Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
An alert reader sent me this clip from a British television show, apparently called “T.V. Burp”. The beginning and end bits are a bit tedious, but the middle, especially the presentation of modern-day Darwin’s finches, is hilarious.
Colin Blakemore, the renowned British neurobiologist, has a pretty hard-hitting article in today’s Guardian about the irreconcilability of faith and science.
. . . . Science has rampaged over the landscape of divine explanation, provoking denial or surrender from the church. Christian leaders, even the Catholic church, have reluctantly accommodated the discoveries of scientists, with the odd burning at the stake and excommunication along the way.
But I was astounded to discover how topical the issue of Galileo’s trial still is in the Vatican and how resistant many Christians are to scientific ideas that challenge scriptural accounts. More than half of Americans, even a third of Brits, still believe that God created humans in their present form.
The process of Christian accommodation is a bit like the fate of fieldmice confronted by a combine harvester, continuously retreating into the shrinking patch of uncut wheat. . . . .
. . . . Human beings are supremely social animals. We recognise people and judge their feelings and intentions from their expressions and actions. Our thoughts about ourselves, and the words we use to describe those thoughts, are infused with wishes and wants. We feel that we are the helmsmen of our actions, free to choose, even to sin.
But increasingly, those who study the human brain see our experiences, even of our own intentions, as being an illusory commentary on what our brains have already decided to do.
Perhaps we humans come with a false model of ourselves, which works well as a means of predicting the behaviour of other people – a belief that actions are the result of conscious intentions. Then could the pervasive human belief in supernatural forces and spiritual agents, controlling the physical world, and influencing our moral judgments, be an extension of that false logic, a misconception no more significant than a visual illusion?
I’m dubious about those “why” questions: why are we here? Why do we have a sense of right and wrong? Either they make no sense or they can be recast as the kind of “how” questions that science answers so well.
When we understand how our brains generate religious ideas, and what the Darwinian adaptive value of such brain processes is, what will be left for religion?
Finally, over at Freespace, Timothy Sandefur comments on my article in the New Republic on accommodationism and the reactions by the scientists at Edge.
In WEIT I mention, in the recommended reading at the end, Donald Prothero’s new book, Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters, published by Columbia University Press. Prothero, a professor of geology at Occidental College in California, is a prolific writer, having produced or co-produced 26 books, most of them on paleobiology.
I don’t think that What the Fossils Say has gotten nearly the attention it deserves, so I wanted to give it a shout-out here. It is simply the best existing book on the evidence for evolution from fossils; there is no competitor. It lays out, for the educated layperson, not only the process of fossilization and the biases it imposes on our knowledge of ancient life, but also discusses systematics, how fossils are used to infer genealogy, and (my favorite part), the evidence. All the favorite transitional forms are there, in nice detail, and many that are not as well known. Prothero does not shy away from engaging creationists–he uses the evidence against their wrongheaded claims at every turn. The writing is superb, the illustrations (many by the great Carl Buell) are a joy. Everybody with an interest in biology and evolution–whether you be a professional or a layperson–should buy and read this book! If you have any doubts, check all the positive reviews on Amazon.
This is Dusty, a bedraggled kitten found by my technician in the alleys of the Pilsen district of Chicago. Dusty was brought up in the lab, where he loved to sleep in plant pots. After several months we adopted him out to a nice couple who promptly renamed him (ugh) “Odin.”
Cat fact (from here; I don’t vouch for its truth!): “Did you know that cats share something in common with only two other species on the planet, the giraffe and the camel? These three beasts are the only ones that when running do not alternate their gait. This means that they run forward with both right feet in one stride, and then both the left feet in the next. All other animals advance with one right and one left, then one left and one right.”
To continue the series of bizarre bird dances demonstrating the ways that sexual selection can mold behavior, I present a short film of the red-capped mankin “moonwalk”, taken in Costa Rica. The species is Pipra mentalis, whose males shuffle down branches while courting. Stiles & Skutch (1989) in A Guide to the Birds of Costa Rica, describe this behaviour of the male as “backwards slides with legs stretched up and yellow thighs exposed.” There are other unique aspects to the courtship behavior as well, including swooping and wing-slapping.
The January 24th issue of New Scientist had a garish cover showing the tree of life, with the words “DARWIN WAS WRONG” emblazoned over it. An editorial bemoaned the phylogenetic errors of the old man, adding a few other buzzwords as well:
A particularly pertinent example is provided in this week’s cover story – the uprooting of the tree of life which Darwin used as an organising principle and which has been a central tenet of biology ever since (see “Axing Darwin’s tree”). Most biologists now accept that the tree is not a fact of nature – it is something we impose on nature in an attempt to make the task of understanding it more tractable. Other important bits of biology – notably development, ageing and sex – are similarly turning out to be much more involved than we ever imagined. As evolutionary biologist Michael Rose at the University of California, Irvine, told us: “The complexity of biology is comparable to quantum mechanics.”
The editors knew in fact that this sensationalistic cover would be appropriated by creationists (as it indeed was), but still said that a “revolution” in biology was in the offing:
As we celebrate the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth, we await a third revolution that will see biology changed and strengthened. None of this should give succour to creationists, whose blinkered universe is doubtless already buzzing with the news that “New Scientist has announced Darwin was wrong”. Expect to find excerpts ripped out of context and presented as evidence that biologists are deserting the theory of evolution en masse. They are not.
What is so wrong with the tree of life? Well, an article by Graham Lawton asserts that horizontal gene transfer (the movement of bits of DNA between species by “infection”), a phenomenon often seen in bacteria and some protists, and occasionally in complex metazoa, invalidates the whole idea of a tree with bifurcating branches. This, of course, is nonsense. Such gene transfer may fuzz out or even obscure genealogies in some prokaryotes, but nobody thinks it’s going to efface the genealogy of most other groups. Can we expect to find that we’re really more closely related to gibbons than to chimpanzees, a truth that has been obscured by massive horizontal transfer from eating bush meat? Don’t expect huge changes in the genealogy of life that we’ve already assembled from molecular data.
And chalk up another erroneous and irresponsible journalistic asssertion that Darwinism is dead. Several of us, including Dan Dennett, P. Z. Myers, and Richard Dawkins, wrote a letter (“Darwin was Right”) to the editor of New Scientist. You can find it here. An excerpt:
Of course there’s a tree; it’s just more of a banyan than an oak at its single-celled-organism base. The problem of horizontal gene-transfer in most non-bacterial species is not serious enough to obscure the branches we find by sequencing their DNA. . . .
The accompanying editorial makes it clear that you knew perfectly well that your cover was handing the creationists a golden opportunity to mislead school boards, students and the general public about the status of evolutionary biology. Indeed, within hours of publication members of the Texas State Board of Education were citing the article as evidence that teachers needed to teach creationist-inspired “weaknesses of evolution”, claiming: “Darwin’s tree of life is wrong”.
“Revolutionary” sentiments are rife in evolutionary biology, but let’s be a little careful before we throw away a paradigm which has, after all, proved to be largely correct for a century and a half. I didn’t anticipate that Darwin Year would bring the neo-Kuhnians out of the woodwork to clamor for an Extended Evolutionary Synthesis. I still can’t see what’s wrong with the old one!
Many birds can keep their heads absolutely stationary while their bodies move around. (Think, for example, of a hummingbird sipping nectar from a flower while its body moves all around.) This is an adaptation to keep the bird’s perception of the environment constant despite other gyrations of the body (such as the bobbing motion of a walking pigeon). One of my friends called my attention to this YouTube video of the phenomenon, involving a guy holding a chicken. It’s absolutely amazing–so much so that I wanted to try it myself. When I was in North Carolina this weekend, I visited a friend who has a pet chicken, and we tried out this maneuver with the bird. Sure enough, the head remained stationary. I am informed that a reputable journal will soon have a short article about bird head tracking, and I’ll post a linke to it here when it’s published in a month.
Addendum: the same guy demonstrates the phenomenon with a lovely purple martin.