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 Matthew Cobb
A propos of nothing. First this video from Richmond Park, on the outskirts of London, which has been a deer park for centuries. Man chases dog chases deer (moral: keep your dog on a leash!). Then a mash-up with the excellent American Werewolf in London…
by Matthew Cobb
This excellent abstract found at boingboing. If only I could be so succinct…
Via @Myrmecos on Twitter. Full article available here.
by Greg Mayer
Linnaeus thought hagfish were worms, not fish, but there has been considerable controversy about which fish they are closest to. Are hagfish the earliest diverging of all extant vertebrates, or are they closer to lampreys? The latter hypothesis, which we might call the cyclostome hypothesis (because hagfish and lampreys have been grouped in the taxon Cyclostomata), was favored for many decades. But in the late 20th century, people began to argue that lampreys were closer to jawed fish (gnathostomes), making cyclostomes paraphyletic (i.e. ancestral rather than sister to gnathostomes), which would mean that hagfish were their own group, an early and primitive branch.
In my post, I said recent molecular data had moved us back to the cyclostome hypothesis. Philippe Janvier, one of the most prominent proponents of the paraphyly hypothesis, has come round back to the cyclostome hypothesis, and has an excellent, brief, discussion of the history of the issue and the evidence. So, hagfish, it seems, are cyclostomes. Money quote:
The results of Heimberg et al. (11) are certainly certainly the most convincing contribution ever published in support of cyclostomes monophyly…, Although I was among the early supporters of vertebrate paraphyly (6, 7), I am impressed by the evidence provided by Heimberg et al. (11) and prepared to admit that cyclostomes are, in fact, monophyletic [i.e. holophyletic].
This is, by the way, an excellent example of how a good scientist accepts new evidence, and alters his views accordingly.
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Janvier, P. 2010. microRNAs revive old views about jawless vertebrate divergence and evolution. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) 107:19137-19138. pdf (may not be open access)
According to what seems to be a well-conducted and properly-analyzed PublicMind poll from Farleigh Dickinson University, how informed you are about world and national affairs is heavily influenced by where you get your news.
612 New Jersey residents were polled about where they got their news, and then were asked a few questions, like whether Egyptians successfully overthrew the Mubarak regime (yes), whether Syrians successfully overthrew the Assad regime (no), and whether the Occupy Wall Street protestors were predominantly Democrats or Republicans (Democrats).
Here’s the surprising results, though some of you will say you’re not surprised:
But the real finding is that the results depend on what media sources people turn to for their news. For example, people who watch Fox News, the most popular of the 24-hour cable news networks, are 18-points less likely to know that Egyptians overthrew their government than those who watch no news at all (after controlling for other news sources, partisanship, education and other demographic factors). Fox News watchers are also 6-points less likely to know that Syrians have not yet overthrown their government than those who watch no news.
Here’s the overall effect of your news source on how well you knew what happened in Egypt. Remember that these results are controlled for gender, education, and party affiliation by multiple regression, so these are the residual effects. They’re also controlled for other news sources, so, for example, the effect of watching Fox News is independent of whether you also relied on other media sources. No matter where else you get your news, watching Fox makes you dumber.
Watching Sunday morning news (a special hobby of the elderly), watching the evening news, or reading a national newspaper all were able to improve your knowledge of this situation by more than 10% over those who watched no news. Fox News, on the other hand, had a negative 18% effect, and, surprisingly, MSNBC had a negative 3% effect and NPR almost no effect.
NPR listeners take heart, though: you did better when answering the question about Syria:
By contrast, some media sources have a positive effect on political knowledge. For example, people who report reading a national newspaper like The New York Times or USA Today are 12-points more likely to know that Egyptians have overthrown their government than those who have not looked at any news source. And those who listen to the non-profit NPR radio network are 11-points more likely to know the outcome of the revolt against Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad. However, the best informed respondents are those that watched Sunday morning news programs: leading to a 16-point increase in the likelihood of knowing what happened in Egypt and an 8-point increase in the likelihood of knowing what happened in Syria.
Here are the Syria results. Remember that a positive figure in the “no” column represents an improvement in your knowledge of what happened there.
And, finally, the results for the Occupy Wall Street situation. Remember that a positive figure in the “Democrat” column shows the marginal increase in knowledge (over no news source) caused by that news source:
The moral? No matter where you get your news, avoid Fox News or MSNBC, and watch the Sunday morning news shows if you have the time.
It’s surprising to me that watching any non-comedy news show could make you more ignorant than watching none: presumably both Fox and MSNBC accurately convey the news from Syria and Egypt, as well as the Wall Street business. And it can’t be that just uneducated people or Republicans watch Fox News, because those factors were controlled for.
The sample size is small, and limited to New Jersey, and the disparity of results for NPR listeners vis-à-vis Syria and Egypt worries me. But the margin of error is 3.5%, so these results aren’t completely meaningless.
h/t: Occam
by Matthew Cobb
Alert WEIT reader Occam refers to the announcement yesterday from the ICARUS team working at CERN that if those pesky OPERA neutrinos had indeed gone faster than light, then they should have shown a loss of energy. They didn’t, so they didn’t. You can read two rather more worked out arguments, one experimental (here) and another that is theoretical (here).
What’s interesting is that Occam points out that our very own Torbjorn Larsson pointed this out in a discussion on WEIT: “-There is no Cherenkov radiation as expected for particles traveling faster than surrounding photons travel.”
As Occam points out, this is precisely the point made by Cohen & Glashow theoretically, and confirmed by M. Antonello et al. experimentally.
WEIT: it’s all you need!
As I’ve found from reading comments on this site, non-Americans are continually astonished by the extreme degree of both religiosity and idiocy of Republicans in America. Without living here, it’s hard to apprehend how soaked in God our country really is. And if you do live here, it’s so common that you barely notice it. If you want a graphic demonstration, here’s a two-hour-plus video of the “Thanksgiving Family Forum,” a meeting of six Republican presidential candidates in Iowa. They include
Congresswoman Michele Bachmann
Herman Cain
[ex] Speaker Newt Gingrich
Congressman Ron Paul
Texas Governor Rick Perry
Senator Rick Santorum
Start at 36 minutes in if you want to skip the opening prayers, Pledge of Allegiance, and other religious and and patriotic requisites and get right to the insanity of the candidates themselves.
Or, better yet, just skip the video and read Rick Saletan’s piece in Slate, “Rule of the Lord,” which summarizes what these politicians have in mind for America. Here are a few salient quotes:
Herman Cain:
What we are seeing is a wider gap between people of faith and people of nonfaith. … Those of us that are people of faith and strong faith have allowed the nonfaith element to intimidate us into not fighting back. I believe we’ve been too passive. We have maybe pushed back, but as people of faith, we have not fought back.
Rick Perry:
Somebody’s values are going to decide what the Congress votes on or what the president of the United States is going to deal with. And the question is: Whose values? And let me tell you, it needs to be our values—values and virtues that this country was based upon in Judeo-Christian founding fathers . . . in every person’s heart, in every person’s soul, there is a hole that can only be filled by the Lord Jesus Christ.
Michele Bachmann:
American exceptionalism is grounded on the Judeo-Christian ethic, which is really based upon the 10 Commandments. The 10 Commandments were the foundation for our law. That’s what Blackstone said—the English jurist—and our founders looked to Blackstone for the foundation of our law. That’s our law . . . I have a biblical worldview. And I think, going back to the Declaration of Independence, the fact that it’s God who created us—if He created us, He created government. And the government is on His shoulders, as the book of Isaiah says.
Rick Santorum:
Unlike Islam, where the higher law and the civil law are the same, in our case, we have civil laws. But our civil laws have to comport with the higher law. … As long as abortion is legal—at least according to the Supreme Court—legal in this country, we will never have rest, because that law does not comport with God’s law. . . The idea that the only things that the states are prevented from doing are only things specifically established in the Constitution is wrong. Our country is based on a moral enterprise. Gay marriage is wrong. As Abraham Lincoln said, the states do not have the right to do wrong. … As a president, I will get involved, because the states do not have the right to undermine the basic, fundamental values that hold this country together.
And Newt Gingrich, who argues that we should abolish the courts’ power to review the constitutionality of laws:
I am intrigued with something which Robby George at Princeton has come up with, which is an interpretation of the 14th Amendment, in which it says that Congress shall define personhood. That’s very clearly in the 14th Amendment. And part of what I would like to explore is whether or not you could get the Congress to pass a law which simply says: Personhood begins at conception. And therefore—and you could, in the same law, block the court and just say, ‘This will not be subject to review,’ which we have precedent for. You would therefore not have to have a constitutional amendment, because the Congress would have exercised its authority under the 14th Amendment to define life, and to therefore undo all of Roe vs. Wade, for the entire country, in one legislative action.
Don’t think for a moment that if religious candidates like these get the upper hand, they won’t do everything in their power to convert their religious values into laws that apply to all of us. And accommodationists wonder why we’re so hard on religious belief! Because, of course, only rarely is such belief a purely private matter. If you think you have God-given truth and morality, it’s almost imperative that you try to impose your values on everyone else, including those who disagree. It’s the Inquisition in latter-day form.
If one of these Republican clowns get elected, it will require the complicity of the religious “moderates” we’re supposed to coddle. Remember that not everyone supporting these people is a fundamentalist or Biblical literalist.
h/t: Tom C.
by Greg Mayer
I’m teaching vertebrate zoology this semester, and one of my favorite topics in the course is the hagfish. Hagfish are jawless, eel-like fish, whose closest relatives are lampreys. (They were once though to be more primitive than lampreys, but molecular data show the two to form a holophyletic group.) I was thus quite pleased to find that Vincent Zintzen from the Museum of New Zealand and colleagues have a recent paper in Scientific Reports on hagfish defensive and predatory behavior, with accompanying videos. There’s more at the website of Te Papa Tongarewa (which is the name of the museum in Maori).
Hagfish are well known for producing copious amounts of viscous slime to discourage predators. In the following video, what’s most remarkable to me is how rapidly the hagfish produces sufficient slime to almost instantaneously deter the predators.
Here’s a closeup of slime production from the Vancouver Aquarium:
And here’s a hagfish preying on a burrowing fish. Zintzen et al. suspect the fish has been killed or disabled by choking with slime while in the burrow.
Hagfish are usually thought of as scavengers (notice the cages of dead meat used as bait in the video). Here’s a more usual feeding episode: large numbers of hagfish gathering on a whale carcass. That sounds like David Attenborough doing the narration.
Finally, here’s an abridged, combined version of the Te Papa videos (if you want to get the under 4 minute version of the whole story):
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Zintzen V., Roberts, C.D., Anderson M.J., Stewart A.L., Struthers C.D. & Harvey E.S. 2011. Hagfish predatory behaviour and slime defence mechanism. Scientific Reports 1: 131, 6 pp. pdf (Scientific Reports is put out online-only by Nature Publishing Group; papers are given at least some peer review, but are not evaluated for how important or interesting they are.)