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.
Honey the duck is pulling the same stunts she did last year: before finally leaving, she absented herself from the pond for a day or so, and then returned. She did this about three times in late August of 2017 (she finally left on September 1), and has done it again—she was there this morning, and ravenous. Here are some photos of the morning feeding. It was pretty dark around the pond, so shutter speeds were low and the photos slightly blurred. But there’s no doubt this is Honey: look at the mottled bill.
Sadly, she is without her drake Jim (James Pond), whom I hoped would act as her guide and protector on the flight south—or wherever she goes. But I’m happy to see her again! We’ll feed her up for migration.
Jacques Hausser from Switzerland (whom I thank profusely for sending me a copy of the 1935 French children’s book Plouf: Canard Sauvage [Plouf: Wild duck; “Plouf” means “splash” or “plonk”]), sent some lovely pictures of wading birds and two landscapes from a recent trip with his daughter to the Shetland Islands. His notes are indented:
With their treeless landscape of moors, peat bogs, lakes and sheep pastures, their countless sheltered fjords (locally called “voe”) and their small human population, the Shetland Islands are a paradise for waders. And for me too, since most of them are rarely seen in Switzerland. As with earlier contributions, photos labelled (Jo) are from my daughter Joëlle. First, two landscapes to give you an idea of the place.
(Jo) A typical Shetland inland landscape: Loch of Clousta, Aisthing, Mainland. At the beginning of June the heather still looks rather wintery.
(Jo). Yes, it is the Atlantic Ocean (pro parte). The incredible Stromness Voe, Whiteness, Mainland, is a five km long, but at most 200 m, wide fjord enclosed between two narrow fingerlike headlands. I have appended a map of the place. The photo was taken from the northern tip of the fjord.
The Eurasian oystercatcher, Haematopus ostralegus (Haemapodidae), is ubiquitous, found either on the sea shore (eating mostly mussels and other bivalve mollusks) or inland on sheep pastures (eating mostly earthworms). Interestingly, the tip of the bill of coastal birds is rather blunt, while it is sharply pointed in inland birds. Nothing genetic here, but a different balance between wear and tear versus growth – yes, bills are made of keratin and grow and wear continuously like nails and claws.
An Eurasian curlew,Numenius arcuata (Scolopacidae), calling. If you don’t know their beautiful songs and calls, you can see and hear a nice video here: [JAC: do have a listen!]
The Northern lapwing, Vanellus vanellus (Charadriidae). Here a female, recognizable by its mostly white throat and its relatively short crest.
Posts are welcome substitutes for trees to enable birds to watch the territory. This Common Redshank, Tringa totanus (Scolopacidae) knows its theory of the center of gravity! And don’t worry, it has two fully functional legs!
(Jo) The Common Snipe, Gallinago gallinago (Scolopacidae). This one was singing on the post signaling a “passing place” on a typical narrow Shetland road, and Joëlle, who was driving, was on the good side of the car. I tried to exit the car discreetly, and of course the bird flew away. I’m still slightly jealous… Note the enormous bill used to probe for earthworms and other prey in the wet ground, and the strange position of the eyes, giving the bird a more than hemispheric field of view – even with the bill deep in the mud.
And now four small species. First the Dunlin, Calidris alpina (Scolopacidae). This tiny bird (hardly larger than a house sparrow) nests in marshy areas.
Common ringed plover, Charadrius hiaticula (Charadriidae). A close cousin of the American kildeer we have seen recently in readers’ photos, but smaller. Like the kildeer, it nests on open ground.
Sanderling, Calidris alba (Scolopacidae) – The Shetland islands are only a stopover on their way to Northern Greenland or Spitzbergen. Alba means “white” in latin, and this name refers to its winter plumage.
(Red) knot, Calidris canutus (Scolopacidae). Another species en route to Greenland. It is a giant among the Calidris sandpipers, approximatively the size of a robin (for American readers) or a blackbird (for European ones).
I was lucky enough to get the four species together…
It’s Wednesday, August 22 (i.e., Hump Day), and, unless Honey and her swain show up when I go to the pond shortly, it’s the First Duckless Day of Summer. It’s also National Pecan Torte Day (meh) and National Eat a Peach Day, which I’d like to think refers to one of my favorite albums (though it doesn’t):
A fricking masterpiece
On this day in 1639, the city of Madras (now called Chennia) was founded by the British East India company on land bought from local rulers. On May 22, 1780, Captain Cook’s ship HMS Resolution returned to England, but sans Cook, who had been killed in Hawaii. Here’s the route of his three big voyages; the last is in blue, with the dashed part the route back after Cook’s death:
(From Wikipedia): The routes of Captain James Cook’s voyages. The first voyage is shown in red, second voyage in green, and third voyage in blue. The route of Cook’s crew following his death is shown as a dashed blue line.
On this day in 1902, Teddy Roosevelt became the first U.S. President to publicly appear in an automobile. Exactly twenty years later, Irish Free State military commander Michael Collins was shot dead in an ambush. He was 31.
On August 22, 1941, the terrible Siege of Leningrad by the Nazis began. It lasted 872 days and produced about four million casualities, mostly Russian. It’s hard to underestimate the horrors that took place, including cannibalism of both living and dead citizens. Wikipedia notes this:
The two-and-a-half year siege caused the greatest destruction and the largest loss of life ever known in a modern city. On Hitler’s direct orders the Wehrmacht looted and then destroyed most of the imperial palaces, such as the Catherine Palace, Peterhof Palace, Ropsha, Strelna, Gatchina, and other historic landmarks located outside the city’s defensive perimeter, with many art collections transported to Germany. A number of factories, schools, hospitals and other civil infrastructure were destroyed by air raids and long range artillery bombardment.
The 872 days of the siege caused extreme famine in the Leningrad region through disruption of utilities, water, energy and food supplies. This resulted in the deaths of up to 1,500,000 soldiers and civilians and the evacuation of 1,400,000 more (mainly women and children), many of whom died during evacuation due to starvation and bombardment.
On this day in 1989, Nolan Ryan struck out Rickey Henderson, becoming the first major league baseball pitcher to hurl 5,000 strikeouts. He still holds the record as the only pitcher with more than that number, but his lifetime total is 5,714. On this day in 2004, versions of Munch’s “The Scream” and “Madonna” were stolen from a museum in Oslo, Norway; both were later recovered, but were somewhat damaged. Finally, on this day eleven years ago, the Texas Rangers defeated the Baltimore Orioles by a score of 30-3, the most runs scored by any team in the modern history of major league baseball. Here are the highlights of that lopsided game:
Notables born on August 22 include Claude Debussy (1862), cartoonist George Herriman (1880), Dorothy Parker (1893), Leni Riefenstahl (1902), Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908), Norman Schwarzkopf, Jr. (1934), and Tori Amos (1963). Here’s one of Cartier-Bresson’s photographs; along with Diane Arbus, he’s my favorite “street photographer”:
Cartier-Bresson: “”Boys playing in Sevilla, 1933”.
Notables who died on this day include Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1806), Huey P. Newton (1989) and Colleen Dewhurst (1991).
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili seemed to be feeling insecure (but was looking very cute). When I asked Malgorzata if Hili was feeling insecure, she responded, “No, I don’t think so. She obviously wants us humans to repeat it often so we don’t start to think above our station in life.”
Hili: How important are cats in the life of humans?
A: Extremely important.
In Polish:
Hili: Jak ważne są koty w życiu człowieka?
Ja: Są niezwykle ważne.
A tweet from Matthew. After looking at the thread, I still have no idea what he ate.
Today I ate some 609 million year old fossilised embryos. They were gritty.
From reader Gethyn: This man’s story of sexual and physical abuse at the hands of the Catholic Church in Ireland can be found here. His testimony is emotional and powerful; do listen to it and see what the Catholic Church did.
Tom Jones and Aretha: who woulda thunk it? It’s GOOD!
I had no idea this existed, from 1970 a live medley of songs with Aretha Franklin and Sir Tom. 6 minutes and 28 seconds of pure bliss. pic.twitter.com/XM9YHUcM4E
From Grania again: All I can say is “OMG”. The video is here.
This story makes me ashamed to be a Portlander: Progressive man brings US flag to protest a right-wing rally. Antifa beats him to a bloody pulp while others watch because they say flag is fascist symbol. https://t.co/BFOCmQ5QcNpic.twitter.com/YiopFcaIYV
Well, I looked up the records for Honey’s appearances last year, and between the 25th and the 31st of August she left the pond three times and then returned for a day. She left for good on September 1.
We’re still hoping she’ll return for a goodbye and a feed, but don’t know for sure. In the meantime, as if to guarantee that she’d leave, Anna bought five pounds of corn yesterday and I ordered three bags of mealworms. Well, they’ll keep till next year. Until then, here’s a pair of empty nesters feeling a bit bittersweet (selfie by Anna). I’m holding corn and mealworms in front of an empty pond. . .
According to a new report by CNN, Trump is heading to West Virginia today to celebrate the further dismantling of prudent environmental regulations. In this case the EPA is going to deregulate federal supervision of coal-fired electric plants, giving the regulations back to the states. Coal states will, of course, scrap those regulations as fast as they can, for fewer regulations mean more jobs for state residents—not to mention more pollution-related diseases. As CNN notes:
The move would reverse Obama administration efforts to combat climate change and marks the fulfillment of a campaign promise at the heart of his appeal in coal-producing states like West Virginia — an appeal embodied by Trump’s 2016 campaign stops in the coal country of West Virginia, Kentucky and Pennsylvania, where Trump supporters waved “Trump Digs Coal” signs and where the President-to-be donned a coal-mining helmet.
The EPA Tuesday morning formally unveiled the details of its new plan to devolve regulation of coal-fired power plants back to the states, one that is expected to give a boost to the coal industry and increase carbon emissions nationwide.
The move is expected to spark an intense legal battle, with environmental groups already readying legal challenges to the new regulations.
Acting EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler on Tuesday argued the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan — the policy being replaced by this week’s proposal — “exceeded the agency’s legal authority” and argued the old regulations led to rising energy prices which have “hurt low and middle income Americans the most.”
Yes, the same people who are also hurt by pollution! Coal contributes not only to global warming compared to other forms of energy, but also creates particulates that contribute to diseases like asthma and heart and lung disease. This translates into deaths.
But there is some pushback:
The move is just the latest effort by the Trump administration to revive an ailing coal industry and strip climate change-fighting regulations established by the Obama administration. He previously announced plans to withdraw from the Paris climate accords, calling it an unfair deal for Americans.
“I was elected by the citizens of Pittsburgh,” Trump said at the time, “not Paris.”
Those moves have been rebuffed by California and a dozen other states, which have led a push to maintain high environmental standards and legally challenge the Trump administration’s rollback of the Obama-era rules.
In a statement on Tuesday, California Gov. Jerry Brown decried the Trump administration’s latest proposal as “a declaration of war against America and all of humanity.”
“It will not stand,” he said. “Truth and common sense will triumph over Trump’s insanity.”
As a harbinger of this new era of despoiling the environment, Trump made some very bizarre statements at a fundraiser in New York—comments so bizarre that the Washington Post, in the article below (click on screenshot), had to translate them into English.
First the comments as given by the Post:
The Toronto Star’s Daniel Dale tweeted the pertinent section, modified from Factba.se’s transcript.
Here it is in its entirety.
“We have — clean coal exports have increased, 60 percent last year — clean coal, which is one of our big assets that we weren’t allowed to use for our miners. You remember Hillary with the coal, right, sitting with the miners at the table? Remember? That wasn’t so good for her. So the people of West Virginia and all over, you look at Wyoming, you look at so many different places where they just, Pennsylvania, where they loved what we did, and it’s clean coal and we have the most modern procedures. But it’s a tremendous form of energy in the sense that in a military way — think of it — coal is indestructible.”
“You can blow up a pipeline, you can blow up the windmills. You know, the windmills, boom, boom, boom [mimicking windmill sound] bing [mimes shooting large gun], that’s the end of that one. If the birds don’t kill it first. The birds could kill it first. They kill so many birds. You look underneath some of those windmills, it’s like a killing field, the birds. But you know, that’s what they were going to, they were going to windmills. And you know, don’t worry about — when the wind doesn’t blow, I said, ‘What happens when the wind doesn’t blow?’ ‘Well, then we have a problem.’
“Okay, good. They were putting them in areas where they didn’t have much wind, too. And it’s a subs — you need subsidy for windmills. You need subsidy. Who wants to have energy where you need subsidy? So, uh, the coal is doing great.”
This is like a twisted version of Ulysses: a mind dump by a demented narcissist. It’s horribly embarrassing to have our President talking about killing birds, blowing up pipelines, and once again bashing Hillary Clinton. But the Post claims there’s a message in there, and translates it. Trump’s references—and lies—include these:
There’s no such thing as “clean coal”. What he’s referring to is apparently coal whose carbon dioxide emissions can be captured and re-used. That’s not what we were exporting: we were shipping out regular “dirty” coal. But even his figure is suspect given that in 2016 coal exports were abnormally low because of low global prices, and exports in 2012 ande 2014 were actually higher than those in 2017.
Clinton did speak to a town hall meeting in West Virginia, and angered locals by talking about “putting a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.” Maybe a good policy, but not a good thing to tell West Virginians.
The blowing up refers to Trump’s idea that attacking a coal company whose fuel is onsite is harder than blowing up a pipeline and windmills. (What he meant by the windmills killing birds is obscure to me, unless he’s somehow appealing to environmentalists!). But blowing up windmills is in fact harder than blowing up a single coal-fired plant, as you’d have to target a lot of windmills. And Trump has an animus against windmills. The Post notes that Trump was ticked off that his Scottish golf courses were going to be affected by local windmills, and he fought their construction, even saying that the sound from the windmills (“boom boom”) would hurt people’s health!
As for subsidies for wind power, that assumes that you have to pay people to generate power with wind farms because they’re more expensive per kilowatt hour generated than are coal plants. But the Post says that’s untrue:
While it can be tricky to compare the costs of electricity generation across methods, the financial advisory firm Lazard each year creates an index of the costs of production without subsidies. The 2017 iteration of that report found that wind power was less expensive than producing energy by burning coal. The long-term trend has been a drop in the cost of wind production, while coal production costs have been fairly steady.
Remember, too, what Trump said about those coal plants that are essential to national security: His administration wants to mandate purchases from them to ensure their viability. That’s a subsidy in its own right.
There’s no question that Trump pledged to prioritize the coal industry as a candidate and that, as president, he has tried to do so. But the rhetoric he uses, often picking up well-worn threads he’s been offering for years, can often be inscrutable. It can also often be wrong.
I lived through Nixon, G. W. Bush, and Reagan, and although I was disaffected then, that’s nothing compared to the horror embodied in having this man as the President of the United States.
When I was sent this announcement of a conference on evolution at Cambridge University next year (click on screenshots), and when I read the program and saw the speakers (links at third screenshot), I smelled a RAT (abbreviation for “rubbish and Templeton”), but I didn’t know for sure that the John Templeton Foundation was one of the sponsors till I clicked on the page given in the fourth screenshot.
And this page gives the aims of the conference and the names of the speakers (I know of only one of them, but of course I’ve been out of active science for a while):
This is the same tired old panoply of buzzwords that we’ve seen before: developmental bias (true in some sense, but we haven’t the slightest idea how important it is in evolution), developmental plasticity (a substitute for natural selection and mutation in initiating adaptive evolution, but again with virtually no evidence to support it) and “extra-genetic inheritance”—read “epigenetics”—another completely unevidenced factor in adaptive evolutionary change. What we have in this program, then, is a group of overly ambitious people, instantiated in the “Extended Evolutionary Synthesis” site (see below), who keep writing papers and having meetings touting their unevidenced theories, hoping that by sheer force of verbiage they’ll hijack modern evolutionary theory.
As for “balance”, there isn’t any in this conference: I see no critics of these buzz-topics on the program (they could, for example, have chosen the eminent critics Brian Charlesworth or Doug Futuyma, whose papers I cite below).
The odor of the Templeton Rat—remember that the nefarious rat in the book Charlotte’s Web was named “Templeton”!)—led me to this, which is exactly what I expected. Templeton is deeply invested, both programatically and financially, in overturning the modern view of evolution, perhaps because they think the “extended synthesis” will somehow promote spirituality or at least do down traditional evolutionary biology:
What is the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES)? You can read about it here, but it’s tendentious: designed explicitly to overturn long-standing aspects of what we call “neo-Darwinism”. Here’s what it’s designed to overthrow (these criticisms are followed by the “replacement theories” of the EES on the page:
We already know that new variation can arise through horizontal gene transfer as well as mutation, but that’s not part of the EES, whose proponents want to include epigenetic variation induced by the environment that mysteriously becomes heritable and a part of the DNA. Then—presto—adaptive evolution occurs! That there is not a lick of evidence for his idea hasn’t fazed its supporters at all. As I’ve stressed before, there is no evidence for any epigenetic changes lasting more than a couple of generations, and virtually no evidence that such changes have been part of adaptive evolutionary change. And to “natural selection”, which has been demonstrated time and time again, EES proponents want to add another arcane mechanism in which nonadaptive developmental plasticity somehow becomes incorporated into the genome as an adaptive phenomenon. Despite thousands of pages written about that, there are no convincing examples, and therefore NO evidence that such plasticity has played an “important” role in evolution.
I’ve leveled my criticisms at these “revolutionary” ideas time and time again (see here, for instance), but you can find them best incorporated in two recent papers (links free):
Charlesworth, D., N. H. Barton, and B. Charlesworth. 2017. The sources of adaptive variation. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 284.DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2016.2864 (see also my take on this)
And here’s who funds the EES. Yep, it’s mostly Templeton again, with a consortium of decent universities all too ready to take filthy lucre. Fifty-one scientists have their hands in the till:
The EES represents a new way of thinking about evolution, with its own assumptions, structure and predictions. It sets out to provide a coherent conceptual framework capable of inspiring novel research in evolutionary biology and adjacent fields.
We aim to:
Demonstrate the explanatory potential of EES thinking
Conduct critical empirical tests of key EES predictions
Devise novel conceptual and formal mathematical theory
Promote awareness of the role of conceptual frameworks in science and encourage pluralism
Our research will:
Provide definitive evaluations of the significance of hotly contested processes in evolution (e.g. niche construction, non-genetic inheritance)
Clarify the evolutionary importance of individual responses to the environment (plasticity)
Devise new theoretical approaches for complex genotype-to-phenotype relations
Establish to what extent developmental processes explain long-term trends, parallel evolution, biological diversity and evolvability
Note that the aims are often to “demonstrate” something rather than test it, and, indeed, this is my big objection to the EES program. While it’s possible that epigenetic inheritance, developmental plasticity as an initiator of adaptive evolutionary change, and other ideas have played some role in evolution, there is no evidence that they’re important. Indeed, this EES business has been promoted for years, and there’s little to show for it—certainly no widely accepted expansion of modern evolutionary theory except for the expansion of gaseous words produced by EES promoters. It’s a melange of theories without evidence—something that, indeed, the EES website admits:
What do people think of the EES?
The EES has been met with both enthusiasm and skepticism. The majority of responses to the EES research program are extremely supportive, but there are of course those who claim that the EES is not going to do any good. The skepticism is to some extent warranted, as the EES has yet to prove itself a vehicle for productive research within evolutionary biology. That is why this project sets out to put EES predictions to the test with a dedicated research program. The project aims to show that, precisely because it is spelled out in a disciplined way, the EES can stimulate novel questions, devise critical tests, open up new lines of enquiry, and provide insights that are unlikely under traditional perspectives.
Well, you know, these ideas have been floating around for about fifteen years or more, and if the EES hasn’t proven itself productive, except in getting dosh to scientists and yielding an endless stream of speculative papers, maybe it’s time to reassess its value. But as long as Templeton keeps handing out millions of dollars to promote these ideas, there will be a never-ending stream of grant-hungry scientists with their hands out, eager to advance their careers by promoting the Templeton agenda. To my mind, this is the biggest example of misguided careerism I’ve seen in evolutionary biology over my lifetime.
