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.
Reader John O’Neall called my attention to a new article in The Independent about the continuing slaughter of African elephants for their ivory tusks. This is a form of artificial selection—the elephants targeted are those with the largest tusks—that has a predictable result given that artificial selection on a trait almost never fails:
An increasing number of African elephants are now born tuskless because poachers have consistently targetted animals with the best ivory over decades, fundamentally altering the gene pool.
In some areas 98 per cent of female elephants now have no tusks, researchers have said, compared to between two and six per cent born tuskless on average in the past.
. . . About 144,000 elephants were killed between 2007 and 2014, leaving the species at risk of extinction in some areas. Meanwhile those African elephant populations that do survive could become virtually tuskless, like their Asian cousins, researchers have warned.
Joyce Poole is head of the charity Elephant Voices and has been tracking developments in the species for more than 30 years. She toldThe Times she had seen a direct correlation between the intensity of poaching and the percentage of females born without tusks in some of the herds she monitored.
In Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique, 90 per cent of elephants were slaughtered between 1977 and 1992, during the country’s civil war. Dr Poole said that because poachers disproportionately targetted tusked animals, almost half the females over 35 years of age have no tusks, and although poaching is now under control and the population is recovering well, they are passing the tuskless gene down to their daughters: 30 per cent of female elephants born since the end of the war also do not have tusks.
You can read a longer and more scientific article about this at the African Wildlife Foundation. When I read about a “tuskless gene” in the bit above, I was dubious, for such selection will work regardless of its genetic basis, and traits like tusk size are usually influenced by many genes of smaller effect. But it turns out that, according to Poole, there is such a gene:
“Elephants carry a sex-linked gene for tusklessness, so in most populations there are always some tuskless elephants,” says Poole. “Because males require tusks for fighting, tusklessness has been selected against in males and very few males are tuskless. For African elephants, tuskless males have a much harder time breeding and do not pass on their genes as often as tusked males.”
I don’t know much about that gene, but it would seem to be recessive, so that tuskless males will always pass on the gene to their daughters, but not their sons (the gene is on the X, not the Y). Tuskless females would have to carry two copies of the recessive gene, and all their sons would be tuskless. But regardless of the genetics, selective poaching of elephants with bigger tusks will cause tusklessness to spread in the population.
An adult female elephant without tusks, perhaps homozygous for the “tuskless” gene. Source.
You might think that this is fine: that once all the elephants are virtually tuskless, the poaching will stop, for elephants are killed only for their ivory. But it’s not that simple, for tusks are there for a reason: they’re used for self-defense, for digging, and, perhaps most important, females prefer to mate with males having larger tusks. While tuskless elephants may survive without their armaments, a strong female preference for mating with tusked males might mean that such populations simply won’t mate, and that means extinction.
This is not the only case in which artificial selection through hunting has changed a species: many edible fish, for example, have evolved reduced body size because fisherman not only go after the big ones, leaving the smaller ones to breed, but overfishing imposes selection on fish to breed when younger and smaller (those fish with genes allowing them to breed when younger are more likely to leave their genes to the next generation).
What we have, then, is another example of the efficacy of artificial selection, something that we’ve known for decades. (In fact, I know of only three laboratory selection experiments that have failed to change a population, and two of those are mine.) And the effect is predictable. The solution is not to cut the tusks off living elephants to prevent their slaughter, or to let elephants evolve tusklessness, which could lead to their extinction.) The solution is to stop the ivory trade. Steps have been taken to do this, but so long as ivory is coveted in countries like China, driving the price of tusks to stratospheric levels (a pound of ivory can fetch $1500 on the black market; a huge amount given the weight of tusks), the problem will persist, and we’ll see horrible scenes like this:
Since the tusks extend into the head, poachers have to partially decapitate the elephant.
Howard Smith is a lecturer in Harvard’s Department of Astronomy as well as an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. He’s also a religious Jew who spends his time reconciling science with the mystical tenets of the Kaballah. The website for Smith’s 2006 book, Let There Be Light: Modern Cosmology and Kaballah: A New Conversation Between Science and Religion, describes the author as “a traditional and observant Jew,” and adds this:
The power of the scientific method is that every single person will see and hear exactly the same thing. Mistakes of interpretation will be found and fixed; cumulative wisdom grows, and as it does, we gain in understanding about God’s “Book of Nature.” In contrast, our relationship with the holy is communal and personal, and is sanctified. Together, our mind and our spirit, our shared and our personal experiences of the Divine, enable us to live in the natural world both aware of and grateful for its blessings. The psalm for Shabbat, Psalm 92, celebrates the universe that was completed with Shabbat: “How amazing is Your Creation, oh Lord, and how subtle are Your thoughts! …. An ignorant person can’t understand it; a simple-minded person won’t get it.” Thanks to the revolution in science and religion we are reaching for new highs of awareness. May we also reach new levels of wonder, gratitude, and holiness.
So what we have here is a religious scientist. But the religion part is completely missing from Smith’s op-ed in Friday’s Washington Post, “Humanity is cosmically special. Here’s how we know.” Or rather, the religion is implied, but is only implicit for reasons we can guess: instead of confessing his beliefs at the outset, Smith tries to use science to show that humans are “special”, and that, perhaps, there’s a Higher Intelligence behind the presence of humans on Earth.
To make his argument, Smith makes a number of discredited claims, including the “fine-tuning” argument. I’ll excerpt a few passages, all of which are wrong:
There was a time, back when astronomy put Earth at the center of the universe, that we thought we were special. But after Copernicus kicked Earth off its pedestal, we decided we were cosmically inconsequential, partly because the universe is vast and about the same everywhere. Astronomer Carl Sagan put it this way: “We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star.” Stephen Hawking was even blunter: “The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet.”
An objective look, however, at just two of the most dramatic discoveries of astronomy — big bang cosmology and planets around other stars (exoplanets) — suggests the opposite. We seem to be cosmically special, perhaps even unique — at least as far as we are likely to know for eons.
The first result — the anthropic principle — has been accepted by physicists for 43 years. The universe, far from being a collection of random accidents, appears to be stupendously perfect and fine-tuned for life.
The weak anthropic principle, that we happen to live in a Universe that allows our existence, and thus our pondering that existence, is not at issue here. That’s just a tautology. The rest of the piece makes clear that Smith is talking about the strong anthropic principle (SAP), in which physical laws were devised by some higher power to permit human life. And that argument has not “been accepted by physicists for 43 years”.
There are, of course, alternative explanations to the SAP, five of which are mentioned by another physicist, Sean Carroll, in the video below. I needn’t reprise them, but I urge you to listen to the 9-minute video to refresh your knowledge of the issues.
There’s more wrong stuff (my emphasis in the excerpt below):
The most extreme example is the big bang creation: Even an infinitesimal change to its explosive expansion value would preclude life. The frequent response from physicists offers a speculative solution: an infinite number of universes — we are just living in the one with the right value. But modern philosophers such as Thomas Nagel and pioneering quantum physicists such as John Wheeler have argued instead that intelligent beings must somehow be the directed goal of such a curiously fine-tuned cosmos.
Carroll takes care of the “big bang creation” argument in the video at 2:15 in the video, showing Smith’s ignorance of the very physics he teaches. As for Nagel, who claims that evolution can’t account for consciousness (Nagel doesn’t mention God but nevertheless suggests some unknown teleological force), my colleague Allen Orr has dispelled that view in his review of Nagel’s ideas in the New York Review of Books.
Then Smith proceeds to a biological argument:
It seems likely that exoplanets could host extraterrestrial intelligence. But intelligence is not so easy to produce. Paleontologist Peter Ward and astronomer Donald Brownlee summarize the many constraints in their book “Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe ” and show why it takes vastly more than liquid water and a pleasant environment to give birth even to simple (much less complex) life. At a minimum, it takes an environment stable for billions of years of evolution, plus all the right ingredients. Biologists from Jacques Monod to Stephen Jay Gould have emphasized the extraordinary circumstances that led to intelligence on Earth, while geneticists have found that DNA probably resulted from many accidents. So although the same processes operate everywhere, some sequences could be unlikely, even astronomically unlikely. The evolution of intelligence could certainly be such a sequence.
In fact, intelligence has evolved independently several times on Earth, unless you confine the definition of intelligence as “human-like” intelligence. Octopuses are intelligent, crows are intelligent, cats are intelligent. These are all independent evolutionary events. So what does that say about the “likelihood” of evolving intelligence? Simply that it’s not “astronomically unlikely”! One can easily see how the evolution of reasoning and foresight could confer enormous adaptive advantages to individuals, probably explaining the convergent evolution of intelligence in many species.
Further, it doesn’t take “billions of years of evolution” to evolve “even simple life”. The first strong evidence for life we have on Earth is about 3.4 billion years ago: bacteria that were already quite complex. And to get that degree of complexity you’d need substantial time. Other evidence suggests that there was life about 3.7 billion years ago—less than one billion years after Earth formed as a molten ball. Smith needs to read up on biology and evolution. What he’s getting at here, of course, is that some Intelligent Force was necessary to force the occurrence of such an improbable phenomenon.
Smith then bangs on about how the finite speed of light prevents us from even knowing about distant but intelligent beings. From that he somehow concludes that we are not only alone in “our cosmic neighborhood,” but “probably rare” and “not ordinary.” Well, surely the conditions for the evolution of life surely aren’t common in the Universe, but we simply have no idea how rare they are. Smith has no evidence that “the bottom line for extraterrestrial intelligence is that it is probably rarer than previously imagined.” Well, lots of people have “previously imagined” the rarity, and made calculations; but all those calculations are speculative, based not only on data we don’t have, but on our solipsistic view that extraterrestrial life must resemble that on Earth.
Smith gives away the game in his final paragraph, where he clearly implies some intelligence behind humans. When I read this, without knowing anything about the author, I immediately thought, “Smith is religious.” It turned out I was right. The bolding below is mine:
Some of my colleagues strongly reject this notion [that “we”–humans–are not ordinary]. They would echo Hawking: “I can’t believe the whole universe exists for our benefit.” Yes, we all have beliefs — but beliefs are not proof. Hawking’s belief presumes that we are nothing but ordinary, a “chemical scum.” All the observations so far, however, are consistent with the idea that humanity is not mediocre at all and that we won’t know otherwise for a long time. It seems we might even serve some cosmic role. So this season let us be grateful for the amazing gifts of life and awareness, and acknowledge the compelling evidence to date that humanity and our home planet, Earth, are rare and cosmically precious. And may we act accordingly.
What on Earth does it mean that we “serve some cosmic role” and are “cosmically precious”? Those very phrases imply that there’s a playwright behind our evolution, and for Smith that’s surely Yahweh. Note that he uses the word “unique” in the first excerpt from his op-ed.
So what we have here is an op-ed in a prominent newspaper that uses dubious and erroneous arguments to claim that humans were designed. But those arguments don’t stand up in light of what physicists and biologists—at least those not already committed to a religious explanation—understand about our cosmos. There is no compelling argument that we serve any cosmic role, or that any Designer is behind physical law and human evolution.
What galls me about Smith’s article is that, in light of his known views, he’s trying to hide his argument for God, all the while leading the reader to think that there must be a god running our Universe. His piece is deliberately misleading—indeed, duplicitous.
Finally, I’d point out to Smith that invoking Yahweh is a nonstarter, for then he’d have to explain the existence of the designer. Where did he come from? How did he act? And those are surely harder to explain than is the existence of intelligent life on Earth.
I’m surprised Smith hasn’t yet been funded by Templeton, but he has talked on these issues at an event sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, under their DoSER (“Dialogue on Science, Ethics and Religion”) program, itself funded by Templeton. (That program, by the way, is a blight on the AAAS.)
I’ll add a link to this post in the comments after Smith’s article.
I call your attention to Heather Hastie’s new post, “Has the US education system been set-up to fail?” It paints a dire picture of what’s happening in U.S. schools, discusses Trump’s appointment of Betsy DeVos (probably a creationist) as his education secretary, and explains why DeVos’s and Trump’s emphasis on “school choice” as a solution to the problem is wrong. The post is thoughtful, full of data, and well worth reading.
By the way, Trump apparently offered DeVos’s post first to Jerry Falwell, Jr., the out-and-out creationist president of the Christian school Liberty University. Falwell, however, turned down the offer as he couldn’t afford the 4-year commitment to a cabinet post in light of his university duties. Despite that, HuffPo (I’m still obsessed) still has this headline on its front page (click to go to the article):
As you see, when you click on the HuffPo headline, it goes to an Associated Press report that says this:
RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr. says President elect-Donald Trump offered him the job of education secretary, but that he turned it down for personal reasons.
Falwell tells The Associated Press that Trump offered him the job last week during a meeting in New York. He says Trump wanted a four- to six-year commitment, but that he couldn’t leave Liberty for more than two years.
. . . Trump announced Wednesday he had selected charter school advocate Betsy DeVos for the job. Falwell says he thinks DeVos is an “excellent choice.”
It would behoove HuffPo to have an accurate headline; this one is duplicitous and is another attempt to go after Trump. Granted, Falwell would have been an abysmal choice—I despair of having a Secretary of Education who doesn’t accept evolution— and DeVos may well share that view, but the headline is misleading.
But no matter what happens, make no mistake: science education, and perhaps science funding, is likely to take a serious hit under a Trump administration.
Today we have three contributions, two from readers and one from me. Readers’ captions are indented.
The first is from Stephen Barnard in Idaho—a time-lapse photo of fog wafting through his area. He’s been experimenting with video, and I’m sure we’ll see more of these. Be sure to watch the video enlarged and on HD (click on the “Vimeo” word at bottom right.
As you know, I’ve been fooling around with time lapse photography. It turns out that getting a technically decent result requires careful planning and elaborate postprocessing. The most important thing is to remove flicker, which will be present even with fully manual settings. Here’s my first acceptable result, which is fairly subtle, but when i get some dramatic weather I’ll be doing more.
From reader Marilee Lovit:
Banana slugs mating. Genus Ariolimax, species might be californicus. Banana slugs are hermaphrodites and have genitals on their heads. Photographed in October in California coastal redwood forest.
This picture goes with my previous pictures of banana slugs because the slugs live in the coastal redwood forest.
Finally, here are pictures of herps I took about a year ago at the National Zoo in Washington, D. C. I’m not sure what species these are, but I know a helpful reader can give us IDs. The photos were taken through glass at the reptile house with my point-and-shoot Panasonic Lumix.
As November draws to a close, we find ourselves at November 27, 2016: National Bavarian Cream Pie Day. And I have no idea what such a pie even is. If you have one, or even know what it is, weigh in below. It’s also Native American Heritage Day, so it behooves us to remember the protest at Standing Rock against the Dakota Access Pipeline, where—shades of the civil rights struggles of the Sixties—peaceful demonstrators are being sprayed (in frigid weather) with fire hoses.
On this day in 1924, the first Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade was held, and now the Felix the Cat balloon has returned! And ten years ago on this day, the Canadian House of Commons approved a motion recognizing Quebec as a nation within Canada. If you’re Canadian, tell us what you think about this. I know Canadians are deeply divided on the issue.
Notables born on this day include Chaim Weizmann (1874), Gail Sheehy (1937), Jimi Hendrix (1942), Bill Nye (1955), and Carolyn Kennedy (1957, the only remaining member of that ill-fated nuclear family). Here’s Hendrix’s famous rendition of the Star Spangled Banner at Woodstock:
Notables who died on this day include Baby Face Nelson (1934) and Harvey Milk (1978, murdered). Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Ms. Hili is solipsistic, but of course that’s synonymous with “cat.”
A: Where is the most important thing hiding?
Hili: Here, just behind your back.
In Polish:
Ja: Gdzie się ukrywa to, co najważniejsze?
Hili: Tu, za twoimi plecami.
And in nearby Wloclawek, Leon is making a final check before bedtime.
Leon: I checked it. There are no spiders here either.
The burqa, the cloth sack that covers Muslim women from head to toe, represents one interpretation of Islam: preserving women’s modesty by hiding them from the gaze of men who, at the sight of one square inch of skin, would become uncontrollably lustful. It’s the sartorial equivalent of a ball and chain. Would we celebrate the first news anchor to appear on national television in such a sack? I don’t think so.
But when the sack is reduced to a headscarf in the form of a hijab, which represents the same idea (in this case, men are driven wild by the sight of hair), then a hijabi who does something for the first time becomes “courageous” or “empowered” or a “role model.” I see that as misguided, for all that is doing is celebrating a form of religiously mandated sex discrimination. Why should women clothe themselves to suppress the lust of men? Why don’t the men simply control their lust, and not burden the women with uncomfortable garments?
Indeed, what would be more courageous, more of a role model, and more empowering, would be the first Muslim woman to do something, regardless of what she wore. But that’s not the way it works. Such women, like the Muslim model Iman (married to the late Davie Bowie) aren’t seen as courageous or empowering, though they embrace exactly the same faith as do hijabis.
Now there’s one caveat here: with the likely rise of anti-Muslim sentiments in Trump’s America, and in Europe, those who wear the hijab are proclaiming themselves as Muslims, and so it may inspire Muslims in some way. But in the end what is being celebrated is both a headscarf and the repressive, misogynistic theology that inspires its wearing. Would we expect to see, for instance, an article extolling the first Jewish anchorman to wear a yarmulke on television? I don’t think so—and the yarmulke, while still a form of fairy-tale costume, is less a symbol of repression than a hijab.
So by all means celebrate the first Muslim woman to do something independent, bucking the norms of the faith, but let us not celebrate the scrap of cloth she wears on her head.
Case in point: Ginella Massa, a television reporter in Toronto who, according to the Regressive Leftist Guardian, filled in as an anchor for CTV News in Kitchener Ontario. She isn’t, as the headline says “Canada’s first hijab-clad anchor,” for it was a one-off appearance. But never mind; what bothers me is how everyone including the Guardian thinks this is wonderful:
Massa recognized the personal career strides she had made after stepping out of the anchor desk, but she said it took her editor to point out the larger significance.
“It wasn’t until my editor said, ‘Hey, great job! Was that a first for Canada? A woman in a hijab?’ And I said yes. And so I tweeted about it. As much as I knew it was important, I didn’t expect the reaction that I received. My phone hasn’t stopped buzzing for the last week,” Massa said.
“I’ve talked to many women who are journalists in the US who work behind the scenes and they’ve told me that they face multiple challenges trying to get on air,” said Massa. “They’ve been told because of their hijab, that’s not going to happen. That makes me really sad because they’re being held back by someone else’s idea of what the public can or cannot handle.”
Although the reaction to Massa’s anchor stint and reporting role has been mostly positive in Canada, she said she has received a handful of negative comments and Tweets.
Oy! A handful of negative comments and Tweets. I get that on a good day! This is not harassment, and, as expected in Canada, it’s not particularly courageous to appear on television wearing one. Those who prevent hijabis from advancing simply because of their scarf are, of course, exercising a prejudice, but this isn’t simply a celebration of overcoming that prejudice.
And would the Guardian go into paroxysms of joy about the same thing for the first woman anchor to wear a burqa? The first Jew to wear a yarmulke? Nope. Nor would they do it for the first non-hijabi Muslim to become an anchor, although there are plenty of them. Why the difference? Because the Left is celebrating the hijab itself, a symbol of oppression.
The last sentence of the Guardian piece is telling:
“But this is all the more reason in today’s climate to see positive images of Muslim women,” [Massa} said. “They are a symbol of Islam when they wear the hijab and that carries a powerful image. It’s so important to see positive images of us in the media.”
Yes, perhaps we need positive images of Muslim women, but not Muslim women succumbing to misogynistic theology. And don’t tell me that Massa chose to wear the hijab, for we don’t know that. I’m deeply dubious of people who say about others that they wear it by choice, and even about those who wear it themselves. There is social pressure to don the headscarf in families and Muslim communities, and before the Islamic revolution, many fewer women wore it in Iran, Afghanistan, or Egypt. That alone shows that it’s largely indoctrination rather than a personal decision.
It’s time to stop celebrating the first hijabi to do X, Y, or Z. It’s like celebrating the first Muslim woman to wear a burqa on television, or the first penitente to give the news while lashing himself for Jesus.
Why do I go after PuffHo? Because it’s a site produced for liberals and progressives, yet it continues to completely demonize Donald Trump. Lest you think I like the man, I despise him and all he stands for, but when a website on OUR side shows an almost hysterical demonization of our opponents, right down to the food they eat, then I get upset. It makes us all look petty.
Here’s the whole piece, including the gratuitous inclusion of a tw**t from Trump. Note also the pejorative “gorges on himself” headline. Of course Thanksgiving dinner is all about gorging and food comas, so “gorging” is simply de rigueur. And “on himself”? Really?
Remember, Obama was fond of cheeseburgers! Anyway, let the bile flow:
Even Donald Trump’s Thanksgiving is all about Donald Trump.
The President elect celebrated the holiday true to form by eating two dishes named after himself. According to NBC News, the Trump family’s Thanksgiving menu featured 24 dishes, including a salad dubbed “Mr. Trump’s Wedge Salad” and a dessert called “Three-Layer Trump Chocolate Cake.”
The eponymous salad is an odd choice given Trump’s notoriously unhealthy diet. He’s spoken highly of McDonald’s and KFC, and is often photographed eating fast food. As far as vegetables go, though, a wedge salad―-traditionally topped with bacon and creamy dressing― is one of the least nutritious.
Great afternoon in Ohio & a great evening in Pennsylvania – departing now. See you tomorrow Virginia! pic.twitter.com/jQTQYBFpdb
The dinner was held at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida and included local favorites like Key Lime Pie in addition to traditional holiday foods (no taco bowls, though.)
Now that’s just ridiculous. Yes, there were pizza bites at the Obama’s place, but a lot of other stuff as well, as this article from People notes (click on screenshot to go there):
You want to see what both the families ate? You can see Trump’s 24-dish menu here, and the Obamas’ menu here. ABC News in Philadelphia adds this:
If I had my choice of either of these meals, I’d take Trump’s, mainly for the great seafood appetizers. Thanksgiving dinner isn’t about health, and I’m not a big fan of pizza bites.
One reader, not poisoned by the venom of Trump Hatred, said this:
Ms. Zell has it right, HuffPo is simply ridden with over-the-top bias, which shows even in articles about his dinner. And I’m not sure that Zell isn’t right that people will tune out if they hear continual carping about stuff like Trump’s meals as opposed to the serious issues: Trump’s policies and his choices for the Cabinet (and what will surely be a dire choice for the Supreme Court).
From Cat Lovers Community we hear the story of Tigger, a klepto-moggie owned by an Oregon cop. Fortunately, marijuana is now legal in Oregon, and even if they could identify the perp, there’d be nothing to do:
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You might have heard of the Lanai Cat Sanctuary (a no-kill operation) on one of the Hawaiian Islands, and if you haven’t, you can read about it in Yahoo News:
The Lanai Cat Sanctuary in Hawaii is home to nearly 500 cats of varying shapes and sizes. Visitors are welcome to pet any and all of the feline inhabitants… if they can find them: the cats are not confined to cages, but rather free to roam and explore the sanctuary. How fun is that?
The sanctuary is located on the small Hawaiian island of Lanai, and is 25,000 square feet. That’s a lot of space for a cat to roam! All kitties are available for either foster or adoption, and any cat that doesn’t find a home can spend the rest of its life at the sanctuary. The sanctuary is open to the public between 10 a.m. to 3.p.m every day.
If you find yourself in Lanai, well, you’ll know what to do.
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If you’ve followed this site, you’ll know that my favorite wild cat species is Pallas’s Cat, Otocolobus manul, often called the manul (see here, for instance). It’s a denizen of Central Asia, and has short ears, long fur, big paws, and a fluffy tail, all signs that it’s adapted to cold climates.
Bored Panda has a bunch of pictures of the manul, calling it “the most expressive cat in the world.” Here are a few of the photos; go to the site for more:
