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.
It’s Ceiling Cat’s Day, and in one week exactly I’ll be arriving, bleary-eyed and jet-lagged, at the Hell on Earth known as Heathrow Airport. Here in Chicago, we’ve had a great spell of warm weather, with temperatures yesterday and today reaching nearly 50°F (10°C). It’s the last day in January, a day on which Guy Fawkes was executed in 1606, the U.S. Congress passed the 13th Amendment (prohibiting slavery) in 1865, and the first McDonald’s opened in Russia (in Moscow) in 1990. In Soviet Russia, the hamburgers eat YOU. Jackie Robinson, the first black player in the major leagues (baseball) was born on this day in 1919, as was “Mr. Cub”, Ernie Banks, in 1931 and pitcher Nolan Ryan in 1947. Those who died on this day include John Galsworthy (1933), A. A. Milne (1956; I still have all my childhood Pooh books), Molly Ivins (2007), and guru Meher Baba (1969; “Don’t worry; be happy. I will help you.”) Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is dissing her staff’s dinner:
Hili: What do you have for dinner today?
A: Pasta.
Hili: Words fail me.
Look at that expression of disgust!
In Polish:
Hili: Co macie dziś na obiad?
Ja: Makaron.
Hili: Nie mam słów.
Leon, the Dark Tabby, is back in Wroclawek, having hiked very little in the mountains. We’ll have to wait till next year for his next hiking vacation:
Leon: I’m going to stop the vacation time.
And remember Jerry Coyne the Cat, raised as a foundling by reader Gayle Ferguson from New Zealand? You can see pictures of him as a kitten here (among other places); here’s one of them:
Now Jerry is two years old, and has grown into a fine, handsome furry fellow. Here are two pictures Gayle just sent, along with a note from Jerry’s staff:
Jerry doesn’t stay still long except when asleep so nabbed these shots before he took off. Still loves your woollen bootie and throws it around, sucks on it and growls at it sometimes too. He is such a character! Gives Loki [the other cat] hell but it is very entertaining when he does.
Heeere’s Jerry:
Since the days of Jerry and his siblings, Gayle’s raised at least four batches of homeless kittens, and every one has been adopted. She’s a true Hero of Felids.
Here’s a robot solving a Rubik’s cube in a tad over one second. It’s not an official record for a machine yet (that’s 2.39 seconds), but they’ll get the Guinness record before too long.
Gizmag gives more information about how the robot works, and I’ll let the geekier readers read the details there. There’s an interesting discussion in the YouTube comments about whether there’s a trick here, but I don’t think so.
You’re probably asking, “What’s the record for a human?” Well, here it is: Lucas Etter solving the cube in 4.90 seconds.
I’ve become aware of someone else besides Jeff Tayler who’s criticizing religion on Salon—a stand decidedly against the editorial current of that site. And the other anti-theist is Phil Torres, an author and ethicist described at Salon as:
(His Wikipedia biography is here, and notes that he’s a musician as well.) Note that Torres’s book comes out February 16, and has an introduction by Uncle Russell Blackford (Eric MacDonald has long since lost his avuncular status, and is reduced to osculating the rump of Edward Feser on the latter’s website).
The reason why Trump’s American exceptionalism is wrong is because, says Torres, America is not exceptional—at least not in the way we think. We’re not by a long shot the most socially healthy country in the word. In fact, as I point out incessantly, we’re the most socially dysfunctional First World country. One of the good things about Torres’s article is that it serves as a compendium, with references, of all the ways the U.S. falls short compared to our “peer countries”—mostly in Europe. We’re horrible, for example, when it comes to these issues:
life expectancy
government-supported health care
gender parity
quality of education
happiness
income equality
ethics and lack of corruption
lack of waste in government spending.
The list goes on, with documentation, so it’s a good reference. Summarizing the U.S.’s ranking, Torres says this:
The point is that, as should be clear by now, there’s an unequivocal pattern of American inferiority when our country’s performance is juxtaposed with the rest of the developed world’s. Indeed, in many categories — such as childhood poverty, income inequality and family paid leave — we’re just barely a developed country, if even that. The result of these failures is that our collective quality of life is not nearly as high as it ought to be. Here it’s worth turning to the Mercer Quality of Life Survey, since it attempts to quantify the livability of some 221 cities around the world. And guess what it finds? The U.S. has only a single city in the top 30 — and it happens to be the ultra-progressive den of liberal debauchery called San Francisco. At the pinnacle of Mercer’s list are cities like Vienna, Zurich, Auckland, Munich and Vancouver. In fact, of all the cities in the North American continent, the top four are all in Canada. Now that’s just embarrassing, eh?
Indeed. I’m going to Auckland! Now what’s the reason why we think we’re so good but we actually are pretty miserable compared to our “peer nations”? Torres singles out two reasons: religion and conservative politics:
Why exactly are we ranked low in terms of opportunity and flourishing? What’s behind our middling performance compared to the world? Is it because our country is too progressive? Too socialist? Too secular? Too crowded with atheists?
The unambiguous answer to these questions is a resounding No! For example, the U.S. turns out to be among the most religious countries in the developed world. According to a 2014 Gallup poll, “nearly four in 10 Americans report that they attended religious services in the past seven days.” In contrast, only about 2 percent of Norwegians attend church on a weekly basis, as of 2009. Along these very lines, a 2011 study reported that religion is tumbling toward “extinction” in nine developed countries, namely Australia, Austria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Switzerland — all of which are doing just fine. And whereas a U.S. politician could hardly dream of running for president as an out-of-the-closet atheist, many other countries have had atheist leaders in the past. As the former Prime Minister of Australia — a progressive woman who doesn’t believe in God — said to the Washington Post, “I think it would be inconceivable for me if I were an American to have turned up at the highest echelon of American politics being an atheist, single and childless.” Yet the empirical fact is that secular people are “markedly less nationalistic, less prejudiced, less anti-Semitic, less racist, less dogmatic, less ethnocentric, less close-minded, and less authoritarian” than religious folks. So it’s not that our country is too Godless.
Most of this I knew, but Torres take on American “progressivism” is pretty new to me:
The U.S. also turns out to be quite conservative by comparative standards. I find it hard to even map right-left American politics onto the political spectrum of European countries. On many issues, for example, the right-wing Tories in the UK are left of the Democrats. And Sweden, whose “thriving economy and society [are] based on a government of socialist principles, higher taxes, and healthy regulations,” has a tax rate that’s nearly double America’s. As an article in Forbes notes, the common thread that weaves together the tapestry of happiest countries is that “they are all borderline socialist states, with generous welfare benefits and lots of redistribution of wealth.” In these countries, civil liberties are taken seriously (some even permit prostitution and drug use), and everyone has a robust safety net to fall back on in tough times. So it’s also not that our country is too progressive.
And indeed, I’ve seen David Cameron take positions that American Democrats would consider too left wing. Not that I favor the Tories, but I’m not a big fan of Democrats (except for Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren) as genuine progressives. They’re too beholden to the banks, the industries, and the gun and health lobbies.
Torres’s conclusion?
I would argue that our country lags behind the developed world precisely because of how religious and conservative we are. As Bertrand Russell correctly observed way back in 1927, “I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.” As a matter of fact, religious conservatives in America have consistently opposed attempts to implement equal pay for women legislation, universal health care and stricter environmental regulations. For reasons that continue to baffle me, many middle-class people still vote for Republicans, even though the effect of Republican policies has been to knock us out of the top bracket with respect to nearly every metric of life-quality.
In the past I’ve argued that America is religious precisely because it’s socially dysfunctional, but Torres reverses the causal arrow: America’s hyper-religiosity makes us bad off. Yes, many religious people oppose social progress, and there’s no reason why there can’t be an insalubrious synergy between religion and social well-being. That is, perhaps religion makes society poorer off according to Torres’s indicators. (I’ll need to ponder that one, but it’s almost certainly true in many Muslim countries.) And when society gets poorer off, it becomes more religious (there’s ample sociological documentation for that). If Torres is right and an important causal direction is from religiosity to social dysfunction, then we need to figure out why America is so much more religious than other First World countries.
As for conservative politics holding back social progress, I’m prepared to believe it. Conservatives consistently oppose measures to equalize income, as well as to equalize rights: the rights of gays, blacks, immigrant, the impoverished, and women. They consistently oppose government intervention to level a playing field tilted by the vagaries of genes and environments.
Torres’s article does the best thing a piece like this can: it gives us food for thought. If you think that American religiosity itself has promoted a dysfunctional society (or if you take the other side), weigh in below. And if you agree, then let us know your hypothesis for why the U.S. is so much more religious than other First World nations.
You may recall that back in October we reported the amazing discovery that, as I put it in the headline, “Neanderthal genes are everywhere“. Up until then, it had been thought that only those human populations outside of Africa carried Neanderthal genes, as a consequence of our ancestors having mated with our Neanderthal cousins—mainly in Europe and the Middle East. People from sub-Saharan Africa, it was thought, did not carry those genes, because their ancestors did not leave Africa, and so didn’t meet the Neanderthals (whose ancestors had left Africa several hundred thousand years earlier).
What happened in October was that a group of researchers from around the world, led by Gallego Llorente of Cambridge University, studied the DNA of Mota, an Ethopian man who lived around 4,500 years ago. They found that he carried an unexpectedly high proportion of DNA from European populations, including DNA that had originally come from Neanderthals over 30,000 years earlier (Neanderthals went extinct around 35,000 years ago). The really exciting bit came next. As I wrote:
When they compared Mota’s DNA with those of modern African populations, they found that the European sequences he carried were also present deep in the continent, even amongst the Pygmies of the Congo. Even ‘reference’ African genomes, such as those from the Yoruba and Mtubi peoples, which were thought not to have been affected by interbreeding with Europeans, turned out to have around 6% of their DNA from European DNA, like Mota. (…)
The final novelty came when the researchers looked at Neanderthal DNA. Mota carried that DNA, just like me, because his ancestors had mated with Neanderthals tens of thousands of years earlier.
And it turned out that some of those Neanderthal sequences could also now be detected in African populations, too. They were very dilute – around 0.5% – but they were clearly there. They do not indicate that there were Neanderthals in Africa, but rather that when the offspring of Mota and others carrying migratory European sequences spread their DNA into Africa, they also spread small amounts of Neanderthal DNA, too.
This was amazing, and I excitedly changed the lecture I gave to my first-year students the next day. I’ve since explained in various public lectures that we all carry Neanderthal DNA, including those of Afro-Caribbean origin.
Now it turns out not to be true.
The authors have published an erratum notice to explain the error, along with updated versions of the figures and tables. If you want the technical explanation, here it is:
A script necessary to convert the input produced by samtools v0.1.19 to be compatible with PLINK was not run when merging the ancient genome, Mota, with the contemporary populations SNP panel, leading to homozygote positions to the human reference genome being dropped as ‘missing data’
What this means is that they forgot to run a particular computer programme (‘script’) that would harmonise the outputs of two different programmes used to do the analyses of Mota and of modern sub-Saharan populations. When they did so, much of their effect disappeared.
As Ewan Callaway explains, the error came to light when two researchers, Pontus Skoglund and David Reich, tried to replicate the finding, doing their own analysis of the Mota genome. They failed, and alerted the original authors, who soon worked out their mistake. In an exemplary act of clarification, they let everyone know their error and have corrected their data.
The conclusion is that although there was migration back into Africa (what is delightfully called ‘back-flow’), this was less extensive in geographical terms than the authors claimed. The European genes carried by Mota did not flood all the way back down to Africa, and Modern sub-Saharan populations do not have unexpectedly high levels of European, and therefore Neanderthal, DNA. We are not all Neanderthals.
These two figures show the difference in the analyses. The first is from the October 2015 article, the second, corrected, version is from the Erratum:
Map showing the proportion of West Eurasian component, λMota,LBK, across the African continent. (Gallego Lllorente et al. 2015). THESE DATA ARE ERRONEOUS – COMPARE WITH THE FIGURE BELOW
The lessons of this are multiple. Above all, hats off to Llorente et al, the original researchers, for making their data openly available, so that quizzical scientists like Skoglund and Reich could explore what they thought to be an unlikely result. And then even more kudos for publishing their correction so quickly. This is how science works – if something seems weird, and it is incorrect, it should get corrected by science’s inherent questioning, based on experimentation.
There is another lesson, too. A lot of modern research is based on complex analyses that can be difficult for those outside of the research group involved to understand. A lot is therefore taken on trust; had the result not been unusual, the mistake might never have been discovered. I have experienced a similar problem when some exciting results we had found eventually turned out to be an artifact, produced by an error in a computer script. Although the work has not been published, so we did not need to retract, we probably wasted about 18 months getting excited about something that turned out not to be there. . .
Finally – what about my students? I told them about the Mota paper, and how they all had Neanderthal genes, even those of Afro-Caribbean origin. I’m going to change the lecture for next year, obviously, but my students – many of whom will not take another course in human evolution – may never discover that what I told them was wrong. And what about next year’s students? Do I tell them the whole story as an example of how science proceeds? If so, I know from bitter experience that for a sizeable number of them, the thing that will stick in their memory will be the wrong result, not the scientific lesson. I think I’ll keep quiet in the lecture, but post links to this and the original post. I’ll also edit the original post, with a pointer to this correction.
When I had a cat, it was a trauma for both of us to go to the vet’s: the cat was freaked out at the carrier, car ride, and strange place where he’d get shots, and I was upset because my cat Teddy didn’t know I was trying to help him.
Here’s a unique solution to the problem of house cats that get loose. It was suggested by Matthew Inman, creator of The Oatmeal, and named “The Kitty Convict Project.” As Inman notes on the page, 7 million pets go missing every year. Of these 26% of dogs get returned home but only 5% of cats. He gives the three reasons why cats are returned so rarely (guess), and suggests a solution:
It’s a good idea, I think, but first you’d have to educate ALL Americans about what to do when they see a cat with an orange collar! Well, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. . .
*******
Finally, from pedget.com we have a nice rear-window decal that’s ideal if a) you own a cat and b) have a rear-window wiper (I don’t). You can get the cats in either happy version (shown) or grumpy version (see site), and there’s a decal for the wiper, too. Only ten bucks for both decals!
I’m a bit less neurotic since several readers have rushed into the breach and provided me with a bunch of photos. But of course you’re welcome to send your good snaps any time. Some readers send only one or two photos at a time, so today we’ll feature a grab-bag of pictures that came in ones and twos.
I don’t think we’ve any wild monotreme photos before, but Russell Moran has sent us one taken in his garden. I didn’t know that there are actually four living species of echidna (genera Tachyglossus and Zaglossus); the one below is probably the short-beaked echidna, Tachyglossus aculeatus, found all over Australia as well as southern New Guinea and Tasmania.
Remember, monotremes are the only egg-laying mammals, and comprise echidnas and platypuses.
Here’s a photograph of an echidna that was wandering around our courtyard in Canberra, Australia a couple of months ago. A rare monotreme visitor, no less! We watched it snuffling around the garden, presumably searching for ants amongst the plant debris [JAC: echidnas are also called “spiny anteaters”]. It seemed oblivious to us humans excitedly hovering around its foraging soujourn.
Echidnas are fairly common in the wild in south-east coast Australia (I’ve seen them about a dozen times in the bush) but I’ve never found one in my backyard before. We live just across the road from bushland where we often see grey kangaroos, possums, parrots and other great stuff, so no doubt it wandered over. And only 6 km from the city centre!
Reader Jonathan Wallace from Newcastle upon Tyne sent an unusual-looking bird’s nest. We don’t know what bird made it, so readers are welcome to guess:
I was walking near my home recently when I spotted this nest in a hedge. One of the nice things about winter is that the dormant state of the vegetation reveals things that are hidden during the summer! I am not sure what species the nest belongs to: possible candidates are Long-tailed Tit, Aegithalos caudatus, or Eurasian Wren Troglodytes troglodytes both of which make a domed nest. Wrens usually, but not exclusively, nest in a cavity of some kind while Long-tailed Tits’ nests tend to be more cylindrical than spherical and are also covered in lichens on the outside, giving a pale grey appearance (but possibly, by winter, mosses used in the construction may have grown through this outer coating to give a green appearance?). So there are grounds to doubt either of these species and I’m open to suggestions as to what species made this nest. It is interesting to note that there is apparently fresh guano beneath the nest entrance which suggests the nest may be currently being used as a night-time roosting site by something – though not necessarily the bird (or species) which made the nest.
I’m not sure whether this is the first robin of Spring in Montreal, though one has already been sighted by reader Taskin in Winnipeg. This one comes from Anne-Marie Cournoyer:
Reader Ed Suominen sent a medley in purple and gold:
In response to your plea for wildlife photos, here is one of my favorites. Although I have done a lot of nature photography (posted on Flickr), it is nearly all of flora and landscapes with a few bugs and turkeys thrown in. Trees sit still while you take pictures of them. I understand this isn’t a bee, but some sort of pollinating fly.
It does seem to have only two wings; do any readers know this insect?
Male House Finch (Carpodacus mexicanus) on rain gauge — I like his cute spotty bum!
Slate-Coloured Dark-eyed Junco (Junco hyemalis) — this is the slate-coloured form, which is much lighter than the black one (obviously). Nice to see the colour variation.
A week from this evening I’ll be heading to Old Blighty, and posting will be very light for a week thereafter, though not entirely absent. This presumes that the planes will in fact be flying, but the ten-day weather predication shows a possibility of snow showers on the day I leave. On this day in 1649, King Charles I of England was executed by Oliver Cromwell and his minions; and on this same day in 1661, the body of Cromwell, who died of an infection in 1658, was exhumed and “ritually executed”: his corpse being hanged and beheaded. (I had no idea this was done, but Wikipedia gives a long list of people who were executed posthumously.) On this day in 1933, Hitler was sworn in as German chancellor, and in 1971, Carole King’s Tapestry was released, becoming one of the best-selling albums of all time (and, as you’ll see below, there was a cat on the cover). On this day in 1882, Franklin D. Roosevelt was born, as was Vanessa Redgrave in 1937 and Dick Cheney in 1941. Orville Wright died on this day in 1948, and Coretta Scott King in 2006. Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili’s being a smartass again, and stealing the title of Bill Nye’s book:
A: What intelligence do cats actually have?
Hili: Undeniable.
In Polish
Ja: Jaka jest właściwie inteligencja kotów?
Hili: Niezaprzeczalna.
As lagniappe, we have reader Taskin’s cat, Gus (who lost much of his ears to frostbite as a stray), pretending he’s a polar bear. Isn’t he cute?
And, if you’re either young or forgetful, here’s the cover of Carole King’s Tapestry:
