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.
I can’t believe I missed this when I was in Amsterdam. The Atlas Obscura reports that the city harbors (literally) a “Poezenboot”, or “cat boat”, a floating sanctuary/adoption agency. It has an English website here.
It was founded by Henriette van Weelde in 1966 as a home for stray, sick, and abandoned felines, and has since grown into an official charity.
The house boat accommodates up to 50 cats at once, 14 of which are permanent residents. Human visitors are welcome on the vessel as well. Many come to choose a cat for adoption, but tourists are also welcome to drop in and scratch a kitty behind the ears.
And here’s where it is (red marker), near the red light district (make jokes at your own expense). If you’re catless in Amsterdam, visit the Poezenboot and grab a pussy:
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Bored Pandashows what it considers the world’s ten most beautiful cats. (I hardly need add that everyone thinks their own cat is the most beautiful.) I’ve already shown #1, Thor the Bengal cat, and he’s a real beauty, but here are a few others. Head to the site to see the rest.
Here’s a tweet from Asia Murphy, sent by Matthew Cobb, who loves “find the. . .” photos. Matthew adds that Asia is doing a Ph.D. on the mammals of Madagascar. Matthew tells us NOT to go looking for the answer on Asia’s Twitter feed, as that would spoil the fun.
— asia murphy, fuck ICE (postdocing) (@am_anatiala) February 10, 2017
If you want to know what a fossa (Cryptoprocta ferox) looks like, here’s one. They are carnivorous mammals in the family Eupleridae, which contains only 10 species, all endemic to Madagascar.
And here’s the enlarge photo. Can you spot this creature? Answer at 1 pm Chicago time:
Reader Rodger Atkin sent a lovely dragonfly photo from Thailand, which may be a mimic. Though I know of no mimetic dragonflies, I don’t know much about Odonata, and Rodger asks readers if they know anything about this one. His notes:
This was taken in my yard in Thailand. I have never seen markings like those on any of the dragonflies before, but with the transparent wings with the marking in the centre I think it must be adapted to look like some other much more dangerous insect. I’ve been through my books and trolled the net but was unable to find anything like it.
Reader Tim Anderson sent two photos from Oz:
Attached are a couple of pictures from a recent jaunt along the Great Ocean Road on the south-western coast of Victoria.
A white-cheeked honeyeater (for some reason it appears with two different generic names, Lichenostomus leucotis and Nesoptilotis leucotis, I don’t know which has priority). [JAC: On Wikipedia it appears as Phylidonyris niger]. I found this one sitting in a stiff breeze on a cliff overlooking Bass Strait.
A Flowering Gum (Corymbia ficifolia) in its full glory. Most eucalypts have white or pale cream coloured inflorescences, but this species has varieties that come out in pink, orange, scarlet and crimson.
As an aside, Corymbia (the bloodwoods) was split out of the genus Eucalyptus in the late 1970s, a decision which we foresters regarded at the time with conservative horror. Cladistics, bah, humbug.
Simon Crase sent a photo of a bird from New Zealand, where I’ll be in just a few weeks. I hope to see some wekas (and keas, tuataras, and—if I’m really lucky—kakapos). Wekas (Gallirallus australis) are flightless birds in the rail family (Rallidae), and, like many flightless birds, its conservation status is “vulnerable.”
I noticed a photo of a weka on your website, so I’ve attached a few taken at our place. We definitely have at least one family of wekas on our land, as I have seen Mum, Dad, and a couple of chicks.
Finally, a picture of the Moon taken recently by reader Nicole Reggia. You should be able to name the large crater at about 4:30, and the two dark “seas” at 11 and 12 o’clock:
Good morning on a balmy Saturday in Chicago. It’s February 11, 2017: one day before Darwin’s birthday (and also Abe Lincoln’s; both were born on the same day in 1809), and three days before Valentine’s Day. To stay out of the doghouse, buy your cards and gifts now. It’s National Peppermint Patty Day, but the object of celebration is the candy, not the cartoon character:
It’s also Inventors’ Day in the U.S., so you should invent something.
On this day in 1826, the University of London was founded, and in 1858 Bernadette Soubirous had her first vision—there were 18 in all—of the Virgin Mary in Lourdes, France, which is still waiting for Jesus’s mother to heal amputees. Here’s Bernadette (now Saint Bernadette), who was 14 when she first thought she saw Mary:
If you want to see the well known movie about her, “The Song of Bernadette” (1943, with Jennifer Jones in the starring role), it’s on YouTube in two parts, with part 1 here and part 2 here.
On this day in 1978, China lifted its ban on works by Aristotle, William Shakespeare and Charles Dickens—authors whose idea surely would have subverted Communism. Finally, on February 11, 1990, Nelson Mandela was released from prison in Cape Town, ending 27 years of forced confinement.
Notable people born on this day include Thomas Edison (1847), Leo Szilard (1898), Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915; his travel books, relatively unknown today, are superb), Anthony Flew (1923), Paul Bocuse (1926), Burt Reynolds (1936), and Sarah Palin (1964). Those who died on this day include René Descartes (1650; no horse jokes, please), Sergei Eisenstein (1948), Sylvia Plath (1963), Eleanor Powell (1982), Paul Feyerabend (1994), Whitney Houston (2012), and Bob Simon (2015). Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is complaining about the snow, while Andrzej points out that that’s not much of a snowfall for Poland:
Hili: We will be buried under this snow.
A: This is a joke—not snow.
Hili: Don’t scare me.
In Polish:
Hili: Zasypie nas ten śnieg.
Ja: To są kpiny, a nie śnieg.
Hili: Nie strasz mnie.
Lagniappe: Reader John S. sent the motto of a “first responder” team in Colorado. (I’m often asked if medicine and technology have led to degeneration of the human gene pool, and the answer is a qualified “yes”.)
Let’s finish the week seven days closer to death than we were last week, but maybe a bit happier. Have a river otter sliding on the snow. (I wonder if he’s having fun or doing what penguins do: sometimes moving by sliding on the belly.)
I didn’t know what a “dubstep” was before, but now I know—from Wikipedia, which describes it as a musical genre that’s been around since the ’90s:
The music generally features sparse, syncopated drum and percussion patterns with bass lines that contain prominent sub bass frequencies.
Well, here’s a dubstep made from bird sounds (and a soupçon of drums), and I quite like it:
And for your Friday fun reading, the Guardian has a wonderful story called “I accidentally bought a giant pig,” about a man who thought he was buying a miniature porker, but it grew into a beloved 500-pound house pet. Read it—it will make you smile.
In 2015, Andrew Sullivan announced that he was retiring from blogging. Well, that lasted two years. He’s started a new column at New York Magazine that he describes like this:
I guess I should start by saying this is not a blog. Nor is it what one might call a column. It’s an experiment of sorts to see if there’s something in between those two. Most Fridays, from now on, I’ll be writing in this space about, among other things, the end of Western civilization, the collapse of the republic, and, yes, my beagles.
And, mirabile dictu, he’s one of those conservatives who simply can’t stomach our new administration. His latest column, “The madness of King Donald,” is about exactly that: Trump’s lies, and what the press should do about them. What they’re doing—at least the reporters I admire—is what Sullivan says they should do: don’t let “alternative truths” pass unquestioned:
What are we supposed to do with this? How are we to respond to a president who in the same week declared that the “murder rate in our country is the highest it’s been in 45 to 47 years,” when, of course, despite some recent, troubling spikes in cities, it’s nationally near a low not seen since the late 1960s, and half what it was in 1980. What are we supposed to do when a president says that two people were shot dead in Chicago during President Obama’s farewell address — when this is directly contradicted by the Chicago police? None of this, moreover, is ever corrected. No error is ever admitted. Any lie is usually doubled down by another lie — along with an ad hominem attack.
Here is what we are supposed to do: rebut every single lie. Insist moreover that each lie is retracted — and journalists in press conferences should back up their colleagues with repeated follow-ups if Spicer tries to duck the plain truth. Do not allow them to move on to another question. Interviews with the president himself should not leave a lie alone; the interviewer should press and press and press until the lie is conceded. The press must not be afraid of even calling the president a liar to his face if he persists. This requires no particular courage. I think, in contrast, of those dissidents whose critical insistence on simple truth in plain language kept reality alive in the Kafkaesque world of totalitarianism. As the Polish dissident Adam Michnik once said: “In the life of every honorable man comes a difficult moment … when the simple statement that this is black and that is white requires paying a high price.” The price Michnik paid was years in prison. American journalists cannot risk a little access or a nasty tweet for the same essential civic duty?
He then does what few journalists will do, but what all of us are thinking: questioning Trump’s sanity:
Here’s what I’d think: This man is off his rocker. He’s deranged; he’s bizarrely living in an alternative universe; he’s delusional. If he kept this up, at some point you’d excuse yourself and edge slowly out of the room and the house and never return. You’d warn your other neighbors. You’d keep your distance. If you saw him, you’d be polite but keep your distance.
I think this is a fundamental reason why so many of us have been so unsettled, anxious, and near panic these past few months. It is not so much this president’s agenda. That always changes from administration to administration. It is that when the linchpin of an entire country is literally delusional, clinically deceptive, and responds to any attempt to correct the record with rage and vengeance, everyone is always on edge.
There is no anchor any more. At the core of the administration of the most powerful country on earth, there is, instead, madness.
I’ve had some beefs with Sullivan, mainly because of his religiosity, and at one point we had an acrimonious exchange about whether Genesis was meant to be taken literally (he said it was palpably metaphorical, I simply quoted the Church Fathers who did take it literally). But I nearly always respected Sullivan because the guy was thoughtful, even when I thought he was wrong. But his Achilles heel was always his faith: his decision to remain Catholic despite being gay, and, indeed, his belief in a God for which there was no evidence at all.
And, sadly, since Sullivan is a believer, he breaks up his newest blog/ column with some delusion on his own part, lauding Martin Scorsese’s movie “The Silence,” which I’ve now seen. It’s about God’s absence in helping the tortured Christians in 17th-century Japan, and an affirmation of faith in God when there’s no God to be seen. It’s not a bad movie except for its unbroken paean to delusion. The bad part is when Sullivan sees God as trumping Trump:
There are moments — surpassingly rare but often indelible — when you do hear the voice of God and see the face of Jesus. You never forget them — and I count those few moments in my life when I have heard the voice and seen the face as mere intimations of what is to come. But the rest is indeed silence. And the conscience is something that cannot sometimes hear itself. I’ve rarely seen the depth of this truth more beautifully unpacked. Which is why, perhaps, the movie has had such a tiny audience so far. Those without faith have no patience for a long meditation on it; those with faith in our time are filled too often with a passionate certainty to appreciate it. And this movie’s mysterious imagery can confound anyone. But its very complexity and subtlety gave me hope in this vulgar, extremist time. We cannot avoid this surreality all around us. But it may be possible occasionally to transcend it.
To me, “passionate certainty” means “delusion”—just the flaw Sullivan imputes to The Donald. Well, Mr. Sullivan, I’m just as disturbed as you by the state of our country, and by who’s running it. But unlike you, I find no hope in Jesus. If we’re to solve this problem, we have to do it ourselves.
Some of you may find this gross, but it’s still a remarkable achievement of natural selection, and one of those weird things that abound in nature but most of which are yet to be described. It’s the discovery of a “fish-scale” gecko that easily sheds its scales when caught, revealing a bizarre, naked reptile that has to regrow its scales but which has escaped predation. That’s a worthwhile tradeoff!
Geckos are lizards in the family Gekkota. The genus Geckolepis, which contains about ten species endemic to Madagascar and the Comoros Islands, are known as “fish-scale geckos” because they have large scales that are shed easily. Presumably, they lose many of their scales, including a portion of their skin, when seized by predators, allowing them to escape.
The new paper tries to resolve the number of species (or “operational taxonomic units”) in the group, but the cool part is the description of a new species, Geckolepis megalepis—the first new species described in this genus in 75 years. Most of the paper is full of arcane details of its anatomy and morphology (needed to describe a new species and distinguish it from existing ones), but we needn’t be concerned with most of those. Here’s what the new species looks like:
Geckolepis megalepis, newly discovered in Madagascar, has the largest scales of any fish-scale gecko. Credit Frank Glaw
What is novel about G. megalepis is that its scales are relatively larger than those of any other fish-scale gecko: the authors say that if we were covered with scales of the same relative size, they’d be the size of our hands. These scales, which are highly mineralized, are shed easily when the animal is grabbed; in fact, the researchers had to catch the animals with wads of cotton to try to preserve them intact. Below are some quotes from the paper:
Geckolepis megalepis was observed active at night both in the rainy and dry seasons, on trees and tsingy limestone rock. When captured, these geckos showed a strong tendency to autotomize [shed] large parts of their scales, leading to partly ‘naked’ geckos without any visible (bloody) lesions. In a subjective comparison this tendency appeared to be even more developed than in other Geckolepis species.
And this is what one looks like after it’s been grabbed and released; one of the authors describes the scale-denuded beast as looking like a “naked chicken breast.”:
For those of you who want more gory detail, read on (I’ve divided one long paragraph into three), for it’s not just the scales that are shed (my emphasis):
Many reptiles have evolved the ability to shed some part of their body in response to predator attack. The most widespread form is caudal autotomy, the shedding of all or part of the tail, which is widespread among Lepidosauria, from amphisbaenians to rhynchocephalians, even being found in some snakes (Arnold, 1984; Bateman & Fleming, 2009).
Geckolepis species are also able to shed their tails, and indeed few specimens survive to adulthood with their original tails intact (see for instance Figs. 3A and 3B). In addition, these geckos have evolved an even more extreme adaptation, i.e. the autotomy of virtually their entire integument when seized or even touched. Earlier studies have shown that the autotomized layers include epidermis, underlying connective tissue, and subcutaneous fat tissue, and that a layer between the integument and the underlying tissue represents a pre-formed splitting zone (Schubert & Christophers, 1985).
The shedding process is most likely achieved by contraction of the network of myofibroblasts in the preformed splitting zone, with vasoconstriction in the most superficial vasculature of the dermis to avoid bleeding (Schubert & Christophers, 1985). This process is thus completely different from the normal skin shedding of squamate reptiles, which leads to a loss of keratinized epidermis only (Schubert & Christophers, 1985) The scarless regeneration of the whole integument occurs within a few weeks, apparently starting from stem cells of the deeper layers of the connecting tissue and is considered as unique among vertebrates (Schubert, Steffen & Christophers, 1990). Superficially, no differences are apparent between regenerated and original scales, due to the irregularity of scalation patterns and some variability in scale size. The same is true for regenerated tails; indeed, it is often hard to be certain that a Geckolepis tail has been regenerated without X-ray images showing that the vertebrae are absent.
But does this presumed defense against predators really work? Well, predation events are hard to see, but at the end of the paper the authors describe one observation of a related species grabbed by a larger gecko, and in that case “the Geckolepis individual [not the new species] slipped from the mouth of the Blaesodactylus [big predatory gecko] ca. 30 seconds after being captured, and escaped denuded, thereby providing the first direct evidence of successful escape by skin shedding.”
Well, it would be good to have more observations, but I suspect that the loose scales and integument have indeed been molded by natural selection to resist predators. These animals pay a big cost in having to regenerate their scales, which must be a big metabolic expense, and they’re also denuded for much of that time, making them more vulnerable. But that’s a smaller price to pay than being ingested by a predator!
From Big Thinkwe have physicist Lawrence Krauss showing why the “teach both sides” argument for evolution—and science in general—is fallacious. This argument is now being inserted into school standards by religionists who have lost repeated court battles trying to get creationism and intelligent design taught explicitly in public schools. Their new tactic is to pass school standards allowing or urging teachers to present evidence for alternative views and “critical evidence for and against” theories like evolution and anthropogenic global warming.
Since those resolutions seem innocuous—after all, what’s wrong with encouraging critical thinking in kids?— we need to remember why they’re there, and what the argument is against teaching “criticisms” of theories that are not flawed. Krauss’s 3.5-minute talk, which characterizes the teaching of creationism as “child abuse” (well, at the least it’s lying to children), highlights the problems with the teach-both-sides argument.
I would add that if you’re going to use the “teach all sides” argument, then medical schools should devote considerable time to spiritual healing, modern history to Holocaust denialism, and psychology courses to ESP and psychic phenomena.
Sometimes alternative theories are just bunk. As Krauss says, “If you think about, allowing the notion that the Earth is 6,000 years to old to be promulgated in schools is like teaching kids that the distance across the United States is 17 feet. That’s how big an error that is.”
The Big Think notes this:
This video was created before the 2016 campaign for president began, and Marco Rubio (whom he mentions in the video) has since dropped out; but the fact is, a large crop of the 2016 candidates from one political party holds to this idea of teaching ignorance in the classroom instead of actual science.
One quibble: At 2:35 he says, “Evolution is the basis of modern biology, and in fact if a lot of people don’t believe it, we have to do a better job teaching it.” Well, besides using “believe” rather than “accept”, what Krauss doesn’t note is that the reason a lot of people don’t accept evolution is not a failure of teaching, but the prevalence of religion. If America were a country of atheists, we’d have a lot more people who accept evolution. The most effective (though not the least laborious) way of getting people to accept evolution is not to teach it better, but to diminish the hold of religion on America.
