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From the shared evolutionary history of microbes and humans to the modern impact of microbiomes on science and medicine, DeSalle and Perkins bore into the subject from the bottom up. “Our understanding of the unique events of divergence through common ancestry has molded the techniques and strategies we use today in modern medicine and microbiology,” they write in the book’s preface. “That is, knowing that we have common ancestry with the very organisms that often make us sick has led to new approaches to how we interact with various environments and keep ourselves healthy.”

The Paradox of Evolution: The Strange Relationship Between Natural Selection and Reproduction

Stephen Rothman
Prometheus Books, December 2015

The complex modes and mechanisms of reproduction that living things have evolved are not the results of natural selection. This potentially incendiary statement forms the hot nucleus of The Paradox of Evolution, the latest book from Stephen Rothman, emeritus professor of physiology at the University of California, San Francisco. Rothman argues that natural selection functions only to enhance the survival of an existing individual; it has nothing to do with reproduction, which concerns the continuance of life, not the continued survival of an individual.

Far from being a nonscientific refutation of Darwin’s theory of evolution, The Paradox is a nuanced and detailed rejection of the portion that says natural selection must give rise to reproductive features just as it does to the somatic features of organisms such as elongated necks or flattened heads. “But however complex, varied, and well developed our somatic adaptations have become, they are merely the handmaidens of reproduction,” Rothman writes. “As explained, survival is necessary for evolution, but it is not sufficient. What it does is make reproduction and hence life’s continuation possible. . . . If natural selection were responsible for the enormous variety and complexity of the mechanisms of reproduction that subsequently evolved, it had to have improved the circumstances of those engaged in the process, ergo the parents.”

Newton’s Apple and Other Myths about Science

Edited by Ronald L. Numbers and Kostas Kampourakis
Harvard University Press, November 2015

Scientific progress sometimes dispels mythologies. But science has also spawned its own mythology, and many of those myths persist today. Newton’s Apple seeks to expose lingering misconceptions about the precursors of modern science, about how science is conducted, and about leading researchers who pushed their fields forward. Doing so is crucial, according to the book’s editors, science historian Ronald Numbers and biologist Kostas Kampourakis. “One should care,” they write, “because historical myths about science hinder science literacy and advance a distorted portrayal of how science has been—and is—done.”

The falling apple that supposedly inspired Isaac Newton is the subject of but one of 27 chapters, each tackling a separate scientific myth, written by a cavalcade of 26 science historians and scientists in addition to the authors. One of the more interesting takedowns appears in a later chapter and involves the fallacy that there is such a thing as “the scientific method” in modern science. “To squeeze a diverse set of practices that span cultural anthropology, paleobotany, and theoretical physics into a handful of steps is an inevitable distortion and, to be blunt, displays a serious poverty of imagination,” writes Oregon State University science historian Daniel Thurs. “Scratch the surface of the scientific method and the messiness spills out.” How do you like them apples?

Dawn of the Neuron: The Early Struggles to Trace the Origin of Nervous Systems

Michel Anctil
McGill-Queen’s University Press, October 2015

The study of coelenterates—a group that includes jellyfish, comb jellies, anemones, and hydra—doesn’t typically make for riveting pop-sci reading. But in the hands of University of Montreal honorary biology professor Michel Anctil, the unassuming creatures take center stage as the birthplace of modern science’s appreciation of neurobiology. In Dawn of the Neuron, Anctil describes how early neuroscientists, armed with the dual insights of cell theory and evolutionary theory, used coelenterates and sponges to show that the building blocks of neural systems existed in the evolutionary ancestors of more complex organisms.

Anctil gives personality to animals once thought not that different from plants and brings back to life the labors of researchers who looked to those simple organisms to make groundbreaking discoveries, the reverberations of which are still felt today.

March: Aging

Aging is complex. It’s a whole-organism process that happens over a lifetime. It happens at the level of the genome—telomeres, DNA repair processes, and epigenetic modifications have all been linked to aging—as well as the level of proteins. Protein misfolding, mitochondrial dysfunction, and stem cell activity are also prime aging suspects. We at The Scientist tackled the diverse molecular dynamics underlying aging in the lead feature story in our special issue on aging. Two other features explored how diet affects aging and the role of retrotransposon-induced DNA damage. In the Literature section, we tackled collagen remodeling in C. elegans and growth-hormone signaling in mice. There’s no way we could have covered it all.

And there’s no way researchers will understand it all unless they are more open with their data, argues University College London and EMBL European Bioinformatics Institute postdoc Matthias Ziehm in an opinion piece on the need to share annotated longevity data. One question that the field is anxious to answer: How do we stay healthy as we live longer?

May: HIV

While today’s antiretroviral therapies keep HIV under control, there’s a long way to go before the virus can be considered defeated. One nagging problem is medicine’s inability to consistently and completely eliminate HIV from the body. The virus lurks in an inactive form that escapes detection by the immune system. Sussing out these hidden reservoirs will be critical to treat patients and eradicate HIV. Understanding where the virus replicates will also be important. Another major line of HIV research focuses on vaccine development. If we can prevent transmission, one day we won’t have to fight the infection.

September: Hearing

In the past four years we’ve dedicated one of our fall issues to the senses of taste, touch, smell, and sight. This year, we complete the survey of the five basic senses with a focus on hearing. The transduction of sound through the human outer, middle, and inner ears is a complicated and fascinating process. Current research on hearing ranges from how we got such abilities—a story of remarkable convergent evolution—to how to prevent and treat hearing loss and tinnitus.

The key players in animal hearing are the inner ear hair cells, which in mammals are arranged in a spiral organ of Corti. Exposure to certain medications, such as the chemotherapy drug cisplatin, can kill these cells, causing hearing loss, though sometimes the cells can regenerate.

Understanding these processes should support the development of new therapies for hearing loss, including improved ear and brain stem implants. Challenges remain, however—notably, the incredibly intricate system that is failing when someone loses his hearing, writes hearing researcher Bernd Fritzsch of the University of Iowa’s Center on Aging in an opinion article: “Piecing together such a complex and delicate organ is not as simple as growing new cells in a petri dish.”

November: Obesity

Nearly 70 percent of US adults are overweight, according to recent data from the National Center for Health Statistics; half of these people are obese. Worldwide, an estimated 2.2 billion adults are overweight or obese. It’s a problem we can’t ignore.

In addition to the elevated blood pressure and high levels of blood sugar and cholesterol that many overweight and obese people suffer, these individuals are also at increased risk for more deadly diseases such as cancer. “This year, obesity overtook smoking as the top preventable cause of cancer death in the U.S., with some 20 percent of the 600,000 cancer deaths per year attributed to obesity,” write the authors of our feature story on the link between obesity and cancer.

Fundamental questions remain. One is, what causes obesity? Some have pointed the finger at low doses of environmental chemicals, which can make animals gain weight. Obesity has also been linked to the gut microbiome. And, of course, we can’t overlook the importance of diet, though two opinions in this issue argue that obesity is not simply a problem of willpower, as it is often portrayed—it is a chronic disease.

Then, of course, there are the consequences of obesity. Fat can affect neural activity in the brain, diminish muscle performance, and trigger a fatty acid synthesis pathway that spurs T cell differentiation and inflammation. Sometimes, a little extra weight can have health benefits.

Finally, researchers are trying to figure out how to treat obesity. Bariatric surgery has come a long way since it was first implemented in the middle of the 20th century, sometimes with fatal outcomes. And pharmaceutical treatments for obesity are finally coming into their own.