Freestyles!

I wrote previously that my wife and I were attending the Arthur Murray "Freestyles" event that was held yesterday, so this post is report on that event.

Wow! It has a lot of fun, a whole day of dancing and socializing with our friends from the Arthur Murray dance studio in Montclair. At a Freestyles event, several Arthur Murray studios get together to give students a venue to perform for a judge, in order to receive impartial feedback. It is not a competitive event, and the emphasis for beginning students (like us) is on performing the syllabus figures for your level, either without additional choreography (closed) or with (open).

Yesterday's Freestyles was held at the Bridgewater Marriott, a centrally located venue for the Arthur Murray studios of Montclair, Kenilworth, Whitehouse Station, and Princeton. The event was well organized. The dancing was by 'heats' of several couples at once on the floor, all dancing the same dance, though each couple was dancing their own choice of steps. Each heat also had a variety of skill levels, and while there were no collisions it was clearly the responsibility of the better dancers and instructors to avoid the less skilled.

Blanka and I had chosen to dance four dances (Rumba, Cha-Cha, Foxtrot, and Tango) both together and with our instructors. As a result, we were each on the floor eight times, across twelve different heats. It was very nice that we were not in the same heat while dancing with our instructors, because we got to enjoy watching each other dance.

The actual dancing was wonderful, without much anxiety about forgetting steps, losing timing, or stepping on the dress of the lady next to me. We had practiced so much leading up to the event that it was almost second nature to dance the dances that we had chosen, and we did dance them 'freestyle', without repeating a set sequence.

As the day progressed, it was obvious that we had taken a very cautious approach to participating in the event. Many students danced multiple heats of the same dance, open and closed, for many more than four dances! There were 166 (!!) heats during the day, so we were sitting and cheering our friends on for most of the day. Next time, we'll know to push ourselves to dance more.

The day included lunch, dinner, a pro show by the instructors from each studio, and casual dancing after dinner. We were quite tired by the end of the evening, and I can't imagine where some of the instructors got their energy, dancing heat after heat with their students.

We had a great time.

Getting the Most from your Arthur Murray Dance Package

My wife, Blanka, and I have been dancing at the Arthur Murray studio in Montclair, NJ for a little less than a year. It all began as a birthday present from her of a few private lessons, but it has grown into an important part of our life and growth within the Montclair community.

Put simply, the people and staff of the dance studio are wonderful. We have met so many people from different backgrounds that we otherwise would never have met. Our instructors, Gregory and Emma, are simply the best. They are fantastic at communicating quickly and clearly, and giving us maximum value in each 40 minute lesson.

If you are also interested in learning to dance through the Arthur Murray system, or you are in the process of comparing studios, here are a few of the things we have learned that will help you maximize your enjoyment, progress, and value of your purchase.

• Buy a package of lessons if you can afford it. It helps lower the total cost and increases your commitment to continuing.
• Stay an informed consumer, and manage your package to make sure you are learning the dances you want. Ask questions and give feedback. You're paying a lot of money to the studio, make sure you feel that you are getting your money's worth.
• At the same time, I can't emphasize enough how helpful it has been for me to spend entire private lessons just on the basics of framing and leading that are fundamental to every dance. Creating a connection with another person on the dance floor is probably the best part of dancing! Don't cheat yourself out of it by making the mistake of focusing on memorizing steps. That will come at its own pace. The body awareness of your dance frame and the 'other' awareness of your lead (or follow) skills are the most important benefits of dancing - they will extend far into other parts of your life.
• Take advantage of all the free training that Arthur Murray studios give you. Attend at least one group lesson and practice party a week.
• Come early to your lesson and warm up. Practice time is also free! This is an important benefit that I don't see a lot of students taking advantage of. You'll get more out of your lesson time if you've warmed up and practiced a bit on your own beforehand.
• Keep a dance journal. We were told that more serious students did this, and now that we do it also, we can see the benefits. It really helps to review what you've learned, and writing out the ideas by hand helps you remember them better. We haven't got to the point of videoing our steps, but it could happen!
• Make friends and have fun. You are there to have fun, right? Moving to music is a pure, visceral joy. Everyone else is also there to have fun. Smile at all your dance partners in group lessons. Our studio is blessed with a diverse student body, and I think mutual encouragement is important to keeping everyone coming.

I hope your studio does not pressure you to participate in additional activities. These balls, festivals, showcases, or competitions are completely extra - do them if they make sense to you, at your comfort level. Don't respond to any high-pressure sales tactics, and if you experience such tactics from your instructor or the studio owner tell them directly that it is inappropriate when you've already committed to spending thousands of dollars with them. (I'm saying that I've experienced anything like this at our studio, but I have read some horror stories on the web...)

Tomorrow, Blanka and I dance in our first "Freestyles" and we are thrilled to do it, having passed up several earlier opportunities that were available to us. Now we are ready, and now we will have fun. We've geared up, bought some extra 'bling' for each of us and we're looking forward to showing off our skills and getting some constructive feedback on our progress. It is going to be a great, fun day! I hope you have a lot of fun days during your dance experience, and I hope these tips will help you.

Barhaminology: The Bioessentialist Manifesto

Over at his TheBestSchools.org blog, James Barham continues to entertain us with armchair philosophy. In this episode, his view of what biology is really all about.

Barham sets up two views, the Darwinian view, and the bioessentialist view. Guess which one he prefers?

The Darwinian View of Life

• There is no deep difference between living and nonliving matter; therefore, it is idle to seek “essential” properties or a “definition” of life.

• In any case, the most fundamental fact about a living thing is its ability to undergo natural selection.

The Bioessentialist View of Life

• There is a fundamental difference in kind between living and nonliving systems; the main task of biology is to understand the distinctive nature of living matter.

• The most fundamental fact about a living thing is its ability, by doing work selectively, to maintain itself in existence as the kind of physical system that it is.

Dismiss in passing Barham's purposeful confusion of Darwinism and materialism. Let's go to the videotape! Anyone remember the search for elan vital? It doesn't exist. Living things are made of the same atoms as non-living things. Use the same chemical reactions. Watch the same TV shows. Mr Barham seems to have forgotten that.


Oh, sorry, I didn't notice that the Darwinian was looking at 'matter' and the bioessentialist was looking at 'systems'. For a philosopher, Barham has a tough time setting up his comparisons.


"The main task of biology" - James Barham, armchair philosopher and web technician, has pronounced. It must be so.


"by doing work selectively," - selectively? A bacteria only eats half the available sugar? A virus only makes half the copies of itself that it could? Sperm cells only swim as much as they want? Barham might work selectively but it hardly qualifies as a definition of life.


(My own definition of life, FWIW: Life is a collection of molecules working together to avoid equilibrium for as long as possible.)


The essay is quite long and continues to be silly in the same vein. Genes are contrasted with proteins because metabolism is more important than reproduction. WTF? Since when was living forever an option? Metabolism explains the fossil record, biodiversity, the peacock's feathers and the panda's thumb?


Barham and his dog Marty are not, apparently, made of quarks descended from the Big Bang. Perhaps they were specially created 6,000 years ago. Who knew? Marty ain't made from no quarks! Reductionism is defeated.

For example, they are all explained at a more fundamental level by the Pauli exclusion principle.

Except when it is convenient.

In the case of a true machine, the functional order has nothing whatever to do with the matter out of which the machine is composed. It is imposed upon the matter entirely from without—by us. The material parts out of which a machine is made are supremely indifferent to the purpose the whole is designed by us to serve. Moreover, the stability of a machine resides in the rigidity—not the flexibility, much less the inherent intelligence—of its parts.
In contrast to what happens inside a machine, everything that goes on within a living being possesses an inherent purpose—namely, maintaining the organism in existence. That is the essential difference between living and nonliving things.

So living things are NOT machines. Just don't tell Polanyi and all those folks that want to argue that living things ARE machines, because machines are designed.


Don't quit the web job, James. Armchair philosophy, it ain't for you.

Someone Teach Ann Gauger to Google

Over at the blog of the Biologic Institute (the Discovery Institute's science-y wing), Ann Gauger has been writing regularly about molecules. Her April 30th post, Intricate Coordination, looked at the enzyme carbamoyl phosphate synthetase (CPS). Wow! CPS is complicated! It has two parts, three active sites, and an intramolecular tunnel. And here is Ann's take-away message:

How does a neo-Darwinian process evolve an enzyme like this? Even if enzymes that carried out the various partial reactions could have evolved separately, the coordination and combining of those domains into one huge enzyme is a feat of engineering beyond anything we can do. 

Well, how do we explain this?

First, by understanding that CPS is not a singular 'thing'. Like any biomolecule of any size, it comes in a variety of shapes and sizes throughout the different species of life. In fact, CPS performs an important role in the cell, and is therefore found across Bacteria, Archaea, and Eukarya. We can use CPS to draw a phylogeny, a tree of life. So the first part of an answer to Ann is yes, CPS does evolve. Evolution is the simplest explanation of the many versions of CPS found throughout living species.

Second, we can see that Ann's question is really a sense-of-wonder question. Parts, sites, a tunnel, a  lab under an extinct volcano, sharks with lasers, it is all so amazing. Yes, it is, even if it doesn't have those last two items. But "substrate channeling", as the cool kids call it, isn't unique to CPS. Lots of enzymes do it. Sometimes they use a tunnel of hydrophobic residues, sometimes hydrophillic residues. Sometimes the 'tunnel' is more of a path of favorable charges across the surface of the enzyme, sometimes it is a floppy arm that carries substrates from one place to another as it flops around. Not only has it evolved, it has evolved multiple times for different substrates.

These different functional mechanisms help to keep reactants from floating off into the cytoplasm, thereby increasing the speed and efficiency of an enzyme. AA residues facing into the tunnel can effect the speed with which molecules diffuse down its length, keeping the different parts of the reaction in sync. These qualify as huge selective pressures, so the second part of an answer to Ann is that evolution created these enzymes using the standard preference for higher functioning processes. Natural selection, you've heard of it, right?

Thirdly, we can understand the question to be one of, 'from what functional predecessor did CPS evolve?" If we look at CPS across the various species, it comes in two parts with separate functions, so right there we can see that these parts could have evolved separately, from less specialized or efficient predecessors. The larger of the two subunits, the part with two active sites, seems to have undergone a gene duplication event very early in its history. This subunit seems to have developed from a carbamate-kinase ancestor.

Putting it together, an answer to Ann's question is "Yes, CPS does evolve, by normal functional selection, from clear ancestors via well understood variational events."

"... a feat of engineering beyond anything we can do"? Ummm, no. Looking at the phylogeny, pretty much any branch is a sequence of exaptations, duplications, fusions, mutations, wash, rinse, repeat. Yeah, we can do that. As a matter of fact, we do do that. We've been poking at CPS for a while, pulling the genes apart, putting them back together, mutating it. It is the basic path to understanding how CPS works.

Now I will make a confession. I am not a biochemist or an evolutionary molecular biologist. But I do know how to use Google. Starting from "evolution carbamoyl phosphate synthetase" and ending with "evolution substrate channeling" I learned a lot about CPS very quickly, mostly with the help of papers published in the 1990's. Google is your friend. PubMed is your friend. 

Friends don't let friends blog stupid. Don't follow the path of Cornelius Hunter, he of the "Stuff's Complicated, Must Be Jeeebus" blog tic. Think about it, Ann.

No trend in tornadoes

This is my first post dipping a toe into the churning waters of climate change/global warming.

I saw a pretty visualization over at WUWT of tornado storm tracks, and decided to follow up with looking at the data myself. It is all available from the NOAA Storm Prediction Center site. (I normally go to WUWT for the comedy. The few earnest skeptics are mixed in with a vast number of loons.)

To estimate the energy of a single tornado, I multiplied the track length * the track width * (F+2)^1.5. This gave me a number I felt it was safe to add up across all tornadoes in a year.

Looking at all tornadoes, or at just the severe F4+F5 subset, I did not see any trend in the data when charted in Excel. That is my rough, first pass observation. There certainly are more tornado observations as time passes, but seeing many more small tornadoes isn't changing the big picture much.

Why might that be? Well, one thing that I can think of is that, as spectacular as tornadoes are, they don't actually account for a lot of energy. Or the GW effect might be to shift where and when the occur, not the strength when they do. Actual strength might be limited by some other constraint of atmospheric physics.

As I said above, there are many more tornadoes reported now compared to decades ago. Many commentators put this down to better observational data, the growth of populations in tornado prevalent areas, etc. If there is a GW aspect to number of tornadoes, it will be difficult to untangle from these issues.

TheBestSchools.org joins the Discovery Institute link farm

For a while, Uncommon Descent's resident flack (Denyse O'Leary) has linked in several blog entries from TheBestSchools.org's blog. TBS appears to be a web resource targeted at Christians choosing a college. The main site mixes articles on the 10 Best Nursing Programs with interviews with folks such as William Lane Craig. The blog, however, seems to be the sole province of James Barham.

Well, it used to be the sole province of James Barham. Now Denyse herself has begun posting there, and Barham's posts have begun cross-posting between TBS and the Discovery Institute's Evolution News and Views site.

I had hopes for TBS, since it seemed to allow comments and Barham seemed to be a nice fellow posting on intellectually interesting topics. Alas, after I registered and tried to post a comment it went from moderation to deletion without seeing the light of day. At this point, I would consider TBS (the blog at least) to be just another corner of the DI link farm.

When there is no good news for ID, quote an old book

It is a slow news day over at UncommonDescent. Actually, every day is a slow news day there, since there are no ID scientists doing ID research publishable in peer reviewed journals. So the UD news desk, Denyse O'Leary, dips into the pages of John Sanford's Genetic Entropy for an extended quote.

During the last century, there was a great deal of effort invested in trying to use mutation to generate useful variation. This was especially true in my own area – plant breeding. When it was discovered that certain forms of radiation and certain chemicals were powerful mutagenic agents, millions and million of plants were mutagenized and screened for possible improvements. Assuming the Primary Axiom (that the secies are merely the product of random mutations plus natural selection), it would seem obvious that this would result in rapid "evolution" of our crops. For several decades this was the main thrust of crop improvement research. Vast numbers of mutants were produced and screened, collectively representing many billions of mutation events. A huge number of small, sterile, sick, deformed, aberrant plants were produced. However, from all this effort, essentially no meaningful crop improvement resulted. The entire effort was a failure, and was eventually abandoned. – Genetic Entropy & the Mystery of the Genome , page 25

It is an interesting quote, and I'd like to address the ideas in it by referencing the development of high-yielding varieties of wheat and rice during the Green Revolution, work which took place during the same approximate time as Sanford refers to.

First, let us note that Sanford is going to trade upon the ambiguity in his phrase "random mutations plus natural selection". RM+NS, as it is often abbreviated in internet dialogs, can mean either any kind of genomic variation and any kind of selective pressure, or only the substitution of exactly one nucleotide for another in DNA and the survival of the fittest. When making a claim against "Darwinism" or "evolutionism" opponents imply the first, broad meaning. When asked to defend a claim, they retreat to the narrow meaning.

No modern scientist thinks nucleotide substitution alone built the genomes of every species alive, and those extinct. Reading the genomes of many species has shown how  groups of genes have been duplicated as groups, sometimes across species boundaries. Importantly for the case of useful plants, the entire genome of plants such as wheat and potatos has been duplicated more than once. Each cell of a wheat plant has six complete copies of its genome! These large scale restructurings are responsible for the rapid change in plant and animal evolution, compared to bacterial evolution.

Second, if we look at the Green Revolution - the rapid expansion of crop productivity around the world since World War II - we see that the main driver was new kinds of wheat and rice. These new cultivars grew shorter stems, which were mechanically stronger than previous wild-type long stems. The strength of the stem was important when the seed head grew bigger. Without a strong stem, the plant fell over (lodged).

The short stems are the result of point mutations in the genome. We've known this for a long time. We know that the mutations affect the growth signal processes, stunting growth compared to the wild-type plant. So Sanford is flat wrong to suggest that we have never found beneficial mutations in plants. He has a fig leaf to hide behind in that these mutations were found in naturally growing variants of wheat and rice. They were not induced by human radiation or chemical experiments.

Since we now know the size of the wheat genome, we could calculate the expected time until discovery of a beneficial mutation, using the techniques of radiation and chemical mutagenesis. I'm going to guess it would be on the order of millions of years, if each batch of seeds has to be grown and tested for increased function.

This is an essential contrast between the small bodied, asexual evolution of bacteria and the large bodied, sexual evolution of plants and animals. We do see rapid response to chemical stresses, such as anti-biotic resistance, in bacteria because the population being stressed is trillions of individuals. We can't test a population of trillions of plants or animals. Perhaps Sanford hasn't thought about the implications of that, or perhaps he has and would prefer to obfuscate them.

The idea that exposing pollen grains to radiation would advance the species is 'hopeful monster' thinking. That said, it worked! Dwarf wheat and rice have fed billions of people. Sanford's pessimism is misplaced.