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.
Good morning on a wet Chicago Wednesday—January 25, 2017. It’s National Irish Coffee Day (didn’t we just have that?), one of the few “sweet” drinks I actually like, particularly when made with Jameson’s Irish Whiskey, strong black coffee (preferably a triple or quadruple espresso), and real whipped cream. It’s also National Voters’ Day in India, the world’s largest democracy.
On January 25, 1858, according to Wikipedia, a famous occasional song had its debut: “The Wedding March by Felix Mendelssohn is played at the marriage of Queen Victoria’s daughter, Victoria, and Friedrich of Prussia, and becomes a popular wedding processional.” On this day in 1915, trans-US phone service began when Alexander Graham Bell spoke from New York to his famous associate Thomas Watson in San Francisco. In 1924, the first Winter Olympics began in Chamonix, France, and, in 1961, JFK held the very first Presidential news conference (I bet he answered questions, too!). On this day in 1971, Charles Manson and three female members of his family were convicted for the Tate-LaBianca murders. Finally, on January 25, 1996, murderer Billy Bailey became the last person in the US to be hanged. He rejected the option of lethal injection, and the state of Delaware had to make extensive preparations and do a ton of research, for it hadn’t hanged anyone in five decades.
Notables born on this day include Robert Burns (1759; is it Burns Night tonight?), W. Somerset Maugham (1874), Virginia Woolf (1882), and Etta James (1938). Those who died on this day include Lucas Cranach the Younger (1586), Al Capone (1947, syphillis), Ava Gardner (1990, ♥), and Philip Johnson (2005). Here’s a section of “The Last Judgment” by Lucas Cranach the Elder (painted 1525-1530):
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, we have a Hili dialogue, so Andrzej and Malgorzata aren’t completely moribund—though I’ve not heard from them about their flu. Once again Hili is touting her appearance and lovely fur; as she once bragged, she’s beautiful to look at, lovely to touch, and her coat is suitable for every occasion.
Hili: Do I look impressive?
A:No doubt for mice you do.
In Polish:
Hili: Czy wyglądam imponująco?
Ja: Dla myszy z pewnością.
Out in the windy wilds of Winnipeg, Gus got himself baked on ‘nip:. As staff Taskin reports:
I put new catnip in this large toy yesterday and of course Gus noticed immediately. 🙂
Here’s a photo of the stoned cat with this caption:
Look at that face! That ‘nipped out adorable face!
Finally, a nice tw**t about the World’s Worst Cat:
Okay, I’m going to try to avoid highlighting all the missteps and stupid things the Tr*mp administration is doing, for if I did that I’d post nothing else. Let me just call to your notice four bad things that his administration just did:
1.) Trump signed an executive order yesterday barring any NGO (“non-governmental organization) that gets US funding from providing abortions or evening mentioning them as a possibility. As the Guardian noted,
The rule will put thousands of international healthcare workers in the difficult position of deciding whether to continue to offer family planning care that includes abortion at the expense of a critical funding stream. Many international health advocates insist that their efforts are not comprehensive without abortion services. Unsafe abortions are a major cause of maternal mortality and kill tens of thousands of women every year.
The US is the single largest donor to global health efforts, providing nearly $3bn toward health efforts through the United States Agency for International Development (USAid) alone. The state department and groups like the Peace Corps offer additional funding. A spokeswoman for International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) said the group will not abide by the gag rule and stands to lose up to $100m it currently receives from the US. None of that money is used for abortion services.
Public health advocates across the globe warned that a change in funding would have grave consequences.
“It would be devastating,” said Amu Singh Sijapati, president of the Family Planning Association of Nepal, a member of IPPF. Her association has used the funds to train healthcare workers and open clinics in remote parts of the country that offer long-acting, reversible contraceptives to disadvantaged women.
The loss of funds would limit the reach of her organization, she said. “Funding cuts would mean we can’t support … the government of Nepal’s effort on sexual and reproductive health and rights. Additionally we would not be able to run community clinics or mobile health days or train healthcare workers. The impact also means we would lose essential medical staff like nurses, doctors and health experts.”
Here’s a photo of Tr*mp signing the executive order. The number of people equals the number of Y chromosomes. In a Guardian commentary on the photo, an enraged Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett says this:
The stupidity of the blinkered, religiously motivated agenda on display here is that no matter what legislation these men implement, they will never succeed in banning abortion, per se, only safe, legal abortion. Marie Stopes estimates that, as a result of the reimposition of the global gag order, the loss of their services alone could result in 6.5m unintended pregnancies during Trump’s first term, 2.1m unsafe abortions, and 21,700 maternal deaths. In passing this law, these patriarchs have fathered millions of unwanted children, helping to create lives that could very well turn out to be painful and potentially motherless.
(from Guardian): Reince Priebus, Peter Navarro, Jared Kushner, Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon watch as Donald Trump signs the executive orders in the Oval Office, 23 January 2017. Photograph: Evan Vucci/AP
2.) Today Tr*mp on signed another executive action to facilitate construction of the Keystone XL and Dakota Access oil pipelines. After the Obama administration blocked construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline last year because it endangered waters on Native American lands, Trump simply overturned that. So much for considering the wishes of those whom we displaced. (The Keystone XL pipeline was blocked in November of 2015 by the Obama Administration, which claimed it didn’t serve the needs of Americans.) It’s clear the that the Tr*mp administration will simply run roughshod over environmental concerns.
3.)The US Environmental Protection Agency has been not only given a gag order (no press releases, no social media, no blog posts, and no new content on any website), but also ordered to freeze all of its grants, including ongoing ones. As the Daily Kos reports, (partly quoting a PuffHo piece):
EPA staff has been instructed to freeze all its grants ― an extensive program that includes funding for research, redevelopment of former industrial sites, air quality monitoring and education, among other things ― and told not to discuss this order with anyone outside the agency, according to a Hill source with knowledge of the situation.
These grants power everything from sampling pollution around Superfund sites to community recycling programs and environmental education programs used in schools. The grant lockdown follows reports that Trump intends to cut $815 million from the EPA’s budget, destroying not only the ability to fund research, but to enforce existing standards.
Requests for comment from the EPA drew no response. Of course.
4.) Tr*mp and his minions blocked any release of information from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. As BuzzFeed reported,
The US Department of Agriculture has banned scientists and other employees in its main research division from publicly sharing everything from the summaries of scientific papers to USDA-branded tweets as it starts to adjust to life under the Trump administration, BuzzFeed News has learned.
According to an email sent Monday morning and obtained by BuzzFeed News, the department told staff — including some 2,000 scientists — at the agency’s main in-house research arm, the Agricultural Research Service (ARS), to stop communicating with the public about taxpayer-funded work.
“Starting immediately and until further notice, ARS will not release any public-facing documents,” Sharon Drumm, chief of staff for ARS, wrote in a department-wide email shared with BuzzFeed News.
“This includes, but is not limited to, news releases, photos, fact sheets, news feeds, and social media content,” she added.
Can governmental denialism of anthropogenic global warming be far behind?
Alfred Henry Sturtevant (1891-1970), one of the first Drosophila geneticists, is also one of my personal scientific heroes. As an undergraduate at Columbia, and a member of Thomas Hunt Morgan’s famed “fly room”, Sturtevant did a remarkable piece of research, showing that genes on chromosomes are not only arrayed in a linear order, but that, by measuring the amount of recombination (or “crossing over”) between various mutations of those genes (seen by their effect on the fly’s body), we could get an idea not only of the order of the genes, but how far apart they were from each other. The procedure he devised as an undergraduate, and published when he was only 22, is the same procedure we use today to “map” genes.
His achievements were far more than that, however: he did crosses on “repair-able” genetic defects that pioneered biochemical genetics, found evidence for the effect of chromosome rearrangements in inhibiting crossing over, did some of the first work on the genetics of speciation with Drosophila simulans (most of his work had been on that workhorse of genetics, Drosophila melanogaster), and found evidence for “maternal effects”: the fact that the genetic constitution of the mother (in a snail) could influence the trait (coiling direction) shown in its offspring, rather than the genetic constitution of the offspring itself. But he did much more than that; read the link at the beginning of this paragraph. He was ferociously smart, and a polymath. In my view, he should have won the Nobel Prize, but his accomplishments, at least early in his life, were subsumed in the prize given to his mentor Thomas Hunt Morgan.
There’s a new paper in Genetics by Mariana Wolfner and Danny Miller with a cute title (below) that highlights another of Sturtevant’s accomplishments: the finding of unequal crossing over between chromosomes. (Click on the screenshot to go to the article).
What is it with Sturtevant walking into a bar? Well, Sturtevant was motivated by the observation of a “bar-eyed” [“Bar’] mutation on the X chromosome of D. melanogaster, which caused small, skinny eyes (see diagram below). Flies with Bar eyes showed extraordinarily high rates of “mutation”: about 1 in 1000 of the offspring of females carrying the gene either reverted to “wild type” (normal eyes) or became “ultra-Bar” (extra skinny eyes; see diagram for both).
This rate was much higher than that of normal gene mutation (around 0.000001), and Sturtevant, based on his previous studies of crossing-over between chromosomes (exchange of genetic material between the pairs of “homologous” chromosomes during gamete formation) hypothesized that Bar “mutations” were really cases not of changes in the gene itself, but changes in the chromosome structure around the gene. By a complicated series of genetic crosses using mutant genes surrounding the Bar region, Sturtevant was able to show that Bar mutants arise from a phenomenon known as “unequal crossing over.”
Normally, during “meiosis,” the genetic process of gamete formation in diploid organisms, “homologous chromosomes” pair (we have two copies of each of our chromosomes, so we have 23 pairs or 46 total; Sturtevant’s flies had 8 total). That pairing is essential to ensure that the homologues separate, because each will go to a different egg or sperm (eggs and sperms have only half the number of chromosomes of a regular cell, and when fertilization ensues the normal number is restored). During that pairing, the homologous chromosomes can exchange genes as the chromosomes break and the bits of different homologues fuse to the other homologue. (For some reason we don’t fully understand, Drosophila females undergo this process but not the males. It was the observation that changes in the Bar eye were seen only from mutant female mothers and not fathers that led Sturtevant to suppose that crossing-over rather than simple mutation was involved.)
Usually this crossing over is exact, with the nucleotides breaking and fusing at the same place, so that if one chromosome has the A allele and the other the A’ allele of a gene, they will swap positions in perfect order. (Of course, the rest of the adjacent genes will be carried along.) Sometimes, though, recombination won’t be perfect, and you can get two copies of a gene on one chromosome and none on the other. For example, ———A——— paired with ———A’——— can give ———AA’——— one on chromosome and —————— on the other. One chromosomes winds up with two copies of the entire gene; the other with none.
By using tricky crosses with mutations flanking the Bar region, Sturtevant showed that this is exactly what was causing the Bar phenomenon. When a normal-eyed fly underwent unequal crossing over, it could produce a fly having two entire copies of the gene region, causing a thin “Bar” eye. Those could also, when paired with a normal fly, produce a fly with three copies of the gene region, producing an even thinner “ultra-Bar” eye. When a Bar eyed fly lost one of its copies by unequal crossing over, it reverted to a normal-eyed fly.
At the time Sturtevant did his experiments in the 1920s, there was no way to confirm his hypothesis by looking directly at the chromosomes. But soon thereafter it was discovered that in the salivary glands of flies, there were “polytene chromosomes” in which the DNA was replicated in tandem hundreds of times, so you could actually look at the physical structure of chromosomes under the microscope. Here, for instance, are the two arms of the second chromosomes, both in photographs and interpretation. The physical markers (“striping”) of the polytene chromosomes are diagnostic: the same for all individuals of a species.
When the salivary gland chromosomes were examined in regular, Bar, and ultra-Bar flies by Bridges (1936) and Mulleret al. (1936) , they confirmed that “Bar” eyes did come from a duplication of the gene region studied by Sturtevant a decade earlier, and that ultra-Bar flies came from a “triplication” of the region, as shown in the diagram below from the Wolfner and Miller paper.
Why is this important? Because, in fact, unequal crossing over is one of the main sources for the origin of new genes in evolution. It leads to a single gene being duplicated precisely on one chromosome, and once that happens, evolution can lead those two copies to diverge, taking on new functions. Further unequal crossing-over can create entire families of genes that have an ancestry from a single copy, but have diverged in function after duplication, triplication, and so on. This is one of the ways that the genome expands, and that we can get new genes with new functions. It is the way, for instance, that the different hemoglobins, α, β, γ and δ, each with a different function, derived from a common ancestor.
Sturtevant’s original research was thus a harbinger of our understanding of how new genetic information arises—all through a mistake in recombination. Similarly, new genetic information can arise via mutations in single genes—also a “mistake” in gene replication. If crossing over and gene replication occurred perfectly, there would be no evolution.
Sturtevant, known to his many friends as “Sturt”, was said to be a terrific guy, free of cant and arrogance, and (like all of Morgan’s offspring—save perhaps H. J. Muller) refreshingly free of a desire to grab credit for his every accomplishment. I’m sad to never have met Sturtevant, but there are some oldsters I’ve known who knew him well, and without exception they’ve all characterized him as a great guy.
Here he is as a stripling:
(From paper) Photo caption: Photo of Alfred Sturtevant, 1922, from History of the Marine Biological Laboratory. Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 3.0
Sturtevant later became a professor of genetics at Cal Tech in Pasadena, where he remained for the rest of his life. And, like a good Drosophilist, he pushed flies with his own hands till the end. Here he is as an older man in his own fly room, doing something now prohibited in all labs: smoking—right next to an “etherizer” that put the flies to sleep using HIGHLY FLAMMABLE ether.
Alfred H. Sturtevant, the Thomas Hunt Morgan Professor of Biology, Emeritus, in his fly lab at Caltech in 1965. Photo by James McClanahan. Credit: Caltech Archives
Eight days ago, I did a taping of The Rubin Report in Los Angeles, and had a great time. I told Dave beforehand that I wasn’t all that politically astute, and might want to talk more about evolution than politics, which is what we wound up doing. It was a pleasant and relaxed conversation, and I think it went well, though, as usual I’ve avoided listening to most of it.
There was of course a modicum of discussion of politics and religion, some of which came from my view that the most effective thing we could do to get people to accept evolution would be to get rid of those religions that condition people to reject it. (Those include Catholicism, which, although officially accepting evolution, also accepts the view that Adam and Eve were the progenitors of all living humans, and 27% of whose American adherents reject evolution despite the Vatican’s stand.) And, to get rid of religion, you need to effect social improvement.
But that wasn’t the bulk of our discussion. Listen for yourself. As is his wont, Dave divided the initial posts into two parts, but I’ll replace them with the concatenated interview when it’s posted later.
Part I:
By the way, I was told that some of the YouTube commenters (I didn’t read the comments) have come to this website expecting everything to be about evolution, and have been disappointed. Well, the website has changed since its inception, but if you want to find the evolution posts, just enter “evolution” into the search box on the upper left, or, better yet, look at this link, which searches by the “evolution” tag appended to the appropriate posts.
After thinking about it for a while, I’ve decided that the concept of “hate crimes,” with substantial extra punishment levied on those who commit them, is untenable and should be discarded. While I admit that the motivation for such laws is often admirable—to prevent bigotry—there are several problems. The first is that a hate crime punishes not the acts itself, but the motivations behind them—the thoughts. In other words, hate crimes are thoughtcrimes. It seems to me that, if you want to treat all people as equals, you don’t levy extra punishment on those who attack certain classes of people. It is sufficient to punish the deed, not the thought, which is often hard to decipher anyway. As Michael McGough noted in an anti-hate-crime piece (from ten years ago!) in the LA Times:
For one thing, I believed, such laws could end up giving extra punishment to ordinary criminals who, while committing a run-of-the-mill crime, engaged in some racial trash talk — and that’s not the kind of bias-motivated crime the law was intended to go after. For another thing, it is possible that such laws could end up punishing blacks who commit violence against whites — which is a far cry from the historical experience that inspired hate-crime statutes.
Perhaps even more worrisome, hate-crime laws also muddle the distinction between bad acts and bad thoughts. As I wrote at the time: “If a mugger of one race uses a racial epithet while snatching the purse of someone of another race, is that a ‘hate crime’? Better for the criminal justice system to punish the act — harshly — and not speculate about the motive.”
To counter this argument, of course, you can claim that punishment is meant to deter others from repeating a crime, to keep the criminal out of society until he’s reformed, and to protect society. One could argue—though one would need facts rather than just a subjective feeling—that hate crimes inspire more “copycat” crimes than do “nonhate” crimes, that those who commit hate crimes are harder to reform and thus need longer sentences (this presumes, of course, that American prisons are engaged in rehabilitation, a fatuous asssertion), and that those who commit hate crimes pose more of a danger to society than those who don’t, and should be locked up longer.
Even if that were true, however, one could, as McGough did, counter-argue that the biggest danger with “hate crimes” is that they could spread to encompass nearly all groups. The very idea of a hate crime is, like the idea of hate speech, an elastic concept that can be stretched to cover those of whom you simply don’t approve. McGough:
The paradox is that as the list of protected groups gets longer and longer, the law approaches a situation in which every crime is a hate crime.
In his opinion in the Wisconsin case upholding “piggyback” hate-crime laws, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist wrote that the “perceived harms” of racial discrimination justified the state’s imposition of harsher penalties for acts of bias-motivated violence. I obviously disagree, but even if you believe that there should be special punishment for, say, cross-burnings (arguably a unique affront given American history), the addition of more and more groups to the hate-crime laws makes no sense.
One final argument against hate-crime laws: If their overarching purpose is to affirm the equality of all people, then the law should punish all assaults the same, regardless of the race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, disability or veteran status of the victim. The “protected class” should be human beings.
McGough’s fear is not an idle one, for, indeed, the definition of what is a “hate crime” has been stretched to ludicrous lengths. In Louisiana, there’s a new law that makes it a hate crime to—get this—resist arrest. That’s considered a “hate crime” against police, and the law making it thus is called a “blue lives matter” law. As KATC reports from Acadiana/Lafayette Louisiana, if you’re arrested for a misdemeanor like shoplifting, your crime can be automatically elevated to a felony if you resist arrest. And that can double your jail time. The article quotes St. Martinville Police Chief Calder Hebert”
“Resisting an officer or battery of a police officer was just that charge, simply. But now, Governor Edwards, in the legislation, made it a hate crime now,” said Hebert.
Under the new law, Hebert says any offender who resists, or gets physical, with an officer can be charged with a felony hate crime.
For example, if someone who’s arrested for petty theft, a misdemeanor, tries to assault an officer, that individual can be charged with a hate crime. A hate crime is considered a much more serious offense, with serious consequences.
“We need the police and the public to work together. The policemen have a job. The public has the job of helping the police. And if someone happens to be involved in criminal activity. Let the courts handle it. Don’t resist physically,” said Hebert.
If the state’s new law proves successful, Hebert said he hopes the rest of the country will adopt similar laws.
“These guys go out there everyday and the main goal is to protect the public and go home at the end of the day. This is one step in making that happen. Hopefully, the rest of the nation follows suit,” said Hebert.
Now why on earth is it a “hate crime” to resist arrest? Does that mean you hate the police? I don’t think so: it means only that you don’t want to be apprehended. It’s possible, of course, that someone could willy-nilly assault a cop out of hatred for the police, but that’s not what the ordinance states. And that’s the whole problem that McGough outlines above.
Readers: do you think there should be a special category of “hate crimes” that are punished more severely?
We have three bird photos from reader Rob Bate; his captions are indented:
More photos from our Falklands/South Georgia/Antarctic expedition here. The first is Magellanic (or South American) Snipe (Gallinagoparaguaiae)from the Falkland Islands. There is surely a distinct group of Magellanic Snipes from the Falklands though even the Magellanics themselves are closely related to the Common Snipe of the Old World. They have excellent camouflage and are easily overlooked. There are no trees, bushes or other cover to speak of on the Falklands and they rely on their camouflage to escape detection.
This next is a Long-tailed Meadowlark, Sturnella loyca, endemic to the tip of South America and the Falklands.
The next is Snowy Sheathbill, Chionis albus, found everywhere on land from Tierra del Fuego to Falklands, South Georgia and even in Antarctica (this one is from the Falklands). It is primarily a scavenger and is the only landbird native to Antarctica – it doesn’t have webbed feet. There is only one other species in the genus Chionis and that one is also restricted to the Antarctic regions.
[JAC: there will be a quiz on this: “What is the only landbird native to Antarctica?” Remember this!]
Stephen Barnard has returned after a photo hiatus. He sends a single photo a Desert Cottontail (Sylvilagus audubonii), which apparently is subsisting on the willow shoots in the photo. His caption:
Signs of life in snowpocalypse. Every time I walk by this guy’s burrow, even with the dogs, he pops his head up, knowing he’s safe behind 10 yards of four-foot-deep snow.
Note by JAC: As I wasn’t 100%, Grania (peace be upon her) once again offered to put up the early-morning Hili dialogues. Sadly, Malgorzata and Andrzej are both still quite ill, and I’m told Andrzej had to crawl to his computer to put up not only Hili, but the regular articles for Listy. I wish them a speedy recovery (it’s a virus, I understand); we may have a hiatus in the words of the Princess until they recover.
by Grania
Good morning! Jerry is better-ish, but I am still on Dialogue Duty today, although PCC(E) will join us anon.
Today has been a somewhat ominous and auspicious day in history, being the day of Roman Empire despot Caligula‘s assassination (41AD) – surely a blessed relief to all those who had encountered him; and the day the Macintosh was released to the world in 1984 (ha!) by one Steve Jobs. It featured:
– 32-bit 68000 CPU
– Memory: 192k
– ROM 64k
– RAM: 128k
JAC: I had one of these (or something issued soon thereafter) that I got as my first computer at my first job (University of Maryland), and in fact that model still sits in my outer office. Ever since then, I’ve always used Macs.
Our musical note comes from birthday man Jools Holland (born 1958), pianist and composer. He’s most well-known for his musical collaborations with artists (but check out this spoof/homage with Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie). Here he is performing with The Temptations.
And on to Poland, where Princess Hili is registering her displeasure at the weather:
Hili: This still doesn’t look like spring.
A: It’s January.
Hili: So I see.
Hili: To nadal nie wygląda jak wiosna.
Ja: Ciągle jest styczeń.
Hili: Właśnie widzę.
And from out in the Arctic wastes of Winnipeg, where polar bears are ravaging the dumpsters, we have a photo (taken by staff Taskin) of Gus waiting for his breakfast:
