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.
by Greg Mayer
In keeping up with the theme begun by Jerry and Matthew, we can now ask: how green were the Hitler Youth? In the following clip, the Australian comedy show The Hamster Wheel reveals that Lord Monckton, the well known and, on the evidence of this video, loony, climate change denialist, is actually a character created by Sacha Baron Cohen. Baron Cohen’s previous creations include Borat, Ali G., and Bruno.
h/t Andrew Sullivan
From alert reader Xaali comes this informative video about the new age in advertising:
This brief video, from David Attenborough’s new series about polar life, Frozen Planet (discussed in the previous post about Discovery Channel’s refusal to show the climate change episode), makes me really want to see the show.
As described by PuffHo (yes, there’s sometimes good stuff there), a brinicle is an underwater icicle that forms from the surface down as dense, subzero-degree salt water (chilled by the air around sea ice) sinks, causing the warmer waters around it to freeze. Note how the brinicle forms a web of ice on the sea floor as it hits bottom, killing all the starfish and sea urchins it touches.
From PuffHo:
Hugh Miller and Doug Anderson filmed the stunning time-lapse clip below, which is apparently the first of its kind. Shot for the BBC’s “Frozen Planet,” the clip was recorded using a special time-lapse camera that caught the brinicle’s entire formation process.
Miller and Anderson captured the brinicle’s formation near Little Razorback Island, close to Antarctica’s Ross Archipelago. The duo found a number of fully formed brinicles close to the site before finding one in the process of forming.
These ice formations were known as ice stalactites until 1974, when Martin Seelye developed the now generally accepted theory of their formation.
The show’s website features a bunch of other nice clips, though I haven’t been able to view them in Spain.
Okay, this is from the Daily Mail, but let’s assume it’s reliable. Backed by BBC One, David Attenborough wrote and presented Frozen Planet, a seven-part television series on the natural history of the polar regions. The last episode, “On Thin Ice,” is about how humans are wrecking this environment via anthropogenic global warming.
Guess what? Although the Discovery Channel is showing the show in the United States, they bought only the first six episodes, omitting the one on global warming. The reason is obvious, even to the Daily Mail:
A poll earlier this year found that the majority of Americans believe that if climate change does exist, it is not caused by humans.
Fifty-three per cent of Republicans say there is no evidence of climate change, while the number is far higher among Tea Party supporters, with 70 per cent saying the theory is ‘junk science’ pushed by groups with a vested interest.
Both the BBC and the Discovery Channel are dissimulating on this one:
A spokesman for the BBC said it would not make sense to force television networks outside the UK to buy the episode as it features 85-year-old Sir David talking a lot of the time to camera, and in many parts of the world he is not famous.
He’s famous enough for his shows to be shown nearly everywhere, and they’re always shown in the U.S. So what’s the excuse for not making the U.S. buy the show as part of the package?
The broadcaster refused to say which countries had shunned ‘On Thin Ice’. They said it wasn’t included in the main package because it features Sir David ‘in vision’ which would make it hard for other countries to translate into their own language.
Yeah, whatever that means. Need I add that Americans speak English too?
Discovery had dropped the full seventh episode due to ‘scheduling issues’, the spokesman added.
What a crock! Does anybody really believe that this is anything other than a television station bowing to potential political pressure? And this isn’t trivial, either—it’s the deliberate withholding of scientific information from the public because that information doesn’t serve certain special interests. It’s a travesty.
Attenborough has largely avoided politics to concentrate on nature, but when humans threaten his beloved planet, he speaks out. He’s done that before about population growth, and now is concerned about global warming. To present his first six episodes and omit the last is to leave out what, for him, is the moral of the tale.
I don’t urge reader action very often, but this is a worthy cause. I seriously doubt that Discovery will bow under the trivial pressure that a website like this can exert, but we should nevertheless make our voices heard. If you’re American and object to the omission of the global-warming episode, go to the Discovery Channel’s “Viewer Relations” page and register your opinion. You’ll have to enter information on three separate pages, and give your cable provider (since that’s required, make one up if you don’t have one), your phone number, and so on, but they do promise to reply within a week, and believe me, I’ll post their reply to my own comment:
I strongly object to your not purchasing or showing the last episode, “On thin ice,” of the Attenborough show “The Frozen Planet”. This is nothing other than your channel’s withholding scientific information from the public in the service of certain private interests. It’s really a travesty, as I am a biologist and want all scientific information, particularly when it involves destruction of our planet, presented to the public. PLEASE reconsider your decision not to show this episode.
Here’s what the show is about, and tells you when the “controversial” last episode will air in the UK:
The show cost an estimated £16 million and took four years to make and has proved hugely popular.
It examines various aspects of the polar wilderness over the seasons and follows the lives of creatures from polar bears and wolves in the Arctic to killer whales and Adelie penguins in the Antarctic.
It has been produced by the BBC’s Natural History Unit in Bristol in conjunction with the Discovery Channel and The Open University.
The climate change episode will be aired on December 7 at 9pm.
h/t: Josh Ozersky
by Greg Mayer
The New York Times has published an obituary. It’s dreadful. Here’s the worst part:
The hypothesis was a direct challenge to the prevailing neo-Darwinist belief that the primary evolutionary mechanism was random mutation.
Rather, Dr. Margulis argued that a more important mechanism was symbiosis; that is, evolution is a function of organisms that are mutually beneficial growing together to become one and reproducing. The theory undermined significant precepts of the study of evolution, underscoring the idea that evolution began at the level of micro-organisms long before it would be visible at the level of species.
I’ll leave the dissection of this nonsense as an exercise.
JAC addition: I agree with Greg; it’s dreadful. And here’s Margulis’s dismissal, given as a quote in the obituary, of an entire cadre of evolutionary biologists:
“I work in evolutionary biology, but with cells and micro-organisms. Richard Dawkins, John Maynard Smith, George Williams, Richard Lewontin, Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould all come out of the zoological tradition, which suggests to me that, in the words of our colleague Simon Robson, they deal with a data set some three billion years out of date.”
As if the work of these people has nothing to contribute to evolutionary biology because it applies to modern-day species! It’s like saying a mechanic can’t work on modern cars because he doesn’t know anything about Stanley Steamers or Model Ts!.
Modern organisms are hardly “out of date”, and they do obey the rules of population genetics. Margulis might as well have dismissed all the architects of modern evolutionary theory, including J. B. S. Haldane, Sewall Wright, Ronald Fisher, and Bill Hamilton.
Margulis’s legacy would be far more positive if she hadn’t spent the last few decades going around saying that she alone had the correct handle on evolutionary biology, and everyone else was wrong. And it would have helped had she not been an HIV-AIDS denialist, asserting that the virus didn’t even exist and the disease was really syphillis, rendered undetectable because the spirochete became symbiotic with our cells. How do we weigh that deadly denialism against her positive contributions about symbiosis?
And then there were her views that the 9/11 destruction in New York was due not to an act of terrorism but to deliberately set bombs. In the video below she explains this crazy idea, and you can read her essay about it here.
Margulis’s legacy in science is secure: because she walked among us, we understand much more about nature than we would have otherwise. Her pushing the theory, in the teeth of doubt and criticism, that some cellular organelles descend from ancient bacteria, is a major advance in our understanding of life.
But her legacy is not unmixed, and her life leaves us with another lesson: if a scientist has a Big Idea that turns out to be right, that does not automatically make her right about everything else. None of us, however famous, should be immune to the criticism that characterizes our discipline. As we remember her on this sad occasion, let us at least have a balanced view of her life.
by Matthew Cobb
Interesting set of comments from women scientists about the importance of evolution and why it should be taught in public (= state) schools. It’s clearly aimed at high school kids or general members of the public, and does a good job. I’m bemused by the very first comment – ‘Accepting evolution doesn’t mean abandoning your personal beliefs’ (surely that depends on what you believe – what if you were a creationist, for example?), but the rest seem pretty spot on to me:
via Ed Yong on Twitter @edyong209
Rejoice, Brother Blackford, for you live in a nation that, according to a new survey, is surprisingly godless.
Based on the reports about resurgent creationism and goddiness in Australian schools, I was prepared to think that Australia lies somewhere between the U.S. and England in the degree of religiosity. But a new “Australian Communities Report,” a survey of 1094 adults commissioned by Olive Tree Media, seems to show the country nearly as atheistic as Scandinavia. Equally surprising, Olive Tree Media appears to be a religious outfit that produces Christian-based media.
Here’s a summary of the report from The Age, a daily newspaper from Melbourne:
Olive Tree director Karl Faase, who is releasing the report at a forum of 70 religious leaders, said the survey sought to identify the ”blocker issues” that turned people off faith.
The obstacle that annoys Australians most is the celebrity endorsements of religion so common in the United States – 70 per cent said they were repelled by it, questioning the motives behind it. Claims of miraculous stories (58 per cent) also repelled non-believers.
The biggest problems Australians have with the church is abuse by the clergy (cited by 91 per cent), hypocrisy and judging others (both 88 per cent) religious wars (83 per cent) and issues around money (87 per cent).
When it comes to church teachings, the main objections are its ideas about homosexuality (69 per cent), hell and condemnation (66 per cent), and the role of women and suffering (both 60 per cent). But 52 per cent were open to philosophical discussion and debating ideas; 54 per cent were impressed by people who lived out a genuine faith, and 60 per cent acknowledged a personal trauma or significant life change might change their attitude to religion.
About 40 per cent of Australians consider themselves Christian, compared with the 2006 census response of 64 per cent, the survey shows. Another 10 per cent identify with other religions; 19 per cent call themselves spiritual but not religious, and 31 per cent identify as having no religion or spiritual belief. Of those who identify with a religion, about half say they don’t actively practise it.
This is all pretty heartening, especially the 24% drop in self-identified Christians in only five years. Perhaps Aussie readers can weigh in about whether they’ve noticed such a striking change. And 31% with no religion or spiritual belief? That compares very favorably with the least religious countries of Europe.
Sadly, you can’t see the entire report without purchasing it (here), but Olive Tree has provided a nice pdf file of figures showing the results. Here are a few screenshots (click to enlarge):
Here’s a five-minute video of the first presentation of the report’s results:
Advance Australia fair!
h/t: Marella