Why isn’t everyone beautiful, smart and healthy? Or, in a less-polite formulation, why haven’t ugly, stupid, unhealthy people been bred out of the population—ugly people because no one will have them as mates, meaning they don’t get the chance to pass their ugliness to the next generation; stupid people because they’re outgunned in the race to financial success (that is, acquiring resources needed to survive and reproduce); unhealthy people because they die before they get a chance to reproduce?

Evolutionary theory predicts that the unfeeling hand of natural selection would lead to a culling of disadvantageous traits—or, as biologists more delicately phrase it, “depletion of genetic variation in natural populations as a result of the effects of selection.”

But look around, and you’ll see that that has not happened—not in people, and not in wild animals where homely and infirm offspring are born all the time.

Evolutionary geneticists try to explain this paradox by positing that mutations for disadvantageous traits keep popping up no matter how hard natural selection attempts to wipe them out, but in their more honest moments the scientists admit that in real life undesirable traits are way more common than this mechanism would account for; “ugly” mutations just don’t occur that often. In a groundbreaking study, biologists at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland have figured out why, at least in one species: genes that are good for males are bad for females and, perhaps, vice versa.

The scientists studied red deer, 3,559 of them from eight generations, living on Scotland’s Isle of Rum. They carefully noted each animal’s fitness, who mated with whom, how many offspring survived, which offspring mated and with what results. Bottom line: “male red deer with relatively high fitness fathered, on average, daughters with relatively low fitness,” Edinburgh’s Katharina Foerster and her colleagues conclude in tomorrow’s issue of the journal Nature. “Male red deer with a relatively high lifetime [fitness, which includes their reproductive success, the only thing evolution cares about] sired, on average, daughters with a relatively low [fitness].” The reverse also holds. Males that were relatively less successful in their reproductive success and fitness had daughters that were extra successful.

The reason is that any particular gene-based trait may have very different effects on males than in females. Extrapolating to humans (and oversimplifying, sorry) you might imagine that a particular shape of the nose or turn of the chin would look drop-dead hunky on a male, but horsey on a woman; dad got to mate because his looks attracted a female, but the result of their togetherness produced daughters whose pulchritude was less than obvious. Traits that evolutionary psychologists tell us make women unfit for mating (having the “wrong” shape) remain abundant in the human race because the DNA for the traits, when inherited by sons, confers a selective advantage; when those sons have daughters, presto—more females with less-than-hourglass shapes. Or as the Edinburgh biologists put it, “optimal genotypes differ between male and female red deer, because a genotype that produces a male phenotype with relatively high fitness will, on average, produce a phenotype with lower fitness when expressed in a female.”

On the ever-shrinking list of behaviors unique to humans, one stands out: selfless altruism.

Or so scientists thought. Even as they dismiss many of the kindnesses we do for others as selfish rather than selfless (that is, we help someone because we expect, even subconsciously, a favor in return one day, or because it makes us feel good), they concede that humans have the capacity to act on behalf of others even when there is no prospect of personal gain and even if it comes at a cost. In that, supposedly, we are unique.

Just as tool use and weaponry and culture and symbolic communication were once thought to be unique to humans but have now been found in chimps and other species, however, so has altruism. In a study in the open-access (that is, free) journal PLoS Biology, biologists led by Felix Warneken of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology found that chimpanzees act altruistically toward unrelated and unfamiliar chimps, with no expectation of reward and even when some effort is required.

That was supposed to be the sole province of Homo sapiens. Chimps do nice things for each other—they share food, groom their friends, console troop-mates and form alliances against opponents—but in every case the action can be explained by increasing the chance that the do-gooder will either be on the receiving end of such a kindness in the future (you groom me, I’ll groom you) or will increase the chance that his relatives will survive and reproduce.

Still, there had been hints of pure altruism. In a 2006 study, for instance, scientists reported that chimpanzees helped their human caregiver fetch objects she was unable to reach. This was the first experimental evidence that chimps are capable of altruistic helping, but even it came with an asterisk: maybe the chimps hoped to eventually be rewarded for their kindness, which would make it less-than-pure altruism.

Finally, a genetically-modified food for the rest of us.

The first food marketed as genetically-modified (the overwhelming majority of such foods are not so labeled) was a tomato called the Flavr Savr introduced in 1993. Even though consumers said they liked the taste, the Flavr Savr bombed in the grocery store, and ever since almost all genetically-engineered crops (or Frankenfoods, as some opponents call them) have aimed to appeal to farmers, not consumers. The “transgenic” foods contain genes for traits such as tolerance to herbicides (so farmers can soak their fields in the poisons, making weed control easier) and resistance to insects (so they can use fewer insecticides to manage infestations). Not surprisingly, consumers leery of genetically-modified (GM) foods wondered, what’s in it for us?

Scientists in Israel have an answer. Writing in the current issue of the journal Nature Biotechnology, Efraim Lewinsohn and colleagues slipped a gene called Ocimum basilicum geraniol synthase into tomato seeds. The gene is a bit of an alchemist, turning one of the tomato’s biochemicals into another. The newly-formed compound, called geraniol, has “an intense rose scent,” the scientists write, and is a precursor to the biocompounds geranial and neral, both of which smell sort of lemony, as well as nerol, citronellol, geraniol ester and citronellol acetate ester, all of which smell like roses.

Buzz Aldrin didn't get to be the first man to set foot on the moon--that privilege went to Neil Armstrong--but he did get his own first. After Armstrong took his historic "one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind" during the 1969 Apollo 11 mission, it was Aldrin's turn to back down the steps of the lunar landing module toward the dusty surface. NASA had told the astronauts to move slowly, Aldrin recalls. So in between steps, he decided he had a moment to, as he delicately puts it, fill the liquid-waste bag inside his space suit. Believe me, you will never again look at the footage of Aldrin slowly descending the steps and pausing almost imperceptibly to stake a claim to his own first the same way again. "Everyone has their own first on the moon, and that one hasn't been disputed," Aldrin says.

If you want to see and hear astronauts as you've never seen and heard them before, see "In the Shadow of the Moon." At the 2007 Sundance film festival, it won the World Cinema Audience Award, and also picked up prizes for Best Documentary and Outstanding Achievement in Filmmaking at this year's Sedona International Film Festival, the Audience Award for Best Documentary at the Indianapolis International Film Festival, and the Grand Prize at the Boulder International Film Festival. It won't be released in theaters until September, but put it on your calendar now: director David Sington got 10 of the 12 astronauts who walked on the moon to open up as never before. He pairs their reminiscences with space footage that you'd swear is simulated, but it's real: Sington and his crew dug through thousands of hours of NASA archives for scenes in space, at mission control and inside the Apollo spacecraft that have never been shown to the public.

Between 1969 and 1972, from Apollo 11 to Apollo 17, six missions deposited astronauts on the surface of another world. Maybe it's the passage of time, maybe it's the perspective that comes with age, but the astronauts Sington filmed have thrown off the old "right stuff" taciturnity and toe-the-NASA-line reticence. Jim Lovell, best known as the commander of the aborted Apollo 13 mission (Tom Hanks played him; Lovell himself had a cameo at the end as the commander of the naval ship that picked up the crew once they finally landed safely in the Pacific), remembers how he and other astronauts felt at the time President Kennedy declared it the nation's mission to land a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s: "At the time, the Atlas boosters were blowing up every other day at Canaveral. It looked like a good way to have a very short career."

Of course the press whines when government scientists won’t talk to reporters. Now the government itself—well, at least the congressional branch—has noticed the same problem. The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) has released a report concluding that three federal agencies that conduct scientific research, including NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the latter of which is the home of much of the nation’s climate research, do a darn good job of preventing government scientists from telling the public what they’ve discovered.

Since it’s the public that pays for the research, this is kind of like hiring a roofer to tell you what’s going on with your flashing and having him clam up on you.

The GAO, the investigative arm of Congress, surveyed 1,811 randomly-selected researchers at three agencies. It found that 102 at NASA and 76 at NOAA have been barred from publicizing their research results. (This did not include those who were shut down for valid reasons, such as that the study did not pass technical muster.)

If you think spring has been arriving earlier, you’re right: although nothing has changed in Earth’s orbit, and the balance of day and night hours has not shifted, the warmth associated with spring has been tiptoeing in sooner than it did 40 years ago, Cornell University scientists reported in 2004 in the International Journal of Biometeorology (see also my June 4 column on how climate change is affecting airborne plant allergens). Models of climate change predict that the planet’s polar regions will feel the impact of a warmer world more than other regions, and an earlier spring, it now turns out, is no exception: in the arctic, winter is giving way to spring weeks earlier than it did just a decade ago, scientists report in Current Biology .

“Arctic environments are and will be exposed to the greatest warming,” says Toke T. Høye of the National Environmental Research Institute, University of Aarhus, Denmark, who led the research. “Our study confirms what many people already think, that the seasons are changing and it is not just one or two warm years but a strong trend seen over a decade.”

The scientists studied the timing of such signs of spring as when plants bloom, butterflies emerge and birds undergo seasonal migration. Most such studies had focused on seasonal shifts in temperate regions, finding that spring has advanced 2.5 days per decade for European plants and 5.1 days per decade for animals and plants globally over the last 40 or so years.

“I feel your pain” is often meaningless pablum, but for some people with unusual brain wiring it is literally true.

People with a condition called mirror-touch synesthesia experience the sensation of being touched when they see someone else being touched. (In other forms of synesthesia, one sensory experience—feeling or hearing, for instance—triggers a wholly different one, such as seeing. As a result, the estimated 1-in-200 people who have synesthesia see particular colors when they hear particular musical notes, or see shapes when they process aromas, or always see specific letters or numbers in the same particular color, so that a P is always lemon yellow and a 5 always mauve. One synesthete told me that a roast chicken in citrus sauce is perfectly cooked when it "looks pointed.”) A new study finds that mirror-touch synesthetes have an unusually strong ability to empathize with others. More than a mere curiosity, the finding hints that empathy may arise from the brain’s ability to feel what it sees.

In 2002 scientists established, with brain imaging, that synesthesia arises from crossed-wiring. In synesthetes who see colors when they hear spoken words, the brain region that processes color in standard brains is also activated by words. Neuroscientists’ best guess is that synesthesia arises when the developing brain fails to prune the millions of extra connections, or synapses, that we are all born with and that standard brains eliminate in childhood; the result is a rich web of circuitry that connects touch areas and visual areas, or sound regions with vision regions, or other sensory combinations.

Alas, poor Pluto, the dissing just keeps on coming.

Last year, the erstwhile ninth planet was demoted because astronomers had discovered a nearby object, now officially named Eris, that was larger in diameter than Pluto. (According to the latest measurements, Eris is 2,400 kilometers across, compared to Pluto’s 2,200.) If Pluto was a planet, then so was Eris—making it the tenth.

But instead of taking that route, which would have opened membership in the club of planets to other large objects such as the asteroid Ceres and Pluto’s own moon Charon, astronomers decided to get pickier about what defines a planet. Pluto would hence be a “dwarf planet,” one that orbits the Sun but that has insufficient mass to “gravitationally dominate” its region of the solar system—that is, enough mass to sweep away other stuff orbiting there. But heck, at least Pluto was the heftiest, most massive dwarf.

Pluto fans who never got over last year’s ouster had better brace themselves. In a paper in tomorrow’s issue of the journal Science, astronomers Michael Brown (who discovered Eris in 2003) and Emily Schaller of the California Institute of Technology report that Eris, having gotten Pluto kicked out of the club of planets, is at it again. Using the Hubble Space Telescope and the telescope at the Keck Observatory, the Caltech astronomers calculate that Eris has a mass 27 percent greater than Pluto’s. That puts its density at 2 grams per cubic centimeter, suggesting a composition of ice and rock very similar to Pluto. “In addition to being the largest, Eris is also the most massive known dwarf planet,” the scientists write. Any hope that Eris is an air head—all diameter and no heft—is now gone.

“This was Pluto’s last chance to be the biggest thing found so far in the Kuiper belt,” said Brown. “There was a possibility that Pluto and Eris were roughly the same size, but these new results show that it’s second place at best for Pluto.”

Pluto could not be reached for comment.

This guy was not playing by the rules.

Most theories of dinosaur evolution say that carnivorous dinosaurs, the ancestors of today’s birds, got smaller as they became more bird-like. But the remains of a new species and genus of dinosaur, discovered in Inner Mongolia and announced at a press conference in Beijing this morning, throw a wrench into that idea.

Gigantoraptor, as he has been named, is surprisingly bird-like in his skeleton, and probably had feathers. He lived in the Late Cretaceous about 70 million years ago, and an analysis of his skeleton puts him in the same family as the beaked, bird-like Oviraptor, say Xing Xu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, who led the discovery, and colleagues. By all rights, a birdlike dinosaur should have been evolving toward the size of birds living today—if not crows, then at least emus.

Gigantoraptor stood about 3.5 meters (10 feet) high at its shoulder, twice the height of a person today. He stretched 8 meters (24 feet) in length and weighed in at 1,400 kilograms (3,000 pounds). Or, in an artist’s conception,

Artist's reconstruction of Gigantoraptor with much smaller feathered ornithomimids. Credit: Zhao Chuang and Xing Lida/IVPP

 (Our boy is the dino on the far left.)

When educators and corporate leaders bemoan America's scientific illiteracy, they're usually referring to how we're losing our competitive edge in science and technology (see, for instance, the 2006 report from the National Academy of Sciences, "Rising Above the Gathering Storn,") or to the fact that fewer than a third of adult Americans know that DNA is the molecule of heredity, that only 10 percent know what radiation is and that 20 percent think the Sun revolves around Earth. But more and more, scientists grappling with the question of what you need to know about science to participate in civic discourse are concluding that the need is more fundamental: you need to know what science is, what it is not, and what it can and cannot answer.

And on that, there is ignorance at the highest levels.

When three Republican presidential hopefuls raised their hands during the recent debate to indicate they "didn't believe in evolution," as moderator Chris Matthews put it, biologist Jerry Coyne was appalled (though not necessarily surprised). As he writes in a scathing--though more in sorrow than in anger--essay, "Because there is just as much evidence for the fact of evolution as there is for the existence of atoms, anyone raising his hand must have been grossly misinformed." But while some of the hand-raising could have been the result of political calculation (more than half of Americans don't believe in Darwinian evolution, and it's always good strategy to be in sync with the majority), when Sen. Sam Brownback expanded on his hand-raising in a New York Times op-ed, the extent of his science ignorance was impossible to ignore.

Now that evolution has become an issue in the presidential campaign (in the May 3 debate among Republican presidential hopefuls, when moderator Chris Matthews asked if any candidates did not “believe in” evolution, three hands—Tom Tancredo’s, Sam Brownback’s and Mike Huckabee’s—shot up), it is always amusing when biologists put another brick in the solid wall that is evolution. The latest comes from a study in which researchers discovered clues to the evolutionary origins of the nervous system.

For anyone who just arrived from Neptune, the “nuanced” stance against evolution—that is, the one that doesn’t make you look like a complete Neanderthal—is to note that of course you know that microevolution occurs, with bacteria evolving resistance to antibiotics and mosquitoes to pesticides, for instance. It’s macroevolution—in which one species evolves into another—that gives you pause since, after all, who has seen such a thing?

The intelligent design camp also argues that some biological structures are just too darn sophisticated to have evolved through random mutation and natural selection. They must therefore have been designed by an intelligent agent. In particular, since complex structures have lots of components, how could the components have been just hanging around for eons waiting for the final component to emerge? Think of it this way: if you don’t already have all the other components of a mousetrap, why would you keep a spring around? A spring is only useful if you also have the base, the bar and the rest. This is the argument called “irreducible complexity,” and it has proved very persuasive to the public.

It’s always dangerous to base your argument on some version of “scientists have never found X” (with X in this case being components of a complex structure existing and serving a function before the rest of the components showed up). That’s because those darn scientists keep making discoveries. If you want to say they “have never found . . . ,” you’d better understand that what you really mean is “they haven’t found it yet.”

A recent email gave me hope that innocence was not dead yet. The sender, a scientist, waxed indignant that I suggested in a recent column that the source of funding can affect the results of experiments. She assured me that the scientific method is strong enough to resist any such pressure.

Imagine my dismay, then, when I saw a study in tonight’s issue of PLoS Medicine which found that the identity of the sponsor of a study of the effectiveness of statins, the blockbuster cholesterol-lowering drugs, affected the study’s conclusions. Specifically, in nearly 200 head-to-head comparisons of statins such as Lipitor or Crestor or Mevacor, the results were more likely to favor the sponsor’s product than the competition: in 66 percent of the studies the sponsor’s drug came out ahead, compared to 10 percent in which the competitor’s drug did. (Other studies were government-funded.)

Why the disparity? Not clear, admit Lisa Bero and colleagues at the University of California, San Francisco. One possibility is that drug companies choose lower dosages for the comparison drug. A more likely one, it seems to me, is the file-drawer effect: if the results aren’t what you hoped, instead of writing it up and sending it off for publication in a medical journal you just file it away, never again to see the light of day (or print). Read it for yourself, here (the PLoS journals have the enlightened policy of making all their papers free; no subscription or per-article fee required). I especially liked this graph:

Maybe it’s not innocence that isn’t dead . . . but naivety.

A favorite tactic of right-wing activists opposed to research with human embryonic stem cells is to sneer something like, “ah, it’ll never work, and you’ll have killed (sic) all those babies (sic) for nothing.” While scientists have been known to exaggerate the potential benefits of their research, when it comes to stem cells they have actually been pulling back, trying to inject a dose of reality into the hope/hype machine that has convinced big chunks of the public that cures for stroke, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and other awful brain diseases are just around the corner—the corner where stem cell studies break free of the shackles President George Bush imposed on them in August 2001.

Except that their studies keep showing that barriers to using stem cells therapeutically are not insurmountable at all. In the latest coup, researchers have transplanted human neural stem cells into the brains of rats and mice, traced the cells’ travels, and found that they navigate toward areas damaged by stroke. Stanford neuroscientist Gary Steinberg and colleagues were able to trace the cells’ travels because they slipped minuscule bits of iron inside the cells so that MRI could detect them. As the scientists are reporting tonight in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the iron doesn’t hurt the cells: the neural cells behaved just as they without the iron. That suggests that a similar tag could be used safely if stem cells are transplanted into human patients, allowing physicians to track their progress.