Using a cellphone camera, a friend of mine captured this photo on a Baltimore Light Rail train a few days ago.  It appears that Chuck, like Elvis, is still among the living.

h/t: Andrew Berry

I am reliably informed by one of my Chinese colleagues that WEIT was chosen by China Reading Weekly (said to be the Chinese equivalent of The New York Review of Books), as one of the top ten books published in China in 2009. It’s #8, and the only science book on the list.  You can see the list here, and the announcement (upper left) here.

Now I know there’s a Chinese-speaking reader who will point out that the title of the book is actually “Why We Should Believe Darwin,” and not “Why Evolution is True.”  That was done, I am told, because of the immense authority Darwin commands in China.

One other interesting point: my Chicago colleague Dr. Manyuan Long, who kindly helped shepherd the book into print in China, and who contributed a foreword, says that he fought to have the word “evolution” translated into the Chinese word (roughly “yanhua”) that means “descent with modification” rather than what the publishers wanted, which is a word equivalent to “progress” (roughly “jinghua”).  (Apparently the “progress” word is more politically congenial.)   Curiously, he won the battle not on the grounds that evolution doesn’t produce what humans think of progress, but on the grounds that the distinguished Professor Jerry Coyne might someday visit China and find out that his words had been distorted!

h/t: Manyuan Long, for all his help, and for calling this to my attention

I’m off to the UK this evening to deliver a humorous/salacious/laudatory “vote of thanks” (that’s what they call it)—an introduction to the talk of a colleague who has been promoted to full professor.  I’ll be back in a week, but may post a thing or two when I get the chance. In the meantime, Greg and Matthew will handle the website.  I am told that there’s a special kitteh for tomorrow. . .

A little over two years ago, Jerry Fodor, a well-known and respected philosopher of mind, wrote an article in the London Review of Books, “Why Pigs Don’t Have Wings,” criticizing the concept of natural selection because it was both philosophically incoherent and empirically untenable.

The high tide of adaptationism floated a motley navy, but it may now be on the ebb. If it does turn out that natural selection isn’t what drives evolution, a lot of loose speculations will be stranded high, dry and looking a little foolish. Induction over the history of science suggests that the best theories we have today will prove more or less untrue at the latest by tomorrow afternoon. In science, as elsewhere, ‘hedge your bets’ is generally good advice.

Many of us, philosophers and scientists alike, responded by writing letters to the LRB pointing out Fodor’s empirical and philosophical errors (scroll down below his article to see all the exchanges).  Fodor was intransigent, refusing to give quarter and continuing to maintain that natural selection is erroneous and outmoded.

Now he and a colleague, Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, a cognitive scientist with some biology training, have expanded the attack on natural selection into a whole book: What Darwin Got Wrong, a book highlighted in today’s Independent. Fortunately (unlike the BBC), they’ve chosen somebody smart and critical—science writer Peter Forbes—to write the appraisal, which is not pretty:

Fodor is a philosophical flâneur: he loves cheap jokes and affects a kind of provocative insouciance. His 2003 book on Hume states at the outset that he “could even write a book on Hume without actually knowing anything about him,” and then claims to have done so. Philosophers and scientists could not be further apart. For geneticist and science writer Professor Steve Jones, “philosophy is to science what pornography is to sex” . . .

Unlike physics, biology is the science of exceptions. Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini come to the same conclusion but mostly for the wrong reasons.

Given the provocative title, it’s important to stress what Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini’s polemic is not. From the outset, they assert that they have no quarrel with the course of evolution and its timescale, only its mechanism. Furthermore, they affirm that they are “outright, card-carrying, signed-up, dyed-in-the-wool, no-holds-barred atheists.” For that small relief, much thanks.

I do, however, disagree with one of Forbes’s criticisms:

Secondly, they attack the logic of Neo-Darwinism. In their philosophical assault, Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini pursue several lines, one of which boils down to the old conundrum: natural selection demonstrates the survival of the fittest. What are the fittest? Those that survive. Scientists know that this is a trivial linguistic trick but Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini pursue this wrangling for 68 pages.

This seems to me a mischaracterization of Fodor and Piattelli-Palmerini’s argument, which is more complex than simply pointing out a tautology. (“Survival of the fittest” is not, by the way, a tautology.)

I’ll be reviewing this book elsewhere, so it would be inappropriate for me to do so here (link will be forthcoming).  Let me just say that virtually every biologist and philosopher who has followed Fodor’s arguments over the past two years has taken issue with his views on natural selection and with his philosophical arguments.  The book will, I predict, give enormous comfort to creationists, but will receive almost no praise from philosophers and scientists.  Fodor, who as far as I can tell has never admitted an error, will then claim that biologists and academic philosophers  have an entrenched interest in the truth of natural selection, and that he and Piattelli-Palmerini are, like Galileo, being reviled for criticizing erroneous dogma.

To this I respond:  for every Galileo there are a thousand crackpots who also question received wisdom—but are wrong.  In their misguided attacks on natural selection, Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini are straying dangerously close to crackpot-dom.

I have no truck with the accommodationist, Templeton-funded website BioLogos, but at least they have the decency to point out the errors in Stephen Meyer’s new creationist book, Signature in the Cell (see Darryl Falk’s review here), which maintains that cells must have been designed by God because they’re too complex to have evolved.   Falk, who is president of BioLogos, also solicited comments from biologists Francisco Ayala (critical), Gerald Joyce (critical but doesn’t want to waste his time on a creationist), and Nobel Laureate Jack Szostak. Szostak is also critical but, in response to Falk (a professor at the religious Point Loma Nazarene University), also takes a swipe at Falks’s accommodationism:

However, I suspect I must part company with you in that I believe that science and religion actually are irreconcilable. In my view a scientific world view is one based on continuous questioning and therefore a search for more and better evidence and theories; faith in the unknowable plays no role. I think that belief systems based on faith are inherently dangerous, as they leave the believer susceptible to manipulation when skepticism and inquiry are discouraged.

Falk is “saddened” by Szostak’s faith-bashing:

I am especially interested in Dr. Szostak’s final paragraph. He is correct that we part company at this point, which saddens me deeply. I have written before, and I will write again: there are very sound reasons for entering the life of faith. I embarked upon a search for a source of ultimate reality and my personal search was based on evidence, too. The journey of faith is by no means blind, and there many fine scientists who—guided by faith, evidence, and reason—choose to follow the same journey I am on. Scientific pathways and faith journeys need not lead to different locations in life. In fact, I am convinced they point in the very same direction and lead to the very same place.

Falk doesn’t tell us what “evidence” shows that faith and science both point in the same direction (presumably toward Jesus).  And of course Falk was “convinced” a priori:  virtually all religious accommodationists start with the premise that science and faith produce the same conclusions (indeed, that’s the mission of BioLogos), and then seek support for this notion.  This shows, more than anything, why there is a disconnect between science and faith: good scientists don’t start with conclusions and then discard any data that don’t support those conclusions.  (What “evidence,” by the way, would show that “scientific pathways” and “faith journeys” actually do lead to different conclusions?)  In responding to Szostak, Falk unwittingly demonstrates why science and faith aren’t compatible.

Meyer published his tedious response here; it’s more of the same ID pap clothed in science language. Note that although Falk offered Meyer “an opportunity to post a 1000 word response to all of this on our site,” he actually published Meyer’s entire 2700-word response.  Maybe that’s because Falk is kindly disposed toward Meyer:  as Falk noted offering Meyer his rebuttal, “He is a Christian brother. I know he means well.”

No, Dr. Falk, Meyer does not mean well.  He is spreading lies and confusing people by distorting real science.  Is that the unfortunate result of “meaning well”?  Do you think that because somebody is a “Christian brother,” he’s incapable of lying for Jesus?

I swear, I do appreciate people like Falk, who are religious, coming out against the lies of the Discovery Institute.  But BioLogos, in its shameful pandering to religion, is simply an embarrassment to the community of biologists.  In their insistence that faith and science are mutually reinforcing, and their unwillingness to entertain any evidence to the contrary, people like Falk are impediments to the advance of rationality.  As Szostak says, “belief systems based on faith are inherently dangerous, as they leave the believer susceptible to manipulation when skepticism and inquiry are discouraged.”

Indeed.

Yesterday the BBC reported on a study by Sonia Altizer and Andrew Davis, of the University of Georgia, purporting to demonstrate that populations of the monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus) show differences in wing size that are correlated with whether or not the populations show migratory behavior to overwintering grounds.  Intrigued, I went to the Evolution website and read the paper, which is accepted but not yet copy-edited.  I found what seemed to be a serious problem with the interpretation—a problem that, had the BBC reporter had some expertise in evolutionary biology—could have been caught, or at least highlighted in the news report.  This underscores the recurring problem that science reporters without much formal training in science often report results without giving the proper caveats.

As you probably know (especially if you watched the NOVA program, The Incredible Journey of  the Butterflies, which aired a few days ago), some populations of monarch butterflies show bizarre and wonderful migratory abilities. Individuals from the east coast overwinter in Mexico, and those from west of the Rockies migrate to Southern California.  The migration is necessary because adult butterflies can’t tolerate cold, but also because their food plants aren’t available in winter.

But this is not a continuous movement of adults from summering grounds to wintering grounds.  The adults do fly the entire one-way journey in the fall, but it takes them several generations (each generation lasting 6-8 weeks) to get back to their summering grounds.  One of the great mysteries of monarch migration is how they’re able to return to the same summering grounds used by their great-grandparents.  What mechanism guides them in the right direction? And how did natural selection produce this directionality? We don’t know the answers to these questions.

Not all populations of monarchs are migratory.  Those in warmer areas, like southern Florida, Costa Rica, and Puerto Rica, have no impetus for migrating since the climate is tolerable and food plants continuously available. They stay put all year.

Based on this “dimorphism” among populations, Altizer and Davis  reanalyzed old data, originally collected for a study of parasitism, to test the following prediction:

We therefore predicted that monarchs from long-distance migratory populations would have larger and more elongated forewings to increase flight surface area and reduce wingtip-induced drag.

That is, individuals from migratory populations are under strong selection to fly long distances, and thus would evolve wings more suited to this task than those populations that are more sedentary.

I won’t go into all the details of this study, but here’s what they found:

1.   Wild-caught individuals from both “eastern migratory” populations (Minnesota, Georgia, and Mexican overwinterers) and “western migratory” populations (California, Utah, Nevada, Washington, and Colorado) were larger than individual from “nonmigratory” populations (Florida, Hawaii, Costa Rica, and Puerto Rico).  This verified their prediction (there were also shape differences, but I won’t discuss them here).

How do we know that these are evolved genetic differences rather than purely environmentally-induced differences in body size (correlated with wing size)? After all, we know from laboratory work that insects reared in colder temperatures grow larger than genetically identical insects reared in warmer temperatures. (I’ve done this many times, for instance, with Drosophila.) To answer this, Altizer and Davis reared three groups of butterflies under constant laboratory conditions of food and temperature.  They observed:

2.  Under these constant conditions, individuals from eastern and western migratory populations still had bigger wings than individuals from nonmigratory populations (unfortunately, they analyzed only one nonmigratory population here: that from south Florida).  From this they conclude that the differences between all populations are genetic and represent evolved adaptive differences:

Collectively, these studies suggest that the demands of long-distance flight represent an important evolutionary force operating on the physical characteristics of migratory species.

The BBC report, written by Matt Walker, echoes this conclusion in the report, titled “Supersized monarch butterflies evolved to fly far.”

These “supersized” butterflies have evolved to cope with the demands of long-distance flight.

In contrast, monarchs that live in one place all year have wings that are up to 20% smaller, report scientists in the journal Evolution. . .

Walker gives no caveats in his report. He simply blurbs the paper and gives some quotes from Altizer.  The reporter made no attempt to seek out opinions or commentary from other scientists.

Is there anything wrong with that? Well, one thing: there’s another explanation for the results, not depending on migration, that neither the paper nor Walker considers.  It is this: it has long been known that if you look at populations of insects from different areas of its range, those from colder locations tend to be larger (both developmentally and genetically) than those from warmer locations.  In other words, they conform to Bergmann’s rule, an “ecogeographic rule” that states that the body mass of an animal is positively correlated with the latitude where it lives. In other words, populations from colder areas have bigger bodies.

The classic explanation of this “rule” involves mammals: if you’re living in a colder climate, it’s adaptive to have a larger mass, for the ratio of heat produced (proportional to the cube of a linear dimension, in other words body mass) to heat lost through radiation (proportional to the square of a linear dimension, in other words body surface area) is lower for larger animals.  That is, it’s easier to stay warm if you’re bigger.  Now this explanation holds only for warm-blooded animals (homeotherms), but we now know that the “rule” is also obeyed by many cold-blooded animals (poikilotherms).  I’ve spent a lot of my career documenting this in Drosophila, and it’s clear that, regardless of the species, populations from colder areas evolve larger size.  Why this is so in poikilotherms, who don’t produce body heat to keep warm, is an intriguing but unanswered question. But the phenomenon is real.

The apparent problem with Altizer and Davis’s result is this: all the “nonmigratory” populations live in warmer areas than do the “migratory” populations.  Therefore, we expect nonmigratory individuals to be smaller than migratory individuals (i.e., have smaller wings), even if there were no difference in migration behavior. (This is aside from the fact that the authors draw sweeping conclusions about genetic differences from comparing only two migratory populations with only a single nonmigratory population.)

Now the authors don’t discuss this potential problem, which I think is serious.  The reviewers of the Evolution paper should have caught it.  Nor does the BBC highlight it.   My verdict on the paper: it’s intriguing but nowhere near conclusive, and should have been reviewed more thoroughly.

I may be wrong in this conclusion, and perhaps the authors will point out my error. And of course further work may show that they’re correct about a correlation between migration and wing size.  But in the meantime, it highlights an apparent breakdown in not only reviewing papers (which has grown more cursory with the exponentially increasing submissions reflecting both the existence of more scientists and the greater pressure on scientists to publish more), but also in the tendency of science reports to avoid looking too hard at research that produces interesting conclusions.

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Altizer, S., and A. K. Davis. 2010. Populations of monarch butterflies with different migratory behaviors show difference in wing morphology. Evolution, in press.