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.
As predicted, there was a 50-50 tie in the Senate over the confirmation of the rich and totally unqualified Betsy DeVos to be Trump’s education secretary. And also as predicted, Vice-President Pence broke the tie, confirming DeVos. If only a single additional Republican had some integrity! But that, I suppose, is too much to ask. This is the first time in the history of Cabinet nominations that the VP had to break a Senate tie.
Here’s a tw**t provided by Matthew Cobb, showing how much money Devos (who’s a billionaire) gave to all the Republicans who voted for her. After all, they want to keep the dosh flowing. . .
PuffHo has a new editor to replace Arianna, but the beat goes on, and that clickbait cesspool is still doing what it does best: risible left-wing outrage. Here’s a headline from today’s entertainment section (click on screenshot if you must);
“24: Legacy” is a spinoff of the “24” television drama, in which each episode depicted 24 hours in the life of an antiterrorist agent (played by Kiefer Sutherland), with each season having 24 unified episodes. That first show ran for 8 seasons and was, I’m told, immensely popular. It’s now given rise to “24 Legacy,” which has aired only two episodes. Sadly, according to PuffHo, the first episode, which aired on Sunday after the S*perbowl, was “unacceptably Islamophobic” because it depicted an episode of Islamic terrorism. Never mind that its predecessor show depicted terrorism of all stripes, including Russians, Mexicans, Chinese, and Americans. Nope, the producers are now “Islamophobic” because they showed a Muslim terrorist right after the Superbowl (so lots of people watched it) and in the first episode!
PuffHo:
Millions of Americans watched the New England Patriots beat the Atlanta Falcons on Sunday. Afterward, the next bit of programming they saw depicted an unidentified Middle Eastern man murdering a white American family in the name of someone called Sheik Bin-Khalid. The terrorist shoots the father in the head, and the camera pans to reveal the bloodied bodies of a mother and child as he exits the home to coordinate a devastating attack on American soil. This reductive depiction of Muslims wasn’t the only one in the episode, but it was certainly the most explicit. And it was first.
. . . That’s why it matters that the show’s producers chose to peddle the same fuzzy representations of Muslims we’ve come to associate with the franchise in the premiere of “24: Legacy,” which continues Monday night. Executive producer and showrunner Manny Coto addressed concerns by stating Sunday’s episode brought an intentionally “inflammatory” start to the series, hinting that future episodes will reveal new truths that complicate our perception of events.
“If we didn’t know the way the entire season went and how it came out the other side, we might be concerned,” Coto told The Hollywood Reporter. “But here’s the thing: The story of this season deliberately starts on an image that you might call jingoistic, expected and possibly inflammatory. We weren’t trying to be inflammatory, but it’s what the story itself called for.”
Yet for many Americans ― likely millions ― that violent first image will be part of the only episode they’ll see. However the show develops over the season is inconsequential. [JAC: PuffHo to Americans: “you’re morons with short attention spans”]
Social media users immediately took issue with the decision to center the terrorist plot around extremist Muslims, as both “24” Season 2 and 4 hinged on similar threats. Some rejected what they saw as an “old and tired” stereotype seen on FOX too often, while others said the show made for “Islamophobic” and even dangerous TV.
. . . Every presumably Muslim character in “24: Legacy” is either directly involved in terrorist acts or accused of being complicit in some way. Accepting a show where Muslims are American-killing terrorists as casual entertainment runs the risk of legitimizing the all-too-real discrimination Muslim people face in and outside U.S. borders. Now more than ever, vigilance is necessary when it comes to consuming media, regardless of intention. “24: Legacy” might have only just begun its season, but for many watching at home its clock has already run out.
And I guess PuffHo has appointed itself the Curator of Television Vigilance.
So here we see the self-censorship of the Regressive Left, which implicitly maintains that while it’s okay to show diverse kinds of terrorists, it’s a no-no to show a Muslim terrorist, because that’s Islamophobia. I guess it’s okay to show Mexican or Russian terrorists, though Mexicans are seen as “people of color”, but PuffHo is on its usual campaign to worship all things Muslim. (They particularly love fetishizing the hijab.) That’s simply an overreaction to real Islamophobia: bigotry against Muslims, and also the kind of virtue signaling in which PuffHo specializes. The fact is that there is Islamic terrorism, and it’s happening worldwide. To leave out one particular group because it’s seen as “Islamophobia” is ridiculous.
What’s next: the demonization of “Orange is the New Black” because it shows women as criminals, when we all know that they’re supposed to be victims?
Why do I dislike PuffHo so much? I suppose it’s because they’re supposed to be progressive, but they’re actually regressive. Stupidity from someone who’s supposed to be on our side sometimes rankles more than stupidity from the right wing—and Lord knows I call that out often enough. I suppose it’s a matter of intellectual honesty: it’s the reason why I sometimes prefer honest Biblical literalists like Ken Ham over mealymouthed metaphorizers and accommodationists who want to have their Jesus and their Darwin, too. Give me Fox News (which I don’t watch) over the Pecksniffian moralizing of PuffHo and its branding of certain television shows as “unacceptable.”
I’m a few days late with this news, and needn’t say much about how ridiculous this is, but last Thursday, Liberty University, a fundamentalist Christian school in Lynchburg, Virginia, announced that its President, Jerry Falwell, Jr. would head up an “education task force” for President Tr*mp. (Fallwell, Jr. is the son of the notorious Jerry Falwell Senior, who founded Liberty in 1971.) That task force is apparently designed to “deregulate” higher education, rolling back some changes enacted by the Obama administration.
Now both Falwells were creationists, and Liberty University adheres to creationism. That is public knowledge, but it’s also supported by this tw**t showing one of Liberty’s textbooks.
It’s not clear whether Falwell, Jr. will have any input into school curricula, but, as the New York Times reports, being on the task force may constitute a conflict of interest for him, as Liberty University has four times more online students than students who actually attend the University physically, and many of these default on their loans. The task force, by loosening the regulations that require universities to disclose default rates and dismantling other federal laws, may benefit the reputation of Liberty, a school that appears to be even more of a scam than I thought:
[Liberty] enrolls about 14,000 students, most of whom are evangelical Christians, at its residential campus in Lynchburg, Va. But it also enrolls an additional 65,000 students online. Most colleges now have a mix of residential and online students, but it’s almost unheard-of to have four times as many online students as residential students.
Because internet courses are cheap to deliver at scale, the online division is a big revenue driver for Liberty, which brought in $591 million in tuition in 2013, against $470 million in expenses. Liberty is essentially a medium-size nonprofit college that owns a huge for-profit college.
. . . Liberty’s marketing and recruitment are driven by an 800-person telemarketing call center in a former Sears department store near the main campus.
Most of the tuition for Liberty’s online students comes from financial aid provided by the federal Department of Education, the same body that Mr. Falwell says is engaged in “overreaching regulation.”
In 2015, Liberty received $347 million from federal undergraduate grant and loan programs. Few other private nonprofit colleges receive anything like that sum. To put the amount in perspective, the highly regarded University of Virginia, a nearby state university, received $37 million from the same sources that year. Arizona State, the nation’s largest public university, received $169 million. Liberty’s considerable financial success — it has built a $1 billion cash reserve, and Mr. Falwell is paid more than $900,000 a year — was underwritten largely by the federal taxpayer.
Liberty also has a huge student loan default rate—about 1.5 times the national average—and although the “nonprofit” school pays no taxes, and is already exempt from some of the Obama regulations, rolling back those regulations will still make Liberty look better. And all that is beside the ignominy of having a fundamentalist Baptist creationist heading up an education task force.
This post began turning out longer than I intended, so I’m going to divide it in two, with the second part up tomorrow.
When we consider major organs or features of animals, they can be bilaterally symmetrical, with the traits the same on both sides, or bilaterally asymmetrical, with differences between left and right. And there are two major forms of bilateral asymmetry.
In antisymmetry (which can be considered a macroscopic form of “fluctuating asymmetry” see here), there is no directionality to the trait, so the asymmetry is random with respect to the side of the body. One example of this is the lobster claws, in which one becomes a “crusher” claw and the other a “cutter”, as in this individual.
Now this asymmetry is adaptive in the sense that it’s useful for a lobster to have one claw that can crush and another that can cut; it’s like a crustacean Swiss Army knife that can do multiple things. But if you look at lobsters, you’ll find that the crusher claw is on the right as often as it is on the left; in other words, the asymmetry is random in direction among individuals.
This is still an evolved trait, as it’s clearly adaptive to have the two functions, but it doesn’t really matter to the lobster which side does which.
We know how this asymmetry develops—at least proximally. What happens is that the claw that is used most often after the fourth molt develops into the crusher claw, and the other one into the cutter. (I recommend having a look at the link, which details some clever experiments.) This means that there is some developmental program in the lobster’s genes that turns on “crusher” genes in the most stimulated claw, and that, in turn, may activate genes (or repress genes) on the other side of the body leading to the development of the cutting claw. In this case the environment itself, or rather the behavior of the animal interacting with the environment, activates the genetic program, and since it’s apparently random which claw is most stimulated, we get half the lobsters with a crusher on the left, and half with the crusher on the right.
Here’s another example of antisymmetry, the big vs. small claws of the male fiddler crab, Uca deichmanni (the females’ claws are the same size). There are equal proportions of right-clawed and left-clawed males:
Another type of asymmetry is directional, that is, the left and right sides differ, but always in the same direction. We’re familiar with this in our own bodies, in which the heart and viscera are directionally asymmetrical. The bulk of the heart, for instances is on the left side of the body, which is why you feel your heartbeat on that side. Quirks of Human Anatomy gives more examples:
Our right lung has three lobes but our left lung only two. Our heart is shifted to left, our spleen is located on the left, and our stomach bulges to the left, whereas our liver is shifted to the right. Our colon curls into a question mark, although its exact path can vary from person to person.
There are rare individuals in which every directionality like this is reversed due to a condition called situs inversus; these individuals are usually normal, but their innards are mirror images of the much more frequent “normal” individuals.
These kinds of directional asymmetries are not infrequent. Male narwhals, for instance, have a grossly enlarged canine tooth (up to 3 meters long) that forms a tusk, and it’s always on the left side, as shown in this photograph below. (Females don’t usually have tusks, which might imply sexual selection via male-male competition, but it looks as if the tooth/tusk is a sensory organ that males, use to communicate with each other when they rub tusks.)
Another example of directionality are some nocturnal owls in which the ear openings are asymmetrical; this helps them localize prey. In the barn owl, the left ear opening is higher than the right. Here’s another owl, the boreal owl, showing directional asymmetry in the skull:
Flounder species show both forms of asymmetry. In some species of flounders, which begin swimming vertically, they subsequently flatten so that they lie on their left side, with the left eye migrating over the head to the right side, while other species lie on their right side with the eye migrating the other way. These species are directionally asymmetrical, but in opposite ways. Still other species of flounders also flatten, but in a random direction, so some individuals lie on their left sides, and others on their right; this, of course, is antisymmetry.
Like antisymmetry, directional symmetry is often adaptive in that it’s useful to have only one side enlarged, and if you have to enlarge a tooth to make a tusk, it’s got to lead to asymmetry. Here, however, we face a genetic problem: the induction of the tooth on a given side is not due to random environmental stimuli, but is somehow to the genes themselves. There must be a genetic program in narwhals, for example, that says “make left tooth grow large,” regardless of the environment. And that means this: those genes know whether they’re on the right or left side of the body! It’s easier to envision genes knowing whether they’re in the front or back half of the body, as an anterior-posterior gradient is set up in the egg or early zygote. But such gradients aren’t obvious for the right versus left sides of the body in animals that are, by and large, bilaterally symmetrical.
Let me add first that while it may be important to be asymmetrical, as with the lobster, there probably aren’t many cases in which directional asymmetry is more important than antisymmetry (can you think of examples?). In these cases which form of asymmetry evolves may just be a result of whether the genetic variation promoting asymmetry is of the antisymmetric or the directional sort.
When I was younger I pondered this question at length. Yes, you can determine front and back in the egg, and then top vs. bottom (dorsal versus ventral), but, unless there’s some directional left-right gradient set up in the egg (and I wasn’t sure how that would work), I couldn’t see how a gene would know, from its internal environment, which side of the body it was on. (Draw a box with a front-back and a top-bottom chemical gradient; you’ll see that the concentrations of the “morphogen” chemicals are the same on the left and the right.) How, then, I wondered, could directional asymmetry, which must involve genes taking cues from their local environments, ever evolve?
Well, if we start with a single trait being directionally asymmetrical, that would be all that is required for subsequent traits to cue on that, or on each other, to themselves evolve directional asymmetries. And even organisms that look pretty bilaterally symmetrical, like Drosophila, can have subtle directional asymmetry (flies have asymmetrical guts and the male genitalia rotate in a given direction during development.)
But that still leaves a problem: Assuming that organisms evolved from a common ancestor that was completely bilaterally symmetrical (right vs left), how did the very first directional asymmetry evolve? With gradients the same on both sides of the organisms, how could gene variants accumulate that would be activated (or silenced) on a consistent side of the body?
I’ll leave this for readers to ponder. If you’re a biologist, you may already know some of the answers. I’ll discuss some solutions (and some selection experiments) in the next installment.
You can listen for free to this 27-minute BBC podcast (and download it) in which Jim Al-Khalili interviews Sean Carroll on cosmology. There’s no direct link, but go to the page by clicking on the screenshot, while you’ll find it at the top.
(Note: the second reader’s comment below gives a link to the direct download.)
Carroll at the LogiCal 2017 conference a few weeks ago (photo by me):
Reader Barbara Wilson sent a series of sea lion photos; her notes are indented:
Male California Sea Lions (Zalophus californianus) travel far north of their breeding grounds during the winter. The external ears distinguish sea lions from seals. Males of this species are identified by the domed heads. I’m not sure if the one with a low head is a female, a young male, or another species. Any time one moves much, he and his neighbors all engage in loud barking and open-mouthed threats. They have impressive canines!
These individuals are resting on low docks in Newport, Oregon. The docks were built for small boats, but the sea lions took over. Now the docksare disintegrating under heavy use and people are raising funds to replace them, so we can continue to see the sea lions this close.
In any large group of animals, you could expect to see injuries and scars. Here is one with some kind of skin problem, next to one with scars from what look like an encounter with a propeller.
Good morning! It’s Tuesday (the cruelest day), February 7, 2017, and it’s National Fettuccine Alfredo Day, also known as Thrombosis on a Plate (noodles, butter, and Parmesan cheese). Why the name? Wikipedia says this: “Alfredo Di Lelio invented the “fettuccine al triplo burro [butter]” (later named ‘fettuccine all’Alfredo’ or ‘fettuccine Alfredo’) in 1892 in a restaurant run by his mother Angelina in piazza Rosa in Rome.” It became famous because of its elaborate preparation at the table:
[The fettuccine] are seasoned with plenty of butter and fat parmesan, not aged, so that, in a ritual of extraordinary theatricality, the owner mixes the pasta and lifts it high to serve it, the white threads of cheese gilded with butter and the bright yellow of the ribbons of egg pasta offering an eyeful for the customer; at the end of the ceremony, the guest of honor is presented the golden cutlery and the serving dish, where the blond fettuccine roll around in the pale gold of the seasonings. It’s worth seeing the whole ceremony. The owner, son of old Alfredo and looking exactly like him, … bends over the great skein of fettuccine, fixes it intensely, his eyes half-closed, and dives into mixing it, waving the golden cutlery with grand gestures, like an orchestra conductor, with his sinister upwards-pointing twirled moustache dancing up and down, pinkies in the air, a rapt gaze, flailing elbows.
Did that make you hungry?
It’s also Independence Day on Grenada, celebrating its freedom from Britain in 1974. On this day in 1898, Émile Zola was brought to trial for libel for publishing J’accuse, a defense of Alfred Dreyfus. Zola was found guilty, but fled to England for 17 months. On February 7, 1938, the game Monopoly was invented, and it’s still going strong. Five years later to the day, the Disney film Pinocchio opened. On Febraruy 7, 1990, the Central Committee of the Soviet Union agreed to relinquish power, leading to the dissolving of the Soviet Union. Finally—and this is unbelievable—it was on this day in 2013 that Mississippi officially certified the Thirteenth Amendment, becoming the final state to approve the abolition of slavery (the state had ratified the Amendment in 1995). (If you doubt that, go here.) It had, of course, become law long before that, as only 3/4 of the states need ratify an amendment before it goes into force.
Notables born on this day include Charles Dickens (1812), Laura Ingalls Wilder (“Little House on the Prairie,” 1867), G. H. Hardy (1877), Sinclair Lewis (1885), Dock Boggs (1898, an Appalachian folk singer, songwriter, and banjo player whose recordings are mesmerizing; listen to his version of “Oh Death” here), and Matt Ridley (1958). Those who died on this day include Josef Mengele (1979; escaped justice), King Hussein of Jordan (1999), and Anne Morrow Lindbergh (2001). Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is flummoxed by what humans consider noms:
Hili: Interesting, what is she doing there?
Cyrus: It looks as if she is slicing an onion.
Hili: Humanity always astounds me.
In Polish:
Hili: Ciekawe co ona tam robi?
Cyrus: Wygląda jakby kroiła cebulę.
Hili: Ludzkość zawsze mnie zdumiewała.
Leon, now back in Wloclawek from his vacation, is still enjoying outdoor adventure.
In the Leon monologue from three days ago, I missed an example of pareidolia, but it was caught by reader Pete Smith. Can you see it in the original photo?
Yes, it’s a satanic cat!:
And while we’re at it, reader Ginger K. called my attention to the Daily Mail‘s article on Alistair Cantley, who spotted the face of Jesus in the door of a bathroom in an IKEA store in Glasgow:
[Cantley] said: ‘It was a fairly normal shopping trip until I saw that. It’s not every day you spot Jesus in Ikea.
‘The door handle was in the way a bit but I think for anyone walking past they can clearly see the face there.
‘I’ll have to call in again soon and see if he’s still there. Maybe he’s watching over me.’
