

Humans evolving to escape from bacterial iron piracy - gk1
http://arstechnica.com/science/2014/12/yarr-humans-evolving-to-escape-from-bacterial-iron-piracy/

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teddyh
It annoys me when people try to look intelligent by inserting literary
references without actually knowing what they are talking about, either by not
remembering nor bothering to look it up, or never having read it in the first
place, simply guessing and make stuff up. Any one of them are by themselves
indicators of poor journalistic practice. What else did the article’s author
not check or simply make up?

> _Alice Liddell first encounters the Red Queen in Chapter 2 of Through the
> Looking Glass. Alice tries to catch her, but although they each run faster
> and faster, neither of them ever gets anywhere._

Although the writer of the article specifically references chapter 2, they
obviously did not read it, nor even glance at the illustrations.

1\. The character in the book is only ever named as “Alice”. The real person
which the author knew, and on which the character “Alice” is based, was indeed
named “Alice Liddell”, but they are not one and the same.

2\. Alice does _not_ try to “catch” the Red Queen. In fact, Alice and the
Queen are running _hand in hand_ , and it is the Red Queen which urges Alice
to go “ _Faster! Faster!_ ”. The accompanying illustration shows the Red Queen
running and holding Alice’s hand, dragging her behind her since Alice has
trouble keeping up.

~~~
magicalist
> _It annoys me when people try to look intelligent by inserting literary
> references_

Besides the old middlebrow dismissal question you should be asking yourself
before posting ("is that the _most_ interesting thing one can say about this
article?"[1]), let me ask you this: is the distinction you're making here at
all material to the article?

Did you consider the possibility that the author hasn't read _Through the
Looking-Glass_ in a while (a "Ph.D. in Cell Biology and Genetics" means you
have to put off a good bit of recreational reading for a number of years) and
thought that the explanation was close enough as background information about
why a 40-year-old, fairly famous evolutionary theory is named the way it was?

And again I'll ask: do either of the author's two mortal sins you've pointed
out in any way change the aptness of the metaphor or give the audience an
incorrect impression of why it was named the way it was? Because I'm pretty
sure they don't.

Sorry if I'm a little heated, but you might say it annoys me when people try
to look intelligent by dismissing interesting things by nitpicking irrelevant
details. Or maybe we shouldn't assume people's motives ("try to look
intelligent"? seriously?), grant a little principle of charity, leave a
correction for the author, and then engage in actually interesting
conversation.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4693920](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4693920)

~~~
gus_massa
A more technical error is in

> [...] _that transferrin has undergone positive evolutionary selection in a
> manner often seen in molecular arms races between mammals and viruses._

but all the discussion is about bacteria. Bacteria and virus are very
different, so the strategies against them are very different too. (I'm not a
biologist, but this strategy to sequester iron while in transit looks like
unuseful against virus, because the virus is only active inside the infected
cells. IANAB.)

~~~
hyperpape
I took it that the point was that evolutionary races might leave similar
evolutionary histories whether they races against bacteria or viruses, not
that the same iron mechanism had anything to do with viruses.

------
ars
Sounds like TbpA would make an excellent target for an antibiotic.

~~~
hga
Not necessarily.

The one bit of actual research I was able to do (in the late '70s) was in a
lab that had serendipitously discovered a new iron scavenging mechanism in _E.
Coli_. If you put it in a sufficiently iron poor environment (e.g. all the
glassware was treated with HCL and then bathed for days in deionized water) it
would synthesize a previously unknown iron binding protein and grab what it
could.

So we shouldn't assume this is the only way many bacteria can get iron, but
it's perhaps worth checking out. And a focus on iron in general might be a
fruitful approach.

