00:00.002-05:00

Deep in the wilds of the UK lives Adam, a man with an incredibly active (and audible) dream life. His wife, Karen, transcribes for him.

Hear him roar. Discussion here.

A few examples:

"Wow. I can't believe I got punched in the face by a cow! Those bovines have bad attitudes. Total bitches. Oh, that's gonna leave a mark."

"I've got some fabulous nail polish for that camel toe."

"You know, the world will be a much better place when we get to eat vegetarians. Furthermore, you get your five-a-day with one of those."

"So the prince and the mermaid lived happily ever after... Until the mermaid's brain exploded. The end."

"Okay, everybody! Anyone who hasn't eaten, put their arms in the air!... That's not YOUR arm! Stupid fucking zombies."

Fact Checked Rap

2011-11-08T01:00:00.000-05:00

Baba Brinkman did rap on evolution here.

Politics and the Silly Season

2011-11-07T09:22:00.004-05:00

A couple of articles have come across my desk recently.

From Gin and Tacos a nice analysis of why we might like some people pursuing their own self interests but not others.

From The Washington Post, an analysis of why the House of Representatives might decide to take time off of its busy schedule to reaffirm our motto is In God We Trust.

Some dynamite James Fallows (here and here) articles on how and why a majority in the Senate can't pass anything and how the party that is to blame (the Republicans) get off scott free.

Welcome to the Silly Season

News from the Book View Cafe

2011-11-02T01:00:00.000-04:00

The Heiress Companion (regency romance)
Madeleine Robins
November 1, 2011 $3.99

ebook here.

Description: While Rowena Cherwood did not go around boasting of it, she had a tidy legacy from her parents. Free to choose the life she wanted, and unwilling to live with her overbearing aunt, she accepted a position as Lady Bradwell's companion.

A spinster of twenty-seven, Rowena gave little thought to marriage--until Lyn Bradwell, Lady Bradwell's long absent son, returned to England, their chemistry was immediate--and fiery.

Love was the last thing on Rowena's mind--or Lyn's. Lady Bradwell, impatient for her companion's happiness and her son's, wondered how long it would be before her companion and her son would open their eyes.

Bio: Madeleine Robins is the author of eleven novels, including five Regency romances; The Stone War; Point of Honour; Petty Treason; The Sleeping Partner; and The Salernitan Women. A native New Yorker, she lives in San Francisco

Copyright: 1981

Keywords: regency romance, historical romance

URL for the ebook:

BONUS: Madeleine Robins’ new Sarah Tolerance novel, The Sleeping Partner, is also available here.