Scattered thoughts on the origins of viruses

"Everything is either living or non-living"

THis is a classificationist/essentialist/didactic ontology or way of dividing the world and unlike most simple divisions it seems like it holds up well. Except for viruses.

Ask probably any teacher or professor and they'll tell you that viruses are non-living because they don't meet part of some list of criteria. Only a few will engage in an consideration of them being alive; for comparison only the most philosophical will suspend disbelief and entertain the idea that rocks are alive.

But the people who agree that viruses are non-living will also easily say that they evolve. This for a long time would've been contradictory, but now where we consider memes to be subject to evolution and definitely not alive, the tension between non-living and evolving isn't apparent. There should be tension because evolution came out of biology, no one looking at non-living but evolving things would've ever come up with the idea of evolution, I suspect.

Nothing that isn't man-made or alive evolves, except viruses. Perhaps rather than being an exception to the general rule they're subject to it and were in the past somehow connected to living things.

Living things reproduce, move, grow, and have some sort of metabolism. In the debates about the origin of life the main focus in fact is between reproduction and metabolism, rather than movement and growth. So perhaps those main features of living things are expressed very different across the whole tree of life. Some things practically don't grow at all. There's a gigantic (essentialist) division between life that reproduces by fission and life that reproduces sexually. Some living things don't move at all, like bacterial mats. And as far as growth, there are things that have the same form and simply grow bigger, and things that take radically different forms as part of growth.

But there's nothing that doesn't have metabolism. What would something without a metabolism look like? It probably can't move much and probably doesn't grow much and probably doesn't have much of an ability to reproduce. It'd look like a virus. So what if viruses evolved from very primitive life forms that slowly lost their metabolism as they became more evolved to live off of and inside bacterial cells?

Alternatively, what if viruses are the product of living cells? Cells could've produced a viral like protein coat/cluster that they pushed out into the world, in order to alter the environment around them, or perhaps even as a type of waste or holdfast structure at the earliest stages. If these holdfasts instead of attached to a neutral substrate were interlocking with proteins expressed on the surface of other cells, they could evolve with even more specificity. Perhaps viral capsules are a bizarre evolution of whatever mechanisms allowed cells to hold on to each other, either in making bacterial mats or as a way to leach off of other cells.

 

Viruses do move. Beyond their brownian motion through a media, once they meet a host cell they attach and undergo molecular movements to flex and introduce their genetic material into the host cell. They attack not by a normal sort of grabbing though but by a lock-and-key like interaction between molecules on the viral surface and molecules on the cellular surface, and in this way have evolved to become host-cell specific.

Everyone takes for granted that viruses evolved this specificity in order to be injected into the cell and hijack it for reproduction. But what would an intermediate stage of that evolution look like? We've learned a tremendous amount about the evolutionary history of birds and reptiles and primates and humans because we have access to intermediate stages, and those intermediate stages have shown us that we should reject orthogenetic evolution or directed and striving evolution. Monkey's didn't evolve into humans with large brains because of some pre-programmed tendency within all of monekydom to have larger brains. Primates didn't rearrange the functional capsules of their face and skull in order to make room  for bulbous brains. Reptiles didn't slowly extend the length and lightness of their scales because eventually it'd pay off in flight. The intermediate stages were undirected and functional on their own often in ways that were totally different than what we recognize the current function is.  Viral latching mechanisms didn't have to evolve in order to inject viral genetic material into a host cell.

Perhaps an imaginary cell growing in competition with early bacteria that were forming matts or volvox like sphere developed viral particles that interrupted the bacterial cellular adhesion of those structures. THis could be a tremendous advantage for a non-colonial organism against a colonial one. Later packaging off some genetic material in it, which isn't so surprising in cells without nuclear organisation and with plasmids circulating in the intercellular fluid, could end up making the interrupting capsules more host/target specific. It'd be an investment with a heck of a payoff, evolutionarily speaking, because the producing cells wouldn't have to invest all that much of their own energy in it, produce a few replicating capsules, and then let their own reproduction propel them on. A free defense mechanism. 

Alternatively, something more like a modern virus could've evolved as a type of machinery that a living cell sends out to attack and lyse nearby competing cells, allowing the producing cell to live off the spilled and lysed materials, like a fly spreading digestive juices onto it's prey and sucking up the mottled remains, or a starfish everting its stomach onto it's prey. An evolutionary scenario like that would provide selection for attachment specificity and the ability to reproduce inside a host-cell.

In any case once these molecular machines are produced, their evolutionary history is decoupled form the producing cells. Perhaps the producing cells went extinct in the Archean for all we know and the machinery has been whirring on ever since. 90% or more of all life has gone extinct so the odds are simply in favor of the producing cells being extinct. The intermediate forms and the producing cells, unlike whole dinosaurs in the case of birds or ape teeth in the case of humans, won't preserve well and would be in rocks that are potentially astoundingly old and rare and metamorphosed when still extant,  we'll likely never find those intermediate forms. And evolution sometimes seems to repeat, flight evolved several times, in birds, pterosaurs, bats, and insects. But notice that besides insects the other groups are somewhat closely related, used relatively similar mechanisms and anatomical structures to evolve flight, and probably did so in very similar environmental circumstances (like arboreality). So if viral producing cells are still extant we'd have to look in environments that would select for it, just like the environments that select for flight. WHich means we need to have better ideas about what those environments and functions are. If it's for lysing cells to digest them, we perhaps need to look at places where autotrophy doesn't work (deep sea environments away from hydrothermal vents? Deeply buried anaerobic soils?)  and heterotrophy has some extreme requirements (like preying on bactieral cells that are too big or too durable for phagocytosis). We'd also want to look for groups of cells that are best candidates for this sort of behavior, just like we'd want to look at vertebrates when studying flight. "Vertebrates" might seem like an absurdly wide group to look for, but the bacterial world is much more diverse than the world of normal macroscopic organism that we're used to (which is basically vertebrates, arthropods, molluscs, and  'plants'), so having something like that would probably help greatly in finding if these types of cells are still alive. Find the target environment, then do something like environmental DNA studies to even see if the 'right' groups are present at all before doing more detailed study.

So in this way we're applying the major themes of evolution across life to the evolution of viruses.

[this is an off the cuff set of thoughts that I'm not even going to bother editing and may return to to wildly change/revise things or may never look at again, just getting some dumb thoughts on 'paper'.)

On Punctuated Equilibria

Reading Eldridge and Gould, 1972. Punctuated Equilibria: An alternative to Phyletic Gradualism. in Schopf (ed) Models in Paleobiolgoy. Freeman, Cooper, & Co. 

E&G begin by noting that research is not conducted in a vacuum and that we don't observe data with a "viewpoint from nowhere": we use theory to organize and interpret data. they call this a "picture" rather than a paradigm/research programme/etc, explicitly trying to avoid the longstanding debate over those terms.

Stepping off from this, they claim that most paleontologists hold a conceptual picture of evolution walking along with slow and small steps; they term this "phyletic gradualism" and link it with sympatric speciation. Importantly they feel that paleontologists haven't been keeping up with the mainstream of population biology, where allopatric speciation is (or at least was in the '70s when the paper was written) was all the rage.

So with that hypothetical apparatus in mind (that "picture" influences theory and paleos currently work under a gradualist picture), they consider how allopatric speciation would look in the fossil record. E&G look at two fossil groups and attempt to establish that the data can be explained, and can possibly be more "interestingly" explained, under the allopatric model.

First they consider Poecilozonites, a genus of pulmonate snails from Bermuda. Using different pictures, they can argue in support of allo- or sympatric  speciation. The species under consideration are all subspecies of P. bermudensis that are marked in being paedomorphic; the adults retain juvenile features. A story of gradual cumulative change can be laid out, but when you start including geographic information, more support is seen for allopatry.

Second they review Phacops rana and related trilobite species from Devonian New York--Ohio strata. In particular the discussion focuses on changes in one 'character' (although it's a complex character with many related components, as the 
authors point out), the number of "dorso-ventral files" in the eye.  They find that the mainline species has 18 of these eye-files, and argue that marginal populations arise with variable number of eye-files. These marginal peripheral populations then expand/migrate, overtaking the mainline. This is the allopatric model in essence. In each case of these triblobites there's a reduction of the number of files in the eye (see Figure 1). 

Figure 1 - Hypothetical Phylogeny

I don't really know anything about the eyes of trilobites, other than that they're complex/compound and insect-like, but are not related to insect eyes. Eyes are fascinating structures, famously Darwin seemed to waiver that natural selection could produce something so complex, and who's function seems so reliant on the interdependence of parts. But of course Darwin immediately recognized that the eye could evolve in stages, and he even cited some fossil examples of probable stage. In fact, one would think that that was a lucky accident and that eyes turned up once in a primitive ancestor and have been inherited by all eyed organisms today-- or maybe they evolved twice, one for organisms with eyes 'like ours' and one for compound eye type organisms). But that's not the case, eyes of various sorts have independently evolved many times amoung animals, up to 100 times.
The only other thing I know about trilobite eyes is that their lenses are made of calcite, a mineral. Our eyes lenses are nothing like this, they contain crystallin, which is a protein, not  a mineral (despite what its name might suggest to some) and our lenses are metabolically active.
So this business of "dorsoventral" whatever seemed like it was worth looking into. Trilobite eyes are compound, similar to an insect's, but independently evolved (they're possibly the oldest eyes we have on record). Each facet is made up of a small calcite lens (and other tissues), and a string of lenses is what E&G is referring to as a "dorso-ventral file". There's more to the eye, with the visual unit, capped by a lens, being called an ommatidia. Lines of lenses that run between the dorsal and ventral surface of an eye are called d-v files, and lines of lenses that run horizontally across an eye are simply called rows. The number of files is used in the determination of species within trilobites.

Figure 2 - Trilobite eye structure

Interestingly, the some of the specimens referred to by E&G are from the Marcellus Shale in NY (a source of hydrofraked natural gas).

E&G go on to state that there's an expectation amoung paleontologists that successively higher taxonomic ranks should have progressively more and more taxa within it, they believe this incorrect assumption is a result of the "picture" of phyletic gradualism; as time goes on more and more species are produced. The reality is that there are, infamously, lots of higher ranks that are species poor, so we in some families there are hundreds of genera each containing dozens of species and good sub-species, but often enough we can have Orders with a few monotypic genera. Allopatric speciation can explain this as repeated splitting with either 1) the parent species going extinct and only marginal ones surviving; 2) when geographic isolates adapt through new modes of feeding/motion/protection/etc; and 3) when it involves a small isolated lineage.

Finally E&G address that exemplar of phyletic gradualism, the evolution of long-term (and especially adaptive) trends in a lineage. They feel that allopatry can result in the appearance of  a trend by way of analogy to how random mutation in a population can still result in the overall production of a trend within that population. Selection pressure moves the population in one direction, and something that would eventually become called "species sorting", IIRC, similarly produces the trend at a higher level. They point out a mechanism in a little more detail, relying on something like the genetic and historical constraints of the mainline species tending to result in marginal species reacting strongly and in the same way to particular to similar marginal environments--say, developing thick skin in desert environments; the net effect is an overall trend for the group of species.

You can see a lot of anticipations of Gould's later work on hierarchical levels of evolution in this work, along with some material that, probably through uncharitable readings, was used to charge Eldridge and Gould with being monstrous saltationists.

I have to wonder at some of their examples though and if they really show a signal of allopatry. With Phacops, we see a few marginal populations developing, in these cases through paedomorphosis, in different locations and then expanding over the ancestral range. E&G note that the mainline population is invariant, with 18 d-v files, while the marginals are at first more variable, and then later less variable with a reduced number of d-v files. But why isn't this just a large, general population with variability in the number of d-v files, why consider the variable population to be an isolate?  If you look at any one slice through time, you find a wide-spanning population with variable d-v file numbers, some living in epeiric seas, other in marginal seas, which aren't terribly different environments either. 

Figure 3 - Some notes on the hypothetical Trilobite phylogeny. Red lines 1--3
are samples at a particular time, the green arrow is a possible trendline.

Figure 3 show populations (marked with red lines) with 1) 18--17 d-v files; 2) only 17 d-v files; and 3) 15--17 d-v files. Further, the green line in Figure 3 shows that in epeiric seas as you move through time the number of d-v files changes 18 to 17 to 15, a trend of reduction in this group at this location. The authors posit that migration has occurred  not evolution in place over a long period of time.

 Obviously the justification for allopatry must be in Eldrige's (and others) stratigraphic and geographic work on the group, but it'd be more helpful to have some discussion of that.

One other thing that really sticks out in this work is that E&G are heavily operating within the adaptationist programme, ironic given that Gould is such a critic of that. Whether they're considering allopatry or sympatry, they can find adaptationist explanations for all the features. Perhaps shells became thinner as an adaptation to living in limey soil, or perhaps that was just the result of drift, a meaningless fixation. It's hard to believe that you can have a wide ranging population of Phacops trilobites with something like the structure of the eye varying so much, and that this is the result of selection pressure for the number of d-v files, rather than just meaningless variability in their number. Eldridge, and others, promoted the idea of identifying species within the trilobites by counting (presumably amoung other things) the number of dorso-ventral lines. Perhaps that 'picture' of trilobite evolution coloured his ideas here.

Disinteresting Star Trek Conventions

Reading: Dear, Peter. 2001 Science Studies as Epistemography. in The One Culture, A Conversation about Science. Labinger & Collins, Eds.

This essay makes the point that Science Studies needs to be disinterested, by which the author means 'not interested in the scientific truth of the matter under study'. If the researcher used normal scientific methodology in order to study his subject, he'd be introducing an 'interest' that could bias the results.
But the problem with this is that the scientific truth of the matter at hand is relevant to the study of science, to the history of science, and why certain theories are accepted while others are not.

In Science Fiction, the reader is asked to suspend disbelief over a few technical issues in order to provide the setting and backdrop against which the story takes place. This, by way of analogy, is like Dear's disinterest. But there is a major problem with this type of disinterest and suspension of disbelief: it's one thing to think about Warp Drives and allow them to exist in order to be entertained and educated by the stories in Star Trek, it's quite another thing to actually go around believing that, yes, Warp Drive does exist. While that belief might seem insane to most people, there is a tendency amoung Trekkies to in fact believe that the Science of Star Trek is real science, or a likely and reasonable projection of what science will be like in the future; it's not science today, so we need to suspend our disbelief in that sense, but one day it will most likely come to fruition, it's believable.

A Star Trek Technical Manual, 
yes, that's "a" manual, there are 
several and they'll explain the 
physics and engineering challenges 
involved in incorporating the 
Bussard Ramscoop into the 
Warp Nacelle, or that a 
Nanocochrane is a billionth 
of a Cochrane, itself a measure of 
the subspace field stress.

Given that this tendency or trend exists (and competes with a similar trend to realize that Star Trek is not about real science), what is the better way to analyze and critique Star Trek? Based on it's literary value or on it's scientific accuracy? Surely most would agree that literary criticism of Star Trek is more sensible than Scientific criticism. And so, by analogy, it might seem that criticism/evaluation/analysis of science should "stand-off" from the truth, that scientific accuracy shouldn't be a criteria through which we analyze the social development of a scientific research program.
But that's wrong, the analogy fails, because Star Trek is literature, it's not the truth and doesn't claim to be scientific. The truth of scientific correctness of a research program or theory is very much a part of the how and why it's successful. The truth of a sci-fi story is not, in fact in a way it's explicitly not, a part of why the story is successful.

Scientists don't just happen to stumble on the truth, the scientific enterprise (see what I did there) builds upon previous successes in order to achieve more success: science progresses. Maybe not in straight lines, and certainly not inevitably, science does form columns and march right into progress, but, nonetheless, it does progress. So it's grossly inadequate to evaluate science from a sociological perspective without taking into account the scientific correctness of the theory, research program, or even researcher, under study.
Clearly there are other influences. Going back to the Sci-Fi analogy, IF you ask the audience to suspend disbelief too much, then at the very least you cross genres and end up in Science Fantasy Land, where hobbits have ray guns, and that's just plain stupid.

No Comment on either.

In the sociology of science, there is a tendency to reject experiment and empiricism, largely because of conventionalism: explaining experimental failures through auxiliary theories that represent an ad hoc defense of the core theory. Philosophers of science like Karl Popper insist that we make a "bold" decision to refrain from conventionalism (and also to design experiments that test our theories where they'd be the weakest, to try to disprove our theories rather than merely confirm them). This has a parallel in science fiction.  The science of Star Trek has been laid out in books and articles and is moderately well established; you can argue about the results of hypothetical actions in the Star Trek universe, and arrive at canonically consistent results (whereas you can't do this in the Dr. Who universe, because time is merely all wibbly wobbly). Star Trek Conventionalists can criticize a Star Trek story if, say, it involves ship speeds greater than Warp 10. If there's a story where this happens, we know that this is not allowed by the fictionalized science, and so some other explanation has to be offered, or instead we could say that a story must stay within the conventions of Star Trek (not to be confused with Star Trek Conventions of course). Popper wants us to avoid that kind of conventionalism and to make what's arguably a quantum leap: that a theory which hasn't technically been completely falsified, should nonetheless be discarded, and we should move on to another. If you do that in Star Trek, what you get are arguable disasters like Enterprise or Andromeda (as far beyond Star Trek as Trek was beyond Today).

Actor Scott Bakula, playing Dr. Sam

Beckett playing Capt Jonathan Archer,

who's hoping that his next leap will 

be his leap home.

In Science, researchers are supposed to,of course, be disinterested; they're supposed to not be interested in one particular theory over another because it's more popular; it's what their lab director has a research program in; or because it's what the government is providing funding for--a literary critic of Star Trek isn't supposed to be interested in, say, the Romulans coming out on top, and if that doesn't happen well dammit the story was flawed! A science fiction critic is supposed to be interested in the story. A scientific researcher is not supposed to be disinterested in the truth.

Responses and Reactions to Threatened Paradigms

There have been a few responses to Dupré's column on a crisis in Evolutionary Theory; Dr. Jerry Coyne's and Dr. Massimo Pigliucci's.

Coyne's arguement

I think Dr. Coyne's argument would be seen by many as the standard fare to expect from most researchers on this issue. A crisis is an extraordinary thing, and it requires, so the saying goes, extraordinary evidence to support it. Dr. Dupré instead offers some interesting things that perhaps Ernst Mayr would've found really surprising, but not an Kuhnian indictment of Evolutionary Theory. 
Dr. Coyne's main beef is that we tend to hear the evolution is in crisis from a lot of quarters, and they're usually wrong. This is not to say that there aren't any debates between biologists, just that we aren't in the stagnation followed by revolution stage of Kuhn, nor near it.

Pigliucci's Points

Dr. Pigliucci's essay is as much a response to Coyne as it is to Dupré. Some would argue that a mainstay of philosophy is to use reconciliation between opposing camps to better get at the 'truth' of any particular matter, and that is what Pigliucci attempts here.

A major disagreement between Coyne and Pigliucci is over rare events and important events. Obviously an event can be both, and Pigliucci cites the Big Bang as a good example of just that. However, while Inflationary Theory is important, did it result in a re-writing of the Standard Model in Physics? While Margulis hit on something amazing in biology, does the endo-symbiont hypothesis really challenge the Modern Synthesis?

Another contentious point is the importance of 'causal arrows' that don't extend out of the genome. I don't think most would consider Coyne a genetic determinist, certainly not in the way that Dawkin's is usually accused of being, but he does seem fairly set in the idea that most of the important stuff traces back to the genome, and things that don't are just ancillary, not revolutionary.

This entire argument really tracks back to, or at least mimics in some ways, reactions to Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions (pdf). Many felt that what Kuhn was describing was the way science normally operates, that he hadn't hit on anything really interesting, and for others his shifting paradigms concept was a truly revolutionary way of understanding change in science, of addressing the 'problem of progress'. For the people who felt Kuhn wasn't saying anything new, well, it was just that, he was describing things events that were already well known, understood, and accepted. His small problems that a standing theory couldn't address (and that eventually were involved in the theory's downfall), weren't capable of bringing the theories down (in this contra-Kuhnian line of thinking). The small problems were relegated to the side or worked on further in the normal process of science, and only added to the existing theory. Thus it is with Dr. Coyne's assessment of Dr. Dupré's crisis claim, the small issues are just that, small, and while they're real, and affect evolutionary theory, they don't represent a crisis.
Prof. Pigliucci seems to feel differently, even if he isn't happy with Dupré's use of 'radical' to describe the changes, and he rattles off a list of concepts that are foreign to the Modern Synthesis.


The biggest challenge to the Modern Synthesis, in my mind, was Genetic Drift and Neutralism, even tho some might argue that they're 'fully' accounted for in MS. And they were successful challenges, and they defeated the Modern Synthesis, or at least the MS-based claim that they couldn't contribute to an organism's evolution and history. But the MS was formulated around a hundred years ago; I don't think that Dr. Coyne is trying to defend the traditional MS in this piece. Dr. Dupré explicitly mentions the MS, and his 'threats' are threats to the MS, but haven't we moved away from the MS already anyway? That's been my impression for a while now, so while Dupré would certainly be right that the traditional Modern Synthesis, which is pretty explicit about what counts in Biology, is challenged to the point of crisis (Kuhnian or not) by the 'threats', or rather, it already had been challenged by those threats and had to give in to them.

Threatened Paradigms?

Dr. Dupré is the Director of the Economic & Social Research Council's Centre for Genomics in Society. He considers speciation by branching and genetic determinism to be  "Threatened Paradigms", as detailed in his column, Evolutionary Theory's welcome crisis. Here are my thoughts on his threatening paradigms.

Horizontal Transfer

This is not a new phenomenon, in fact it's something that's so well established and argueably uninteresting that it's made it's way into high school textbooks. If our focus is on largish mutlicellular animals, then yes, we're probably not appreciating the quantity of horizontal tranfers that goes on in life, but the bigger problem there is that we're focused on largish mutlicellular animals in the first place! Microbes are by far the greater moiety that makes up life, and there horizontal transfer is rampant. While the recognition that microbial life is where the bulk of the action of life is 'at' is an important recognition, it's not one that Dupré actually calls out; it's not something that really changes our understanding  of evolution; and it's not a new idea.

Epigenetics

Again, this is not a new phenomenon, and while it wasn't in my high school textbooks, I honestly wouldn't be surprised if it was in then now. Dupré also overstates the case when it comes to epigenetics, it's not like the outside environment sends molecules into the organism that then alters the genome or suppresses/activates large segments of it, it's the genome that largely does the control work for epigentics. Much like "Evo-Devo" as a phrase, epigenetics is something that seemed to claim something radical, but as a program, hasn't altered the status quo much. 

Also, note that what  Dr. Dupré claims here is that, these are not merely interesting addenda to the Modern Synthesis, but rather they're 'Radical Restructuring of Evolutionary Theory'.  From what I can tell, if Stephen J. Gould's ideas, as worked out in his magnum opus "The Structure of Evolutionary Theory" were to take over the majority of thinking in evolution and biology, that would be a radical restructuring, not paying attention to drift, methylation, and horizontal transfer.


I 'get' that maybe  Dupré 's main point was that it's the disagreements between evolutionary theorists and biologists and the like that really shows how evolution (in fact science itself), shines, but that claim doesn't require the non sequitor of radical restructuring.

via Storify

E-Portfolios and Cats

re: http://nogoodreason.typepad.co.uk/no_good_reason/2011/06/eportfolios-all-thats-wrong-with-ed-tech.html

The crux of the above post is that e-portfolios were all the rage, but the fell out of favour because they add unnecessary complications, are de-socialized, have a steep learning curve, and often quickly just became ways to submit student work.

They are still alive at our campus. I don't use them and don't know anyone that uses them, but I occasionally see campus-wide-list-emails about them. Development of e-portfolios is managed by our 'Center for Advanced Technologies Training', along with many other systems, like BlackBoard, Blogs, and Wikis. Most of our faculty doesn't have their Faculty Profile webpage set up though, so I suspect that these resources are under-utilized. I know the people at our CATT and they are great, extremely helpful, so I have to think that what the above post suggests is true about a lot of electronic systems.

One comment on the above blog is interesting:

So e-portfolios are problematic if you're talking about education and learning, but in the context of schooling - the real world in which most people live, they work just fine (or as well as anything does...).

This highlights the difference between Actual Learning and Scholasticism. On the one hand our students, and this seems to be true everywhere regardless of what people say, are expected to basically jump through a set of hoops. And they approach it as such, tasks to check off in order to move up.

I was at a graduation ceremony this weekend at a high level private high school. The Valedictorian actually said just that, that they learned nothing in their school other than to use things like cliff and spark notes, and that putting work off until the night before was actually better than doing it ahead of time, not merely acceptable or sufficient but preferable because they can focus on other things to learn that are important (and he did not mean academic matters).

So it sounds like e-portfolios are great, as long as you want the same-old-same-old, or as long as you want 'top performing students' who are doing nothing.

I'll have to actually try to verify that though, maybe I need to talk to the guys over at our CATT.