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.
No braining today, as I have to direct my brains elsewhere. So let’s have some music.
Grania came across this song, “Suis-moi” (“Follow Me”) performed by the YouTube artists Nataly Dawn and Cyrille Aimée, and I found it delightfully addictive. It’s from last year’s animated French film The Little Prince, with music by Hans Zimmer and Richard Harvey. “Suis-moi” was performed in the movie by French singer Camille.
I believe I’ve featured Nataly Dawn before, but not Aimée, who contributes some nice scat singing to this version. The French lyrics and English translation are below; this seems to be one of those “Life is lovely” songs, which is not to denigrate it. The French is hard for me to understand, perhaps because it’s Canadian French—or perhaps there’s artistic license in how it’s pronounced. Anyway, I really like this version (TRIGGER WARNING: D*g at 2:37). The last minute features the singers talking about how they met and touting each other’s albums.
Below is the official music video with scenes from the movie, and you can see a live version of Camille singing the song (with a bass accompaniment) here. It’s been dog’s years since I read Le Petit Prince, so what’s with the sheep?
Here’s a 5½-minute video of “passive aggressive cats,” though not all of them deserve that monicker: some are active aggressive. But what a cruel joke the staff plays at 2:13! And I love the cat vs. kitten scuffle at 3:15.
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In this short video, a black mother cat communicates vocally with her tabby kittens. (Remember that all black cats carry the tabby gene, and in the right light you can sometimes see their stripes.)
UPDATE: Reader Beckie showed the video above to her moggies, and even made a video of their reaction:
This morning I was watching the mama cat video from your Caturday post. My kittens, Norbert and Lilith were looking for the other kitties. Thought you might enjoy a video of kittens enjoying a cat video.
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Reader pyers called my attention this morning to a French animal site, Wamiz, which had an article called “8 croyances absolument adorables sur les chats.” And he translated it, beginning with the title, “8 absolutely adorable beliefs about cats,” saving me the trouble of struggling with my rudimentary French. Pyers’s translation:
A stab at the translation: ( a French speaker might well tidy it up !)
In France, a stray cat taking up residence brings you luck.
In the States, seeing a white cat in a dream is a good luck sign.
For Italians, hearing a sneezing cat brings good luck on all who hear it.
To the Japanese, a tri-coloured moggy guarantees happiness to the home.
In Scotland, having a stray on your porch brings good luck.
(More sneezing !) In France, a cat sneezing on a bride on the morning of her wedding means that she will have a happy marriage.
Sailors need no convincing: cats bring good luck at sea.
For the Japanese, black cats keep away evil spirits and guarantee the good heath of their homes.
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As lagniappe, here’s a post and video from SOTT (via reader Steve K.) showing a well-behaved cat using a zebra crossing. The details:
A chauffeur in England spotted a law abiding cat waiting for the light to change before crossing the street at a local crosswalk.
Justin Scrutton shared dash cam video of the “streetwise” cat as it waited patiently for traffic to stop before walking along a crosswalk.
“Cat using a Zebra Crossing,” Scrutton wrote. “Only in Dartford…”
Scrutton applauded the feline as it appeared to follow proper traffic etiquette by looking both ways before crossing the two-way street.
“I was amazed when the car on the other side of the road stopped too and the cat calmly crossed,” he told ITV.
Worried that I wouldn’t understand the video (though, having visited the UK many times, I did), Matthew Cobb explained it to me:
For this to make sense your readers have to know that the black and white striped section of road is called a zebra crossing in the UK, and by law, if there is a pedestrian standing at the edge, the traffic HAS to stop (so the white van is being VERY BAD). The yellow-topped posts on either side are called Belisha beacons, after Leslie Hore-Belisha (1893–1957), the Minister of Transport who introduced them in the 1930s.
This would appear to be a genuine dash-cam from Dartford in Kent.
It’s Sept. 10, 2016 (lots of commemorations tomorrow for 9/11), and TV Dinner Day.
I’m pretty sure this is an indigenous American habit, but when I was a kid the family would watch television while eating special TV dinners you could buy frozen at the store and then reheat. Each one consisted of an aluminum tray with several compartments: one for a “meat”, one for potatoes, and then several vegetables. They were dreadful, and I’m not sure they even make them any more. And we, like many other families, had a set of TV. Dinner Trays: folding trays on legs that you could set up in front of a chair. The idea was to watch television and eat at the same time. Here’s a TV dinner in situ (this one even has dessert: baked apple slices); you can see more here.
This is more or less the kind of metal tray we had when I was young (richer folks would have wooden ones):
Does anybody still do this? If you’re “of a certain age,” as they say, you’ll remember these.
On this day in 1960, Abebe Bikila became the first sub-Saharan African to win a gold medal (Rome Olympics); he ran the marathon in bare feet! And, on September 10, 2008, the Large Hadron Collider, the instrument that found the Higgs Boson, was turned on in Geneva.
Notables born on this day include Arnold Palmer (1929), Roger Maris (1934), and Misty Copeland (1982). Those who died on TV Dinner Day include Mary Wollstonecraft (1797), Huey Long (1935; he was assassinated), and Jane Wyman (2007). Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the Princess is fishing for compliments:
Hili: How do I look?
A: Amazing.
Hili: I thought so.
In Polish:
Hili: Jak wyglądam?
Ja: Wspaniale.
Hili: Tak myślałam.
I’m not the only atheist who’s tamed wild rodents! This video by Dan Barker, co-president of the Freedom from Religion Foundation, was on his Facebook page this morning, but I persuaded him to put it on YouTube so I could embed it. On his FB page was this caption:
I have a little friend. The past 2 years, while reading and writing in the back yard, my 17 millionth cousin has been keeping me company.
He added in an email:
Darwin dug up worms in his backyard; I’m observing chipmunks. There are three other chipmunks out there who are not as brave. Yet.
We have a challenge here for reader Diana MacPherson, who feeds chipmunks, but not by hand. . .
Barbara King, a retired anthropology professor at William and Mary (my alma mater), has a regular column at National Public Radio’s (NPR’s), Cosmos & Culture site. The column this week, “Evolution uproar: What to do when a famous author dismisses Darwin, ” is devoted to Tom Wolfe’s new book The Kingdom Of Speech, which I reviewed for the Washington Post. And while Wolfe’s book is devoted to taking down two people who saw some biologically hardwired basis for human language—Charles Darwin and Noam Chomsky—King talks only about Darwin.
I can’t really grasp the point of King’s column, except to say that Wolfe’s book is deeply misguided about Darwin, and that Wolfe doesn’t have the chops to even begin attacking evolutionary biology. Several reviewers, including me, agreed, and feel that Wolfe’s book really isn’t worth reading.
But King disagrees with that, and point of her piece, if there is one, seems to be this: we should really, really read Wolfe’s book. I quote from King’s column:
The Kingdom of Speech has been out for 10 days. Many scientists I’m linked to through social media are suggesting it’s a waste of time to read it.
On the contrary, I believe we should read Wolfe’s book — and not only because it’s a slim little thing at 170 pages, easily consumed in a day.
An essay from 2005, “Always Go to the Funeral,” went viral for its poignant appeal for us to always honor someone else’s loss by making time in our busy schedules to go a memorial service. My parallel dictum would be “Always Read the Book.” Making the effort to read ideas that may diverge significantly from our own is a greater good — though doing so leaves us free to respond critically to the material in a way that I hope no one would do about the deceased at a funeral!
My “always read the book” mantra gains urgency because Wolfe flatly denies evolution. It’s not that he’s religious — he’s an atheist. He just, as he told CBS This Morning, considers evolution “a myth.” When people or projects distort or dismiss evolution, the bedrock understanding we have of life on Earth, we need to listen in a big way — and push back, as I wrote earlier this summer in “There’s No Controversy: Let’s Stop Failing Our Children On Evolution.”
It’s devastatingly easy to undermine Wolfe’s breezy dismissive statements — both about Darwin and about the great gulf that divides humans from other animals.
King then mentions Darwin’s Beagle voyage and the discovery and tool-using in chimps as forms of evidence for evolution, but she’s not more specific than that.
More important for her own argument, fails to make a case for why it’s important for us to read The Kingdom of Speech. And yet she’s insistent that we do. Why? There are far more comprehensive attempts to attack Darwin, and most people interested in the evolution vs. creationism controversy will have read them (Wolfe, for example, barely mentions intelligent design.) If you want to read more detailed critiques of modern evolution by creationists, pick up any of the Intelligent Design books of the last decade or so. You’ll find much more there to argue with than you will in Wolfe’s slim volume.
King then dismisses several lame reviews of Wolfe’s book, including the two in the New York Times (I agree), and gives me a shout-out, which I appreciate (though there’s a huge gaffe in the excerpt below—can you spot it?). But why on earth should we “certainly read Wolfe”? Reading Darwin (along with Behe or Wells, if you must) will suffice. Or, better yet, WEIT, which brings Darwin’s evidence up to date. But there’s nothing for the interested layperson to gain by perusing Wolfe’s cursory and misguided (though pretty well written) attacks on evolution.
So while King does call attention to the controversy, which NPR was loath to do, she doesn’t say why we need to read Wolfe’s take on Darwin. Maybe I’m missing something here, so have a look at her short column and weigh in below.
Over at the Atlantic, Ed Yong shows and describes some stunning videos of “evolution in action”: in this case bacteria evolving resistance to antibiotics. It’s a clever way to visualize the accumulation of mutations over time as bacteria evolve to survive increasingly large doses of antibiotics. Beyond this demonstration, the experiment also permits serious scientific study of the nature of those mutations. Questions, for example, could involve “Do the same mutations get fixed over and over again in independent trials?”; “Does evolution ever fail to occur?” (for example, certain strains of Streptococcus bacteria in humans didn’t evolve resistance to penicillin for years, though that may now be happening); “Are multiple mutations ever responsible for a single advance, so that there’s a waiting time for their accumulation?”, and so on.
The setup for these videos, and the conception of the experiment, was by Michael Baym at Harvard. His team built a huge petri dish, four feet by two feet, filled with agar colored black (to visualize the bacteria). At the edges of the “plate,” as shown below, there was no antibiotic in the agar. Then, as one moved toward the middle, antibiotic concentrations increased in a logarithmic manner, until in the middle there was a thousand times the amount of antibiotic that would kill the bacteria initially (the amount that would kill nearly all of them at first is the “1” stripe in the screenshot below).
Plates were then inoculated with E. coli at the two ends and allowed to adapt to the antibiotic by mutations and natural selection. They could grow toward the center only as resistance mutations accumulated. The bacteria are light colored so you can see the evolutionary wave of advance.
Here’s Ed’s description of what happens (video below) when the bacteria are challenged with ciprofloxacin—a very powerful antibiotic used for a variety of infections; I always take “cipro” with me when traveling overseas. “Real time” here means 14 days of evolution.
At the start of the video, bacteria are dropped into the edges of the dish and soon colonise the outer safe zones. Then they hit their first antibiotic wall, which halts their progress. After a few moments, bright spots appear at this frontier and start spreading outwards. These are resistant bacteria that have picked up mutations that allow them to shrug off the drug. They advance until they hit the next antibiotic zone. Another pause, until even more resistant strains evolve and invade further into the dish. By the end of the movie, even the centre-most stripe—the zone with the highest levels of killer chemicals—is colonised.
And Baym’s caption:
The MEGA-plate with a CPR gradient as in fig. S1 (0-20-200-2000-20000-2000-200-20-0). Movie was compiled from time-lapse imagery every 10 minutes for 14.2 days, and played at 30fps (18000X speed).
The second video shows adaptation to the antibiotic tremethoprim, and in this case you can see secondary mutations that speed up growth arising within one segment of the gradient. Again I quote Ed’s piece:
Resistance doesn’t come for free, and the same mutations that make bacteria invincible tend to slow their growth. You can see that in the movie below: at the 0:30 mark, the bacteria have advanced into the first antibiotic zone, but their colonies are faint and sparse.
But as the movie continues, bright spots start appearing within the faint areas. These are bacteria that have picked up “compensatory mutations”, which allow them to grow quickly and resist antibiotics. They ought to have been the fittest microbes on the plate, able to colonise new areas more effectively than their slower-growing peers. But more often than not, they became trapped. Weaker strains at the front of the expanding wave of microbes were already gobbling up all the nutrients, leaving their faster-growing peers with nowhere to grow. “You don’t have to be better than everyone else around you; you just have to be the first in a new area,” says Baym.
Here’s Baym’s caption for the video below; in this case “real time” is over about 12 days:
The MEGA-plate with an exponential trimethoprim gradient (0-3-30-300-3000-300-30-3-0 MIC). This movie was compiled from time-lapse imagery every 10 minutes for 11.7 days, and played at 30fps (18000X speed). Each second of video is approximately five hours of real time. Condensation on the lid is visible in the first several frames, and a single contaminating colony appears on the plate.
So what do we have here? As I said we have, “Evolution in Real Time”: something that creationists like Ray Comfort are always saying we don’t have. For evolution to be deemed true, say many creationists, we have to see it happen before our eyes, within a human lifetime or, preferably, within days! Yet that’s exactly what we have here, and we’ve known about this ever since antibiotics were widely dispensed after World War II. Antibiotic resistance is the paradigmatic example of evolution in real time. But we have similar real-time examples: herbicide resistance in plants, insecticide resistance in insects, and so on.
But of course, creationists don’t buy this as compelling evidence for evolution. The kind of evolution we see in the videos above, they say, is “microevolution”: one species simply changes a tiny bit to respond to a challenge. In other words, it’s evolution, but it doesn’t turn a bacterium into a dog, much less a eukaryote. What we want, say creationists, is “macroevolution in real time”: some substantial change that we see in real time—though they never define what they mean by substantial.
But the call for macroevolution in real time is impossible to meet, for the pace of such change is very slow. Nevertheless, we can actually see macroevolution over evolutionary time: big transitions in the fossil record. We have transitions between fish and amphibians, amphibians and reptiles, reptiles and mammals, reptiles and birds, terrestrial grazing mammals and whales (only about 8 million years!), and so on. No matter what you consider to be macroevolution, these are macroevolutionary changes visible through the strata. To say that they don’t count because we don’t see that change happening in a decade or so is simply bogus. Historical records of change, properly documented, are evidence every bit as valid as seeing bacteria evolve in petri dishes.
As for the ability of selection to produce big changes in short periods of time, just look at all the breeds of dogs, all descendants of a single wolf ancestor about 15,000 years ago. And if the breeds were known only as fossils, they’d be regarded not just as different species, but sometimes as different genera. Of course, creationists would respond that that’s not natural selection but “intelligent design,” since humans chose what features they wanted. But that’s also irrelevant, for, as Darwin realized, artificial selection is a very good model of natural selection—but with humans rather than nature imposing the criteria for fitness. If artificial selection works, and works to cause big changes, then there’s no reason to say that there are some limits to evolution that allow microevolution but not macroevolution. That whole distinction between micro- and macro-, which has become a cottage industry for creationists, is specious.
Stephen Knight, aka “The Godless Spellchecker”, is punctilious in checking his and other people’s sources, which has resulted in his calling out prominent figures for misquotation, or, in the case of C. J. W*rl*m*n, putting the kibosh on his career because of rampant plagiarism.
In a new article on his site, “A lesson in ‘journalism’ with Ansar and W*rl*m*n” (I can’t spell the second name lest I lose a bet), Knight did some checking on two claims. The first was this September 7 tweet by He Who Cannot Be Named:
Apparently the man who emitted this tweet didn’t bother to check his sources; as Knight notes:
What [W*rl*m*n] fails to tell you however, is that not only is the footage from 2008, but the Palestinian detainee was shot with a rubber bullet, in the foot. Hardly desirable behaviour I’ll grant you – but it paints a slightly different picture than the one presented by Werleman. As a side note, the soldier responsible was arrested and convicted for his actions – by Israeli authorities.
. . .Cast your mind back to the time Werleman shared a similar video which he claimed to show ‘Israeli soldiers beating and torturing Palestinian detainees in occupied West Bank’.
Unfortunately for Werleman the soldiers were not Israeli. The detainees were not Palestinian. This wasn’t even the West Bank. This was footage of the Guatemalan army mistreating civilians. It seems nothing has been learned since this humiliating episode.
Go to Knight’s site to see the fun. Well, we’re used to W*rl*m*n’s sleazy behavior, but here’s a really irksome case. There’s a picture of Sam Harris circulating on Twitter along with a sentence he supposedly uttered:
Knowing Sam, and having read most of what he’s written, I was unfamiliar with that quote, and simply didn’t believe it. Seriously, do you think Harris would say “we should nuke all the Muslim countries”? That doesn’t even sound like his style of writing or speaking.
Well, Knight did his usual digging and found that this picture and quote had been retweeted by Ashgar Bukhari, whom Knight describes as “founder of the soft-Islamist group the Muslim Public Affairs Committee” and “the gentleman who claimed that ‘Zionists’ had stole his shoe.” (Remember that “shoe” video?)
It was also passed along by writer and commentator Mo Ansar, who has been largely discredited for fraudulent misrepresentation of his credentials. Ansar became the voice of “moderate” Islam in Britain, but—see the video at Knight’s site—was actually an extremist who thought that thieves should have their limbs amputated.
Pressing Ansar for the source of Harris’s quote, Knight found out that, as expected, it was completely fabricated. Go to Godless Spellchecker to how Ansar waffled and sputtered when pressed for his sources. Ansar also managed to use the quote to tar the Qulliam foundation as a way of getting back at Maajid Nawaz, who had exposed Ansar’s extremism.
As we’ve seen, one of the manifestations of hatred for the New Atheists, even on the part of other atheists, is their willingness to take quotes out of context—Harris is particularly susceptible to this treatment—or, as in this case, to simply make up quotes. So willing are people to believe this stuff that they simply don’t bother to check. There’s a lot of bad faith out there, even among the godless, but not, praise Ceiling Cat, the Godless Spellchecker.
Strolling by the discard box in front of the local used bookstore, Powell’s, I spotted a copy of the 1953 Harvard College yearbook: a compilation of that year’s activities, sporting events, and so on, with a list of clubs and organizations—all accompanied by photos. I picked it up and took it home to see if I recognized anybody from that era, four years after I was born.
The “three seventeen” on the cover means that that was the 317th year since Harvard was founded in 1636.
Sure enough, there were lots of famous faculty, including Archibald MacLeish, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and biologists I recognized, like Kirtley Mather, mentioned in this well-known essay by Steve Gould (read it!) And one of the young faculty members was Julian Schwinger, shown at lower left, posed at the blackboard. Schwinger, of course, won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965, sharing it with Richard Feynman and Shinichiro Tomonaga. Four of his 73 (!) graduate students also won Nobel Prizes.
Maybe some of you can identify the formulae in Schwinger’s writings on the board.
I was amused at this photo of the Young Democrats club, looking at a picture of Adlai Stevenson as if he were God:
And finally, the quiz. Here’s a two-page spread of the undergraduate editors of the Harvard Lampoon, the College’s humor magazine. One of them went on to became a famous writer. Can you name him? I think this is pretty easy. (You can put your answers below, but if you want to guess on your own, don’t look at the comments.)
