text:
Five cheapest places to purchase property in Ireland
James O'Shea
Beautiful Donegal: Thinking of buying a vacation home in Ireland. Here's country's most affordable locations.Getty
Wishing you could buy a vacation home in Ireland but thinking you could never afford it? Think again. Some of Ireland's remote beauty spots are going for dirt cheap, according to the Irish Independent.
Local agents in each county explain why these areas have the most depressed property values.
Here are Ireland's five cheapest locations to buy property within the last two years:
5. Donegal
Average Price of a Four-Bedroom Bungalow: €144,000 ($197,000)
Average Price Three-bed semi: €69,000 ($94,500)
Ireland's wildest county is also one of Ireland's cheapest. With its scattered population and lack of a major town, Donegal's median sale price of property is way below the national average.
Brendan McGee, director of Franklins estate agents in Letterkenny, says that areas in west Donegal – Glenties, Gweedore, Dungloe and Ardara for instance – have the lowest property prices.
"The towns and villages on the periphery of the county have been absolutely decimated by emigration, so there's no demand for properties in those areas any more," he said.
He adds that Northern holiday-home buyers are not interested in those regions because they're harder to reach than more popular areas such as Rathmullan, Dunfanaghy or Downings.
McGee says that property in Letterkenny, the main county town, is also undersold. "On average it costs about €120,000 or €130,000 to build a three- or four-bed semi. Arguably there's no three- or four-bed semi in Letterkenny worth more than €100,000 at the moment."
He blames a flood of residential investment properties being released onto the market by receivers and banks, for keeping a cap on values. "I suppose you could say it's also fast-tracking a process, but we're five years into now."
4. Cavan
Cavan County
Average Price of A Four-bed bungalow: €132,000 ($181,000)
Average Price of A Three-bed semi: €64,000 ($88,000)
Although west Cavan boasts some of the most beautiful scenery in Ireland, areas like Belturbet Ballyconnell and Bawnboy are just too far off the beaten path, said Eugene O'Dwyer of DNG O'Dwyer in Virginia, Co Cavan.
"The day of scenic is gone, I'm afraid. It's all about location. That's what sells property at the minute. West Cavan is just that bit too far away from Dublin," he said.
Peter Donohoe of REA Peter Donohoe told the Irish Independent that property in the area is "absolutely cheaper than it should be."
Evidence suggests some homes in the county are now selling for less that it would cost to construct them.
3. Leitrim
Boats docked in Leitrim Village.
Average Price of a Four Bed Bungalow: €120,000 ($164,000)
Ireland's most underpopulated county also has the most ghost estates per head of population, according to a census taken in 2010.
Many of Leitrim's population emigrated in the 20th century due to the county's generally poor agricultural land, leaving behind many empty homes. Rural renewal housing incentives in remote areas followed, making matters worse.
Like Cavan, Leitrim main economic activity comes from tourism.
The Leitrim end of Cavan and the Cavan end of Leitrim are where prices are lowest, say agents.
Leitrim's demand is greatest around Carrick-on-Shannon, and lowest in the east of the county, around Carrigallen, said agent Peter Donohue.
Donohue added that the demand for lettings were high and that sales were increasing.
"People are beginning to realize that it's quite a good buy because property is cheap here, and naturally if it's cheaper now there's a better chance it'll improve as time goes on," he said.
2. Roscommon
Roscommon town
Average Price of A Four- bedroom bungalow: €116,000 ($159,000)
Average Price of Three-bed semi: €56,000 ($77,000)
Tax incentives left Roscommon with the country's second highest number of ghost estates.
"There's an overbuild of developments because of Section 23. That's the history of it. Towns like Tulsk, Castlerea, Rooskey, Strokestown – any of these towns have three or four developments sitting on the edge of them," said John Earley of Property Partners Earley in Roscommon.
He added that houses in Roscommon town sell at about 25pc below construction cost; in Tulsk or Boyle or Strokestown, they sell for about 50pc below building cost.
Much of the county's property is being purchased now by foreign buyers.
"Of the last seven or eight sales I've made, I had an American purchaser, at least six English purchasers and one Irish," he said.
1. Laois
Rock of Dunamas, Laois
Laois comes in as the cheapest place to buy property in Ireland.
Farm-rich, flat Laois differs from the other four counties on this list in that it isn't a holiday home destination, says local agent Matt Dunne of Matt Dunne & Associates in Portarlington.
There's not much scenic interest in the midland county, he says. "And we're only an hour from Dublin – why would you have a holiday home here?"
In its heyday, the county's property market was sustained by Dublin commuters, but the economic crash ended the location's appeal.
"We used to get a hundred phone calls a day. Then the phone calls went down to 10 a day," said Dunne.
"What happened was that the cost of commuting became too expensive – the cost of fuel. And anyway they didn't need to come down this far because property prices in Dublin were so cheap relatively."
However, Dunne says he is encouraged by rising house prices in Dublin.
"It's great to see a bubble, if you want to call it that, in Dublin because of the domino effect. If it's a big bubble in Dublin then it's a smaller bubble in Naas and a smaller bubble in Newbridge and eventually it finds its way down to Laois.
"We need demand like that in Dublin for us to survive. We're just hanging on to the coattails. And nothing functions down here, almost, without it. If we're relying on the local trade at the moment there's nothing going to happen."
* Originally published in September 2014.


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Home » Research Talks » Evolution
The Evolution of Neural Circuits and Behaviors
Part 1: Introduction to Evolution
00:00:07.24	Hi. My name is Melina Hale.
00:00:09.08	I'm a professor at the University of Chicago.
00:00:11.14	In my lab, we study neurobiology,
00:00:13.10	biomechanics,
00:00:14.22	and evolution.
00:00:16.09	I'm going to present two different topics.
00:00:18.12	The first is an introduction to evolution.
00:00:22.12	Then we'll go on to talk about
00:00:24.10	a specific example from my lab
00:00:26.26	of how we map the nervous system
00:00:29.20	and aspects of the nervous system
00:00:31.12	onto the evolution of animals.
00:00:33.18	We work in my lab, specifically,
00:00:35.06	on vertebrate animals,
00:00:36.18	things like fish and tetrapods,
00:00:38.17	mammals, and reptiles,
00:00:40.27	and so I'm going to focus on that
00:00:43.07	part of biodiversity
00:00:45.07	in my talks.
00:00:46.22	There's a lot of other organisms out there, of course,
00:00:49.08	invertebrates, and insects, and plants,
00:00:51.18	and microbes,
00:00:52.26	that we won't touch on in these lectures.
00:00:55.26	So, we'll start with this introduction into evolution.
00:00:58.10	What is evolution?
00:01:00.05	Now, Charles Darwin
00:01:02.13	originally proposed the theory of evolution,
00:01:05.00	which can be summarized
00:01:06.27	in a very succinct phrase:
00:01:08.14	descent with modification.
00:01:10.05	Now, let's break that down a little bit, though,
00:01:12.17	to a broader definition,
00:01:14.22	which is change in the heritable characteristics
00:01:17.10	of organisms
00:01:18.29	from generation to generation.
00:01:20.29	We can break that down
00:01:22.13	even further to look at
00:01:24.11	the component parts of that sentence.
00:01:25.18	First, if we think about
00:01:27.03	this idea of generation to generation,
00:01:29.12	that means that when we look at evolution,
00:01:31.05	we're really not talking about changes
00:01:33.00	in individuals
00:01:34.17	or over short time frames.
00:01:36.01	Instead, we're talking about
00:01:38.04	changes that we see
00:01:39.28	over a long history
00:01:41.23	of the descent of an organism over time.
00:01:45.11	What about heritable characteristics?
00:01:47.04	Well, we all have lots of characteristics
00:01:49.01	to our bodies.
00:01:51.02	We may have big muscles
00:01:52.24	if we exercise a lot,
00:01:54.09	we may have had injuries in our lifetime
00:01:56.11	that have given us scars.
00:01:57.21	Those are not heritable characteristics.
00:02:00.10	Heritable characteristics
00:02:02.02	are the types of traits
00:02:03.19	that we pass on to subsequent generations,
00:02:06.11	or that we inherited from our parents
00:02:08.29	and grandparents.
00:02:12.15	are an important part of evolution,
00:02:14.11	because it allows transmission
00:02:17.12	from one generation to the next,
00:02:18.24	and on and on through evolutionary history.
00:02:21.23	Now, the last part of this is change,
00:02:23.29	and change is also really important.
00:02:26.08	There has to be the ability in evolution
00:02:29.05	for these heritable characteristics
00:02:30.29	to vary,
00:02:32.21	to change in response to environmental factors
00:02:35.13	that might favor one type of characteristic
00:02:38.09	or another,
00:02:39.16	and we'll come back to that.
00:02:40.25	And that's what Darwin was getting at
00:02:42.21	with this idea of modification,
00:02:44.13	that there's going to be change
00:02:46.01	in how organisms are organized
00:02:47.24	and how they look over time.
00:02:52.03	So, here's an example,
00:02:53.18	a cute picture of a pair of dogs
00:02:56.07	and their puppies,
00:02:57.19	where you can really see
00:02:59.07	the variation in characteristics,
00:03:00.25	even in one generation.
00:03:02.23	If you look at the parents
00:03:04.11	and you look at the pups,
00:03:05.21	you can see some of the puppies
00:03:07.03	look like one parent,
00:03:08.21	with, you know, pure light fur,
00:03:11.03	others look like the other parent,
00:03:12.27	with very dark fur around the face,
00:03:15.03	but yet there are other puppies in the litter
00:03:17.13	that look different yet again,
00:03:19.04	that have a mix of the characteristics
00:03:21.29	of those two adults.
00:03:24.05	So, you can get a sense
00:03:25.29	of the variation in this image
00:03:27.26	that can be explored in evolution
00:03:30.29	and capitalized upon
00:03:33.06	through evolutionary time.
00:03:35.29	One example of variation
00:03:38.05	that's been really important for us
00:03:40.11	to understand how we can
00:03:43.17	change the characteristics,
00:03:45.07	the features of a species,
00:03:47.14	over time,
00:03:48.28	is the peppered moth.
00:03:50.12	So, these two moths,
00:03:51.23	that look very, very different
00:03:53.06	-- the light one on the left
00:03:54.24	and the dark one on the right --
00:03:56.01	are the same species.
00:03:57.12	They can interbreed.
00:03:58.23	Now, the dark one and the light one,
00:04:00.04	as you might expect,
00:04:02.07	do better in different types of environments.
00:04:06.03	This color characteristic
00:04:08.03	varies, of course,
00:04:10.00	and in some environments
00:04:11.29	it benefits the organisms
00:04:13.21	to be light or to be dark.
00:04:15.02	In other environments,
00:04:16.21	that same characteristic
00:04:18.16	may be detrimental to the animal.
00:04:20.14	So, these peppered moths
00:04:22.10	provided a classic example
00:04:24.01	of how characteristics can vary
00:04:27.07	with environment,
00:04:28.12	and how populations of a particular species
00:04:30.28	can vary.
00:04:32.22	So, this was noted
00:04:34.07	particularly in the industrial revolution.
00:04:36.19	At that time,
00:04:38.00	we went from manufacturing
00:04:39.22	using people
00:04:41.21	sewing or create objects
00:04:43.08	to using a lot of machines
00:04:44.26	to make products.
00:04:47.01	With the use of machines
00:04:48.21	came the use of coal,
00:04:50.25	and with coal came soot,
00:04:52.19	or pollution in the air.
00:04:54.06	Now, with that soot and pollution,
00:04:55.24	you could imagine that structures in the environment,
00:04:59.03	like trees,
00:05:00.19	would become darker,
00:05:01.28	and the peppered moth populations
00:05:04.05	changed in order to accommodate that.
00:05:06.27	And the darker morph
00:05:09.05	of the peppered moth
00:05:11.14	survived better. Right?
00:05:12.26	It was better camouflaged
00:05:14.23	against potential predators in the environment.
00:05:17.08	When the environment cleared up
00:05:19.21	and pollution decreased,
00:05:21.08	the tree barks became lighter
00:05:23.26	and the lighter version of the moth
00:05:25.25	actually survived better.
00:05:27.17	So, we can see variation
00:05:29.00	in the characteristics in a population,
00:05:31.19	even over this short amount of time,
00:05:34.20	and due to a human-induced
00:05:37.07	artifact in the environment,
00:05:38.09	this pollution from coal.
00:05:41.01	Now, just to show you how striking
00:05:43.05	this difference can be in the camouflage
00:05:45.05	of these moths on trees,
00:05:46.29	we can see some here.
00:05:48.19	So, here's our dark morph and our light morph,
00:05:50.17	and if we look at this tree,
00:05:51.28	we can see both the dark morph
00:05:53.15	and the light morph.
00:05:54.19	Here's the light one right down here,
00:05:56.20	and you can see it better camouflages
00:05:58.00	against the light bark
00:05:59.17	in this healthy tree.
00:06:01.05	The dark morph stands out against that light tree,
00:06:03.27	expect in this area over here,
00:06:05.22	where it's against this injury to the tree,
00:06:08.09	which shows up darker.
00:06:10.03	Another example in variation in populations
00:06:14.08	that we've probably all had experience with
00:06:16.14	is in bacteria
00:06:18.19	and the treatment of bacteria with antibiotics.
00:06:21.06	So, when we go to our doctor's office
00:06:22.26	with a bacterial infection,
00:06:24.08	we're prescribed antibiotics,
00:06:26.06	medicine to kill those bacteria,
00:06:28.19	and doctors are often very specific
00:06:31.09	about the need to take that medicine
00:06:34.11	over a precise time course,
00:06:36.11	and in particularly they say,
00:06:37.27	"Don't stop the medicine early.
00:06:40.12	You have to take the full course of medicine.
00:06:42.19	Even if you're feeling better,
00:06:44.21	take the full course of medicine."
00:06:46.07	It's important to do that.
00:06:47.25	Why is that?
00:06:49.02	It's because of the selection
00:06:51.00	that's acting on the variation in the population.
00:06:54.13	So, when we have a bacterial infection,
00:06:57.00	the species of bacteria
00:06:58.27	that's in our bodies
00:07:00.07	may have lots of variants to it,
00:07:02.04	and this is shown in number 1 on the left.
00:07:04.06	They might vary in aspects of their biology,
00:07:07.16	including how strong they are,
00:07:09.01	how resistant they are
00:07:11.01	to antibiotic medicines.
00:07:12.27	If we treat them,
00:07:15.06	shown in point 2 over here,
00:07:17.05	but we don't treat them long enough,
00:07:19.14	which are the bacteria
00:07:21.03	that are going to survive?
00:07:22.12	It's going to be the ones that are the strongest,
00:07:23.28	that are the most resistant
00:07:25.25	to the medication.
00:07:27.06	So, if we don't kill them
00:07:29.03	and we stop taking the medicine,
00:07:30.26	they'll be able to multiply
00:07:32.24	and will take on a larger part
00:07:34.28	of the population
00:07:36.20	of the bacteria.
00:07:37.25	It's not unless we kill them all
00:07:39.17	that we can prevent those resistant bacteria
00:07:42.06	from then multiplying
00:07:43.28	and becoming a problem
00:07:45.15	for our antibiotic medications
00:07:47.16	down the road.
00:07:49.07	So, I've shown you several examples
00:07:51.08	of how populations of a species can vary,
00:07:55.07	whether it's peppered moths or bacteria,
00:07:58.05	but how do we go from that
00:07:59.23	population-level variation
00:08:01.26	to the evolution of new species?
00:08:05.11	This is called speciation,
00:08:07.13	and in general
00:08:09.15	what happens is that populations
00:08:11.08	of a species
00:08:12.28	will be separated
00:08:14.13	and unable to interbreed,
00:08:16.03	and if they're separated
00:08:18.01	for a long enough period of time,
00:08:19.17	when they come back together
00:08:21.02	they may not be able to interbreed,
00:08:23.27	and then we would call them
00:08:25.25	different species.
00:08:27.02	One of the ways
00:08:28.25	that interbreeding is prevented
00:08:30.16	is through geographic isolation.
00:08:35.06	One of the students in my lab,
00:08:36.18	Andrew Trandai,
00:08:38.07	actually helped me out
00:08:40.13	by developing this hypothetical example
00:08:42.14	that I'm going to show you
00:08:44.23	on what a speciation event
00:08:46.13	might look like,
00:08:47.23	so I have to thank Andrew
00:08:49.19	for all of the images
00:08:50.28	that are coming up in the next series.
00:08:54.06	Okay, so in our hypothetical example,
00:08:56.29	what we're looking at is
00:08:58.29	some rodent squirrel-like animal
00:09:01.00	in an environment
00:09:02.19	-- one species --
00:09:04.06	all together as one population.
00:09:07.20	So, how do we separate them
00:09:09.16	and get new populations to evolve?
00:09:11.17	Well, in Andrew's example, here,
00:09:13.23	we have flooding
00:09:15.29	and an aquatic barrier
00:09:17.27	that these animals cannot cross,
00:09:20.01	so effectively
00:09:21.29	the population in the trees
00:09:23.12	and the population in the sand
00:09:25.19	are separated now
00:09:27.16	and will be evolving independently.
00:09:30.21	Over time, if we look at each of them,
00:09:32.23	we may see differences
00:09:34.12	being incorporated
00:09:37.17	into their biology.
00:09:38.25	Just superficially,
00:09:40.06	we might see the animals
00:09:41.29	that are in the forest
00:09:43.23	turning a different color,
00:09:45.19	other aspects of their anatomy
00:09:47.15	might change
00:09:49.17	to live in the trees.
00:09:51.04	On the opposite side of our river,
00:09:54.18	we may see the populations
00:09:56.07	that are in more of a sandy desert environment
00:09:59.18	change coat color
00:10:01.09	to match that environment,
00:10:02.20	or change size
00:10:04.15	to better adjust physiologically
00:10:06.10	to this drier environment.
00:10:08.13	Then ultimately,
00:10:10.00	once these differences have occurred
00:10:12.06	over, again, a very, very long period of time,
00:10:15.01	through evolution,
00:10:16.08	what would happen if the river dried up
00:10:18.16	and these animals
00:10:20.24	were able to come back together?
00:10:22.27	Well, they might come back together
00:10:25.07	and be able to interbreed,
00:10:27.10	but they may come back together
00:10:28.29	and not recognize each other
00:10:30.18	as the same species,
00:10:32.00	and therefore,
00:10:33.16	even though they're together
00:10:34.25	in this environment,
00:10:35.29	they would not interbreed
00:10:37.18	and their independent characteristics
00:10:39.04	would be carried on
00:10:40.25	from generation to generation
00:10:42.12	in those species.
00:10:47.14	So, that was an example
00:10:49.04	of geographic isolation,
00:10:51.04	and the biggest example of geographic isolation
00:10:53.22	happened about 200 million years ago,
00:10:56.18	when Pangaea,
00:10:58.06	which was this big super continental landmass,
00:11:00.25	broke apart to give us
00:11:03.16	the different continents that we know today.
00:11:05.28	So, South America and Africa
00:11:09.16	broke apart from North America and Europe,
00:11:13.08	and those continents
00:11:15.03	moved and separated around the globe.
00:11:17.22	With that separation,
00:11:20.00	the species that were together
00:11:22.08	prior to this breakup
00:11:23.25	then became separated,
00:11:25.16	and so if we look at species
00:11:27.10	that are in Africa versus South America,
00:11:29.20	for example,
00:11:30.28	we can see animals that
00:11:32.27	perhaps came from the same lineage,
00:11:34.14	but now are very, very different,
00:11:37.06	and are in fact different species.
00:11:43.20	Okay, so we've talked about this
00:11:46.04	process of evolution
00:11:47.16	and how it can occur.
00:11:49.28	What if we want to understand
00:11:51.16	the evolutionary history
00:11:53.11	of the animals that are
00:11:55.22	alive on earth today?
00:11:58.09	Well, we have to use a different set of techniques
00:12:00.28	to do that.
00:12:02.14	Here's just some of vertebrate diversity
00:12:04.16	and, as I said at the beginning of the lecture,
00:12:07.11	we also have lots of plants
00:12:09.16	and invertebrates and insects.
00:12:11.10	So I'm just showing you a very small part
00:12:12.14	of biodiversity here.
00:12:14.14	How do we figure out,
00:12:16.06	with animals so diverse as these,
00:12:18.17	how they're related to one another?
00:12:20.16	And how they evolved through time?
00:12:23.10	Well, we can take
00:12:25.04	a very simple example
00:12:27.03	of how we construct our own family trees
00:12:29.24	over very short time periods,
00:12:31.23	over several generations, say.
00:12:33.21	We research our genealogy,
00:12:35.11	we use birth notices and death notices,
00:12:38.27	and we recalled history
00:12:40.27	from our parents or grandparents,
00:12:42.29	and we can use that
00:12:45.01	to construct relationships
00:12:46.21	among our relatives and ourselves.
00:12:49.13	This is a really interesting family tree
00:12:51.25	that's on the wall of a Czech castle, actually,
00:12:55.01	and shows the relatedness
00:12:56.19	of this family,
00:12:58.04	going from a founder
00:12:59.17	down at the base of the tree, in the trunk,
00:13:01.20	up to the descendants at the top of the tree.
00:13:05.24	So, if we take a hypothetical example,
00:13:07.25	again,
00:13:09.01	of building a family tree,
00:13:11.05	and we start with
00:13:13.06	this family of green-ish and blue-ish,
00:13:15.13	big-eared and small-eared organisms,
00:13:18.04	and try to construct how they're related,
00:13:20.21	we can just look and see how family trees
00:13:23.05	are organized.
00:13:26.01	So, here I've taken that population
00:13:27.29	and put them onto their tree
00:13:29.25	-- that I made up --
00:13:32.01	and we can see that they're related to one another.
00:13:36.10	So, the individuals
00:13:39.12	that are connected at the first branch
00:13:41.21	are siblings.
00:13:43.11	They have the same parents.
00:13:45.21	If we move back in the tree,
00:13:48.01	we're looking at the different common ancestors
00:13:51.23	of these individuals.
00:13:54.17	So, if we go back,
00:13:56.21	these groups that are bracketed
00:13:58.23	in the orange boxes
00:14:00.14	are shared pairs of grandparents,
00:14:03.20	so they'd be cousins.
00:14:06.19	And if we look down near the base,
00:14:08.28	we can see that all of these organisms
00:14:11.07	share a pair of grandparents.
00:14:13.28	Now, because we're in recent history
00:14:16.25	and we have all sorts of ways
00:14:18.13	to record our history,
00:14:19.25	we may even know what these grandparents look like,
00:14:22.19	what our common ancestors of us,
00:14:24.15	and our sibling, and cousins, look like,
00:14:28.04	and I've reconstructed them this way.
00:14:30.01	If we look at at a group of animals
00:14:31.27	that's as broad as fish and mammals
00:14:33.27	and amphibians and reptiles, though,
00:14:36.04	we don't have that record,
00:14:38.18	to know what those common ancestors are
00:14:41.17	or what they looked like.
00:14:43.03	We have to use other types of approaches,
00:14:44.29	called phylogenetic approaches,
00:14:46.16	to basically try
00:14:48.26	to reconstruct the common ancestor
00:14:51.06	and how those species are related.
00:14:53.22	So, if we take this set of vertebrates,
00:14:56.22	this small number of animals,
00:14:58.20	and try to put them on a tree,
00:15:00.21	this is what it would look like,
00:15:02.04	and this is based on lots of peoples' research
00:15:04.08	over many, many years,
00:15:06.06	and I'll run you through it quickly.
00:15:08.20	On the far left,
00:15:10.18	we have the base of the vertebrate tree,
00:15:13.12	and these are lampreys,
00:15:14.28	these are animals that don't even have, really,
00:15:17.16	jaws.
00:15:18.20	They have these suction discs
00:15:20.02	that rasp and grip onto other species.
00:15:22.26	As we move up the tree,
00:15:24.13	we get into things like sharks,
00:15:26.00	and skates, and rays,
00:15:27.16	that have jaws,
00:15:30.02	but they have a cartilaginous skeleton.
00:15:31.29	When we move up yet again,
00:15:33.14	we get to the bony organisms
00:15:35.03	that include the fishes,
00:15:36.18	shown with these anemone fish,
00:15:38.14	the third image from the left,
00:15:40.08	and then we get up into the tetrapods,
00:15:42.26	that include amphibians,
00:15:45.17	reptiles, birds, and mammals.
00:15:48.14	Now, how do we construct
00:15:50.10	this kind of tree when
00:15:52.14	we don't have these detailed records
00:15:53.29	that we have of families?
00:15:55.12	Well, we do it by looking at
00:15:57.23	what characteristics these organisms share
00:16:00.14	and what characteristics vary between them.
00:16:02.26	There are lots of different types of characteristics
00:16:04.15	that we can use.
00:16:08.04	So, one of the features that we look for
00:16:10.20	when we're looking at shared characteristics,
00:16:12.22	or similarities and differences among organisms,
00:16:15.20	are anatomical features,
00:16:17.22	things like the shape of bones
00:16:20.06	or where sutures
00:16:21.14	-- where bones connect to one another --
00:16:23.04	or where we see holes through our skull
00:16:25.03	or other parts of our anatomy.
00:16:27.12	Bone and other structures
00:16:29.09	from the body
00:16:30.26	provide really nice characters
00:16:32.11	that we can use to try to figure
00:16:34.03	the relatedness of organisms.
00:16:36.11	In addition to using anatomical features
00:16:39.10	to try to understand the evolutionary history
00:16:41.20	of organisms and their relatedness,
00:16:43.24	DNA is now also
00:16:46.14	providing a really powerful way
00:16:48.24	of generating characters
00:16:50.17	to try to understand
00:16:52.20	how organisms have evolved.
00:16:54.08	In particular, we can compare a single gene
00:16:56.24	among different organisms,
00:16:58.14	different animals and species,
00:17:00.17	and see how it varies and how it's similar,
00:17:03.05	and look for changes in that
00:17:07.17	organization of the gene itself
00:17:09.05	that might give us signals
00:17:11.07	about how close a species is
00:17:12.27	to another species
00:17:14.20	and the relationship among them
00:17:16.28	and to different species.
00:17:18.18	Now, another set of data
00:17:20.12	that's been useful in understanding evolutionary history,
00:17:22.28	of course, is fossils.
00:17:24.22	They're really important.
00:17:26.01	Now, fossils provide information
00:17:28.16	about when and how features arose.
00:17:30.26	They won't, though,
00:17:32.20	provide the common ancestor.
00:17:34.07	It would be very unlikely
00:17:35.21	to actually dig up a fossil
00:17:37.12	that gives you the exact common ancestor of a species
00:17:39.24	but, nevertheless,
00:17:41.20	what they can provide us,
00:17:42.28	how they can ground our understanding
00:17:45.29	of when an organism
00:17:47.24	or particular elements and characteristics
00:17:49.11	of an organism arose,
00:17:50.28	is incredibly important.
00:17:53.25	So, to summarize
00:17:56.23	our introduction to evolution
00:17:58.09	and some of the major points we've talked about...
00:18:00.11	first, evolution is change
00:18:02.13	in the heritable characteristics of organisms
00:18:05.00	from generation to generation,
00:18:06.17	descent with modification
00:18:08.21	as proposed by Darwin.
00:18:11.08	Variation in characteristics
00:18:13.09	allows some subsets of populations
00:18:15.18	to be selected for or against.
00:18:18.20	And selection can cause change
00:18:20.14	in the characteristics
00:18:22.11	that persist in a population,
00:18:23.26	and this can allow for populations to diverge.
00:18:28.27	Reconstructing how the diversity of organisms
00:18:31.19	evolved
00:18:33.09	involves making trees,
00:18:34.23	or these phylogenies that I talked about,
00:18:37.09	that show different organisms
00:18:39.12	are related to one another.
00:18:41.19	And phylogenies, though,
00:18:43.08	depend on identifying characteristics
00:18:45.29	that are shared between organisms
00:18:48.06	and that can suggest their common ancestry.
00:18:50.07	And, again, we can get those characteristics
00:18:52.22	from morphology, from genes,
00:18:54.24	from all sorts of different sources.
00:18:57.19	Thank you.
Part 2: Neural Circuits and How They Evolve: A Startling Example!
00:00:07.18	Hi, my name is Melina Hale.
00:00:11.14	My lab works on
00:00:12.25	neurobiology, biomechanics,
00:00:16.18	In a previous video,
00:00:17.28	I gave an introduction to evolution,
00:00:20.08	and now I want to give you
00:00:22.08	an example of how we study evolution
00:00:24.02	in our lab,
00:00:25.14	and one of the things we look at is
00:00:27.20	the evolution of neural circuits.
00:00:28.27	So I'll talk about one of the systems we study,
00:00:31.28	which is the startle response,
00:00:33.12	its neural circuits,
00:00:34.20	and how we think they're evolving
00:00:36.22	over time.
00:00:37.26	So, the example on the screen here is...
00:00:41.02	you might be able to tell it's a fish.
00:00:42.07	It's actually a larval zebrafish.
00:00:44.09	It's about five days old
00:00:45.26	and three millimeters long,
00:00:47.19	and the probe you see
00:00:50.18	coming in from the left side of the screen
00:00:53.20	is a little injector and it has dye in it,
00:00:55.20	and one of the ways we get fish to startle,
00:00:58.14	to study this behavior,
00:01:00.20	is through puffing a little bit of dye at their body
00:01:02.29	and then watching their response.
00:01:04.22	So, you'll see its response.
00:01:06.13	It's analogous to a startle in humans,
00:01:09.28	which might be if you're at a scary movie
00:01:11.16	and something surprising happens,
00:01:13.08	we jump.
00:01:15.05	This is the fish equivalent of that.
00:01:16.27	It looks a bit different.
00:01:18.18	Let me show you the video
00:01:20.22	and we can talk about it a little bit.
00:01:22.12	So, that's the startle.
00:01:23.28	So, you might have been able to see the dye
00:01:25.22	hit the side of the head of the animal,
00:01:27.12	and then you see this big turn to one side,
00:01:30.04	and the animal swims away.
00:01:31.26	This is the behavior and circuit
00:01:33.24	we'll mainly be talking about today.
00:01:40.14	So, let's back up for just a minute, though,
00:01:43.09	and talk about how we study the brain.
00:01:45.29	A lot of different researchers
00:01:48.02	are working on brain function and structure,
00:01:50.16	and have been for many, many years,
00:01:52.04	and there's a lot of beautiful work going on.
00:01:54.14	Some of it tries to
00:01:56.26	identify how regions of the brain are functioning.
00:01:59.10	So, here we see half of the brain, only,
00:02:02.00	in a translucent skull,
00:02:04.13	and in red is one little part of the brain
00:02:06.29	that's called Broca's area,
00:02:08.13	and you'll see it when it comes back around,
00:02:10.02	right there.
00:02:11.12	This is actually part of the brain
00:02:13.05	that's really active when we are speaking,
00:02:15.13	so as I'm talking to you,
00:02:17.20	that part of my brain
00:02:19.20	is really, really active.
00:02:21.13	And people go and study
00:02:23.02	all these different regions of the brain
00:02:24.13	to understand when they're active
00:02:26.20	in relationship to behavior
00:02:28.28	and how they interact.
00:02:30.11	So, in addition to understanding
00:02:32.24	the cells that are in these locations,
00:02:34.12	like in Broca's area,
00:02:37.02	researchers are also trying to understand
00:02:39.15	how these cells connect.
00:02:40.26	So, the cells in the nervous system
00:02:43.13	are not just little balls
00:02:45.01	like you might see in some typical pictures of cells.
00:02:48.09	They have long processes on them
00:02:50.09	and those processes connect between cells,
00:02:53.01	from cell to cell,
00:02:54.10	and among regions of the brain.
00:02:55.24	So, what we're looking at on this image
00:02:58.01	is lots of different processes,
00:03:00.01	from regions of the brain,
00:03:01.15	from particular neurons
00:03:03.10	that are traveling to other parts of the brain
00:03:04.25	to integrate information,
00:03:06.19	to transmit information,
00:03:08.12	and ultimately to generate
00:03:11.05	some sort of function,
00:03:12.09	whether it's a behavior
00:03:13.26	or a stored memory...
00:03:15.13	various things like that.
00:03:19.21	Another way we've been studying the brain,
00:03:22.05	in addition to doing experiments
00:03:26.01	that try to look at
00:03:27.25	connections and regions,
00:03:29.25	is through wonderful neurology work
00:03:32.17	that's examined how injuries
00:03:35.03	are associated with changes
00:03:36.26	in brain function and behavior.
00:03:38.12	And that work started a very, very long time ago.
00:03:42.02	These are pages from the
00:03:43.13	Edwin Smith papyrus,
00:03:45.09	which is from about 1500 BC,
00:03:48.08	and is the first, the earliest documented
00:03:52.16	incident of people
00:03:55.15	actually relating an injury
00:03:57.18	to the nervous system,
00:03:58.26	or to the body,
00:04:00.17	to a behavior,
00:04:02.06	so seeing that there's an injury
00:04:04.03	to a part of the spinal cord or brain
00:04:05.25	and how that affects
00:04:07.21	the movements of an animal
00:04:09.08	or the behavior of a human,
00:04:11.13	in particular in this.
00:04:13.11	In my lab, we're interested in understanding
00:04:16.13	how particular neurons, nerve cells,
00:04:19.01	connect to one another,
00:04:20.11	and how those cells
00:04:22.02	and the simple circuits they're a part of
00:04:24.15	generate movements,
00:04:25.26	the startle movement in particular
00:04:27.19	that I showed you earlier.
00:04:29.08	So, to understand circuits and how they function,
00:04:32.15	a lot of us use simple model systems
00:04:35.10	for that work.
00:04:36.24	They're much simpler,
00:04:38.09	less complicated than the human brain
00:04:40.06	or large brains,
00:04:42.01	but yet they let us get at basic principles
00:04:44.15	of how the nervous system functions.
00:04:46.19	One of the fantastic models
00:04:48.16	that's been used for neural circuit work
00:04:50.23	is the nematode C. elegans.
00:04:54.16	The nematode is pictured right down here.
00:04:56.27	It's a tiny little worm,
00:04:58.26	really, really small.
00:05:00.15	It has only a small number of neurons
00:05:03.00	in its nervous system,
00:05:04.12	a few over 200,
00:05:06.19	and folks working on C. elegans
00:05:08.25	have been able to map
00:05:10.27	how those neurons connect to one another.
00:05:12.22	So, what you're seeing in these little blips
00:05:14.28	to the left of the nematode
00:05:16.20	are different neurons and their pathways,
00:05:19.03	the connections from one to the other.
00:05:23.05	Now, there are a number of other
00:05:25.08	simple model systems that have been
00:05:27.07	used productively in neuroscience
00:05:29.09	-- the sea hare on the left,
00:05:31.02	lobsters, lampreys,
00:05:32.25	and bees are just a few examples of those --
00:05:35.15	and they've provided an understanding of
00:05:39.07	foundational principles of connectivity and function,
00:05:42.14	really important things that
00:05:44.17	have influenced a lot of work in neuroscience,
00:05:46.04	for example the work in learning and memory
00:05:48.23	in the sea hare on the left.
00:05:53.10	When you're interested in evolution, though,
00:05:55.22	as we are,
00:05:57.13	we still have some issues here.
00:05:58.23	So, we can have all of these simple models
00:06:01.03	spread across the phylogeny,
00:06:02.27	but because there's so few of them,
00:06:04.16	and they're so far apart,
00:06:06.13	trying to reconstruct
00:06:08.12	the evolutionary history of a neural circuit
00:06:11.13	is really difficult,
00:06:13.03	and we're just at the beginning stages
00:06:14.21	of being able to do that
00:06:16.16	in organisms.
00:06:19.05	The startle behavior,
00:06:21.22	for several reasons that I'll talk about
00:06:23.15	in a few minutes,
00:06:24.26	is one of the best systems
00:06:26.28	for understanding how neural circuits evolve.
00:06:29.27	Part of the reason that it's so useful
00:06:32.09	is that because the startle behavior
00:06:34.10	occurs in so many animals
00:06:36.12	across the phylogeny,
00:06:37.28	it's a key predator avoidance behavior,
00:06:40.04	so you might imagine, evolutionarily,
00:06:42.06	it's going to be very important and highly conserved.
00:06:45.17	What we're looking at here is
00:06:48.05	a pike, a northern pike,
00:06:50.23	the image on the right,
00:06:52.10	and what you're seeing on the left is a still from a video
00:06:54.11	that I'll show you in a second.
00:06:55.28	Just to orient you to that video,
00:06:57.12	we're actually looking at the belly of the fish,
00:06:59.19	the ventral view,
00:07:01.15	and that gray shadow above it
00:07:03.12	is my hand coming over,
00:07:05.05	and I'm going to startle this animal.
00:07:07.22	So, if we look at the movie of that behavior,
00:07:10.16	you'll see how the pike startles,
00:07:14.12	so let's... it's going...
00:07:16.24	there, I've touched the fish on the head
00:07:18.28	and you can see it do that really fast movement away,
00:07:21.22	like the larval zebrafish
00:07:23.26	in the first image that I showed you.
00:07:26.13	Now, this type of startle,
00:07:28.07	this bend to one side and swim away,
00:07:31.10	is characteristic of many, many species of fish.
00:07:34.17	If we look at in just a set of silhouettes,
00:07:38.10	we can really break down what that behavior is.
00:07:42.08	Generally, these fish start
00:07:44.02	in a straight position,
00:07:45.20	so as they're sitting in the water
00:07:47.08	not expecting a predator to come along,
00:07:49.01	they're just hanging out and their body is straight.
00:07:51.08	When the sense a predator coming from one side,
00:07:53.20	as shown in image three,
00:07:55.11	they do this massive turn and bend,
00:07:58.13	they orient their head away from the predator,
00:08:01.22	and then they use a number of swimming strokes
00:08:04.09	to get out of there as fast as they can.
00:08:06.29	This is a typical response, as I said,
00:08:09.16	of a number of fish including zebrafish,
00:08:11.20	and pike, and many others.
00:08:15.18	Now, what's driving that behavior? Let me tell you a little bit about the
00:08:19.17	neural circuit that's important
00:08:22.02	for that response.
00:08:24.11	The circuit is highly conserved,
00:08:26.07	so we see some of the same neurons
00:08:28.22	in pike, and in zebrafish,
00:08:30.10	and all the other species,
00:08:31.21	even though they're hundreds of millions of years
00:08:34.27	separated in evolutionary time,
00:08:37.11	in terms of when they diverged.
00:08:39.19	So, this is...
00:08:41.29	you might not be able to tell right away,
00:08:43.25	but this is the brain of the zebrafish,
00:08:46.02	with certain neurons labeled.
00:08:48.00	So, just to orient you...
00:08:49.19	here are the eyes and the ears of the brain,
00:08:53.00	the otic capsules,
00:08:54.23	and all those white blips
00:08:56.17	are different nerve cells
00:08:58.14	that are in the brain
00:08:59.26	and are sending those processes,
00:09:01.15	what are called axons,
00:09:02.29	down into the spinal cord of the animal.
00:09:04.20	So, they're sending signals
00:09:06.11	down to the body
00:09:07.26	to get the fish to do something.
00:09:09.16	This is a larval zebrafish,
00:09:11.20	so the head is only a millimeter or so across.
00:09:14.07	Now, these, here, are really important cells
00:09:18.13	for the startle response.
00:09:20.05	They're called the Mauthner neurons
00:09:21.23	and there are only two of them.
00:09:23.17	They're giant neurons that are in
00:09:26.07	all of these fish
00:09:27.23	that do this type of startle that I've shown you,
00:09:30.12	and they're located in the hindbrain of the animal.
00:09:34.13	Up here are a different set of neurons
00:09:36.23	we won't be talking about,
00:09:38.04	but they're neurons in the midbrain
00:09:39.21	that control that rhythmic swimming
00:09:41.17	that you might have seen at the end of the videos
00:09:44.00	that I showed you.
00:09:45.19	So we're going to focus on the Mauthner cell
00:09:47.21	and the Mauthner cell circuit.
00:09:50.08	So, this is a simplified
00:09:52.08	Mauthner cell circuit,
00:09:53.23	so the Mauthner cell
00:09:55.10	and the neurons that it connects to.
00:09:56.28	I just wanted to show you a little bit about
00:09:59.09	how it works in the organism.
00:10:01.09	So, if we have a stimulus in the circuit,
00:10:03.07	coming from the right,
00:10:04.28	then here's the circuit...
00:10:06.17	the stimulus is coming from the right...
00:10:08.03	the Mauthner cell on the right,
00:10:10.04	which is this big, dark blue cell,
00:10:12.12	is going to fire.
00:10:13.29	When it fires, it's actually generating
00:10:16.14	what's called an action potential,
00:10:18.01	a signal that's transmitted
00:10:19.28	all the way down its process,
00:10:21.12	down its axon.
00:10:22.25	In this case, it goes
00:10:25.06	from being in the hindbrain,
00:10:26.18	which is that top group of cells on this image,
00:10:28.16	down into the spinal cord.
00:10:30.11	In the spinal cord,
00:10:32.21	it'll signal other interneurons and motor neurons
00:10:35.16	to signal muscle
00:10:37.11	to cause the body bending
00:10:39.03	that I showed you in those videos.
00:10:40.17	So, if I'm the fish
00:10:42.14	and this is, you know, this is me,
00:10:44.17	a stimulus coming from this side of my head
00:10:46.19	would cause the Mauthner cell to fire,
00:10:49.19	it would send a signal down my spinal cord,
00:10:52.03	and I would bend in that direction,
00:10:54.16	forming that C-shaped bend
00:10:56.12	that you saw in those videos.
00:11:00.28	Now, one of the really interesting things
00:11:04.03	about the Mauthner cell
00:11:05.19	is that there's this special part of the circuit
00:11:08.03	that's really not diagrammed in detail here.
00:11:10.07	It's called the axon cap,
00:11:12.09	and the axon cap has all sorts of interesting things
00:11:14.20	going on in it.
00:11:16.00	It has cells coming in
00:11:17.22	that excite the Mauthner cell
00:11:19.03	and get it to fire more readily.
00:11:20.18	It also has neuron processes coming in
00:11:24.15	that inhibit the Mauthner cell
00:11:26.07	and prevent it from firing.
00:11:27.19	So, there's a lot going on in this region.
00:11:30.02	Because the Mauthner cell
00:11:31.23	is so big and obvious,
00:11:33.26	and so conserved across a lot of taxa,
00:11:36.16	we can use the cell as an anchor
00:11:39.15	to understand the circuit components
00:11:41.27	that are in the axon cap structure.
00:11:46.18	So, let me show you a Mauthner cell firing
00:11:49.19	and then we'll talk a little bit more about it.
00:11:52.28	So, this is a Mauthner cell
00:11:55.02	that I've injected with
00:11:56.24	what's called a calcium-sensitive dye.
00:11:59.00	So, when the Mauthner cell fires,
00:12:01.22	calcium floods into the cell,
00:12:03.27	and the dye actually
00:12:05.27	reacts with the calcium
00:12:07.13	and becomes brighter when the cell is active.
00:12:10.09	Now, we've color-coded brightness
00:12:12.06	with this heat map,
00:12:13.21	so that when this cell fires
00:12:15.20	you'll see more reds and oranges.
00:12:19.01	So, here's the Mauthner cell
00:12:20.17	and you can imagine I'm tapping the fish on the head
00:12:23.07	from this side,
00:12:24.17	and you can see what happens.
00:12:27.16	So, that's a Mauthner cell activation;
00:12:30.16	that's the activity
00:12:32.18	that's initiating that big bend
00:12:34.18	that we showed you.
00:12:37.07	Let me show you one more time...
00:12:39.04	touch the fish
00:12:41.05	and it fires really, really quickly.
00:12:42.29	Something I didn't point out before
00:12:44.25	is that these various videos I've shown you,
00:12:46.14	and even this image,
00:12:48.00	are shown slowed down quite substantially.
00:12:50.14	A typical Mauthner cell response...
00:12:53.25	the behavior would occur
00:12:55.29	within tens of milliseconds,
00:12:58.02	so in less than the blink of an eye.
00:13:02.00	So, studying the Mauthner cell overall,
00:13:04.23	and this is not my lab specifically,
00:13:06.18	but in this broad group of researchers
00:13:08.24	that have looked at the Mauthner cell
00:13:10.18	over 100+ years,
00:13:12.09	we've learned a lot about neuroscience.
00:13:14.20	This simple system has been really, really valuable.
00:13:17.22	We've looked and been able to understand
00:13:19.24	more about the subcellular structure
00:13:21.18	of vertebrate neurons,
00:13:23.10	how neurons communicate to each other
00:13:25.13	through different types of synapses.
00:13:28.05	We've learned about this transmission
00:13:30.01	of electrical signals between neurons as well.
00:13:33.26	In addition, the Mauthner circuit
00:13:35.28	has been used to study learning
00:13:38.06	and to look at the relationship
00:13:40.00	between neural activity and behavior.
00:13:43.00	So, it's given us access to circuits
00:13:45.16	in a way that we just can't get
00:13:47.17	in a human brain, for example.
00:13:50.29	Alright, so let's talk a little bit
00:13:53.24	about evolution of this circuit now.
00:13:56.02	So, I introduced you to the Mauthner cell
00:13:58.12	and told you that's found
00:14:00.03	in lots of different animals,
00:14:01.24	and I also mentioned this structure
00:14:03.12	called the axon cap,
00:14:04.24	which has excitatory inputs and inhibitory inputs,
00:14:07.05	and gives us a little window
00:14:09.04	into how neural circuits might work.
00:14:11.12	So, this is a phylogeny
00:14:13.12	that I showed on the previous video
00:14:15.08	that I did on an introduction to evolution.
00:14:18.20	It's again of just vertebrate animals,
00:14:21.01	and only a very, very few of them
00:14:23.10	where we see on the left
00:14:25.09	the jawless fishes, like lampreys.
00:14:27.21	We move up the tree through the chondrichthyans
00:14:30.02	into fishes,
00:14:32.06	and then tetrapods as well.
00:14:34.29	Now, for the Mauthner cell,
00:14:36.22	we see its presence
00:14:39.02	in many of these different groups.
00:14:41.00	Lampreys have the Mauthner cell.
00:14:42.24	Chondrichthyans, in a few species we see Mauthner cells.
00:14:46.04	Many, many fishes,
00:14:48.00	the vast majority of the 30,000 species of fishes
00:14:51.02	that are known have Mauthner cells.
00:14:53.11	And even in amphibians,
00:14:55.15	in both tadpoles and in some frogs,
00:14:57.25	as well as in salamanders,
00:14:59.10	we also see Mauthner cells.
00:15:02.04	When we move up into the tree, though,
00:15:04.20	we have quite a mystery to solve.
00:15:06.29	We do not know what happens
00:15:09.10	to these giant, really important neurons
00:15:12.05	once we move up into the tetrapod animals
00:15:15.24	that have become terrestrial
00:15:17.16	and have changed their startle behaviors.
00:15:19.12	It's one of these big questions
00:15:21.27	that I'm so curious about and my lab's trying to investigate.
00:15:27.10	So, let's look at that cap
00:15:29.05	and see where we've gotten
00:15:30.20	in terms of understanding how the Mauthner cells
00:15:32.07	and their circuits have evolved.
00:15:34.27	So, remember where those yellow stars were
00:15:37.12	on that very simplified diagram
00:15:39.04	of the Mauthner circuit.
00:15:40.13	This is what we're looking at here on the left,
00:15:42.19	that cap structure,
00:15:43.29	and as I mentioned there are excitatory neurons
00:15:46.23	that are connecting to the Mauthner cells.
00:15:48.15	Those are shown as these cells that are...
00:15:50.29	this process that's spiraling around the base
00:15:53.19	of the cell on the far left.
00:15:55.17	Then we see this sort of egg-shaped capsule
00:15:57.26	around that process of the cell,
00:16:01.09	and those little black nubbins coming in
00:16:04.17	are the inhibitory interneurons,
00:16:06.05	that are shutting down the Mauthner cells.
00:16:07.27	So, we have excitatory and inhibitory components.
00:16:11.01	On the right, you can see what that actually looks like
00:16:14.06	in a section of a brain of one of these fishes.
00:16:17.02	So, this is what we call the composite axon cap.
00:16:19.09	It has all these different components to it.
00:16:21.20	This is the cap that you would see
00:16:24.09	in fish that...
00:16:25.26	if you go to an aquarium
00:16:27.11	and are looking at a lot of fish swimming around in a tank,
00:16:29.20	or at a pet store,
00:16:31.04	most of them have Mauthner cells that look like this.
00:16:35.10	Now, I showed you this image of the startle
00:16:38.16	in the top panel, here,
00:16:40.12	this is shown in a trout,
00:16:42.15	and the composite cap and Mauthner cell
00:16:45.08	generates this type of startle.
00:16:47.14	But startles in fish are actually
00:16:48.28	a bit more diverse than that,
00:16:50.25	and in particular if we look down in the lampreys,
00:16:52.28	which diverged off the of the main lineages of vertebrates
00:16:55.22	at the base of the tree,
00:16:57.01	we see a very different type of startle.
00:16:59.08	It's a retraction response,
00:17:00.28	shown down below here,
00:17:02.22	where the animal, actually, when stimulated,
00:17:05.24	kind of contracts or accordions its body.
00:17:08.17	In the lampreys, the Mauthner cells
00:17:11.05	are there,
00:17:12.20	but they don't have this axon cap structure,
00:17:14.16	so without these inputs
00:17:16.12	they generate a very, very
00:17:18.14	different behavioral output.
00:17:23.22	So, here are the two primary basic
00:17:27.16	types of caps that have been known for awhile:
00:17:30.12	this composite cap of typical teleosts fishes,
00:17:32.29	typical bony fishes,
00:17:34.11	and this no cap condition
00:17:36.11	that we see in these retracting animals like lampreys.
00:17:41.06	In my lab,
00:17:43.11	one of my students, Hilary Bierman,
00:17:45.01	and a colleague, Steve Zottoli,
00:17:47.06	worked with me to try to get
00:17:49.11	a better sense of how this cap structure
00:17:51.25	varies across species,
00:17:53.17	and whether there is actually variation
00:17:55.29	between those two basic morphs.
00:17:58.05	When we look at lots and lots of different species,
00:18:00.25	we actually found that there are
00:18:03.11	four types of caps.
00:18:04.21	In addition to those first two that I talked about,
00:18:06.22	we have what's called a simple cap,
00:18:08.14	that's shown on the top,
00:18:10.03	where we have those winding excitatory fibers
00:18:12.19	at the base of the Mauthner cell,
00:18:14.19	and then we have what we're calling
00:18:17.05	a simple dense cap,
00:18:18.13	where we have those same winding fibers,
00:18:20.21	but they're much, much more populous,
00:18:22.17	much denser in the axon cap region.
00:18:25.26	Note both of these cases,
00:18:27.20	and these images in the diagrams shown here,
00:18:30.09	we don't have that nice glial...
00:18:35.04	that nice cap around the axon
00:18:37.13	where we have those inhibitory interneurons coming in,
00:18:40.07	so they differ quite a bit from the composite cap.
00:18:43.26	So, let's map the Mauthner cells
00:18:46.10	and the Mauthner cell axon cap
00:18:47.27	onto the phylogenetic tree of vertebrates,
00:18:51.07	and this is a bit more of a complicated tree,
00:18:53.11	a detailed tree,
00:18:54.29	than what I've shown you previously.
00:18:56.19	At the base, shown in yellow,
00:18:58.23	are two clades that actually even aren't vertebrates.
00:19:01.08	We see the amphioxus there
00:19:03.15	and hagfishes.
00:19:05.05	Amphioxus and hagfish
00:19:06.24	actually don't even have Mauthner cells.
00:19:08.09	We think the Mauthner cells
00:19:10.05	arose before the lampreys,
00:19:12.03	which are shown in white,
00:19:14.03	branched from the rest of the vertebrates.
00:19:16.00	Now, as I said previously,
00:19:18.06	the lampreys do this retraction response
00:19:19.17	and they don't have axon caps at all.
00:19:24.11	we see several lineages
00:19:26.11	that are shown in purple
00:19:27.29	that have a simple cap structure
00:19:32.06	Those includes things like sharks
00:19:34.17	and, as we move up, amphibians and lungfish,
00:19:37.08	as well as some of the basal bony fishes
00:19:40.08	called bichers and ropefishes.
00:19:43.14	Moving up in the tree from there,
00:19:45.07	we see the evolution of the simple dense cap,
00:19:47.28	and that's in these species
00:19:50.23	that we don't actually have a lot of extant today,
00:19:53.13	they are some species, but not a ton,
00:19:55.23	of sturgeons and gar,
00:19:57.29	and there's really only one extant species
00:20:00.03	of bowfin
00:20:02.01	that was a very diverse group
00:20:03.21	many, many hundreds of millions of years ago.
00:20:07.03	They all have a simple dense cap.
00:20:09.23	Interestingly, where we see a transition
00:20:13.06	into this composite complex cap structure,
00:20:17.12	is right at the base of the teleosts.
00:20:19.22	Now, the teleosts are the modern bony fishes.
00:20:22.13	It's this amazingly diverse
00:20:25.08	and speciose group.
00:20:26.26	There are many, many species.
00:20:28.17	It's the dominant group of fishes
00:20:31.16	in the world today, the extant fishes.
00:20:34.03	Nearly all of them
00:20:36.04	have this composite cap.
00:20:37.20	It seems to be characteristic of that group of organisms.
00:20:41.21	Now, evolution isn't quite that simple,
00:20:43.17	and we do see some differences
00:20:46.01	from this nice pattern
00:20:48.13	that we've looked at up the tree.
00:20:50.08	In particular, if you go back over into the purple area,
00:20:53.11	where the sharks are,
00:20:55.02	a branch in that tree called the ratfish,
00:20:56.19	or the chimeras,
00:20:58.08	have a simple cap.
00:20:59.21	And in the teleosts,
00:21:01.11	you can see that one white branch
00:21:03.06	and that's the eels.
00:21:05.13	And so in a few places through the tree,
00:21:07.19	we will see variation.
00:21:09.23	Now, if we look at how
00:21:14.08	the cap structure and this variation
00:21:16.02	relate to behavior,
00:21:17.21	if we map behavior onto this tree,
00:21:19.14	we can pull out a couple key points.
00:21:21.28	The first is that when we have
00:21:24.24	the absence of this axon cap,
00:21:26.10	you just have the Mauthner cells
00:21:28.00	with none of this excitatory and inhibitory inputs
00:21:30.07	coming to them,
00:21:31.19	we tend to see a retraction response,
00:21:33.20	which is that pulling back of the head.
00:21:38.01	We see that in lampreys
00:21:39.15	and also in the eels,
00:21:41.01	which lack the axon cap structures.
00:21:47.01	All of these other animals
00:21:48.25	perform more of a C-start type of response,
00:21:51.23	although it varies in its strength
00:21:53.29	and how high performance,
00:21:56.11	how fast it is.
00:21:58.00	But one thing that's noticeable
00:22:00.17	is that when we get to this composite cap
00:22:01.28	at the base of teleosts,
00:22:03.13	we see a really high performance response,
00:22:06.20	like there's some innovation
00:22:08.17	of how that cap works
00:22:10.10	that allows the performance
00:22:12.01	to be very, very high, a very strong response.
00:22:15.11	This middle area of the tree,
00:22:17.05	we're still figuring out.
00:22:18.27	Fish with the simple and simple dense caps
00:22:21.08	have more diverse startles
00:22:23.11	- the same basic pattern,
00:22:24.20	but there's a diversity in performance
00:22:26.22	and how it's generated by muscle
00:22:28.13	that we're still trying to understand.
00:22:30.17	And the motor patterns are quite complex.
00:22:34.26	Now, if we get up into the amphibians,
00:22:36.25	as you could imagine,
00:22:38.19	I mentioned earlier that
00:22:40.13	not only do the tadpoles
00:22:42.22	have Mauthner cells, but also frogs.
00:22:45.05	You probably can, you know,
00:22:46.25	predict what a frog's startle response would be,
00:22:49.17	it will be a bilateral hop.
00:22:51.17	One of the things we're trying to figure out now
00:22:54.01	is how that relates to the Mauthner cells
00:22:55.27	and this circuit.
00:22:57.17	Well, what about the startles
00:22:59.01	of humans and other mammals?
00:23:00.08	This is an example
00:23:02.01	of an armadillo startle,
00:23:04.04	where the animal jumps up on its legs
00:23:06.13	into the air when it's startled.
00:23:08.11	Are these types of behaviors, and our startles,
00:23:10.27	also generated by Mauthner cells
00:23:13.03	and this Mauthner cell circuit?
00:23:14.27	We actually don't know.
00:23:16.23	There are similarities in the startle behavior,
00:23:18.27	as you might imagine.
00:23:20.17	They're really fast, really high performance,
00:23:22.23	but they're different
00:23:24.05	and we haven't been able
00:23:25.25	to associate the neural circuit of the startle in mammals
00:23:28.20	with that of the startle of fishes.
00:23:31.23	It's one of the things we really want to know in my lab,
00:23:34.24	and we're beginning to take steps
00:23:38.07	to figure out.
00:23:41.05	So, let's conclude.
00:23:43.16	First, I want to make the point that
00:23:46.25	there are a lot of ways of understanding
00:23:48.16	how the brain works,
00:23:49.27	lots of labs doing beautiful imaging work
00:23:51.25	studying healthy human brains,
00:23:54.05	and also studying injured human brains,
00:23:56.04	where we can associate damage
00:23:58.11	to a particular region
00:24:00.03	with changes in behavior or function.
00:24:02.20	In addition, we can use more tractable brains,
00:24:04.29	or more tractable nervous systems, in other species,
00:24:07.21	like C. elegans and the sea hare,
00:24:11.15	to understand how circuits are put together.
00:24:14.14	Looking at those simple circuits,
00:24:16.17	we can use them to understand
00:24:19.05	basic principles
00:24:20.25	that also may apply in tetrapods
00:24:22.27	and in other vertebrates.
00:24:25.10	Now, in addition to using models,
00:24:27.25	comparing across models
00:24:29.25	or other species
00:24:31.05	gives us a different sort of power
00:24:32.21	of looking at how things are similar
00:24:34.20	or how evolution may have
00:24:36.15	come up with different solutions
00:24:38.19	to generating certain functions in the body
00:24:40.22	and in the brain.
00:24:42.02	So, we use comparisons and evolutionary approaches
00:24:44.20	to relate structure and function more broadly.
00:24:48.02	Now, on the Mauthner cell system in particular...
00:24:51.18	I hope I've shown you that the Mauthner cell
00:24:53.19	is an example of a simple neural circuit
00:24:56.21	that we can use
00:24:58.25	to understand not only basic principles of the nervous system,
00:25:01.19	but also nervous system evolution.
00:25:04.17	In particular, because we can follow this cell
00:25:07.09	and use it to anchor this circuit,
00:25:09.21	through brains from a wide variety of animals,
00:25:12.05	we're able to then track the circuit
00:25:14.29	over a large swath of evolutionary time,
00:25:17.19	from the divergence of lampreys on up,
00:25:20.02	and that diverge occurred
00:25:21.26	about 500 million years ago,
00:25:23.10	so we're talking about a really long time frame here.
00:25:28.29	So, as I end, I just want to acknowledge
00:25:30.19	some of the people who were important to this work.
00:25:32.27	In particular, some of my students.
00:25:35.25	These are all students who were in the lab
00:25:38.01	over the past decade or so.
00:25:40.11	Hilary Bierman, who was a graduate student,
00:25:42.13	and Rachel Fremont and Julie Schriefer,
00:25:44.01	who were both undergraduates
00:25:45.19	at the University of Chicago.
00:25:47.05	In addition, my collaborators
00:25:48.20	at the University and at other institutions,
00:25:50.29	include Steve Zottoli,
00:25:52.20	Mark Westneat, John Long,
00:25:54.00	and Vicky Prince,
00:25:55.11	and they've all been important to the ideas
00:25:57.00	as well as the data collection and analysis of this work.
00:26:00.25	In particular, though, I'd also like to thank Glenn Northcutt.
00:26:03.07	The images of axon caps that I showed you...
00:26:06.11	some of them were made in my lab,
00:26:07.27	others were actually photos of collections
00:26:10.19	that he's taken over a number of years,
00:26:13.01	and they've been so important for our work,
00:26:15.07	so I wanted to thank Glenn,
00:26:16.15	and also to make the point that collections,
00:26:19.26	biological collections,
00:26:21.23	are just really important,
00:26:23.15	not only for what we've learned up 'til now,
00:26:25.07	but for the future of discovery in science.
00:26:28.17	And of course I want to thank our funders,
00:26:31.04	the National Science Foundation,
00:26:33.23	and grants that we've had for work in the lab,
00:26:35.13	have been really important
00:26:37.19	to our research and our ideas.
00:26:39.10	So, thank you.
Speaker: Melina Hale
All Talks in Evolution
Dr. Hale overviews the neural circuits and how they evolve. In her first video, Hale does an excellent job of defining evolution as a change in heritable characteristics. She uses examples, such as the variable color of the pepper moth, to explain selection for and against specific characteristics. She explains how individual species arise and concludes by describing the techniques, such as fossil and DNA analyses, that scientists can use to build "trees" or phylogenies between related species.
In Part 2 video, Hale explains why the "startle response," a highly conserved behavior found in most fish and vertebrates, is a good system for studying how neurons connect and neural circuits have evolved. The Mauthner cells are the neurons that control the startle response. By comparing these neurons across many species of fish, it has been possible to follow the organization of the nervous system and control of behavior over hundreds of millions of years.
Melina Hale
Melina Hale is a professor of Organismal Biology and Anatomy and Neurobiology and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Chicago. Using predominantly zebra fish, Hale's lab studies neural circuits that control limb and axis movement and how that movement changes over time. Movement changes can be seen both in the short time frame of development… Continue Reading
Playlist: Circuits, Learning and Behavior
Networks and the Nervous System
Developing Autism Spectrum Disorder Therapeutics
Rapid Adaptive Camouflage and Signaling in Cephalopods
Brain Pathways for Vocal Learning
Hale ME, Long JH Jr, McHenry MJ, Westneat MW. (2002) Evolution of behavior and neural control of the fast-start escape response. Evolution 56(5):993-1007. PMID:12093034
Bierman HS, Schriefer JE, Zottoli SJ, Hale ME. (2004) The effects of head and tail stimulation on the withdrawal startle response of the rope fish (Erpetoichthys calabaricus).J Exp Biol. 207(Pt 22):3985-97. PMID:15472029
Bierman HS, Zottoli SJ, Hale ME. (2009) Evolution of the Mauthner axon cap. Brain Behav Evol. 73(3):174-87. PMID:19494486
Liu YC, Hale ME. (2014) Alternative forms of axial startle behaviors in fishes.Zoology (Jena). 117(1):36-47. PMID: 24374038
Sillar KT. (2009) Mauthner cells. Curr Biol. 19(9):R353-5. Review. PMID:19439253
Hale ME. (2014) Mapping circuits beyond the models: integrating connectomics and comparative neuroscience. Neuron. 83(6):1256-8. Review. PMID: 25233308

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


That is certainly true for her renovated Portsmouth, New Hampshire, bungalow, where she designed details ranging from drawers that tuck neatly into small steps, to a narrow, floor-to-ceiling wall of shelves housing her vase collection, to the special stories behind certain paintings and furniture.
Dutton describes her house, where she has lived with her family for five years, as "a poor man's bungalow. It didn't have any nice woodwork or anything" when they moved in, she says. "It was very closed off. You walked in and it was very dark—we opened it all up." She got rid of a chimney, a boxed-in hallway, and a petite front bedroom that now serves as an office.
Despite the lack of original features, Dutton respected the history of her new home. "I was trying to stay as close to the bones of the house as possible," she says. "That was really important to me." All the wood throughout the house is reclaimed, as is a stately staircase that begins near the entry of the house. Dutton purchased most of the wood now found in the house from Old House Parts in Kennebunk, Maine; the stairs were originally in a house in York, Maine. "I like reclaimed features," Dutton says, and to that end she left in place stains and dents that reveal something about the stairway's origins.
Bungalows in Portsmouth ringed the edge of the city at the beginning of the twentieth century, says Richard Candee, the author of Building Portsmouth: The Neighborhoods and Architecture of New Hampshire's Oldest City. "Bungalows are pretty standard throughout the country," he says. Candee is an expert on historic preservation and president of the Portsmouth Historical Society's board of directors. "Companies [such as Sears] either made them up and sold them as kits, or sold plan books to local lumber yards." He estimates dozens of bungalows still stand throughout Portsmouth.
In Dutton's 1910 bungalow, some of the home's most striking features are in the kitchen, though it was not part of the original renovation plan. She was in Ireland when her husband called to ask what kind of floors she wanted for the kitchen. The builder had mistakenly taken the room down to the studs. "I guess we're doing the kitchen," Dutton told her husband, commercial real estate broker Brooks Murphy. Faced with an extra, unbudgeted renovation, the homeowners got creative.
"I wanted to show people that if you don't have a ton of money, you can still have a kitchen that's nice and clean and a little different," Dutton says. She had contractor Moe Houde of Cape Neddick, Maine, install plywood floors, which she hand painted with a swirling pattern. She continues to paint them, changing the design every six months or so. The glass-fronted, wood cabinets, painted light avocado green, are from Ikea and Lowe's. The island, a former nun's table from Europe, previously existed as a narrow table in their former home; it was put on casters to raise it to the appropriate height. "I don't know if it's going to stay—like everything I do," she says. Doors salvaged from a Boston office open upon narrow shelves—an adaptive reuse of the shelving in the master bedroom's barely functional closet.
Across from a door leading to the basement, Dutton put in narrow white shelves to house her glass collection. Although she knew she had to downsize when she packed for the move to the bungalow (her previous house measured 3,400 square feet), she was not willing to part with the vases. Instead, she thought about where they could go. Some extra space along a door-sized wall at the top of the basement steps turned out to be the answer. "I think of it as an art wall," says Dutton, who uses and rearranges the vases regularly.
A path lined with flowers and grasses leads to outdoor seating.
Photo by Claudia Kaerner Photography.Leading from Dutton's kitchen—and accessible from the driveway—is the home's mudroom, a space added a year after the main renovation and exemplifying Dutton's careful approach. "Everything is really thought out," she says. Small doors inside the steps keep miscellanea such as takeout menus. One eight-foot-high closet houses coats and includes shelves inside. Within the tight space of the mudroom are also a desk, pantry, and more storage, plus a dog bed. Numerous pegs make room for hats and coats. Several works of art once done by her children—now ages 12, 15, and 19—hang framed on one wall. An elegant bathroom located off the mudroom also hides a laundry room, where eight-foot doors create access to high shelves inside. In the mudroom, Dutton decided to line the ceiling with fir bead board. "I love fir because it's so warm," she says. An existing cutout from the kitchen into the mudroom was kept, allowing the homeowners to look at their backyard while cooking or washing dishes.
One outdoor challenge was the lot's size: it is less than one-fifth of an acre, with square-shaped plots in the front and back. "The hard part was the amount of material that had to be brought in to such a small space," Hale says. Dutton also wanted some sort of privacy screen, but given the small space, evergreens were not really an option. Instead, Hale used clumping bamboo, placing plastic three feet below ground so that the often-invasive plant would not be able to spread.
Décor throughout the house mixes old and new: reclaimed and antique, pieces from family, and even a painting that came by way of her hairdresser. "I wanted things to feel old but I also really, really like contemporary," Dutton says. To that end, and because of the home's compactness, she looked to stores such as West Elm and Crate & Barrel for smaller-sized couches and tables. An old hutch set in a corner of the open-concept first floor was her mother's. Dutton says people often have trouble letting go of items they have inherited, but she has a pragmatic attitude toward it. "My mother passed away when I was 30," she says. "I thought she didn't live in [the furniture], so I let go of a lot of things." Another treasure she kept is a pew from the church in Berkeley, California, where her parents were married. It now serves as additional kitchen table seating. Rich wall colors, such as a cobalt blue in the downstairs bath and mustard on the home's front wall, help bring the space to life.
The painting from Dutton's hairdresser depicts Portsmouth's Memorial Bridge, now demolished, by artist Don Lent of Exeter, New Hampshire. After Dutton had described to her that an awkward wall remained after a chimney was removed, her hairdresser knew the perfect painting to hang there and brought it over. "It represents bridging our lives from Maine to New Hampshire," Dutton says. "We used to walk over the bridge all the time." The painting is now Murphy's and her favorite artwork in the house.
From a one-story, two-bedroom bungalow built more than a century ago, Dutton has created a home for her family of five and their dog. "We lived in the house while we were constructing it, and that was a bonding family experience," she says. If her family members need even more time to bond, the remodeling of the first-floor master bedroom still awaits them!


Inserts are installed inside an existing masonry fireplace to provide a more efficient, clean burning fire. They can be wood, gas or pellet. Gas is the most popular, providing the convenience of a fire at a flip of a switch with no mess or change to indoor air quality.


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Mayflower II begins voyage after restoration
As onlookers flanked both sides of the Mystic River and people watched from small boats and kayaks, the Mayflower II left the Mystic Seaport Museum shipyard in the fog Monday morning on its way to New London.
The voyage marks the completion of a yearslong restoration project at the museum. The ship, a replica of the vessel the Pilgrims traveled in to reach Plymouth in 1620, will participate in sea trials in New London for about two weeks before leaving to return to Plymouth, Mass., on Aug 10.
With many restaurants open, others opt to remain closed or stick to takeout
A few months after the COVID-19 pandemic first threw the restaurant industry into turmoil, many restaurants opted to open for outdoor dining in May and indoor dining in June, while others have closed their doors for good. But some have chosen to remain closed temporarily, or continue just offering takeout an...Continue Reading
Staying local with Let's Go 860
By mid-March, it became obvious to business leaders in southeastern Connecticut that COVID-19 would cause big disruptions. But a series of COVID conference calls led by entrepreneur Scott Gladstone identified perhaps a bigger concern: a feeling of doom that made it difficult to imagine a path to prosperity. "We identified ...Continue Reading
History Revisited: Groton-New London Airport's humble beginnings
Recently, while organizing a few of my historical research files, I came across one titled "Trumbull Airfield". Upon looking through the information and documents, I could not help but think that there were probably a great many residents, both newly located and "long timers", who might not be aware o...Continue Reading


While folding some laundry this morning (typical weekend chore), I had a nice "chat" with the Holy Spirit on a variety of topics. It was like a stream of conscious that was interrupted here and there by a thought from the Spirit that then led me in some new directions (for me). I apologize for the length, but I hope, if you take the time, you will be blessed as I was.
My first thoughts were about the subtle difference between the church's idea of salvation and the salvation that Jesus provided. They seem so close, in fact, I was thinking it was so close that maybe it doesn't REALLY matter if people believe the traditional paradigm. I mean, the result — a heart that understands the love of God — is the same, right?
Actually, no, the Spirit convicted me and impressed on me that I need to tell the truth, even if it is uncomfortable.
The church's idea of salvation, the one that you will hear from 95% of pulpits today is based on this: We are saved by grace through faith. Sounds great. Sounds "right". It fleshes out something like this… When we believe in Jesus, which means believing a litany of things about Him: His Godhood. His sinlessness. His love of humanity. His act of sacrifice in our place on the cross, we are saved. The cross is where He took the world's sin upon Himself, so that God could punish HIM for our sin instead of us, and in that act we could be forgiven and have the righteousness of Jesus cover our own sin. Believing ALL of that and recognizing your place, your NEED of it, allows God to forgive YOU personally and accept you (adopt you) as His child. To simplify… believe in Jesus (as described above) and be saved (be forgiven/accepted by God). Your repentance and belief results in your salvation by God. Again. Sounds good, sounds right, right? Well, yeah, it's what we've always been told.
But it is wrong. So subtly wrong. We are saved by our faith yes, but it is not the faith that causes or allows God to save us. We are saved THROUGH (via the process of) our faith. It is not the faith which allows God to change our position before Him. It is our faith that allows us to see our ALREADY (and before time) position before Him, where before we DIDN'T see/believe it. Our faith is not just in what happened on the cross. Our faith is in what that TELLS us about who God is and what He thinks of us. And when we BELIEVE that God really does love and forgive us no matter what we do (including killing Him), then we are saved from what we USED to believe about Him (our foolish ideas about God as judge looking to punish us for wrongs done which offend Him). What we are saved from is not "Hell", or God's wrath (directly), or punishment, but our FALSE ideas. And when we have FAITH, we are dispelling/denying/repenting of (changing our minds) about those ideas and agreeing with who JESUS says and PROVED on the cross that God IS.
Such a subtle difference, but it means SO much because it changes how we see God. And THAT is the crux of being "saved". Our false view of God is the "SIN" that Jesus came to save His people from. There is more to it, more details, more to unpack, but that is the "big picture" paradigm shift that we experience at "salvation". And that brings me to the 2nd thought I had today.
We have "the gospel" wrong.
Traditionally the gospel is said to be the cross. The sacrifice, and the EXCHANGE that happened — our sin for His righteousness — is the good news. That we can appear righteous before God (and be accepted) because God punished our sins in JESUS, instead of in us.
But that's NOT the good news (gospel) at all.
I submit that the GOSPEL was declared LONG before the cross. The gospel was declared at the incarnation. At Jesus' birth. When the heavenly hosts said, "Peace, goodwill towards men, on whom His favor rests." THAT is the gospel. God ALREADY favors (accepts/delights) in us. God ALREADY has nothing but GOOD in store for us (not punishment or wrath) and God is in the process of bringing PEACE to the world through His Son, and not JUST "spiritual peace" between God and man, but actual, practical world-changing, life-saving, war-ending peace.
It started when Jesus was born, and that is STILL the gospel message. God's peace, God's favor, God's goodness. For you. Right here and now.
So how does the cross fit in?
The cross PROVED that this was true. The cross proved that even though we were allowed (Jesus laid down His life) to kill our OWN God, that when He rose again and came back, the first thing He said was to repeat what was said the day He was born, "Peace be with you.". NOTHING you do will change the good news of God's favor, goodness and peace. The good news is that we had God wrong, but NOW we can see, because of Jesus and because of the cross, what God is REALLY like and how He REALLY feels towards us. Mankind killing Jesus was not "good news". It was a horrible act. But it is what God felt was necessary to PROVE to us who He really was.
What's so bad is that now we found a way to believe in the cross, but STILL miss who God is. Not only that, but now we have used the cross to ENFORCE our terrible image of God as judge and punisher of evil, and have made Him into a child-sacrificer to boot. How BAD can we make Him look? How far short of His glory CAN we fall in disparaging His good reputation? We have TWISTED the cross and twisted God's image in the process. And most everyone believes this is the truth. It almost makes me believe in the devil again because it's such a subtle, but deadly deception that has totally derailed the gospel message of God's peace, goodwill and favor toward man.
It's time to RECLAIM the true gospel that was declared to man when Jesus arrived here. God's favor rests on you. You, as you are. Not you as religion wants to MAKE you so God will accept you. Not you who believes just the "right things" about Jesus so God doesn't have to avert His eyes from your loathsomeness. But you RIGHT NOW. THIS news will transform lives. I know because it has mine. It has given me such a love for God and for humanity that I never even understood before. I always believed I loved, but now I can see how superficial (though sincere) that love really was, because it was still based on a God who is looking to ERADICATE evil and punish and torture all those who break His moral standards.
And you can't really love a God who tortures people. You can SAY you do, but it's half-hearted at best, even if you BELIEVE it is whole-hearted. I know, again, because I've EXPERIENCED it. You can only see it from the OTHER side. (Yeah, I know how 'conceited' that sounds, but I'm really being sincere here). I couldn't see how "weak" my love of God was until I really understood who He is and how much He loves me.
You cannot love humanity, when you think the majority of them are lost forever because of their depraved state before God. You can PITY them, yes, but pity is NOT love. Pity does not give them the intrinsic worth and love that God gives them AS THEY ARE, "evil" and all. Yes, INTRINSIC worth, not IMPUTED worth. Which brings me to my third, final and most profound thought of the day.
The traditional view of "imputed righteousness" says that when Jesus died for our sins, He took them on Himself and gave US His righteousness, so that when God looks at US (if we've "accepted Christ"), He sees Jesus' righteousness instead of our sin. It's kind of like we are wearing a Jesus-cloak of righteousness that covers up our "filthy rags" of sin. But let's examine this idea more closely.
The first problem is our misunderstanding of the word "righteous" or "righteousness". We have equated this with "sinless" and "sinlessness" or "perfect goodness" or "purity". And the word CAN be used that way in Greek, but it's meaning is much more about trajectory than about purity. Righteousness is "going in the right direction". That's what the word actually means. If you were travelling down the road, and you stopped and asked for directions, and found out you were headed the wrong way, you were "unrighteous" (headed in the wrong direction). You needed to be made righteous (ie. JUSTIFIED, adjusted) and placed in the right direction (made righteous), so that then, as you continued your journey, you would be displaying "righteousness" in being headed in the right direction, and people could actually follow YOU if they wanted to know the right way to go. THIS is the picture of what righteousness is.
So, then, how does this affect the idea of "imputed righteousness"? Can you only LOOK like your headed in the right direction, but not REALLY be righteous yourself? No. Jesus doesn't just make us LOOK righteous. He places us in the right direction (justifies us), so we ARE headed in the right direction.
Then I started thinking about the idea of wearing Jesus righteousness like a garment. There's a verse that says to "put on" the breastplate of righteousness. So I was thinking about whether there were any other places in the Bible where putting on a garment had to do with changing or going a particular direction. And the Spirit brought Elijah's cloak to mind. Elijah passed his cloak on to Elisha in the old Bible story. However, my mind immediately dismissed this as I have always been taught that the cloak represented God's power and authority being passed from Elijah to Elisha and that had nothing to do with going in a particular direction.
I continued thinking about this idea of righteousness being about being headed in the right direction, and thinking if about how FAITH puts us in the right direction (is counted as righteousness). When Abraham BELIEVED God, that God would make him a great nation and give him a land, he started out on a JOURNEY, both spiritually and physically, with God. He started on a particular trajectory. He was "made righteous" (placed on a certain path with a certain goal) THROUGH his faith. He certainly wasn't thought of as "good" as in pure or morally perfect. Far from it. He made awful choices. God wasn't OVERLOOKING those because Abraham believed in Him. His righteousness was not about what he did, but the TRAJECTORY of his life.
The cloak of Elijah was how Elisha was COMMISSIONED, how he was "chosen" for the task as a prophet of God. When he took on the cloak, he took on the job, the mission, the PATH that was set before him by God. He "put on" his righteousness, because the cloak put him on the path that would determine the rest of his life. My jaw dropped. This is how Jesus "imputes" His righteousness to us. He gives us HIS commission to be HIS ambassadors of reconciliation. To continue down the path that He showed us. The path, the trajectory, of peace, goodwill and love towards mankind. And we "take up" this cloak (or breastplate), when we BELIEVE in the message of Jesus, in the Gospel. When we ACCEPT the commission (the way pointed out) of Jesus.
Our faith is counted as righteousness. I hope this blessed you today.
This is so well stated I had to share on my own blog. I haven't gotten to the topic of Mainstream Religion and my experience with it…but I will be sure to share my own experience with religion as I continue to blog. Enjoy!
I appreciate your insight Ken. Very inspiring!
Thank you for the encouragement. I'm happy you liked it.


The fate of the chief of the Paint Creek Joint EMS/Fire District remains in limbo following a special meeting Tuesday of the Paint Creek board.
Dan Mathews, president of the board, said Wednesday that board members met in executive session Tuesday evening. He said chief Bradley George was not present.
"We took no action," said Mathews. He said it was "strictly the board" participating in Tuesday's executive session. George had attended last week's meeting and met with board members.
The board will meet in regular session again next Tuesday, but Mathews said it might be "three or four weeks" before any action is taken.
George was placed on administrative leave for "personnel reasons" in early July. He has been chief of the Paint Creek district since its formation five years ago.
Since then, Paint Creek has expanded to become the dominant fire department in Highland County, and one of the largest fire districts in Ohio.


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Kim Coates and Theo Rossi Photos»Photostream
Premiere Screening Of FX's "Sons Of Anarchy" - Red Carpet
In This Photo: Kim Coates, Theo Rossi, Tommy Flanagan
(L-R) Actors Kim Coates, Tommy Flanagan and Theo Rossi arrive at the season 7 premiere screening of FX's "Sons of Anarchy" at the Chinese Theatre on September 6, 2014 in Los Angeles, California.
(Sept. 5, 2014 - Source: Kevin Winter/Getty Images North America) more pics from this album »
Kim Coates Photostream Theo Rossi Photostream
Show Kim Coates With:
Kim Coates and Theo Rossi Photos appear in: more Kim Coates and Theo Rossi Photos pictures »
'Sons of Anarchy' Cast Hosts a Boot Bash
'Sons of Anarchy' Panel at Comic-Con
'Sons of Anarchy' Press Line at Comic-Con
Kim Coates and Theo Rossi Photos Pictures »


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An implementation of blackjack as part of 'An Introduction to Interactive Programming in Python' Rice University course.

![screenshot](http://i.imgur.com/xAbFJlw.png "Blackjack")

# Installation
You don't need to install anything, as a matter of fact, this game won't even run as a Python program.

It has been developed in Rice University's online, browser-based Python interpreter using a subset of Python 2 and graphical libraries, such as SimpleGui.

# Play
Simply open up [CodeSkulptor](http://www.codeskulptor.org/) and copy-paste the contents of blackjack.py.

Hit Run!

## Controls

Use the action buttons to play the game.
```
Deal - New game
Hit - Take one more card
Stand - End turn
```

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


The conclusion of the OECD's BEPS-project ('Base Erosion and Profit Shifting') states that taxation should be aligned with a transaction's economic reality rather than strictly focusing on the transaction's legal/contractual terms. This principle also applies when determining transfer pricing for intangible assets and is described in action 8-10 of the BEPS-project ("Aligning Transfer Pricing Outcomes with Value Creation"). For example: the mere fact that an entity is the legal owner of an intangible asset does not mean that that entity is entitled to all the profits relating to the intangible asset. The revised OECD Transfer Pricing Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises ("OECD Guidelines") state that if an entity only has the legal ownership of an intangible asset (and not the economic ownership), then that entity should only receive a limited amount of remuneration for its legal ownership. The residual profit resulting from that intangible asset, on the other hand, should be allocated to the intangible asset's economic owner.
Per DEMPE function it should be determined: who has control, who is funding, and who is incurring the risks related to the function. The determination of the functions performed and the consideration of the factors are combined in a DEMPE analysis. Such a DEMPE analysis should be prepared on a case-by-case basis and should be substantiated by objective documents such as annual reports, board meeting notes or any other internal documents that could provide further substantiation.
After having performed a DEMPE analysis, it can be determined which entity is entitled to the profits resulting from an intangible asset. However, it can also be concluded that multiple entities perform considerable DEMPE functions. In that case, multiple entities are entitled to the profits resulting from an intangible asset. The OECD Guidelines set out that the Profit Split Method is the most appropriate method for allocating the profits in such circumstances.


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Inside the retro-style Subbuteo stadium that looks like the real thing
A few weeks ago we asked the Subbuteo community to share their stadiums with us and the results have been incredible.
We have been inundated with beautiful Subbuteo stadiums both old and new and we will be featuring all of them in the coming weeks.
To begin we're heading to Italy and Alessandro, who has build a continental-style Subbuteo stadium that is straight out of the golden era of football in the late 1980s.
The compact, atmospheric stadium has everything from a single tier grandstand, wrap-around stands using the old beige open-top Subbuteo stands and even custom advertising hoardings featuring the likes of JVC, Mars and Gillette.
We particularly love the ultra banner hanging from the main stand and the style of photography, which makes it look like you are in the stadium itself.
The competition-style goals add a nostalgic feel to the stadium, while the single tier stands means this can actually be played on comfortably if you feel like a flickabout.
Zooming out you can see the incredible amount of work that has gone in to painting hundreds of spectators and there is even a glimpse of a hefty Subbuteo collection in the surrounding cupboards.
Previously we have featured massive Subbuteo stadiums with three tiers and LED hoardings, and even one with an electronic closing roof. However, there is something brilliant about a compact, detailed and playable stadium that makes this one stand out.
With a quality astropitch it is one of our favourite Subbuteo stadiums we have seen. But we have plenty more to come from the ever-creative Subbuteo community.
Thanks to Alessandro for letting us use the pictures.
Subbuteo Women's FA Cup set sold on eBay for a big price
Subbutegoals: Leeds vs Aston Villa and Bamford's controversial dive
You can now buy a snowy Subbuteo pitch for winter games
The best Subbuteo rules for beginners
The tiny feature that could add a lot of value to your Italian Subbuteo teams
What does Subbuteo's cryptic message mean for the future of the game?


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Dragonflies and damselflies: Order Odona
Dragonflies and damselflies: Order Odonata
David Britton
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Dragonflies and damselflies
Dragonflies and damselflies are large, conspicuous insects generally found near freshwater habitats. They are an ancient and successful group that was around long before the dinosaurs evolved.
One species that lived around 250 million years ago was the largest insect known to exist and had a wingspan of over 70 cm. Their success as a group is largely because of their fantastic flying abilities and their well-developed eyes. They are excellent hunters of other flying insects and can hover, move in zigzags, and even fly backwards. And they are fast - some of the larger dragonflies can reach flying speeds of 70 km per hour - possibly the fastest flying insects on Earth. Many people find their size and speed intimidating but, despite their powerful jaws, they are harmless. In fact, they do us a favour by eating many insects that bite us.
Dragonfly and damselfly facts
There are over 6,000 species worldwide.
There are 320 species known from Australia and about 100 of these occur around Sydney.
The larvae are aquatic or semi-aquatic and are known as mud-eyes.
Both adults and larvae are predatory.
Adults are often found close to water, where they hunt flying insects.
Adults' legs point forward, forming a basket to capture prey in mid-flight.
Dragonflies are generally more powerful fliers than damselflies and most dragonflies have large eyes that almost meet at the top of their head.
Damselflies often rest with their wings folded along their backs. Dragonflies usually rest with their wings held straight out from their body.
Dragonflies and damselflies are large, conspicuous insects often found close to fresh water. The Order Odonata is divided into two suborders, the Anisoptera containing the dragonflies, and the Zygoptera containing the damselflies. Odonata closely resemble the oldest flying insects known from fossils. These fossil 'dragonflies' were very large, with one species reaching 71 cm in wingspan.
Adult dragonflies are generally stout bodied and when at rest spread their wings out to the sides. Damselflies are generally more delicate and hold their wings along their body when at rest.
The larval stages of the two suborders can be distinguished by the placement of the gills. Dragonfly larvae suck water into their abdomen and move it over their internal gills. Damselfly larvae have gills at the end of the body as three appendages.
Dragonflies are insects. They have three stages in their life cycle: egg - larva - adult. Adult dragonflies have a long and slender abdomen, two pairs of wings and three pairs of legs. They also have very large eyes. Image: Andrew Howells
Damselflies are insects. They have three stages in their life cycle: egg - larva - adult. They have a long and slender abdomen, two pairs of wings and three pairs of long legs. They also have very large eyes. Image: Andrew Howells
Habitat and Biology
Like many insects, the larval and adult stages of dragonflies and damselflies differ in their shape and behaviour and use different habitats.
Eggs are laid into, or close to, water. The larvae adopt an aquatic lifestyle, with only a few exceptions. They feed on aquatic animals such as other insects, tadpoles and occasionally fish. Some larval dragonflies and damselflies are commonly known as 'mudeyes'. They are important in the diets of many aquatic predators such as fish.
Dragonfly Larvae, Odonata Anisoptera Image: Mathew Bulbert
After progressing through up to twelve larval stages the larvae crawl out of the water. Their skin splits and the adults emerge. The adults are predators that often capture prey while flying.
The adult stage has a pre-reproductive period that may last up to three weeks. At this stage the colour of the wings and body may change and the adults may disperse from their emergence point.
The reproductive phase may involve the establishment of territories by males, which are protected against other males of the same species. Copulation involves the male grasping the female behind the head with appendages on his abdomen while she bends her abdomen underneath his thorax to recover a packet of sperm that he has placed there. Adults may occasionally be seen flying in this tandem position.
Several species are endangered, such as the species that lives in peat bogs near Bowral and Robertson in the southern highlands and the hanging swamps of the Blue Mountains (both in New South Wales). This is because many Odonata larvae rely on precise water temperatures, good oxygen levels and unpolluted water to survive, and some of these habitats have been degraded. This sensitivity means that dragonflies and damselflies are important bioindicators of water quality.
Some species can tolerate poor water quality and low oxygen levels and at least one Australian species doesn't even develop under water, although it still needs a moist habitat.
Watson, J.A.L., Theisinger, G. & Abbey, H.M. 1991. The Australian Dragonflies. CSIRO Publications, Melbourne.
Watson, J.A.L. & O'Farrell, A.F. 1991. Odonata. In: Naumann et al. (eds.) Insects of Australia. Melbourne University Press, Australia.
Corbet, P.S. 1963. A Biology of Dragonflies. Quadrangle Books, Chicago, Illinois.
dragonfly insect Damselfly
Flies and mosquitoes: Order Diptera
Grasshoppers, crickets, katydids and locusts: Order Orthoptera
Why most animals are insects
Wombat Flies
Bugs: Order Hemiptera
Metamorphosis: a remarkable change
Observing ants
Ants as pests
Wasps: Suborder Apocrita
What are the differences between butterflies and moths?
Where have all the Christmas beetles gone?
What do dragonflies and damselflies look like?
Dragonflies and damselflies belong to the Order Odonata.
Common seasonal enquiries Dragonflies and Damselflies
Dragonflies are an ancient and successful group that was around long before the dinosaurs evolved.
A list of dragonflies collected at Iron Range, Cape York Peninsula from 10th-13th April, 1971
Sydney Hawk Dragonfly
New species of Australian Lestidae (Odonata)
What are insects?
In order to answer this question we must look at where insects fit in the animal kingdom. The animal kingdom is divided into several groups called phyla. An example of a phylum is the Chordata, which holds all the backboned a
DNA evidence that the morphological 'forms' of Palpopleura lucia (Drury) are separate species (Odonata: Libellulidae)
Damselfly life cycle
Damselflies are insects. They have three stages in their life cycle: egg - larva - adult. They have a long and slender abdomen, two pairs of wings and three pairs of long legs. They also have very large eyes.
The identity of the dragonfly Macromia viridescens Tillyard (Odonata: Corduliidae)
On a collection of Papuan dragonflies (Odonata) made by the late Mr. Allan R. McCulloch in 1922–3, with descriptions of new species
Lacewings and Antlions: Order Neuroptera
What do lacewings look like?
Lacewings are solitary but they may group together or swarm during mating.