16: The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature, Matt Ridley

Yeah! Good stuff! Melissa recommended this.

Cute things I learned:

• Bdelloid rotifers and tardigrades can survive years in a dried state.
  
• Muller's ratchet: the genome of an asexually reproducing population accumulates defects in a non-reversible manner.
  
• Thomas Ray's Tierra: an early 1990's computer simulation (without an artificial fitness function).
  
• Histocompatibility: having the same alleles of a particular set of genes (the major histocompatibility complex or MHC). The genes are expressed in most tissue as antigens to which the immune system may make antigens. The immune system of the host will, of course, not do so. Transplant operations are trivial (well...) for histocompatible tissue. The cool bit is that plants use a form of histocompatibility to prevent inbreeding. Pollen histocompatible with the female plant causes zygotes to fail to grow or die soon after germination. Bitchin'!
  
• Some bamboos flower once every 121 years—at the same time the world over!
  
• Bilharzia (Schistosomiasis): caused by one of five species of Platyhelminthes Trematoda. Trematoda are just crazy. From wikipedia:

  Trematodes have a complex life cycle, often involving several hosts. The eggs pass from the host with the feces. When the eggs reach water, they hatch into free-swimming forms called miracidia. The miracidia penetrate a snail or other molluscan host to become sporocysts. The cells inside the sporocysts typically divide by mitosis to form rediae. Rediae, in turn, give rise to free-swimming cercariae, which escape from the mollusk into water. Using enzymes to burrow through exposed skin, cercariae penetrate another host (often an arthropod) and then encyst as metacercariae. When this host is eaten by the definitive host, the metacercariae excyst and develop and the life cycle repeats

  
  
• Tragedy of the Commons: conflict of resources between individual interests and the common good. Term first used by William Forster Lloyd in his 1833 book on population. The commons were communal land owned for grazing. The individual benefits from letting its flock graze as much as it wishes. The community benefits from everybody holding back their flock a bit, to prevent over-grazing.
  
• Chlamydomonas: I've forgotten why these were interesting.
  
• Cholesterol is a precursor for both testosterone and cortisol. I once knew this.
  
• Steroid hormones (like testosterone and cortisol) lower the immune system's efficiency. (Can cause and effect be reversed?) This is why men are more susceptible to infectious diseases.
  

I will need to re-read at some point, because there's lots of interesting stuff that merits further digging. There was the crazy organism with 13 ordered sexes, for instance. Brilliant!