Your teenager troubles you? Read on ...

It was an inconsequential, and yet a serious, chat with "S" about parenting and children.  Coming from different backgrounds and age didn't seem to matter at all when he and I speculated that the troubling adolescent behavior is coded somewhere in the human genes only to ensure that the child will wean away from the parent.  Else, given the unique ways in which humans take care of their young, well, this split might not happen--in an extreme case--and that could threaten the propagation.

Hey, every casual conversation doesn't have to be about politics, you know.

Speaking of which, did you catch this beauty from Bill Maher on the allegation in the book that Sarah Palin did cocaine?  Maher said, “Sarah Palin doing cocaine? That’s ridiculous. That stuff can make you yammer like an imbecile.”

Ok, stay focused here. Adolescent behavior. No, for the final time, this post on adolescent behavior is not about Palin :)

One of the typical adolescent attitude is towards risk--they seem to care less about actions that we older folks might think are way too risky.  

Teens take more risks not because they don't understand the dangers but because they weigh risk versus reward differently: In situations where risk can get them something they want, they value the reward more heavily than adults do.

Interesting.  I had always worked with the assumption that the teenage behavior is framed by the context of inadequate information about the risks.  But, if they are aware of the risks, at levels comparable to adult understanding, then it has tremendous implications for public policies too, right?  Ok, I am getting ahead of myself.  The researchers add:

"They didn't take more chances because they suddenly downgraded the risk," says Steinberg. "They did so because they gave more weight to the payoff."
Researchers such as Steinberg and Casey believe this risk-friendly weighing of cost versus reward has been selected for because, over the course of human evolution, the willingness to take risks during this period of life has granted an adaptive edge. Succeeding often requires moving out of the home and into less secure situations. "The more you seek novelty and take risks," says Baird, "the better you do." This responsiveness to reward thus works like the desire for new sensation: It gets you out of the house and into new turf.

Risks and the high that comes from novelty, which are further enhanced in the company of peers.  Gets them out of the parents' shadows:

The move outward from home is the most difficult thing that humans do, as well as the most critical—not just for individuals but for a species that has shown an unmatched ability to master challenging new environments. In scientific terms, teenagers can be a pain in the ass. But they are quite possibly the most fully, crucially adaptive human beings around. Without them, humanity might not have so readily spread across the globe.

A painful aspect in parenting.  But, a critical part of the remarkable success we humans have had as a species.

Hmmm ... so, "S" and I were really on to something in that casual chat; maybe I should forward this to him.

Destroying "Intelligent Design" into single-cells :)

I wish I had more time to read up on science articles that are not too complicated for me.  I am glad with this recommendation that Ron Bailey had.  This article, in the Journal of Eukaryotic Microbiology that offers a lit-review of the evidence that punctures the argument of the Intelligent Design folks.  And the evidence is all from the single-celled world! 

While it is true that I will not be able to comprehend the finer details of the terms used, I was blown away by this paragraph in that article:

When one considers the tremendous diversity of protistan forms (see Adl et al. 2005), the array of body plans among the Cambrian metazoa pales in comparison. In terms of biological diversity it can be argued that no group approaches that of the protists, especially if one considers that all the plants, fungi, and animals, including the famously diverse Coleoptera, are merely sub-groups of the protistan clades Archaeplastida and Opisthokonta (Adl et al. 2005). Even with the exclusion of the multicellular ‘‘higher’’ eukaryotes, the morphological and physiological diversity among protists is staggering. The major clades of protists contain everything from photosynthetic autotrophs to amitochondriate flagellates and are found in virtually every habitat on Earth (Foissner 2008). The extant diversity of the protists should therefore be seen as the ‘‘background radiation’’ of the eukaryotic Big Bang, with the Cambrian radiation of the metazoa being a subsequent event within a specific group.

I had no idea that there was such a tremendous diversity of those tiny single-celled critters.  The metaphor of the "background radiation" before the biological big bang also really, really appeals to me
And when I read the following paragraph, I thought how cool it will be if the DNA had some kind of a time-stamp on it!!!  I mean, that time-stamp alone can come in handy in everything from crime-scene-investigations to solving the puzzle of when life originated.  Hey, maybe it is encoded somewhere and we are yet to figure it out :-)

As readers of this journal know, DNA sequences are not like birth certificates, stamping an organism with the time and place of its origin. Ancestries inferred from DNA-based methods are founded on comparison of sequence or genomic data, evidence-based modeling of how DNA changes over time, and calculations of the most credible relationship between genetic sequences or patterns. This is just as true for variable number of tandem repeats (VNTR, or so-called ‘‘DNA fingerprint’’) analysis, which is broadly accepted in courts of law, as it is for deep phylogenetic analyses encompassing hundreds of millions of years of evolutionary history. For that matter, acceptance of ‘‘written geneaological records’ requires confidence that the records are not false or misread. Therefore, all methods for determining the history of an organism (except for the direct observation described in the previous section) require theory and well-grounded inference, just as stratigraphic analysis does; they stand or fall together.