Month: September 2013

Caturday felid trifecta: Saturday Hili, Kitty (and a hoomin) play a theremin, and a bizarre road sign in Moscow

September 28, 2013 • 2:51 am

First, of course, we must have today’s Hili Dialogue:

A: Are you coming or going?
Hili: I’m in the hall and I wonder: does it lead outside or to the kitchen?
Hili

In Polish:

Ja: Wchodzisz czy wychodzisz?
Hili: Jestem w przedsionku i jeszcze się zastanawiam, czy on prowadzi na dwór czy do kuchni?

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I’m told that this video below has gone viral on the Internet, and it’s not surprising why: it shows a cat playing theremin.  Not only that, but the cat appears to have figured out that making movements in front of the instrument makes it play, something one wouldn’t think a cat could do easily. Well, watch it:

Wikipedia describes this arcane instrument for those of you who insist on knowing how it works (ten to one somebody will find an error here!). It was, by the way, invented by the Russian physicist Lev Sergeevich Termen in 1920, and you may have heard it in sci-fi or horror movies, as well as in Led Zeppelin music.

The instrument’s controlling section usually consists of two metal antennas which sense the relative position of the thereminist’s hands and control oscillators for frequency with one hand, and amplitude(volume) with the other. The electric signals from the theremin are amplified and sent to a loudspeaker. . .

The theremin is unique among musical instruments in that it is played without physical contact. The musician stands in front of the instrument and moves his or her hands in the proximity of two metal antennas. The distance from one antenna determines frequency (pitch), and the distance from the other controls amplitude (volume). Most frequently, the right hand controls the pitch and the left controls the volume, although some performers reverse this arrangement. Some low-cost theremins use a conventional, knob operated volume control and have only the pitch antenna. While commonly called antennas, they are not used for receiving or broadcasting radio frequency, but act as plates in a capacitor.

The theremin uses the heterodyne principle to generate an audio signal. The instrument’s pitch circuitry includes two radio frequency oscillators. One oscillator operates at a fixed frequency. The frequency of the other oscillator is controlled by the performer’s distance from the pitch control antenna. The performer’s hand acts as the grounded plate (the performer’s body being the connection to ground) of a variable capacitor in an L-C (inductance-capacitance) circuit, which is part of the oscillator and determines its frequency. (Although the capacitance between the performer and the instrument is on the order of picofarads or even hundreds of femtofarads, the circuit design gives a useful frequency shift.) The difference between the frequencies of the two oscillators at each moment allows the creation of a difference tone in the audio frequency range, resulting in audio signals that are amplified and sent to a loudspeaker.

To control volume, the performer’s other hand acts as the grounded plate of another variable capacitor. In this case, the capacitor detunes another oscillator; that detuning is processed to change the attenuation in the amplifier circuit. The distance between the performer’s hand and the volume control antenna determines the capacitance, which regulates the theremin’s volume.

Here’s Lev Termin (Westernized as Leon Theremin) playing his own invention:

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From Flavorwire we hear about a strange road sign, one of “Ten bizarre literary landmarks.

This amazing road sign popped up near Moscow’s Patriarch Ponds sometime last year. It is, obviously, prohibiting Professor Woland, Koroviev, and Behemoth, the devilish trio from Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita from the area. The sign underneath warns, “Do not talk with strangers.”

patriarchvijver-2

Now to my shame I haven’t read The Master and Margarita, which seems to be much beloved, so all I know is that there’s a cat in it. But I’ll leave my readers the pleasure of enlightening me.

Be sure you look at the other ten “must visit” landmarks (I especially recommend #5 and #10).

h/t: Merilee,

Much ado about something

September 27, 2013 • 1:39 pm

by Greg Mayer

In a paper in press in Nature, Min Zhu and colleagues describe a new species of placoderm from the Silurian period of China. Placoderms are an extinct group of (usually) heavily armored jawed fishes that lived in the Silurian and Devonian. The new species is based on a beautifully preserved 3-D specimen, and is interesting, but it is being widely misreported in the press.

The holotype of the new species, a three-dimensionally preserved specimen with head and trunk armour in anterolateral (a), lateral (b), anteroventral (c) and dorsal (d) views. A small part of the left trunk armour was accidentally sawed off as extraneous material and repositioned in b. Scale bars, 1 cm. e, Life restoration.

To understand why this new species is interesting requires some background information. First, we need to know that while most modern vertebrates (backboned animals such as ourselves) have jaws, and are called gnathostomes (“jaw mouths”), not having jaws is the primitive condition (jawless vertebrates, represented today only by hagfish and lampreys, are called agnathans). The origin of jaws is thus a key episode in the vertebrate story.

Second, we need to know that there are four great groups pf gnathostomes, the placoderms, the acanthodians (another extinct group, often called ‘spiny fish’), chondrichthyans (cartilaginous fish: sharks, rays, and their relatives), and osteichthyans (bony fish: tuna, gars, goldfish, etc.; the tetrapods are descended from osteichthyans, and for our purposes can be included with them).

And finally, we need to know that the vertebrate skull is a composite of bones from three different sources: the chondrocranium, bones preformed in cartilage that surround the brain, the splanchocranium, bones preformed in cartilage that support the gill arches, and the dermatocranium, bones that ossify directly and cover most of the outside of the skull. Gnathostome jaws are formed by the anteriormost bones of the splanchocranium (the palatoquadrate in the upper jaw, and Meckel’s cartilage in the lower jaw), which are often covered over or replaced by dermal bones in development. (Chondrichthyans, lacking bone, have only the first two components in their skulls.)

Chondrocranium, blue, splanchocranium green, dermatocranium labeled ‘dc’. From https://ecovertanatomy.wikispaces.com/Properties+of+Bone+and+Cartilage+and+Regions+of+the+Cranial+Skeleton.

Okay, so what’s interesting? Placoderms have jaws, including the palatoquadrate and Meckel’s cartilage, which are accompanied by dermal bones that have usually been thought not to correspond very precisely to the dermal bones of osteichthyans. In the new fossil, Zhu and colleagues identify some dermal bones as being the same as in osteichthyans, most prominently the maxilla in the upper jaw and the dentary in the lower jaw (see first figure above). This is what’s interesting, because if true, it would mean that the osteichthyan condition is more widespread than previously known, and thus perhaps change some of our ideas on the relationships of the various gnathostome groups.

Another thing Zhu and colleagues do is a phylogenetic analysis of 75 taxa with 253 characters, but unfortunately for them the results are quite muddled, with no clear evidence that the ‘maxilla’ or other dermal jaw bones of the new placoderm are homologous to those of osteichthyans. These large data set analyses rarely produce convincing results, because it is the interpretation and analysis of the individual characters that most strongly influence the results, and these individual analyses are usually de-emphasized (or as in this case, hidden in the online supplement).

So where has the press gone wrong? First, some commentary, especially by scientists, has been directed toward the differing trees gotten by Zhu and colleagues, versus the one obtained by Davis et al. (2012) last year using essentially the same data set. This is inside baseball– the relationships among the four great gnathostome groups is quite interesting, but this paper does not resolve the question.

Popular media have been implying that jaws were not previously known in placoderms or fish in general, or that we would not expect jaws in fish this primitive or early. None of this is right. Placoderms are jawed fish, they are not the oldest known jawed fish, and the bones in this specimen do not apparently show a new or previously unknown condition (rather, the claim is that the condition in this fish resembles an already known condition). There is definitely something of interest here, but it’s not quite all that the media are portraying it as.

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Davis, S. P., Finarelli, J. A. & Coates, M. I. 2012. Acanthodes and shark-like conditions in the last common ancestor of modern gnathostomes. Nature 486: 247–250.

Zhu, M., X. Yu, P.E. Alberg, B. Choo, J. Lu, Q. Qu, W. Zhao, L. Jia, H. Blom and Y. Zhu. 2013. A Silurian placoderm with osteichthyan-like marginal jaw bones. Nature in press.

Atheism to be taught in Irish schools

September 27, 2013 • 10:54 am

Some days most of the news is about atheism vs. faith, and I suppose today is one of those days.  But this time the news is good. According to the Guardian, mandatory lessons that include instruction in atheistic thought will soon begin in Irish primary schools:

In a historic move that will cheer Richard Dawkins, lessons about atheism are to be taught in Ireland’s primary schools for the first time.

The lessons on atheism, agnosticism and humanism for thousands of primary-school pupils in Ireland will be drawn up by Atheist Ireland and multi-denominational school provider Educate Together, in an education system that the Catholic church hierarchy has traditionally dominated.

Up to 16,000 primary schoolchildren who attend the fast-growing multi-denominational Irish school sector will receive tuition about atheism as part of their basic introduction course to ethics and belief systems, including other religions.

From September 2014 children could be reading texts such as Dawkins’ The Magic of Reality, his book aimed at children, according to Atheist Ireland.

Do note the gratuitious mention of Dawkins. He’s not the only person who will be cheered!

Well, I suppose this is good news, although I’m in favor of this only if it avoids indoctrination, that is, if such instruction is part of a general course in the diversity of religious belief. And that’s what it appears to be. I know Dan Dennett is enthusiastic about such courses, but I’ve always worried that it would be difficult to teach religion even in a “survey” course, for believers could easily squabble about how to present the the “essential doctrine” of their faiths (imagine Sunni vs. Shia Islam, for instance).  But if they’re teaching religious thought, then they should teach nonreligious thought as well. On balance, it’s good.

Now before you get all excited, note that 93% of all primary schools in Ireland are run by the Catholic Church, where this curriculum won’t apply. Nevertheless, according to Michael Nugent of Atheist Ireland (who, along with his organization, deserve kudos for pushing this through), even Catholics will have access to the materials:

But Michael Nugent, Atheist Ireland’s co-founder, stressed that all primary-school pupils, including the 93% of the population who attend schools run by the Catholic church, can access their atheism course on the internet and by downloading an app on smartphones. He said these would be advertised and offered to all parents with children at primary schools in the state.

I doubt that the Catholic nuns and priests who teach in these schools, or Catholic parents, will rush to make the materials accessible to who are offensively called as “Catholic children.”

Here’s how the system will work:

“There will be a module of 10 classes of between 30 to 40 minutes from the ages of four upwards. It is necessary because the Irish education system has for too long been totally biased in favour of religious indoctrination. And if parents whose kids are in schools under church control want to opt their kids out of learning religion (as is their right these days) then they can use our course as an alternative for their children to study,” he said.

Nugent added: “Religion isn’t even taught properly as an objective subject with various religions and their origins examined and explained. The teaching is to create faith formation first, not objective education. We see our course as a chance for young Irish children to get an alternative view on how the world works.”

The upshot: it’s a good start, though the opportunity for de-brainwashing “Catholic children” will be limited.  What surprises me is that this is taking place in Ireland at all.

Here are some fun facts about Ireland’s schools from the Guardian piece (my emphasis):

  • The Catholic church’s near monopoly of influence in education means that the ultimate power in each school is the local Catholic bishop.
  • In Dublin the city’s archbishop, Diarmuid Martin, is patron of about 470 primary schools. He is responsible for the management of the ethos of those schools, for senior appointments and is the one who can be sued when legal action takes place.
  • The Irish taxpayer, and not the church, pays the bills for all the schools the hierarchy controls.

There will be a palliative cat later.

h/t: Rev. Al

Dawkins’s book gets a brickbat-filled bouquet from NPR. Also, I’m giving away tickets.

September 27, 2013 • 5:35 am

There’s yet more accommodationism from National Public Radio (NPR):

Over at NPR’s cosmos & culture section, a site that seems to be turning into Accommodationism Central, Barbara King reviews Richard Dawkins’s new autobiography, An Appetite for Wonder.  It’s a positive review, with this summary:

So, I approached An Appetite for Wonder with some trepidation. Indeed, the book was lampooned in The Guardian‘s “digested read” feature as boastful and arrogant. But what I discovered was something quite different. It’s a memoir that is funny and modest, absorbing and playful. Dawkins has written a marvelous love letter to science.

Indeed, that Guardian “digested read” was unfair and mean-spirited, and I know because I’ve read the book.

There’s one problem, though. King calls her review “Richard Dawkins’ delightful memoir dilutes the poison.”

What’s the “poison”? You can guess. King refers to a 23-minute radio interview she had with Dawkins last year, which you can hear on another NPR post, “Richard Dawkins celebrates reason, ridicules faith.” (King, by the way, is an anthropology professor at my own alma mater, The College of William and Mary.)

In much of the interview, King takes out after Dawkins for insulting people as well as their faith.  She really is like a dog with her teeth in the postman’s leg, and clearly has the agenda of defending faith against not only accusations of falsity, but against any criticism at all.

She summarizes the interview in a small essay on the post, which includes this (my emphases):

On his blog last year, Dawkins called a person named Minor Vidal a “fool” for his expression of thanks to God after surviving a deadly plane crash. (To be fair, Dawkins called “billions” of other people fools, too, in the same post.)

Dawkins told me that if he insulted any person, he regrets it. But this example shows how hard it is, in practice rather than theory, to aim harsh language only at a person’s belief, and not at the person.

Another example comes from Saturday’s rally. There, Dawkins noted his incredulity when meeting people who believe a Communion wafer turns into the body of Christ during the Eucharist. He then urged his followers to “mock” and “ridicule” that. (He says this 13 minutes into the video, though it’s best to watch the whole thing.) His exact words after describing the Catholic ritual, were “Mock them. Ridicule them.” So by “them” did he intend to refer to Catholic beliefs, not Catholic people? In context, it doesn’t seem so to me.

How much does that distinction matter? When it comes to religion, does demeaning a person’s belief not also demean the person?

Why use demeaning terms, and urge others to use them, for either the belief or the person? Surely it’s not adequate justification that some religious people are guilty of the same sin, or worse. Doesn’t the embrace of reason compel a person to rise above a grade school calculus of that sort?

. . . My steadfast disagreement with Dawkins emerges from his refusal to see that the expression of faith isn’t inevitably a simple-minded approach to living. I’m a big fan of reason. I’m just no fan of the stereotype, embodied by Dawkins, that we atheists equate others’ religious faith with a lack of intelligence or courage, or both.

Well, we can disagree about how often faith is “sophisticated” and “not simple-minded.”  I’d bet that King, an academic, rubs elbows with religious people who are extremely liberal—almost atheists. Nevertheless, I’d also bet that they aver belief in things like a divine being who came to earth as his own son, was executed, and then was resurrected.

But since King claims to be a “big fan of reason,” doesn’t she agree that faith based on revelation and dogma, but not on evidence and reason, attest to some lack of rationality, or to unreflective “wish thinking”?  (Of course King says nothing about the palpable harms of faith.) But to argue, as King does, that demeaning beliefs is the same as demeaning persons, is simply a tactic to make atheists shut up.

In truth, criticizing religious beliefs is often taken as a personal attack. My response to that is, “Too bad!” Religion doesn’t get a pass over any other form of belief because discussing it hurts people’s feelings. As someone once said in reference to such criticism, “Nobody has a right not to be offended.”

Do listen to the interview and see if you detect any “poison” in Dawkins’s responses. I know I’m biased, but I found his responses temperate and—given King’s animus—respectful.

Oh, and has King (who admits she’s an atheist) spent any time criticizing those believers who denigrate atheists? That all starts in the Bible with Psalm 53:1:

The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. Corrupt are they, and have done abominable iniquity: there is none that doeth good.
Maybe someone can explain to me why people like King, who are atheists, spend far more time criticizing and tone-trolling other atheists than in criticizing the follies of faith and the viciousness of many who promulgate religion. Nor do they suggest ways to criticize faith without hurting people’s feelings. Ask yourself this as an atheist: what is more harmful in this world: religious belief or the perceived offensiveness of those who criticize it?
It will be a cold day in July when, for instance, we hear a critique of Islam on NPR.
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CONTEST:  I have four extra tickets (free) for the Dawkins book-tour event at Northwestern University next Thursday, which involves my 45-minute conversation with Richard, an equally long Dawkins Q&A with the audience, and then his book signing (I’ll be signing mine, too). If you’re in the Chicago area and want to come, please add a short (no more than two-sentence) request in the comments, explaining why you deserve a ticket.  The judgment of Professor Ceiling Cat, which will be rendered by Monday a.m., is final.

Poor Richard’s Almanac: Andrew Brown and the Pope go after The Selfish Gene

September 26, 2013 • 10:38 am

Over at the Guardian, Andrew Brown damns Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene with faint praise, noting as well that former Pope Benedict has criticized the book as science fiction.

The Selfish Gene, which has by now sold well over a million copies in a gazillion languages, is a seminal work, and has opened the eyes of millions to a gene-centered view of evolution and all that it explains: cooperation, conflict, and, in its brilliant central metaphor, the process of natural selection. I can’t count the number of people who have told me, either in person or on this site, that it changed their lives, opening them up to the wonders of science.

And this is what Brown says about it in his essay, “Ex-Pope Benedict says The Selfish Gene is science fiction. He’s half right.”

The first thing to be said about The Selfish Gene is that it is a very fine piece of pop science writing indeed. It is not as dense and thought-provoking as Richard Dawkins’s second book, The Extended Phenotype – but without it, who would had bought or read the latter? – and it is not as accomplished as The Blind Watchmaker or Climbing Mount Improbable but those early books are much better than anything he has produced in his subsequent career. Their freshness and direct force is extraordinary.

Well, that’s not too bad, though the phrase “pop science writing” makes me quail. And I do think it was far more influential than the other two books Brown mentions. But he’s entitled to his opinion, though I think it’s a matter of record that The Selfish Gene has outstripped the others in both sales and influence. But then Brown says these things:

The Selfish Gene must have inspired thousands of people to take up biology. Beyond that, it had a huge influence on the culture of nerds. There is nothing original in the biology and some can now be seen to be wrong, but that’s the fate of any 30-year-old undergraduate text (it grew out of his lectures to students).

“Nerds”?  “Undergraduate text”? It’s not an undergraduate text, and the use of “nerds” is simply an ad hominem.  And even if Dawkins was just explicating the results of other scientists, he did it in an original and literary way, bringing to the public important science that would otherwise have remained obscure. In other words, Dawkins’s book spread wonder through the world. It was a good thing for science education.

But Brown’s piece gets worse:

But alongside the intellectual force and drive, wrapped round it and giving it shape, as histones give shape to DNA, came Dawkins’s shadow side – the fact that he is his own greatest fan and believer. You may think the competition for this position is too great for there to be any single winner but I think it’s safe to say that not even the most devoted of his groupies have their partner read out loud from his books at bedtime, as he does. But even if he does have readers more delighted in his cleverness than he is himself, they don’t have quite the same corrupting effect on his understanding.

What is that about? It seems that what Brown dislikes is not the book, but Dawkins.  And, as almost everyone knows, Dawkins’s wife, Lalla Ward, is a trained actress, and has helped coach him about how to read in public by reading his books out loud (she also, Richard says, has helped him realize that good writing should sound mellifluous when you read it aloud). It’s simply wrong, and nasty, to imply that this “reading out loud” reflects some kind of groupie-ism. It’s tutelage, and nothing more. How low of Brown to say something like this.

Finally, Brown makes the Mary Midgley-ian argument that The Selfish Gene goes astray because of the weakness of its central metaphor:

In particular, the ascription of agency to genes led him and his followers into endless confusion. The point is not merely whether genes can be selfish or generous, but whether they can be said to have any activity at all in the world. This is a point which he freely concedes and then forgets – his manner of dealing with most criticism. If a gene is defined, as he defines it, as a piece of chromosomal material subject to the pressures of selection, it is the pressures of selection which are the active and changing parts of the picture, and the DNA sequence is entirely passive.

It is still less true to imagine that genes “build” us into “great lumbering robots”. The process by which a stretch of DNA sequence becomes a protein is complicated, and determined by cellular mechanisms which are in turn reacting to pressures from their environment. The process by which proteins become bodies is even more complicated.

The Selfish Gene is a brilliant phrase. It’s also accurate, so long as you realise that “selfish” doesn’t mean selfish, “gene” doesn’t mean gene, and the definite article is a bit of an abstraction. But taken as the literal truth, it’s about as much use as “In the beginning was the word”. Given Dawkins’s hostility to everyone else’s metaphysics, this is an unfortunate weakness. “Science fiction” may not be the right term for the book but it does capture the sense in which its hold on the imagination depends on the parts that aren’t science but dazzling metaphor.

I don’t see the “endless confusion” that the metaphor caused, except by those like Mary Midgley who seemed too obtuse to realize the brilliance of analogizing the behavior of genes to some kind of “selfishness.” How many people really were led astray by this metaphor? Not many, I’d guess. And “pressures of selection” are themselves metaphorical; those are simply another word for the differential effects of different bits of DNA on reproduction—the effects that lead to natural selection. Natural selection is not an external pressure imposed on the organism, but a description of how genes replicate themselves differentially in specific environments. It’s a process of sorting among “selfish genes”.

The bit about genes not building bodies directly is, of course, something that Dawkins is aware of and has written about constantly. And it’s largely irrelevant to the whole “selfish gene” idea.  Brown’s final paragraph, which implies that the part of The Selfish Gene that’s half right is the “fiction” part of “science fiction”, is simply wrong. The book educated millions of people about how natural selection works, and what kind of behaviors it can mold. That depended on the science, not on the metaphor, as the metaphor was just a way to bring the science home. When people talk about Dawkins’s book, they talk about how it opened their eyes to the wonder of natural selection, not about how clever the “selfish gene” idea was.

Poor Richard! I can imagine how frustrating it must feel to be subject to such unwarranted attacks—attacks that not only have been rebutted years ago, but are repeated endlessly by those who dislike his atheism (or his fame).

Even the Pope got into the act. As The Independent reports, ex-Pope Benedict apparently agrees with Brown. Have a look at what Ratzinger said:

The 86-year-old discusses atheism, apparently poking fun at Odifreddi’s previous statements and condemning Richard Dawkins’ writing as a “classic example of science fiction”.

In response to Odifreddi’s 2009 declaration that the church preaches conjecture, not facts, and is therefore “science fiction”, Benedict said: “There is, moreover, science fiction in a big way just even within the theory of evolution. The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins is a classic example of science fiction.”

He added: “The great Jacques Monod wrote the sentences that he has inserted in his work certainly just as science fiction. I quote: ‘The emergence of tetrapod vertebrates … draws its origin from the fact that a primitive fish’ chose ‘to go and explore the land, on which, however, was unable to move except jumping clumsily and thus creating, as a result of a modification of behaviour, the selective pressure due to which would have developed the sturdy limbs of tetrapods’”.

So much for the Catholic Church being down with evolution!  As for Monod’s statement about the evolution of terrestriality in vertebrates, it’s a bit extreme but not inaccurate. Terrestriality might have arisen through a behavior in which a “fishapod” that had already evolved sturdy fins to “stand” in shallow water went looking for food (or another pond) by walking ashore, and, if that behavior was successful, could have promoted the evolution of further adaptations to live on land.  That’s “fiction” only in the sense that we don’t know it for sure, but it’s certainly not “fiction” in the sense that it’s deliberately untrue!

The idea that many major evolutionary changes begin with a change in behavior has been suggested by many, including the famous evolutionist Ernst Mayr. Flight may also have begun in a similar way in theropods that had already evolved feathers for other reasons.