Christmas Lagniappe December 15, 2000

One of the Christmas traditions I started for my family is the Christmas movie countdown. We try to work our way through a new Christmas movie every night. There are more than enough of them to make almost a complete month. We usually start off with "Home for the Holidays", a Thanksgiving movie but one sure to get us in the mood (i.e. dysfunctional family at the holidays). We have the Alistair Sim version of "A Christmas Carol", the George C. Scott Version, the Muppet Version. We have "A Miracle on 34th Street" (my wife's favorite). For the adult we have "Die Hard" (it happens during a Christmas Party) and "The Ref" (Dennis Leary, Kevin Spacey and Judy Davis, wow.). "Home Alone" (Best live action Tom and Jerry movie ever made) and "National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation" hold the spot for best comedies, although "Scrooged" has its moments (The ad for The Day the Reindeer Died just about makes the entire movie worthwhile.). And "The Santa Clause" is kind of sweet. Being a cartoon buff, I love "How the Grinch Stole Christmas". The new one with Jim Carrey will probably be added to the collection when it comes out but I don't think it will make the top tier group.

That group includes "A Christmas Story." This holds sentimental value for me because I loved it before it became popular. I saw it when it first came out, in 1983. Me and about 12 other people. For some really odd reason, the studio did an awful job marketing it and hardly anyone went to see it, even though it got great reviews. Maybe it was because it was directed by the same guy who did the Porky's movies. It was out on tape the next year but for rental only. You could not purchase it for home use. But, after Christmas, the rental store put it on sale for about five dollars and I bought a used version. It seemed to take several years for the studio to clue into the fact that it had a special movie on its hands and finally market it properly. But I still have my original, first edition video tape.

But the top Christmas movie in my book, the one I always hold out for last, is the classic starring Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed. "It's a Wonderful Life" is as great an American Christmas Tale as Dickens' A Christmas Carol is British. The actors were splendidly cast (Lionel Barrymore is such a great villain. I just love his voice. And Donna Reed's relationship with Stewart is just, well, wonderful.) Frank Capra was at his best (A CalTech alumnus who forsook his engineering training for Hollywood). Capra always had a wonderful directing style and, even though his movies have gotten a reputation being mawkish (thus the term 'capra-corn'), this movie is really driven by its darker moments. The last 30 minutes are as horrifying as Scrooge's visit by the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come.

Okay, this is not a term paper of great holiday movies. We watched "Home Alone" and "A Christmas Vacation" last week, and I noticed something. Both were written by John Hughes, who has written many screenplays over the last 20 years. I noticed that the both took place in Chicago, as does other movies by John Hughes - "Ferris Bueller's Day Off", "The Breakfast Club", "Sixteen Candles", "Plane, Trains and Automobiles", and "Uncle Buck". In fact, virtually every movie written by Hughes takes place near Chicago. Some routine Internet searching revealed that not only do they take place near Chicago, they actually all originate in the same make-believe suburb of Chicago, Shermer.

In fact, the school housing the library that "The Breakfast Club" takes place in is the same one that "Ferris Bueller" attends. Ferris also knows the principle protagonists in "Sixteen Candles". The Griswold house, of Vacation fame, is only a few blocks away from Steve Martin's house of "Planes, Trains and Automobiles". The "Home Alone" dwelling is also not too far from either.

Of course, this creates some interesting consequences since John Candy and Anthony Michael Hall were in at least 3 of these movies each, implying that there are several dopplegangers for residents of Shermer, Illinois.

Now, this connection between all these movies really serves no literary purpose. It does not affect the plot of any movie and does not really drive the action. The location of these movies does not really matter and it is simply an artifice of the creator to make them all come from the same town. But it does add something extra to the entire oeuvre of John Hughes. It is as if he is simply chronicling the occurrences in a real town, rather than making up stories. This sort of approach is a common occurrence in books. Many authors return to the same location for their stories. It is rare in movies. (Of course, the fact that Hughes grew up in a suburb of Chicago that was called Shermerville until the 1950's probably has something to do with it. The high school that was used in filming Ferris Bueller is the same one that Hughes attended. Write what you know.)

In fact, Hughes' something extra has now transcended his own movies. Kevin Smith, writer/director of "Clerks", "Mallrats", and "Chasing Amy", who also locates most of his movies in the same region of New Jersey, has a pair of recurring characters, Jay and Silent Bob. In his latest movie, "Dogma", he has these two characters searching for Shermer, Illinois. An homage from one writer to another. This is really something extra.

A great word for this is lagniappe. It is a Louisiana French term derived from Spanish-American word. (Not too many of those in our language.). It means a little gift. It refers to the little something extra bakers would provide, something like getting 13 doughnuts but only paying for 12. I first ran across this word in an old Larry Niven science fiction story and, even though I am not really sure HOW to pronounce it, it just looks so cool.

These columns have always been a little something extra that I provided along with the main purpose of publishing the Discovery Researcher. They gave me a chance to write to a captive audience, or at least one that did not talk back. They started out as simply a device to write about some topics that interested me. But I have found that I enjoyed doing these a lot. And I really do appreciate the great feedback from you all. I especially love getting suggestions for further columns. Makes it a lot easier sometimes. So I guess you can talk back.

So, today I am going to write about a few lagniappes that readers have suggested. The first, while it does have math in it, offers some counterintuitive ideas about the development of new species. Geographic isolation can create new species, even if there is no selective pressure. The second deals with some really fantastic explorations being done right here on Earth that are every bit as wild and astonishing as going to Mars (and the UDub is involved).

One of the standard explanations for the development of new genes, and the basic dogma for mining sequence databases, is that genes become duplicated. This allows the organism to maintain the previous genes function while potentially developing new functions. A paper in a recent edition of Science looks at this process. The authors examined the occurrence of duplicated sequences in a wide range of metazoans. As we get better databases, we get a better idea of the development of duplicated sequences.

There are 3 possible fates for a pair of duplicated genes: one copy can mutate and become nonfunctional; one copy can mutate and gain new functions; and both copies can mutate to the point that the overall activity of both is the same as the activity of the original, single gene. Since the expectation is that many mutations will be deleterious, it would be expected that most duplicated genes would result in one active gene and one silenced gene. Most models suggest that this would occur in a short time, measured in just a few million years.

But, the databases now allow us to look at the effects of gene duplication directly and not through a mathematical model. I won't go into the math used in the paper. I'll leave that to the bioinformatics group. But what they found was interesting. The fate of most duplicated genes is to be silenced, with a half-life of about 3-7 million years, depending on the organism. And they could also determine the rate of origin of new duplicated genes. This is about 0.01 per gene per million years.

This does not sound like much but this works out to about 50% of the genes in a metazoan being duplicated at least once in the range of 35 to 350 million years, in the complete absence of any polyploidization. And this is actually of the same order of magnitude as the rate of mutation per nucleotide. So the rate of gene duplication is almost as frequent as the rate of mutation. But, the average gene duplication is silenced in just a few million years.

Doesn't seem like gene duplication might be very important, if most genes are silenced in such a short period of time. But, what if we look at pair of duplicated genes in a single species that is separated into 2 groups by geographical isolation. In a period of say 2 million years there is a very good chance that a random copy of a gene will be silenced in each of the sister species. There is a 50% chance that it will be copy A in one group and copy B in the second group. So, there is a substantial chance that some of the progeny between these 2 groups, if they ever came back together, will have 2 inactive copies of the gene. The number of duplications can range up to the hundreds in most eukaryotic organisms and several hundred more can occur every million years.

So, even if some of the gene duplications never get used for anything novel, their presence can help create new species. In fact, there can be substantial change in the genomes. This is a more defined process than simple genetic drift. It is derived from a process that appears to constantly be creating new sequences and then dealing with them. Often by simply silencing them but sometimes by developing new uses. So, even a small something extra can have extraordinary effects.

The other topic looks at a potentially new feature in the Mid-Atlantic Ridge that has substantial implications for early life on Earth, as well as completely novel life today. I'll discuss it more in the next column.