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.
Every scientist, I suspect, gets these invitations from predatory journals looking to solicit papers. And 98 times out of 100, the journal is completely unrelated to my work, showing that they’re just trolling scientists to get papers. Here’s one I got today. Needless to say, I gave them a sharp answer and told them to leave me alone. Though I had unsubscribed before, it clearly didn’t work, as this is a second solicitation:
It is not hard to compile a mailing list of qualified workers in obstetrics and gynecology for solicitations like this, but I guess it’s easier just to spam every biologist. You wouldn’t believe the list of journals and societies where I’ve been invited to submit or give papers, nearly all of them in medical areas that have nothing to do with evolution.
From PetaPixel we have the story (and a video) about a lioness who stole a photographer’s camera and gave it to her three cubs as a toy. How did this happen?
Wildlife photographer Barbara Jensen Vorster was photographing a pride of lions in Botswana in July when she had her camera stolen by a lioness. She luckily had another camera ready and captured a series of photos showing what happened next.
Vorster was shooting at the Mashatu Game Reserve with her Canon 7D and Canon 100-400mm lens— a camera kit worth over $2,000 — when she accidentally dropped the kit on the ground. Upon hearing the thud, the protective lioness mother growled and then approached the group to investigate, causing Vorster and her party to retreat in their 4×4.
“The camera fell with the lens looking up, she gently flipped the camera on its side and picked it up by the barrel of the lens,” Vorster says.
The lioness then picked up the camera and telephoto lens in her mouth and carried it a distance before dropping it onto the ground. Her cubs then pounced on their new toy and began playing with it.
A photo:
“They dragged it through the dirt, chewed on the lens hood and then fortunately, like most kids, soon grew tired with their new toy,” the photographer says.
After retrieving her abandoned camera, she found that it was still functioning perfectly aside from teeth marks across the surfaces.
The camera was “very dirty but appears to still work,” Vorster says. “There are two huge teeth marks on the rubber focus rings of the lens and small teeth marks on the plastic lens hood, both of which I decided not to replace.”
And the video:
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I got this story from tons of people, and it’s everywhere on the Internet, probably because it fulfills peoples’ desire, in these troubled times, to see acts of kindness. And it is cool. From BuzzFeed News, for example, we hear of a man named Terry Lauermann who wandered into the Safe Haven Pet Sanctuary in Green Bay Wisconsin—a place where “difficult” cats are kept (and not in cages) in hopes they’ll be adopted. Terry came in volunteering to brush the cats, which he does, and often falls asleep with them. It’s adorable. Here are a few photos and tweets documenting it:
Terry brushes the cats every day. Courtesy of Safe Haven Pet Sanctuary
According to [founder Elizabeth] Feldhausen, Terry has a “magic brush” and all the cats — even the ones who normally won’t play with others — flock to this Pied Piper of sorts.
“He’s amazing with them,” she added. “Even the anxious ones get excited when he comes to volunteer.”
So far the story about Terry has prompted people to give $10,000 in donations, and if you’d like to donate (I did), you can do so here.
More:
Here’s a video (another one showing Terry in action is here):
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From Mashable we have a passel of videos showing cats taking hikes. There are five, and I’ll show two, but if you’re an ailurophile you’ll want to watch them all:
And another, showing Honey Bee, a blind rescue cat, who loves the sounds and smells of the great outdoors:
Reader Tom Carrolan sent some lovely raptor photos. Look and learn! (His comments are indented.)
Before Earth Day (1970) and wetland protection laws, the Red-shouldered Hawk (Buteo lineatus) was being extirpated from most of Northeastern North America. As various endangered and threatened state laws came into place, this species was added as Threatened. Nesting in wetland forests brought about those listings. In Massachusetts, many of the first strip and enclosed malls were built after destroying Atlantic Whitecedar Swamps along the Route 128 corridor: prime real estate for the Red-shouldered Hawk. This species has recovered in the Northeast — US and Canada — but not to pre-WWII populations.
In the west, the birds are much more richly colored and marked (Bl.eligans). While in the SE, the birds are quite pale (Bl.extimus).
First we have a hawk in hand at Braddock Bay, north of Rochester NY. This is from my digibanding project where images were added to the measurement data recorded when a bird is banded. This shows the species best fieldmark: the white slash in the outer primaries (the hand). While it is a classic feature, it can be mistaken for a pale feather area present in other Buteo species. This image also shows the adult ‘red shoulder’: red feathering on the upper wing coverts. This is a male: with a gray/pale face and limited vertical streaking on the breast and belly. [22 March 2003]
In contrast, here’s an adult female in migration. In much of North America, this species is non-migratory with pairs staying on territory through the winter, with the young moving out. But the northern birds—in most of New England and the rest of the continent north of that latitude—migrate. We are seeing more wintering adult males to the north, with a larger proportion of the late March and early April migration consisting of adult females.
This is a female with a brown/dark face and extensive vertical dark markings. This sex can even exhibit a bellyband, like other buteo species. [21 March 2007, Mexico NY]
Here’s an adult male in migration. We see larger head on a tapering body with a light face and very limited streaking on the breast and belly. As an adult ages, in most of our hawk species, the markings molt-in paler, so that an older experienced bird is easy to tell—if you are a discriminating female. Thus ends the evolutionary biology portion of our program(!) [11 March 2013]
Juvenile Red-shouldered Hawks are tricky to identify, especially perched. I receive images of questionable perched hawks from many states and provinces. Perched birds seem to give birders problems. This species is most often mistaken for an accipiter species, but Redtails and Broad-winged Hawks are also early choices.
So young Red-shoulders have the species defining restricted pale slash in the outer primaries. Best observed on the upper wing surface, when the bird turns. Also the breast and belly is marked with spots, more than streaks. Most often the throat is marked (young Broadwings have an unmarked upper breast and throat, mostly).[25 March 2010]
This is a fresh-plumaged dispersing juvenile with an unusual clear throat area, but showing the pale crescents very well. Both juveniles show a finely banded tail with a wider subterminal band. Note that the adults above and these two juvs exhibit well-delineated and dark wing tips.
In migration, young Shoulders are uncommon, both spring and fall. This indicates that they are moving — and they all do — in ways not observed when seeing the bulk of other migrating hawks! Occasionally a winter juv is reported on a Christmas Bird Count in a northern cline, but come February, these souls have moved south or succumbed to winter. [24 August 2016]
I am occasionally sent an image like this one: a lightly marked adult Shoulder photographed somewhere in northeastern North America. The sender wants me to confirm that it is the Florida subspecies; sorry, folks. It’s not (and these images are always taken in spring). Red avian pigmentation wears/wades quite easily. This is a simply a worn bird, like this adult female.
While the Red-shouldered Hawk is a wet forest dwelling species and rarely observed out of that element, they do migrate. This young adult male likely encountered a shotgun, although other issues, like snapping turtles, are possible for the missing outer primaries. [1 April 2014]
And last, back to the issue of wintering birds in northeastern North America. This is a situation I have been interested in for the last twenty winters plus. Hundred of migrating birds of this species are counted across the Northeast in both spring and fall. When observed singly in winter, these have always been adult males… I have requested or received dozen of images over the years. I had such a bird in my eastern Massachusetts backyard, but my image is too small for showing here.
This adult male was photographed in the Syracuse NY area in early January. [2 January 2015]
As of 7 p.m. this evening, summer is ended, finito, gone. It sleeps with the fishes and sings in the choir invisible. For today is the beginning of autumn in the Northern Hemisphere: September 22, 2018. The temperature has dropped rapidly in Chicago: on Thursday we reached a high of 93° F (34° C), a record for that date, but today the high will reach only 63° F (17° C). That’s a huge drop, and it will remain cool for the week. Perhaps that will get Honey and James thinking about migrating.
As for food, it’s National White Chocolate Day, celebrating something that isn’t really chocolate. It’s also World Car-Free Day, which is a good idea but, in fact, today is the one day in the week that I always use my car: to go grocery shopping.
On September 22, 1598, playwright Ben Jonson killed actor Gabriel Spencer in a duel. Jonson was indicted for manslaughter but received no punishment. On this day in 1692, the last people convicted of witchcraft in the Salem Witch Trials were hanged; the remainder of the convicted were eventually released. On this day in 1776, Nathan Hale was hanged by the British for spying. He was only 21, and the words he was reputed to have said on the gallows—”I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country” (note the misplacement of “only”)—may have been apocryphal. He is, however the Official State Hero of Connecticut.
On this day in 1823, Joseph Smith said that, directed by God through the angel Moroni, he found the Golden Plates that yielded the Book of Mormon. I am amazed at so many people were duped, and continue to be duped, by this cockamamie story. On this day in 1888, the first issue of National Geographic magazine was issued. Exactly eight years later, Queen Victoria surpassed King George III, her grandfather, as the longest reigning monarch in British history. She went on to reign for 13 more years. On September 22, 1975, Sara Jane Moore tried to assassinate President Gerald Ford of the U.S. but was thwarted. Sentenced to life in prison, Moore was released in 2007 at age 77, having served 32 years. Finally, on this day in 1991, the Dead Sea Scrolls were made available to the public for the first time. Here is a photo of one of them and the caves where they were found in Israel in 1946:
Not many notable people were born on this day; the few I have include White Rose member Hans Scholl (1918), Debby Boone (1956), and Joan Jett (1958). Those who died on this day include Guru Nanak, the founder of Sikhism (1539), Nathan Hale (1776; see above), botanist John Bartram (1777), Shaka Zulu (1828), Irving Berling (1989), George C. Scott (1999), Marcel Marceau (2007), Eddie Fisher (2010), and Yogi Berra (2015). How did Berra get his first name? According to Wikipedia, “he received the nickname “Yogi” from his friend Jack Maguire, who, after seeing a newsreel about India, said that he resembled a Hindu yogi whenever he sat around with arms and legs crossed waiting to bat or while looking sad after a losing game. Judge for yourself:
Yogi Berra, a great catcher
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is dreaming as fall approaches:
Hili: The cloudy sky above me and a law of the jungle within me.
A: Are you going hunting?
Hili: No, I’m going to sleep. We’ll see what I dream about.
In Polish:
Hili: Niebo pochmurne nade mną i prawo dżungli we mnie.
Ja: Idziesz polować?
Hili: Nie, idę spać, zobaczę co mi się przyśni.
A cartoon:
Tweets from Grania, the first showing Saturday Night Live‘s characterization of Chicago’s Billy Goat Tavern, which still resides on (or rather beneath) Michigan Avenue. No Coke—Pepsi!
From the First Amendment lawyer Popehat. I, too, would prefer not to have to read about The Donald’s equipment. It’s unseemly that mainstream media are glomming onto this with such glee. Yes, the man is a lecher and a groper, but I doubt the press would have given such graphic details about Clinton’s nether parts (if they’d had it).
this yeti mushroom thing is hideous I need something wholesome oh good bert and ernie are trending I'll just click on
Suicide is at its lowest level since the 1970s. The only reason it is the ‘biggest killer of young men’ is because men are today far less likely to die prematurely at all, says @LukeSGittos1986https://t.co/X9aLiFjWUk
A tweet from Matthew revealing the identity of the Mystery Body Part:
For those who had been guessing what I had posted earlier, here's the globuled spiny orb weaver from Borneo, Actinacantha globulata. Might be synonymized with Gasteracantha crucigera in the future. Did you get it right? pic.twitter.com/UfLhNGkK26
Just to end the work week, here’s a BBC video of one animal (a fish) hiding inside the nether orifice of another (an echinoderm). A lot of people think this is gross, but being a biologist sort of immunizes you against that kind of reaction. And if you think it’s gross, you miss how interesting it is.
I’ve watched with approbation as Andrew Sullivan, with whom I’ve often disagreed, seems to have mellowed, becoming at least a centrist instead of a conservative, and remaining mum about his mystifying Catholicism. Sullivan’s nice new column in New York Magazine, on tribalism, starts with Jon Haidt and Greg Lukianoff’s new book, The Coddling of the American Mind, and then goes into the bitter and acerbic polarization of the American electorate, as exemplified by the fracas around Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination (I still am unable to automatically equate accusations with fact) and the firing of the New York Review of Books editor Ian Buruma simply because he published a piece by an accused sexual assailant (Jian Ghomeshi) who was acquitted. Sometimes I feel the world has gone mad, and I no longer know where I fit in. I can’t align with the extreme Left, whose actions often seem fascistic, but I despise the ideology of the Right. I consider myself on the Left but am constantly accused of being an alt-righter.
Sullivan feels the same way:
And it’s this reflexive, reptilian sorting of in-group and out-group that has now been supercharged by social media, by Trump’s hideous identity politics, and by campus and corporate culture. There seem to be just two inalterable categories: the oppressors or the oppressed; elite globalists or decent “normal” people. You are in one camp or the other, and, as time passes, those of us who don’t fit into this rubric will become irrelevant to the discourse, if we haven’t already got there.
And one more excerpt:
Haidt and Lukianoff are particularly acute about how the generational shift has intensified the trend. Their hypothesis is that the members of the iGen generation (those born in the mid- to late 1990s) have been raised (unwittingly and with good intentions) in such a way to maximize tribal identities rather than dilute them.
They have been told, in Haidt’s and Lukianoff’s view, that safety is far more important than exposure to the unknown, that they should always trust their feelings, and that life is a struggle between good people and evil people. This infantilizes them, emotionalizes them, and tribalizes them. These kids have been denied freedom, have little experience of confronting danger and overcoming it themselves, have been kept monitored to all times. They tend to have older parents and fewer siblings. There is a reason the safest generation in history is also the most anxious, the most depressed, and the most suicidal. It is not that it’s all in their heads — prejudice and discrimination exist — but that they do not have the skills to put any of this in perspective. And so rather than rebel against their authorities, as students used to do, they cling to them like safety blankets, begging them to protect them just as their parents did.
This is what a cultural revolution feels like. It is given legitimacy by the top, but it is enforced horizontally from below. You are encouraged to denounce and expose your friends, your co-workers, and your bosses for the harm they inflict. Colleagues vie to signal that they are not guilty of being an oppressor, partly because they are not, and partly to avoid being the next scalp. Soon, silence is not enough — in fact, it’s suspicious. And so it becomes necessary to endorse the revolution, celebrate it, and enforce it, prove that you are in good standing. Examples are made of slackers — the more arbitrary the better — to keep fear alive in the minds of everyone. If you so much as quibble, you’ll be the next head on the chopping block. When the very existence of people is at stake — and it always is for the catastrophists — there is no limiting principle.
We live then in a paradox. Our society has less crime and less danger than ever, and yet we see threats everywhere. It has become more racially and culturally diverse than any society in the history of humankind, but it is plagued by “white supremacists” or “hordes of illegals.” And you cannot question these feelings because subjectivity is more important than objectivity, and sensitivity trumps reality. Gay, lesbian, and transgender people live in a world unimaginable to the overwhelming majority of humankind, and to our predecessors of only five years ago, and yet we are told by our leaders that we are “under siege.” As women kick ass in our economy and culture, as they achieve success that previous generations would have thought extraordinary, what is the response? Rage, of course! Furious rage!
This is a mind-set that Haidt and Lukianoff see as very similar to a clinically depressed one, catastrophizing, paranoid, leaning into ever-escalating feelings of victimhood rather than pushing against them with reason. . .
. . . I was struck in Haidt and Lukianoff’s book by a quote that is almost a perfect inversion of today’s political conversation. “When my brothers try to draw a circle to exclude me, I shall draw a larger circle to include them,” Martin Luther King said, which is why today’s cultural revolutionaries have so little time for him. But he made a huge practical difference in moving everyone forward a little. He made things better by including more. That was also how we won marriage equality, the biggest civil rights victory of my generation. We did it by drawing larger and larger circles, by treating the other side as arguing in good faith, and appealing to a shared humanity, to what we have in common as citizens, rather than what divides us as members of a tribe. Today’s well-intentioned activists — the ones driving much of the conversation around Kavanaugh and, on a much smaller scale, Buruma — in contrast, are drawing an ever smaller, purer, more tightly policed circle, in order to wage a scorched earth war against another, ever-purer, tightly policed circle. And God help anyone who gets in their way.
The Ediacaran fauna, a group of extinct species that lived between 571 and 541 million years ago, has been an evolutionary anomaly. Its fossil record contains multicellular organisms, but they are just plain weird, bearing little resemblance to present-day metazoan (multicellular) animals.
The two species of “dickinsoniids” shown below, for example, lack a mouth or gut (possibly having external digestion instead), are bilaterally asymmetrical, and bear a pattern of body “quilting” that isn’t seen in present-day animals or definite early metazoans like worms:
Here’s Dickinsonia, studied in the paper we’re discussing today. It’s about 7.5 cm long, or three inches, so it’s fairly large:
Here’s a dickinsoniid in the genus Andiva, also studied in the present paper:
What are these things? Controversy has centered on whether they were a whole kingdom of life different from any that we know today (a group that went wholly extinct), or, in contrast, perhaps the ancestors of modern day animals—or at least the relatives of modern day animals. Scientists have guessed that they might be either lichens or giant protozoans. (Yes, protozoans can get this large; some are nearly ten inches long!) This is important to resolve because the “Cambrian explosion” that gave rise to many modern groups of animals began about 541 million years ago, and we want to know if there were animal precursors before that, and what they were. We also want to know whether the Ediacaran fauna really does represent an entire group of creatures that disappeared without issue.
A new paper in Science by Ilya Bobrovskiy et al. (reference at bottom with free Unpaywall link, free pdf here) establishes fairly securely that Dickinsonia and related anomalous species do indeed seem to be metazoan animals rather than members of a separate large group that went extinct entirely. The telling data involves biochemical analysis of the thin films of organic matter that cover the fossils and was presumably produced by the fossils. These fossils were 558 million years old, which, if they were animals, would make them the oldest known metazoans.
To make a long story short, Bobrovskiy and colleagues collected specimens of dickinsoniids from sandstones of the White Sea region of Russia and removed the small (three micron thick) organic mat covering the fossils. Great care was taken to avoid contamination, and they also analyzed the sandstone around, above, and below the fossil to see if the peculiar organic profile they found was associated with the fossil itself. It was, and it also suggested that the fossils were animals, not lichens or giant protozoans.
The telling chemicals were 27 carbon steroids—cholesteroids—which were present as 93% of chemicals in the mat atop the fossils, but only 11-12% of the surrounding sandstone (probably coming from algae or other plants). The fossils, moreover, were almost entirely missing a class of chemicals, ergosteroids, that characterize lichens. And the chemical signature of these fossils didn’t much resemble that of the modern giant protists, either.
There was, however, one twist to the findings: the “isomers” (chemically identical molecules of different handedness or arrangement) of the cholesteroids in these fossils were mostly of a single handedness (the “5β” form), while that of more recent and genuine animal fossils have a more even mixture of right- and left-handedness. This is puzzling, and the authors have no real explanation. This may suggest that even if these fossils were related to modern animals, they were distantly related, having a unique metabolism. They may, then, have branched off from modern animals, with the dickinsoniids and other Ediacaran fauna having gone extinct without descendants. Further, analysis of Andiva doesn’t show the same elevation of cholesteroids, though it does show a preponderance of 5β forms.
So this isn’t as compelling a demonstration as I had wished, but it still shows that these things were probably metazoans and not creatures related to modern lichens or protozoans. The authors conclude this:
Molecular fossils firmly place dickinsoniids within the animal kingdom, establishing Dickinsonia as the oldest confirmed macroscopic animals in the fossil record (558 million years ago) next to marginally younger Kimberella from Zimnie Gory (555 million years ago). However alien they looked, the presence of large dickinsoniid animals, reaching 1.4 m in size, reveals that the appearance of the Ediacara biota in the fossil record is not an independent experiment in large body size but indeed a prelude to the Cambrian explosion of animal life.
“Prelude” is a bit ambiguous, but I’ll grant that these are animals. I asked my friend Latha Menon, who has a Ph.D. from Oxford in early life studies, whether this paper was important, and I give her answer (with permission):
I do think it is an important paper. I’ve recently seen a lovely Dickinsonia specimen in a collection. You can really see how it’s like a very thin flatworm like form (or like a giant Trichoplax?) draped over the uneven ground below. Much has been written about its morphology but to find a specimen with associated organic matter and demonstrate that it is an animal from the biomarkers is very solid evidence. We have indications of simple animals earlier, from the traces found by Alex Liu and myself, and the remarkable squished Haootia specimen Martin Brasier discovered, which seems to show muscle bands. This specimen is younger and part of a more complex assemblage, but it is good to have solid evidence of animals well before the Cambrian boundary and some 40 Ma before the Cambrian explosion. Animals did not burst on the scene then; there was, as most of us have suspected, a long fuse.
Of course this does not mean that all the large forms of the Ediacaran were animals; there were probably several kinds of forms. But it does show that one ‘quilted’ form was animal and that suggests a number of other enigmatic forms in the biota were too.
Just for grins, here’s a photo, courtesy of Australian National University, showing Bobrovskiy collecting fossils in Russia. It ain’t easy!
