To Believe or not to Believe? A College Student Explores Knowledge and Attitudes about Evolution at her School

After interviewing 17 students and four teachers at Drew University, a college of 1,400 undergraduates which I attend, I found that whereas most express a belief in evolution, many display a hesitancy to embrace the theory entirely. Instead, most students choose to believe only in evolution within lineages and not on a larger scale, specifically in the creation of new species. Teachers at the school explain that their experiences at Drew are similar to those they have experienced at other colleges they have taught at and discuss their methods for introducing the subject in the classroom and the significance of learning evolution. Furthermore, whereas it is easy for students to avoid taking biology classes that would expose them to the theory, I discuss what students look for when taking biology courses and preconceptions teachers must help students overcome when exposing them to evolution.     

Believe it or not, QTLs are accurate!

It is generally believed that mapping quantitative trait loci (QTLs) does not accurately position genes underlying polygenic traits on the genome, which limits the application of QTL analysis in marker-assisted selection and gene discovery. However, now that a few plant QTLs have been cloned or accurately tagged, it appears that they might be accurate to within 2cM or less. This means that there will be circumstances when map-based cloning using only original mapping data would be a realistic option that avoids time-consuming and expensive fine mapping. Acceptance of this view would enhance the value of past and future mapping experiments, particularly those revealing small and environmentally sensitive QTLs that are often considered intractable at the molecular level.     

Stratigraphy and Practical Reason

The organization of human behavior often defies utilitarian or practical reason. Inferences based in practical reason simplify behavioral variability and as a result obscure evidence of ritual organization contained in sequences of archaeological deposits. To expose such sequences, 1 offer a behaviorally based artifact life history approach to the study of prehistoric ritual stratigraphy. I illustrate this approach through a case study of ethnographic and archaeological evidence of ritual and warfare in the American Southwest. [Key words: theory, ritual, war, stratigraphy, Casas Grandes]     

To Cease or To Proliferate

Tor (Target of Rapamycin) pathway underlies a major signaling mechanism for controlling cell growth and proliferation1. Rheb (Ras homolog enriched in brain) is a small GTPase in the Tor pathway2-4. Similar to other small GTPases, Rheb cycles between a GTP-bound active state and a GDP-bound inactive state. TSC2 (Tuberous sclerosis complex 2), a gene mutated in an autosomal dominant disease Tuberous sclerosis, was shown to be the Rheb-GAP (GTPase activating protein)5, 6. However, a guanine nucleotide exchange factor (GEF) for Rheb had been missing. Human TCTP (Translationally controlled tumor protein) has been implicated in cancer, but its function in vivo has not been clearly elucidated. Recently we reported a molecular genetic characterization of TCTP function in Drosophila7. Drosophila TCTP (dTCTP) displays GEF activity to Rheb and is essential for Rheb activation in organ growth. Thus, our study provides a tight linkage of dTCTP to the Rheb-TOR pathway. In this addendum, we will briefly overview our findings and discuss our perspectives for future research on TCTP.     

Restaging the Will to Believe: Religious Pluralism, Anti-Syncretism, and the Problem of Belief

In this article, I examine anthropological conceptions of religious belief by concentrating on the problems that arise in employing them in socioreligious fields characterized by pluralism, a high degree of mobility in changing religious affiliation, and by what Rosalind Shaw and Charles Stewart have called "anti-syncretism" (1994). Instead of discarding the concept for anthropology, however, as some scholars have proposed, I suggest that indigenous discourses referring to and practices of belief represent an important field of anthropological inquiry, particularly as concerns non-Western forms of Christianity. In this article, I argue that people's ideas of and experiences with spiritual entities engender particular ways of talking about and practicing belief. Analyzing religious practices among the Zambian Gwembe Tonga, it is shown that some conceptual problems can be overcome by shifting the focus from belief as a stable and perpetual interior state of religious practitioners to the practice of cyclically regenerating a condition of internalized "believing."