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.
To end a snowy day, here are two videos of Giant Pandas in the snow. The first shows the Toronto Zoo’s panda Da Mao frolicking in newly fallen snow:
and twin cubs in the snow:
And here from the CBC News is a heartwarming (and catwarming) story of a nearly frozen cat rescued by a conductor and an engineer of a train headed to Edmonton in -40° weather (doesn’t matter if it’s Celsius or Fahrenheit, for at -40 the two temperatures are identical). The cat, later named Q199 after the train, had frostbitten ears and paws (and may, like Gus, lose both ears), but was revived with water and some bits of beef jerky. Q 199 has now been adopted by conductor Brad Slater and is now doing well. Do read the story.
CN conductor Brad Slater and Q199, the cat named after the train on which it was found hitching a ride, are enjoying getting to know each other. (CBC/Trevor Wilson)
The most consumed fish in the U.S. are #1: tuna, and #2 salmon. What do they have in common? They’re “unfishy” fish, with a meaty texture and flavor. In fact, I frequently hear people say that they don’t like “fishy” fish, which means that they don’t much like fish.
I know a lot of people will write in angrily and say they love fish, and love fishy fish like anchovies and herring. I recognize that you people exist, but I am making a general argument, one supported by the data above. (Another non-fishy fish that’s highly prized, by the way, is swordfish.)
Full disclosure: I am not much of a fish fan, and when I do eat it it, it’s tuna or salmon.
p.s. Be temperate in your remarks below: remember there are rules about calling people names. Try not to carp too much.
p.p.s. I am talking about humans here, not cats.
Now of course a lot of people wrote in saying they LOVED fish, as if that were some kind of refutation of an argument based, well, not on statistics, but on general observation. Single cases of fish-lovers don’t count. And I still claim that most “carnivores”, that is, people who eat both fish and meat, and have the opportunities to do so, usually prefer meat to fish. Remember, the most-loved fish are tuna, salmon, and also swordfish, which are “unfishy” fish.
Yesterday it occurred to me that there may be an evolutionary reason why people prefer meat to fish. Over the vast period of human evolution, we ate plants and meat—and meat more often after we tamed fire. But surely we ate uncooked meat over much of our evolutionary history. On the other hand, we didn’t eat much fish, if for no other reason than early African ancestors probably didn’t live near areas that harbored a lot of fish. Further, the first evidence for fishing dates back only about 40,000 years—only 1% of the time since we split off from our ancestor with chimps.
What does this mean? As I’ve always said, foods don’t have an inherent flavor: how they “taste” to us is an evolutionary product of our olfactory and taste receptors and the neurons in our brain that interpret their signals as “yummy” or “ick”. And evolution would mold the taste “qualia” in a way that we would discern as pleasurable the foods that we require given our physiology and way of life. I’ve also said that a vulture probably finds the taste of well rotted carrion as pleasurable as we find the taste of ice cream sundaes or (if you don’t like sweets), steak or chicken. We like fats and sweets because, in our ancestors, those substances were vital nutrients and sources of energy, and so natural selection molded us and our ancestors to find those things tasty. (Now, of course, we’re screwed by those genes, for we eat fats and sweets in quantities never available to our ancestors, causing diabetes, obesity, and heart problems in modern humans.)
So why do we like meat more than fish? Because meat was for dinner over most of our evolution and fish wasn’t. Our taste receptors and neurons gradually adapted to this diet, so that we find meat far more palatable than fish. Those people who didn’t like meat didn’t leave as many copies of their genes. That, at least, is my theory, which is mine.
Now don’t go into the comments and carp, saying that my argument is wrong because you like fish. That’s an anecdote, not a counterargument. (My anecdote: I’d take a good steak over tilapia any day.) If you want to refute my argument, which after all is just a top-of-the-head thought, you’ll have to come up with something else.
An addendum: in those cultures which now subsist largely on fish, selection will mold genes for fish-liking; and, of course, there are culturally-based preferences, so some of the Japanese love of fish surely comes from the fact that they’re brought up with it, and may regard other foods with suspicion.
This is a story that will chill you to the marrow, at least if you have any respect for due process, freedom of speech, and a loathing for the Regressive Left.
You can find two successive versions of the tale in the Vancouver Sun and theNational Post, so it seems kosher to me. It’s about the hounding and then firing of an anonymous 44-year-old male teacher (we’ll call him “AT”) for making an innocuous comment in a class at a very ritzy and expensive private school in Vancouver, Fraser Academy. The school, which teaches students from grades 1-12 (tuition: $30,000 per year), specializes in students with “language-based learning disabilities”, but also seems thoroughly imbued with Regressive Leftism. As the Sun reports (my emphasis):
Before classes even started last fall, teachers underwent serious “gender training” given by QMUNITY, an organization for LGBTQQ2S (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, questioning and two-spirit) people. Teachers were told in no uncertain terms, for instance, that “no one is 100-per-cent male or female” and that everyone is somewhere on the “gender spectrum.”
Unsurprisingly, students at the school, where $30,000-a-year tuition buys small classes, regularly say “I’m so triggered” and are allowed to walk out of class.
The triggering event at issue occurred on November 24, and seems tame enough, but it mushroomed into a huge fracas that led to AT’s firing. AT describes what he said to a 12th-grade class unit on criminal law, vice, ethics, and morality (my emphasis):
“I was working my way through examples of how some people’s sense of personal ethics was more liberal than the letter of the law,” he said in an email.
For example, he told them, many people might roll through a stop sign on a deserted country road, deeming it morally acceptable, even if unlawful.
In other words, he said, in a pluralistic democracy, there’s often “a difference between people’s private morality and the law.
“I find abortion to be wrong,” he said, as another illustration of this gap, “but the law is often different from our personal opinions.”
That was it, the teacher said. “It was just a quick exemplar, nothing more. And we moved on.”
A little later, the class had a five-minute break, and when it resumed, several students didn’t return, among them a popular young woman who had gone to an administrator to complain that what the teacher said had “triggered” her such that she felt “unsafe” and that, in any case, he had no right to an opinion on the subject of abortion because he was a man.
There ensued a series of stressful meetings between the teacher, his bosses, and the student. AT was asked to show contrition in a meeting with the student and another teacher, but AT refused on the grounds that it would set a bad precedent. But he then apoligized to the student. That wasn’t good enough, even though he’d been recognized as an outstanding teacher at Fraser. He later met with his class and the boss to tender a public apology, knowing that his job was on the line. And he did apologize, but in the wrong way. Here’s AT’s account (my emphasis):
It was exactly the horror show [AT had] imagined: His boss sat among a crowd of students, ran through a list of what had gone wrong and “what I needed to do to change.” While most students appeared to be on his side, the offended girl was still furious.
He apologized specifically to her, but then made what was apparently a fatal error: He said he liked her, that she was a bright and engaging student, and said he’d told her father just that at a recent parent-teacher night.
She stormed out of the class in tears, and he was again castigated by his superiors, this time for having been “too personal” in his apologia.
On Nov. 30, he showed up at the school, was retrieved by an administrator and taken to the “head” of school, the private school equivalent of a principal.
He was told he “could no longer continue in the classroom,” and was offered a short-term medical disability top-up for employment insurance.
He was then escorted down the hall and off the premises.
Now remember that this is AT’s account; the school won’t comment on personnel issues and, according to the Post, Fraser has put its teachers under a gag order. Nevertheless. the school sent a public relations representative to the Post, but it was an off-the-record contact, so we have no information. But the Post‘s interviewed four ex-employees of Fraser, reporting that they complain about the lack of due process for teachers and “a querulous, autocratic, and unpredictable administration.” (Remember, these are ex-employees, but they are also the only ones free to speak given the gag order.)
The Post article gives several other stories of teachers fired for ridiculous things, including leaving the school Christmas party and eating on his own after a parent-teacher pizza party. This reminds me of the episode, recounted in The Gulag Archipelago, in which people stood up and applauded Stalin after a speech, and the applause went on for minutes, with everyone afraid to stop clapping first. And the one who did was arrested and sent to the gulag.
I’ll take AT’s story as true for the time being. I’m horrified by what happened to AT and by the power these easily-triggered students have over faculty. And remember that AT was a highly lauded teacher (he apparently now works for the Vancouver School System). The Offense Culture is now infecting both the US and Canada, and in some ways it’s worse in Canada.
No teacher should have been treated like that, and I fear for those students when they leave the cocoon of Fraser and enter the real world. Of course what the “real world” is becoming in Canada may be congenial to the coddled.
Reader Joe Dickinson sent some gorgeous photos from the Serengeti. The cheetah profile is one of the finest wildlife pictures I’ve put on this site. Joe’s notes are indented:
Here is a set from eastern and central Serengeti, where the rains still had not arrived. As you can see, we had very good luck with felids, which do not follow the migratory herds and rely through somewhat lean times on non-migratory species like impala and gazelles.
We start with a nice group of Masai giraffes (Giraffa camelopardalis) circling a thorny acacia. I recently saw an article (in Science?) suggesting that several recognized subspecies of giraffe actually are good species. Don’t know where these stand. [JAC: I’ve written about that here, finding their status as distinct species dubious.]
Coke’s hartebeest (Alcelaphus buselaphus) seemed to be one of the less common antelopes. This landscape is fairly characteristic of the area, with scattered acacias and rocky kopjes in the background:
And here, on top of a kopje, is one of my favorite sightings from the whole trip, a beautiful cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus):
Another cheetah, within sight of the first one, was walking casually on a diagonal toward a group of gazelles, trying to pretend he did not see them and ascertain if they had seen him. They had.
This is most of the largest pride of lions (Panthera leo) that we saw. You can see eleven of fifteen members that we counted, including several cubs. This can’t be the entire pride since no males are present. Once again, nearby zebras seemed relatively unconcerned. I tried to explain to my fellow travelers that natural selection would not favor individuals that ran in blind panic at every sighting of a predator. A cost/benefit analysis would doubtless show that frequent expenditure of energy (and loss of feeding opportunity) would decrease fitness more than taking a small risk (albeit occasionally fatal):
Kirk’s dik-dik (Madoqua kirkii), a very small antelope almost always found in pairs that are mated for life. Aren’t those wonderful eyes?
A nice group of African elephants (Loxodonta africana) crosses a meadow with some zebras and cape buffalo in the background:
In a nice segue, the rock hyrax (Heterohyrax brucei) is probably the closest terrestrial relative of elephants. The Sirenia (manatees, etc. ) are sister group to elephants, and hyraxes are sister group to that combination. This was suggested long ago based on anatomy, confirmed more recently by molecular data.
And, finally, another prized sighting, a fine leopard (Panthera pardus) resting in a tree and rewarding some patient watching by getting up to change positions.
It snowed till late evening here last night, though we don’t have the ten inches originally predicted. There is enough, though, to cause cancellation of flights at O’Hare and Midway. And enough for students at my University to make a cool snowman (snowperson?). The mohawk hairdo is made from coffee stirrers purloined from the dining hall. I love the leafy necklace:
And here’s a mystery: footprints in ice. Can you explain this? Remember, it snowed twice in the past two days, with nearly a day’s break between.
It’s December 12, 2016—two weeks till Boxing Day. And it’s both National Cocoa Day (appropriate given the amount of snow and the cold temperatures here) and also National Ambrosia Day, a fruit salad made with a variety of things that don’t meld well (Wikipedia gives the most common ingredients as fresh or sweetened pineapple, mandarin oranges or fresh orange sections, miniature marshmallows, and coconut. I’m not too fond of it, but I’d eat it if it were the only dessert on tap. It’s also Kanji Day in Japan, an unusual holiday in which the Japanese vote on a written character that best represents the events of the year. I’m not sure how it works, for this year’s character is already on Wikipedia as having been chosen. Perhaps the character is first chosen by the Japanese Kanji Proficiency Society, and then there’s simply a yes or no vote. Japanese-knowledgable readers, please weigh in.
Here’s this year’s kanji:
And the explanation:
High number of gold medals won at the 2016 Rio Olympics, the shift to minus interest (“interest rate” is “kinri” in Japanese), Trump’s U.S. presidential election victory, and Piko Taro, singer of ‘PPAP’, who’s known for wearing a gold-colored animal print outfit.
On this day in 1911, Delhi replaced Calcutta as the capital city of India. A good thing, too, as Delhi is much nicer (I’ve been to both places). In 1935, Himmler started the Lebensbornproject, a scheme to increase the production of more Aryan types. Exactly 6 years later, Hitler announced his plan to exterminate the Jews, though I’m dubious of that Wikipedia entry since I know of no formal document or announcement of that, beyond Hitler’s intimations in Mein Kampf. On December 12, 1963, Kenya became independent of the UK, and, in 2000, the infamous Bush v. Gore decision came down from the Supreme Court, effectively declaring GW the President.
Notables born on this day include John Jay (1745), Gustave Flaubert (1821), Edvard Munch (1863), Edward G. Robinson (1893), Frank Sinatra (1915), Ted Kennedy (1925), Buford Pusser (1937; I just wanted to write his name), Dickey Betts (1943, and, amazingly, still alive), and Jennifer Connelly (1970 ♥). Those who died on this day include Robert Browning (1889), Tallulah Bankhead (1968), and Joseph Heller (1999).
Here’s a very early Sinatra song: “Night and Day,” one of my favorites. The writer was Cole Porter.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is still pondering the meaning of meaning (something philosophers do all the time, and get paid for it!). Her staff has just purchased a new camera, too, so we can expect some nice new pictures in the next week:
Hili: There are moments when I wonder.
A: Frankly speaking, me too.
In Polish:
Hili: Są momenty kiedy się zastanawiam.
Ja: Szczerze mówiąc, ja też.
It’s cold and snowy out in Winnipeg, and Gus spends his time watching the world on his Katzenbaum, as well as nomming his new box. He’s started doing that again, and has shredded nearly one whole side:
Yep, you’re right: all of them. The women named in the December 8 piece include a hijabi fashion blogger, a journalist who appeared (clothed) in Playboy, a fencer, a hip-hop group, and the Miss Minnesota contestant who wore both a hijab and a burkini. It’s not so much the achievements of Muslim women that are celebrated here—and there’s nothing wrong with that—but the headscarf. Hijabs are mentioned repeatedly: here are two excerpts.
From the introduction:
Muslim Americans continue to face rising intolerance and Islamophobia as a result, in part, of aggressive attacks on their community by politicians and conservative media. They were assaulted, ridiculed and at times even murdered for their religious identification ― and hijab-wearing Muslim women often bore the brunt of this bigotry.
Check the link to the “even murdered for their religious identification” link in the Guardian, which says this about the murder of two men wearing Muslim garb:
The motive for the shooting was not immediately known and no evidence has been uncovered so far that the two men were targeted because of their faith.
“There’s nothing in the preliminary investigation to indicate that they were targeted because of their faith,” said deputy inspector Henry Sautner of the New York police department.
That’s the exact opposite of what the HuffPo article claims about the link. And then there’s this:
Well-known Muslim beauty blogger Nura Afia made history in November by becoming CoverGirl’s first ambassador who wears a hijab. With her CoverGirl contract, Afia will appear in commercials as well as a giant billboard in New York’s Times Square alongside celebrity representatives like Sofia Vergara and Katy Perry.
“I feel proud to be part of a movement that is showing the hijab in a positive light for once. The more of us who can wear them as representatives of these big household names on TV or billboards the better,” Afia told The New York Times.
Now that’s making America great!
What is really the positive light here is not the woman herself who is achieving, but that the achiever wears a hijab. And can this garment, reflecting a religious dictate that women must hide themselves to avoid arousing the uncontrollable lusts of men, really be seen in a positive light? It’s a symbol not only of a largely oppressive faith (one based, like all faiths, on fiction), but of the misogyny of that faith itself. Do we need to show the yarmulke in a positive light given the higher per capita rate of anti-Semitic than anti-Islamic acts?
Read for yourself (screenshot links to the article):
I can’t brain today, which is lucky because there’s nothing substantive to write about—and I have other work to do. So enjoy these photographs from Robert Clark’s new photo book: Evolution: A Visual Record. I’ve selected a few photographs from a longer selection in the December 8 Washington Post. The notes at flush left are mine but are informed by the Post‘s captions. All photos are by Clark himself.
Below is a gynandromorph (half male, half female) of the Palawan Birdwing butterfly (Trogonoptera trojana): guess which half is male. What probably happened here is that one sex chromosome in a male embryo was lost at the two-cell stage, so that the left half remained ZZ in sex-chromosome constitution, while the right half was ZO. (In birds and butterflies, unlike mammals and flies, males have two identical sex chromosomes, ZZ, and females have unlike sex chromosomes ZW. If you’re ZZ and lose a Z, you’re ZO, probably a female—and very probably sterile.) [Note added in proof: actually, this speculation isn’t correct; as reader Arnaud Martin pointed out in a comment on this site, Lepidopteran gynandromorphs are produced in a genetically different way. But the stuff about flies below is correct.]
This beautiful specimen is certainly sterile, with its body split right up the middle. Notice the longer antennae of the male as well as its shorter hindwing. It’s a direct way of comparing the traits that are sexually dimorphic, but in a single individual.
I sometimes found flies just like this, though the gynandromorphs were caused by a loss of the X chromosome in females, causing one half (or bits) of the body to be XX (female) and the other half to be XO (phenotypically male). Sometimes the loss of the X occurs later in development, so that only a portion of the body is male.
My undergraduate student Ryan Oyama and I used genetic tricks to make lots of these gynandromorphs (with the male parts identified by bearing a yellow body-color mutation), trying to find out where in the body the male cuticular hydrocarbons, which act as sex pheromones, were made. (Males and females have different pheromones.) I found that it was only when the abdomen was male did the gynandromorph produce male pheromones, so that area, I concluded, was where the hydrocarbons were made. (Each gynandromorph, carefully scored for where and how much was male vs female, was then assessed for its hydrocarbons using gas chromatography.) This location was later confirmed by others who directly found the hydrocarbon-producing cells—right under the surface of the abdomen.
Here’s the table from my PNAS paper with Ryan clearly showing that the abdomen must be male for the fly to have male pheromone, and female to have the female pheromone (female pheromone is 7, 11-HD or 7,11-heptacosadiene, male is 7-T, or 7-tricosene). The “H”, “T” and “A” in the first three columns refer, respectively, to the sex identification (F for female, M for male) of the gynandromorphs (“mosaics”) we produced. n is the sample size.
I was just reminded that Matthew had a post–a really good one–on this site about Lepidopteran gynandromorphs as well as gynandromorphs affecting behavior in Drosophila. The first comment on that post, by Arnaud Martin, corrects both Matthew and me in our speculations about the source of the gynandromorphism.
The orchid, from Madagascar, was described by a French botanist in 1798, but came to be named “Darwin’s Orchid” because Darwin speculated that the flower, which had a long nectar spur—27–43 cm, or 10.6–16.9 in—must have been pollinated by a moth that could stick its very long proboscis all the way into the spur. (By so doing, the moth pollinated the orchid by pressing its head against the opening of the flower. Flowers produce nectar as a way to get their genes into the next generation through pollination.) Here’s the orchid (photo by B. J. Ramsay):
Darwin’s idea was ridiculed by some of his colleagues, but then the moth was discovered in 1903. Darwin, as usual, was right, though he didn’t live to see his vindication—at least about the moth.
Here’s how Wikipedia describes the pollination:
The fertilization of A. sesquipedale has been observed to proceed as follows. The moth approaches the flower to ascertain by scent whether or not it is the correct orchid species. Then the moth backs up over a foot and unrolls its proboscis, then flies forward, inserting it into a cleft in the rostellum which leads to the spur while gripping the labellum. After the moth has finished drinking the nectar, which usually takes about 6 seconds, it instinctively raises its head while removing its proboscis from the spur, and in doing so causes the viscidium to adhere to its proboscis usually about 4 to 9 mm (0.16 to 0.35 in) from its base.[22]Attached to the viscidium via the caudicle is the pollinia. Upon removing its proboscis from the flower, the pollinarium stalk will be straight and parallel with the moth’s proboscis. Then after leaving the orchid the caudicle will eventually dry out, causing its angle relative to the moth’s proboscis to change by 90° so that it is at the correct angle to attach to the stigma of the next orchid the moth visits. The moth then repeats this process at another A. sesquipedale orchid and simultaneously fertilizes it. Once the flower has been fertilized, it quickly stops producing its powerful scent.
I believe it was my friend Phil DeVries who first actually photographed the pollination event, which takes place at night (video at link).
I’ll add two more photos because Matthew, who called the Post piece to my attention, said they were his favorite pictures of the lot. I’ve used the Post‘s own captions here.
Not so long ago, it was a controversial theory, but now it’s widely accepted: Birds aren’t just dinosaur-like; they are in fact living dinosaurs. That’s true of everything from sparrows to eagles to Darwin’s finches — but it’s rarely more obvious than when looking at a southern cassowary (Casuarius casuarius), the flightless bird native to Australia and New Guinea that at 5 feet tall and over 100 pounds is one of the largest and heaviest birds on Earth. (Robert Clark/Courtesy of Phaidon)
And this is amazing, though there are much older hominin footprints (the Laetoli footprints, which date back 3.7 million years and were probably made by Australopithecus afarensis). Both show humans walking bipedally, and the A. afarensis footprints are direct confirmation of what was surmised only from anatomy.
“The combination of good sedimentary conditions and the fact that animals, including hominids, like to be near a source of water,” the great paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey said, helps explain why the remains of human ancestors — and many other creatures — are so often found near the shores of lakes. These beautiful human footprints, about 120,000 years old, were discovered south of Lake Natron, Tanzania. (Robert Clark/Courtesy of Phaidon)
Here’s Clark’s book, which is much cheaper at both Amazon and Target. It would make a great Christmas present for your evolution-loving friends or relatives.
