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.
The media has been criticized for going easy on Muslims, and even ISIS, but at least the BBC has a sense of humor about them. As The Independentand Metro report, on Tuesday the BBC 2 screened the clip below as part of the comedy show “Revolting”.
But the clip has caused outrage among many people who say it is insensitive, with more than 33,000 comments left under the trailer debating whether or not it goes too far.
‘Making fun of vulnerable girls who’ve been groomed and are being raped by terrorists,’ one woman wrote. ‘To everyone finding this funny, you’re sick in the head.’
Judge for yourself, and remember it’s just a self-contained clip, not a real show. Also, since many Muslims criticize or “disown” ISIS, you’d think they wouldn’t be so hard on this kind of satire.
While I’m surprised this appeared on the BBC, I have no problem with it; in fact, I think it’s funny, and good in that it makes a mockery of ISIS. Yes, there’s implied violence, but there was real violence, including a mass suicide and a crucifixion, in Monty Python’s “Life of Brian”. Comedy is supposed to push the envelope, and mocking ISIS fills that bill nicely. In fact, here’s an ISIS-themed commercial, with Dakota Johnson that did the same thing, parodying a Toyota commercial. That, too, sparked outrage when it appeared on NBC’s show “Saturday Night Live.”
Here are a few of the comments reproduced by Metro:
Do you find this offensive? Even if you do, do you still think it’s funny?
Reader Carl Sufit sent us some underwater shots of cephalopods; his notes are indented:
I’ll start with some images from Bonaire, of my (and many others’) favorite Order(?), Octopoda(?)
Although they are generally nocturnal hunters, we do get to see them during the day, although they tend to retreat back into a tiny hole in the reef when confronted by divers. Occasionally I’ve seen one that seemed so intent on some task that it ignores the bubbling hulks nearby. This one, I assume a Caribbean Reef Octopus, Octopus briareus, kept leaving its lair in a coral head, and moving a meter or two down to a sandy area and grabbing some dead coral and bringing it back up. Setting up defenses?? No idea.
And I’ll throw in a cousin cephalopod, a Caribbean Reef Squid, Sepioteuthis sepioidea. They often shy away from divers, but occasionally they seem curious and I’ve actually been approached by them briefly.
And some mammals from Karen Bartelt:
I recently took a trip to Panama with the Sierra Club. One of the places we stayed was called to Canopy Tower, a former radar installation in the old Canal Zone. Now part of Soberania National Park, it’s an ecolodge and an excellent place to view wildlife. Though the focus of the trip was birds and butterflies, we did see a few mammals, including this Brown-throated Three-toed Sloth (Bradypus variegatus). The second pair of photos were taken days after the first two, so these may be two different animals. There were several sloths around, and it was wonderful to shoot across the canopy rather than up, as we were at about the same level. They seemed to not have a care in the world.
Canopy Tower:
There were also troops of Geoffroy’s Tamarin (Sanguinus geoffroyi) that came and begged for bananas. We heard howler monkeys, and also saw agoutis and capuchin monkeys, but my photos of these aren’t very good.
Finally, we have last night’s moon, photographed by reader Nicole Reggia with a hand-held camera propped against a tree, and a 150-600 mm Tamron zoom lens:
Good morning on January 5, 2017: National Whipped Cream Day. It’s also National Bird Day in the U.S., with lots of birders fanning out throughout the US to watch our feathered friends. It’s also National Sausage Day in the UK, where I guarantee thousands of Briths, Welsh, Scots, and inhabitants of Norn Iron will be tucking into that delicacy, regardless of the holiday.
On this day in 1895, French artillery officer Alfred Dreyfus was convicted of treason and sentenced to life on Devil’s Island; he was then publicly stripped of his rank. He was later exonerated and served his country honorably. On this day in 1933, construction began on one of America’s glories, the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. And in 1974, there occurred the highest temperature ever reliable measured below the Antarctic Circle—a tropical +59 °F (+15 °C) recorded at Vanda Station.
Notables born on this day include George “Superman” Reeves (1914), Jane Wyman (1917), Walter Mondale (1928), Robert Duvall (1931), Umberto Eco (1932), Phil Ramone (1934), Diane Keaton (1946) and Marilyn Manson (1969). Those who died on this day include Ernest Shackleton (1922), Calvin Coolidge (1933), Tina Modotti (1942), George Washington Carver (1943), Rabbit Maranville (1954), Tip O’Neill (1994) and Norman Heatley (2004). Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hil is affronted!
Hili: This stick has been provoking me since yesterday.
A: It probably drank too much.
In Polish:
Hili: Ten patyczek od wczoraj mnie zaczepia.
Ja: Chyba za dużo wypił
Out in Winnipeg, Gus, housebound and bored, was given one of his favorite treats: dried shrimp that, I’m told, smell dreadful to humans. But he loves to crunch them.
Finally, on Tuesday here in Chicago, a two week old baby Bornean orangutan (Pongo pygmaeus; remember that there are two species of Pongo) was put on public display at the Brookfield Zoo
I’m working simultaneously on a talk and a children’s book (talk about brain-stretching!), and I have no neurons to spare today. So, courtesy of ever-attentive Twi**er watcher Matthew Cobb, have a look at this wasp-mimicking beetle.
Entomologists have weighed in, tentatively identifying it as a Cerambycid (longhorn beetle), probably in the genus Enchoptera. It looks to me a bit like the wasp mimic E. apicalis, but the coloration isn’t right.
The wasp it’s mimicking is probably a gasteruptiid wasp; and here is your quiz:
a. If it is a mimic of such a wasp, and the beetle is itself edible and not toxic, what kind of mimicry is this called? You should know the answer by now.
b. If it does mimic a gasteruptiid, one would expect to find the “model” wasp in the same area. After all, a predator’s avoidance of this species, if it is a mimic, would probably have to be learned by, say, a bird who has encountered the wasp, forms an image of it (to avoid it), and then applies that image to the beetle, giving it a selective advantage. (Such avoidance could of course be evolved.) Can you find the Australian model? I’ll leave that to you, but do note that the mimicry hypothesis does make predictions.
Under the despot Recep Erdoğan, the wonderful country of Turkey is becoming a nightmare, with people arrested for insulting the President (this includes a former Miss Turkey), the media muzzled, social media shut down when it calls attention to the President’s malfeasance, and an increasing censorship that is going to take a once-enlightened Nation back to an Islamist theocracy.
The latest incident, as reported by ClarionProject and Middle East Eye, involves the deportation of a Turkish fashion designer from Cyprus for making an anti-regime video, and his beating and arrest as he arrived in Turkey,
The fashion designer is Barbaros Şansal, 59, who made a video deemed by the regime to be “insulting to Turkey.” In Cyprus at the time, he was deported back to his homeland, and, in a really horrible move, the government broadcast when his plane was going to land in Istanbul:
Sansal, an outspoken critic of the ruling Islamist AK party [AKP], was forced out of the self-declared state of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus after making a video on New Year’s Eve deemed to be insulting to Turkey.
In the video, which was uploaded before the jihadi attack on an Istanbul nightclub that killed 39 people [you can see the video, with English translation here], Sansal rails against the “scores of journalists in prison,” “corruption and bribes” and the increased Islamization of the country:
While scores of journalists are in prison, while children are sexually harassed, raped, while corruption and brides are everywhere, radical Islamist are distributing shit to you in the streets. Are you still celebrating the New Year? I am not … You know what I will do? I will drink all the drinks in this room and bar. I will drink all of them! Will not leave you a single drop. I will take all my dollars to Switzerland. I will not leave a single penny [in Turkey]. OK? On the other hand, I am in Cyprus. The [North] Cyprus is now in the New Year, as they follow Turkey because of pressure. There is still an hour for the Cyprus Republic to enter the New Year. I will go there and I will celebrate there as well. I will drink there, too. I will drink everything. OK, baby? I am not even kissing you. You carry on with your celebration … in this disgrace, misery and dirt. Drown in your shit, Turkey!
On his Facebook page, Ari Murad, a Kurdish human rights activist and filmmaker, reported that “after the video went viral, Sansal was detained by Turkish Cypriot authorities and then extradited to Turkey. While Sansal was being ‘extradited’ to Turkey, Turkish state news agency AA informed readers of the flight airline and hour of departure.”
Other media picked up the gauntlet as well. A tweet by CNN Turk’s presenter Beste Uyanik [JAC: Now deleted] said Sansal “must be cut down to size” and “taught his limits,” when he arrives in Turkey.
What happened is shown in the video below. Sansal was summarily attacked and bloodied by a group of “baggage handlers” (probably government goons) as he walked down the stairs, was beaten viciously, and then dragged to a waiting police car. All for criticizing the government in a video.
And it’s absolutely unbelievable that the government itself would tell people when Sansal would arrive. That’s deliberate encouragement of vigilante justice.
He wound up looking like this:
And yesterday he was charged with “inciting hatred and animosity among the public” and for “insulting” the public.
I weep for Turkey, as would Kemal Atatürk, the architect of Turkish democracy and secularism. There’s no way Turkey will ever get into the EU, but I suppose it doesn’t care. What has happened is that a petty tyrant has taken over a vibrant country, and is dismantling all the progressivism started by Atatürk and maintained by (some) regimes. The ban on hijabs in public universities has been lifted, and more and more women are veiling themselves. It is a great pity.
Most evolutionists think that speciation, which we see as the origin of a new group whose members are unable to produce fertile hybrids with other such groups (but whose members are interfertile with each other) occurs in the following way. Populations of a single species become geographically isolated by the interposition of geographic barriers like mountains, deserts, water, continental drift, etc. These barriers can either arise de novo, like the Andes, thus isolating populations on either side of them, or result from a rare migration event that is a one-off, like the invasion of the Galápagos by ancestral iguanas, tortoises, or finches. By preventing the mixing of genes among populations of what was initially a single species, the populations can then diverge genetically, often by natural or sexual selection, but also by processes like genetic drift. Different environments, different selective pressures and different mutations will then assure that the geographically isolated populations will travel along different evolutionary pathways.
When sufficient genetic divergence has occurred that the populations can no longer produce fertile hybrids if they were once again to come into contact, we say that they are separate biological species. The genetic barriers preventing successful hybridization, called reproductive isolating barriers, are diverse: they can include a preference for different environments, mating at different times (“temporal isolation,” which occurs in corals), a dislike of mating with the other species (“sexual isolation”, very common in birds and flies) or the production of either inviable or sterile hybrids (e.g., the sterile mule) when members of different species do mate. What has happened is that the geographic isolation allows the evolution of genetic isolation up to the point of speciation.
The scenario I just described is called allopatric speciation (from the Greek meaning “different places”). But there is evidence that species can form without such geographic isolation, especially in the case of polyploidy in plants, in which two species hybridize (or a single species doubles its genome), and genetic processes in the hybrid make it a different species from either parent. This can take only a handful of generations. And we are learning that, more often than we thought, species can still split while exchanging some of their genes.
Now all of this represents our best current take about the origin of species, which is summed up in the technical book I wrote with Allen Orr in 2004, Speciation. These views were not developed by Darwin, as he didn’t have a clear idea of the relationship between species and reproductive isolation. Although his most famous book is called On the Origin of Species, it says little about that issue, but rather deals more with the origin of adaptations within a species.
But how long does it take for this process to occur? That’s harder, as only in very rare cases can we actually observe new species arising, and only when it’s fast—as in polyploidy (about 3 generations to get a new plant species). Without our having been there, we have to use indirect methods. Allen Orr and I, in a pair of papers in Evolution (references below), tried to do that with the fruit fly Drosophila.
What we did was take named species of flies whose degree of reproductive isolation—only sexual isolation and hybrid inviability and sterility—had been measured in the lab, and estimated the “genetic distance” between those species using early electrophoretic data. In that way we could correlate the degree of reproductive isolation of different species with the degree of genetic divergence between them. Assuming the latter statistic accumulates roughly linearly with time (the so-called “molecular clock”), we could then get an idea of how fast reproductive isolation accumulates. Our admittedly rough estimate—for we neglected forms of reproductive isolation impossible to measure in the lab (i.e., ecological differences)—was that it took between 200,000 and 2.7 million years for one species of Drosophila to split into two. (The faster estimates are for species now found in the same area, for in such cases natural selection against hybridization, if hybrids are sterile or inviable, can speed up the evolution of reproductive isolation.)
In our book Speciation, Allen and I considered many other groups, and concluded that in general speciation takes between 0.5 and 5 million years, with some exceptions like polyploidy. But that’s a very rough guess based on many kinds of data, including fossils. That is, by the way, ample time to generate the millions of species living today, even taking pervasive extinction into account.
A new paper in PLOS Biology by Camille Roux et al. (reference and free link below) uses a related method to see how much genetic distance between groups is sufficient to make them different species, although in this case the species were designated simply by nomenclature rather than by strict consideration of reproductive isolation. The methods are complex, but I’ll oversimplify them to give the general result.
Roux et al. used data on 61 pairs of species or populations; these were diverse, including worms, fish, crustaceans, mammals, and insects. All of these pairs had extensive molecular data known for them. Ten were pairs taken from the literature, 22 were pairs of named, distinct species, and 29 were pairs of populations considered to be within the same species.
Using various complex models, the authors attempted to see how much gene flow was going on between these pairs of taxa, relating that to the genetic distance between them. (There are ways to do this without it being circular.) They used various models, including complete allopatric speciation, speciation occurring while gene flow was going on between the separating groups, and gene flow that occurred after geographically isolated groups once again came to live in the same place. What they came up with is a plot showing the relationship between the degree of genetic difference between pairs of species or populations (Da below) and the probability of ongoing gene flow between taxa (P in the diagram below).
(From journal): Fig 3. Probability of ongoing gene flow along a continuum of molecular divergence. Each dot is for one observed pair of populations/species. x-axis: net molecular divergence Da measured at synonymous positions (log10 scale) and averaged across sequenced loci. y-axis: relative posterior probability of ongoing gene flow (i.e., SC, IM, and PAN models) estimated by ABC. Red dots: pairs with a strong support for current isolation. Grey dots: pairs with no strong statistical support for any demographic model (robustness <0.95). Blue dots: pairs with strong statistical support for genome-homogeneous ongoing gene flow. Purple dots: pairs with strong statistical support for genome-heterogeneous ongoing gene flow. Filled symbols: pairs with a strong support for genome-heterogeneous Ne. Open symbols: genome-homogeneous Ne. The light grey rectangle spans the range of net synonymous divergence in which both currently isolated and currently connected pairs are found (see S1 Data).
What does this diagram show? Well, as you move along the horizontal (X) axis from left to right, the genetic distance at “neutral” sites increases, meaning that the species or population pairs get older. And you see from the Y axis (gene flow) that as the age between taxa increases, the amount of gene flow between them decreases, finally winding up at zero—at which point they are full biological species (in red). The Big Deal about the paper, however, is the fairly narrow transitional “gray zone”: the bar that marks the transition between fairly free gene flow (populations or incipient species) and full species. That gray bar extends from 0.5% to 2% sequence difference at “neutral” sites.
Surprisingly, the transition zone is about the same regardless of whether the groups are geographically isolated or not; I would have expected that geographic isolation would speed up speciation by impeding “annoying” divergence-preventing evolutionary difference. The authors were also surprised at this, but said this may be because their range data were not so great. Further, the authors recognized several new species, which looked pretty much the same but whose genetic distance put them on the right (i.e., not left) side of the speciation threshold.
The fact that diverse taxa adhere to the same “threshold” of speciation seems surprising, implying that the amount of neutral genetic difference associated with speciation is roughly the same for very different groups. From that observation the authors conclude this (my emphasis):
. . . our report of a strong and general relationship between molecular divergence and genetic isolation across a wide diversity of animals suggests that, at the genome level, speciation operates in a more or less similar fashion in distinct taxa, irrespective of biological and ecological particularities.
Does this paper tell us what is and isn’t a species? No, it doesn’t. But, it gives us an idea of how to understand the process of speciation across species. It also indicates that speciation happens (genetically at least) in pretty similar ways in all species regardless of the specifics of the population…which is good news for anyone interested in developing better ecological and evolutionary theories to explain how species come about through natural selection.
Well, both of these conclusions are dubious. Yes, it was surprising that the “gray zone” wasn’t so different among diverse taxa, but remember that these taxa are not all phylogenetically independent. Some groups are used more than once, so we can’t be sure that every data point represents an evolutionarily independent pair of taxa. Further, the sample size is limited (e.g., no Drosophila!) Also, there are these problems:
We know of some cases of speciation that are very rapid, including about 4000 years in some cichlids, 50 years in polyploid plants, and a few hundred years in sunflowers (see here for some fast cases of speciation that are outside the gray zone). Polyploidy, or rapid ecological speciation, obviate these conclusions. One cannot conclude that all speciation events adhere to the pattern above.
A constant genetic distance of 0.5%-2% does not necessarily mean that species take roughly the same time to evolve in nature. That’s because the molecular clock ticks at different rates in different taxa, so a divergence of 1% in flies could represent a very different time for a divergence of 1% in mammals or worms.
We already know that different taxa speciate in different ways, so saying that “speciation happens in similar ways in all species regardless of the specifics of the population” is just wrong. (Polyploidy instantly invalidates that statement!) And it’s wrong to say, as the authors do, that “speciation operates in a more or less similar fashion in distinct taxa.” What the data show is that the neutral genetic distance associated with the reduction of gene flow is similar in this small sample of species. The paper doesn’t—and cannot—say anything about the process or “mechanism” of speciation, which we already know differs in different groups. We can’t even say that the rate of speciation is similar in different groups until we know how neutral genetic distance translates into years among different groups.
I think, then, that too much is being made of this paper, though the results are still quite interesting. But we need a much better data set, a much better calibration of the molecular clock in different groups, and some clearer thinking about what the authors mean by “speciation operating in a similar fashion.” We already know that in different groups different reproductive isolating barriers are important (pollinator isolation in orchids, sexual isolation in birds, etc.—see Speciation). And if by “similar fashion” the authors mean “similar rates,” well, that remains to be seen as well.
The authors discuss the use of this gray-zone metric as a conservation tool—a way to distinguish taxa to put them within the regulations for protection of endangered groups—but I won’t open that can of worms.
Reader Tony Eales from Queensland sendt some lovely photos; his notes are indented. The first one is, I think, one of the finest insect photos that’s ever appeared here:
Then a Stilt Legged Fly—I think genus Metopochetus. I found in the local sub-tropical rainforest. It appeared to be going around on a fallen log depositing eggs in small holes and crevices it found.
Lastly one of my favourite rainforest ants, the Red Spider Ant, Leptomyrmex rufipes [JAC: one site says that they cock their abdomens up in the air when disturbed, and this one seems to be doing that]:
