Readers’ wildlife photographs

September 13, 2016 • 7:30 am

Mark Sturtevant sent some lovely photos of lepidopterans:

This is my 2nd installment of pictures from local butterfly houses. Most of these were recently featured here by Robert Lang, but among this batch are some new species.

The first two pictures show one of the more common butterflies featured in these houses, namely the postman (Heliconius melpomene). This South American species is unpalatable, and comes in several regional forms that co-mimics regional forms of another unpalatable species, H. erato. Mimicry between species that share Do Not Eat warning signs is called Müllerian mimicry. The distribution of the two species are mapped here.

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The zebra longwing (Heliconius charitonia) shown in the next picture is a widely distributed species of the neotropics. It ranges northward into Florida where I hear it is their state butterfly. I had learned that this species lives quite a long time because they supplement the usual nectar diet by also eating pollen. I wonder how they do that.

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Next is a very large butterfly, the paper kite (Idea leuconoe). This species ranges through southeast Asia.

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This mating pair of cattleheart butterflies (Parides eurimedes) has an interesting story. I was setting up to take a picture of one of them, when along came the second one (which must have been a male) and this one hovered over the perching female for several seconds while flicking its abdomen up and down. I immediately knew this was to direct a pheromone from the flying male to the perching female, because I learned it from WEIT some time ago.  The aphrodisiac evidently worked because the male then landed next to its intended, and they wasted no time, as shown here. I was pretty much gobsmacked.

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No trip to a butterfly house is complete without seeing the large blue morphos (Morpho peleides). These always attract a lot of attention when in flight, but as the first picture shows they usually sit with their wings tightly closed. This one let its camouflage slip a little. I had a couple land on me, and someone told me that they like to do that if you are wearing brown, which indeed I was.

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The second picture shows one with wings open. I do not know the purpose of this spectacular color, but perhaps it is to signal to other morphos since they do chase each other around a lot.

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Next is an old morpho, wings open, that has probably reached the end of its life. The blue color is not due to pigment but is an example of a structural color, meaning that light striking the upper wing surfaces experience differential wave interference. Only blue color reflects away from the labyrinthine microstructures on the upper wing scales, and so that is what we see.

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I regard the final picture as one of the best pictures I have taken in my hobby. This old morpho (it might have been the same one in the previous picture) was perched up high near the glass ceiling so that sunlight was strongly passing through the wings. Absolutely no blue color was visible since the light transmitted through the wings was more intense than the reflected light needed for the blue color. But by using the camera flash I could get a bit more reflected light off of the upper wing surface, and voilà: blue color!

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Tuesday: Hili dialogue

September 13, 2016 • 6:43 am
It’s September 13, and I’m glad to report that it’s International Chocolate Day (decreed, of course, by the U.S. National Confectioners Association to coincide with the birthday of Milton Hershey, and you know who he is).  On this day in 1848, Vermont railroad worker Phineas Gage (1823-1860) survived a  3′ 7″ crowbar weighing  13 pounds being driven through his skull during an explosion. It destroyed much of his temporal lobe, with marked effects on his personality after he recovered, leading to an obvious connection between brain structure and personality, though this was before the days when good neurological studies could be done.  Here’s a photo of his skull after death, the bar that went through it (look at the size of that thing!), a reconstruction of the damage and a photo of Gage, who died at 37 after a bout of seizures:
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Notables born on this day include Walter Reed (1851), John J. Pershing (1860), and Judith “Miss Manners” Martin (1938). Those who died on this day include Amon Göth, who ran the Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp and was played by Ralph Fiennes in the movie “Schindler’s List” (executed 1946; you can see his hanging here on YouTube, which took several attempts before it worked), Tupac Shakur (shot to death in 1996), and Ann Richards (2006), a decent governor of Texas later defeated by George W. Bush. Since then it’s been downhill all the way in Texas.  Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is being her usual demanding self, in this case demanding shade from Malgorzata. In other words, Malgorzata is throwing shade on the Princess!
Hili: It’s good that you are giving me shade, the sun is scorching.
M: But can we go now?
Hili: Wait a moment, I have to look at something.
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In Polish:
Hili: Dobrze, że dostarczasz mi cienia, bo to słońce strasznie praży.
Małgorzata: A czy możemy pójść dalej?
Hili: Zaczekaj, muszę coś zobaczyć.
And, as lagniappe, reader Blue from Iowa sent me the sign she’s put by her front door to keep the goddies away. They’re only $15.99 from this site and, she says, “seem sturdy”.
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British ailurophiles: Get your tuchas to Clapham Common Tube station, where there are no ads—just cats!

September 12, 2016 • 2:00 pm

It’s time! For two weeks (see my announcement here), the Clapham Common Tube station in London will have every ad replaced by pictures of . . . . CATS! No ads, just moggies! This is the result of a Kickstarter campaign that raised £ 23,000 pounds. As the BBC reported a while back:

Almost 700 people helped the Citizens Advertising Takeover Service (Cats) raise £23,000 to buy the advertising space at Clapham Common station.

. . . The images will be around the turnstiles (which the collective are calling cat flaps), down the escalators and leading up to the platform. The aim is that, wherever people look, there will be cats.

The adverts will be word-free apart from one which will highlight the work of Battersea Cats and Dogs Home and Cat Protection charities.

The idea emerged from a 200-strong group called Glimpse, which wanted to express how “friends and experiences are more valuable than stuff you can buy” said Mr Turner.

Initially they were going to use pictures of forests and the ocean.

“But then we thought about grabbing people’s attention and should use the one thing that the internet loves and cats were the obvious answer,” he added.

He said he loved the idea as it was “very subversive, as there’s nothing anyone can do about it”.

“If you can’t have a real cat, this will be the next best thing,” he added.

This is what it looks like right now, as reported by metro.co.uk. What are you waiting for?

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screen-shot-2016-09-12-at-12-20-24-pmThe first reader who sends me a photo of him/her posing in front of the cat ads will receive a free autographed copy of Faith Versus Fact. This offer expires in one week.

h/t: pyers

Join iNaturalist and get your nature photos identified to species

September 12, 2016 • 1:00 pm

Reader Susan Heller called my attention to a new free program called iNaturalist, run by the Cal Academy, where you can register (takes one minute: just give a login name, email, and password), and then submit your nature photos. There’s no downside. As Susan wrote:

Your readers who send wildlife photos might enjoy joining iNaturalist. You post your photos on this site, and if you’re not sure of the identification, other members will help identify your postings.  I recently posted a couple of dragonfly photos (and I know nothing about dragonflies except that they emerge from nymphs), and within 30 minutes both had been identified!  I love the name “Black Saddlebags,” one of the dragonflies with bizarre black ‘bags’ on its wings. Various groups also check the site and add your observations to their data bases – especially the bird and biodiversity groups. Anyway, http://www.iNaturalist.org is the address.

I’m sure you’re curious about the Black Saddlebags dragonfly (Tramea lacerata), so here it is:

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This is a project of The iNaturalist Network, which describes itself like this:

iNaturalist is an global community of naturalists, scientists, and members of the public sharing over a million wildlife sightings to teach one another about the natural world while creating high quality citizen science data for science and conservation. The iNaturalist technology infrastructure and open source software is administered by the California Academy of Sciences as part of their mission to explore, explain, and sustain life on Earth.

If any reader needs an ID, try it out and report back here.

A map of the Universe

September 12, 2016 • 12:30 pm

This video is self-explanatory, but when I first watched it a question came immediately to mind: how come the superfluity of stars that serve no obvious purpose if you think this is all God’s creation? Since we can’t see most of these by eye, why did God make them in the first place? Or are they providing light for God-created species living on other planets?

Be sure to enlarge the video.

Inside the Templeton Foundation: You can have your evolution and your Adam and Eve, too

September 12, 2016 • 11:00 am

It turns out that one of our readers, who occasionally comments as “Douglas E” (DE), was involved with both BioLogos and the Templeton Foundation, and has some inside skinny on both organizations. Actually, BioLogos comes out looking much better than Templeton, since the Foundation put DE and his colleagues through endless hoops when they were trying to fund a proposal to turn evangelical Christians toward evolution, and then ultimately rejected the hypothesis for reasons that I’ve long suspected.

You can read the whole tortuous story (and see the links) at DE’s website A View from Planet Boulder, in a post called “The Templeton two-step.” In short, DE, in collaboration with geneticist Joseph McInerney, Francis Collins (Founder of BioLogos and now head of the National Institutes of Healthy), Pete Enns (a Harvard-trained theologian who later became the chief biblical scholar for BioLogos) and Darrell Falk (a Christian biology professor who later became president of BioLogos), decided to apply for an educational grant from the John Templeton Foundation.

Templeton had already given a big grant to fund the infrastructure and leadership of BioLogos, an organization designed to acquaint evangelical Christians with evolution, and, by showing them that their faith was really compatible with evolution, make them fans of Darwin. But beyond salaries and infrastructure, BioLogos needed funds for educational programs. So DE and his colleagues applied formally to Templeton for a grant to develop educational resources for religious students learning evolution, a grant called “Integrating Evolution and Faith: Resources for College Biology Professors.”

A sidelight here: both Karl Giberson (executive Vice-President of Biologos) and Pete Enns didn’t believe in the existence of a historical Adam and Eve as the First Couple (see here and here), a belief that is almost a sine qua non for evangelical Christians. After all, if you don’t see Adam and Eve as real people, then where did Original Sin come from and how did it get transmitted to all humanity? And if none of us are imbued with Original Sin, what’s the point of Jesus coming to Earth to give up his life so that, by taking him as our savior, we could be cleansed of that Sin? Without Adam and Eve as literal people, the whole narrative of evangelical Christianity falls to bits.

Yet both Enns and Giberson saw Adam and Eve as metaphorical, a view that has its own theological problems but is at least supported by science, for population genetics tells us that the human population was never smaller than 12,500 individuals during the last million years. I discuss Enns’s view on how one should argue for a metaphorical Adam and Eve in Faith Versus Fact (pp. 130-131) as well as here. You can read Enns’s own arguments in his book The Evolution of Adam: What the Bible Does and Doesn’t Say about Human Origins.

But a metaphorical rather than a literal Adam and Eve is, as I said, anathema to Evangelical Christians (and also to the Catholic Church, whose official dogma is that yes, Adam and Eve were not only real people, but the ancestors of us all). If the pair was simply a big metaphor, well, then Jesus died for a metaphor.

Enns and Giberson left BioLogos around 2011, and I suspected from various murmurings that they either left of their own accord or were fired. As I wrote in 2012:

Peter Enns was the Senior Fellow in Biblical Studies at BioLogos, the Templeton-funded and Francis-Collins-founded organization devoted to reconciling evangelical Christianity and evolution.  Enns has good academic credentials, including a Ph.D. from Harvard in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations.  And he left BioLogos about the same time as Karl Giberson (the Vice President), and I suspect it was because both of these guys couldn’t abide BioLogos‘s weaselly stand on Adam and Eve: a refusal to take a stand on whether they existed or not despite the clear results of populations genetics that they could not have existed.

Besides his tortuous interactions with Templeton, which apparently micromanages grants—including making sure the “theological aspect” is up to snuff—DE says some things that confirm that an Adam and Eve kerfuffle was behind the departure of Enns from BioLogos. A metaphorical Adam and Eve just wasn’t acceptable to Templeton, but was the only thing acceptable to the grant-writers. And so the grant went down the tubes, and Enns and Giberson left BioLogos. From DE’s post:

In retrospect, this should have been translated as “Pete needs both guidance and a leash.” Pete would likely admit that he is not the most diplomatic person, and often uses challenging and controversial ideas to generate meaningful discussions about important topics. The titles of his books indicate his positions: The Bible Tells Me So – Why Defending Scripture Has Made Us Unable To Read It; The Evolution Of Adam – What The Bible Does And Doesn’t Say About Human Origins; The Sin Of Certainty – Why God Desires Our Trust More Than Our “Correct” Beliefs. I think that it would be safe to say that these are not the types of things that many fundamentalist Christians want to hear, and certainly would not be inclined to accept; hence the Foundation’s fixation on ‘theological credibility.’

Also, in retrospect, it seems quite clear that JTF [John Templeton Foundation] personnel had privately conveyed concern to BioLogos about how the details of Theist Evolution /Evolutionary Creation were going to be presented in a pastoral manner to the targeted evangelical community. Note my emphasis on ‘pastoral’. The target community needed more pastoring than biblical scholarship, especially if that scholarship accepts the scientific evidence for human origins, not a literal interpretation of the Genesis account of the creation of Adam and Eve. To accommodate this perceived need, the JTF proposed that we add personnel to the proposal to address the pastoral component, and that Pete’s time and effort be cut back. Understandably, Pete was not pleased. The implicit message was that targeted evangelicals would likely not be particularly receptive to Pete’s Old Testament scholarship regarding creation and Adam and Eve. As one Templeton official said: “They need an Adam and Eve.” [JAC: my emphasis there.]

This is when Joe and I said “Nope”. We agreed that this is not how projects should be developed, reviewed, funded and managed. We had established a good working relationship with Pete and respected his theological positions in relationship to what we biologists accept as established science. We were not interested in being funded by an organization that appeared to be involved with micromanagement, control, and influence.  It seemed clear to Joe and me that the JTF had a  literalist/creationist bias regarding the project and its expected outcomes, e.g., many evangelicals need a real Adam and an Eve; thus promote any data and any experts that support such a notion.  Not possible from my and Joe’s perspective.

As DE noted in an email to me, “My recollection is that the folks at Templeton felt that many evangelicals ‘need an Adam and Eve’ and thus believed that the Enns position would be off-putting to their target audience.  Of course that was the whole point – to get the evangelicals to understand that there was no original two, and to convince them that they could take the bible seriously without taking it literally.  Basically they let the tail wag the dog.  They seem not to understand that their target audience is not the flaming fundamentalists who have no intentions of ever changing their minds, evidence be damned!!!”

I’ve long felt that the Adam and Eve story is going to become the Waterloo of accommodationism: a decisive battle that evangelical Christians simply can’t win. Now I’m not a Sophisticated Theologian™, but I can’t see how the whole Christian narrative makes any sense if Adam and Eve were metaphorical—if for no other reason than if that were true, there’s no convincing story for why we’re all imbued with sin and need to be cleansed by the blood of Jesus. The conflict between the facts of population genetics and the necessities of Christianity admits of no easy resolution, and is a paradigm of how when facts contradict faith, people tenaciously cling to their faith.

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Jeremy England: the next Charles Darwin?

September 12, 2016 • 9:00 am

A reader whose email I’ve lost (sorry) sent me a link to this provocatively titled article from ozy.com: “Jeremy England, the man who may one-up Darwin.” Well, I had to look that up, for I’ve seen claims of one-upping Darwin many times in my career, but I’ve heard a lot lately about this England fellow. Only 33, he’s the Thomas D. & Virginia W. Cabot Career Development Associate Professor of Physics at MIT. The buzz about him, as detailed (or rather, sketched) in the ozy.com piece, is that he’s supposedly developed a theory that explains the origin of life from physical principles.  But what that theory is seems so arcane, and buried in hard-to-read papers, see below, that I haven’t been able to understand it, and thus can’t judge it.

Now explaining the origin of life, or “abiogenesis,” would be great, though we almost certainly won’t know if such theories describe the way life actually started, but that doesn’t make England a substitute for or equivalent to Darwin. Not that Darwin was right about everything—he got genetics wrong, for instance—but Darwin’s 1859 book was so comprehensive, so correct in the main, that unless someone proposes an entire new theory of evolution, they won’t be be entitled to the monicker “the next Darwin”.

Nevertheless, the best summary of England’s theory for the layperson that I’ve seen is given in the Times of Israel (England is an Orthodox Jew and spends a lot of time studying the Torah, trying to reconcile it with modern science). England’s theory is apparently based on the self-organizing properties of molecules:

For instance, plants are structured in such a way that they are great at absorbing energy from sunlight. Monkeys are good at finding bananas and eating them.

England says that if you take a system containing a tremendous diversity of molecules, then add an external energy source, the molecules will start to arrange themselves in a shape that resonates with their environment.

How does this happen?

The famous video of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse, and the way a glass breaks when an opera singer reaches a certain pitch, are both examples of the physical phenomenon of resonance, where the shape of object or vessel will affect the pitch that it wants to vibrate at.

“If particles are in the right shape they will move and wiggle a lot with their environment. If they’re in the wrong shape they won’t wiggle so much.”

Any given system, says England, is constantly fluctuating a little bit and changing its shape, even if this is happening very slowly — for instance, water wearing away at rock or the motion of a glacier.

“A system is capable of shifts in its shape but often slowly enough that you’re not keeping track. It will make lots of different random moves but if I am poking at it or singing at it or blowing at it, the system makes a little hop then another random little hop then another, and this is happening at the molecular level.”

England says there’s a bias in how these hops happen.

“The hops you’re less likely to undo are the ones where you get pushed harder by the environment. The most durable changes in shape happen when the system is shaped to be good at getting pushed on by the environment.”

Ergo, life. (See another description of the theory here.) The novelty of England’s theory appears to reside at least partly in his claim that it makes the origin of life nearly inevitable.

Did you understand that? I didn’t, either. But I haven’t read the papers, so I can’t really judge (there’s also a lecture on YouTube that doesn’t enlighten me much), and just maybe the theory is so complicated that it can’t be explained properly to the layperson.  I’ve put some of England’s papers on the topic below (with links) in the hopes that readers who understand these things can see how revolutionary his hypothesis is. He’s certainly received publicity and encomiums for it.

The ozy.com article, however, doesn’t shed much light on England’s new idea. The paragraph in bold below, for instance, seems misleading, as if there’s a huge problem in explaining why organisms that “thrive in the same environmental conditions” aren’t identical. But whales and phytoplankton have very different ways of life, and evolved from very different ancestors. England’s problem seems to be that organisms that live in the same general habitat should, according to modern evolutionary theory, be identical. But “the same general habitat” is not identical to “the same ecological niche.”

England didn’t begin with number-crunching, though. During his postdoc research on embryonic development, he kept coming back to the question: What qualifies something as alive or not? He later superimposed an analytical rigor to that question, publishing an equation in 2013 about how much energy is required for self-replication to take place. For England, that investigation was only the beginning. “I couldn’t stop thinking about it,” he says, his normally deep voice rising until eventually cracking. “It was so frustrating.” Over the next year, he worked on a second paper, which is under peer review now. This one took his past findings and used them to explain theoretically how, under certain physical circumstances, life could emerge from nonlife.

In the most basic terms, Darwinism and the idea of natural selection tell us that well-adapted organisms evolve in order to survive and better reproduce in their environment. England doesn’t dispute this reasoning, but he argues that it’s too vague. For instance, he says, blue whales and phytoplankton thrive in the same environmental conditions — the ocean — but they do so by vastly different means. That’s because that while they’re both made of the same basic building blocks, strings of DNA are arranged differently in each organism.

Now take England’s simulation of an opera singer who holds a crystal glass and sings at a certain pitch. Instead of shattering, England predicts that over time, the atoms will rearrange themselves to better absorb the energy the singer’s voice projects, essentially protecting the glass’s livelihood. So how’s a glass distinct from, say, a plankton-type organism that rearranges it self over several generations? Does that make glass a living organism?

I don’t get what’s revolutionary here. Overall, I think that England’s theory is based on life originating by the self-organization of molecules that will almost always occur under Earthlike conditions. The self-organization bit isn’t new, but the inevitability may be. And then I see some criticism of Darwinian evolution that makes no sense at all.  So, I’ll reserve judgement about the Second Coming of Darwin until the experts have weighed in on England’s work. If you’ve read his stuff already please weigh in below.

Here are four seemingly relevant papers linked to England’s MIT webpage:

Spot the snipe!

September 12, 2016 • 7:30 am

No Readers’ Wildlife photos today as I have to conserve what I have (send yours in), and Stephen Barnard also sent me a “spot the. . ” photograph. His notes:

I was taking some calibration shots with my digiscoping setup, trying to get the exposure right, when this bird popped into view. The rig was fixed on a tripod and I had no idea the bird was there until I saw the photo. Pretty sure it’s a Wilson’s Snipe (Gallinago delicata). Not a great photo, but I thought the serendipity was cool.

Can you spot it? I classify this one as “pretty easy”.

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