Monday: Hili dialogue

July 16, 2018 • 6:30 am

It’s Monday, July 16, 2018, and National Corn Fritters Day, celebrating a foodstuff that is good but rarely seen. It’s going to be another steambath in Chicago today, with a high of 85° F (29.4°C) but a sopping humidity of 88%. The ducks will be hot in their feather coats, but fortunately can swim and gambol in a cool pond, constantly replenished with fresh cold water.

Today’s news: a new law that could reduce aggression takes force tomorrow. As the Guardian notes (h/t Grania):

Tuesday is a red-letter day for international law: from then on, political and military leaders who order the invasion of foreign countries will be guilty of the crime of aggression, and may be punishable at the international criminal court in The Hague. Had this been an offence back in 2003, Tony Blair would have been bang to rights, together with senior numbers of his cabinet and some British military commanders. But if that were the case, of course, they would not have gone ahead; George W Bush would have been without his willing UK accomplices.

. . . The crime will be committed by those who direct the use of armed force against the “sovereignty, territorial integrity or political independence” of another member state, in a manner which “by its character, gravity, and scale” amounts to a “manifest violation” of the UN charter (which prohibits such attacks, other than in self-defence).

July 16, 622, marks the beginning of the Islamic calendar; that’s the year in which Muhamed (peace be upon him) and his followers (peace be upon them too) moved from Mecca to Medina. On this day in 1661, the first banknotes in Europe were issued by the Swedish bank Stockholms Banco. Here’s what one looked like:

On July 16, 1769, Fr. Junípero Serra founded the first of California’s missions, the Mission San Diego de Alacalà, which became the hub of the city of San Diego.  In 1790, Washington, D.C. officially became the U.S.’s capital city when the Residence Act was signed. A sad day for all of us: on this day in 1935, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma installed the world’s first parking meter. Here is that infernal machine:

On July 16, 1941, Joe DiMaggio hit safely in his 56th consecutive baseball game, ending a streak that still stands as the record for Major League Baseball (in the minor leagues, he hit safely in 61 straight games for the San Francisco Seals). That was one of several landmarks in baseball on July 16; here’s a video describing them:

On this day in 1945, the US. successfully detonated a plutonium-based nuclear weapon in New Mexico, inaugurating the Atomic Age. On this day in 1969, the Apollo 11 mission began with a launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida that culminated with the first walk on the Moon four days later. On July 16, 1999, John F. Kennedy Jr., his wife, and his sister-in-law were killed when a small plane piloted by JFK Jr. plunged into the Atlantic Ocean off Martha’s Vineyard. Finally, on this day in 2004, the highly visited Millennium Park opened in Chicago, which Wikipedia describes as “Chicago’s first and most ambitious early 21st-century architectural project.”

Notables born on this day include Joshua Reynolds (1723), Mary Baker Eddy (1821), Roald Amundsen (1872), Shoeless Joe Jackson (1887), Bess Myerson (1924; the first Jewish Miss America), Desmond Dekker (1941), and Tony Kushner (1956). Those who died on July 16 include Mary Todd Lincoln (1882), Heinrich Böll (1985), Julian Schwinger (1994; Nobel Laureate), Stephen Spender (1995), John F. Kennedy Junior (1999; see above), and Kitty Wells (2012).

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is at last doing her job.  Malgorzata explains:

Hili is sitting outside the window and looking into the room at Andrzej’s screen, fulfilling her editor’s duties even while taking a break.
Hili: Correct this typo.
A: Where?
Hili: Third paragraph, second word.
In Polish:
Hili: Popraw tę literówkę.
Ja: Gdzie?
Hili: Drugi akapit, trzecie słowo.

From reader Anne Houde: 11 ducklings saved! What a catch, and what a nice man!

https://twitter.com/HubCutest/status/1018135867234312193

From reader Gethyn, amazing cat art:

From Matthew: Wouldn’t you know it! (The tweet has disappeared: the animal was a raccoon):

https://twitter.com/wild_ecology/status/1018172472498278400

Speaking of turtles, they’re a source of salt much needed by butterflies. Be sure to check out the video in the link:

I don’t know how this guy got away with diving in tennis, but it’s funny:

https://twitter.com/WorldCupStuff18/status/1018398586957017089

Biology teachers: here’s a diagram to use in your classes:

British cop high-fives a Trump protestor:

From Grania: a cat wearing a Dunkin Donuts bag.

https://twitter.com/BoringEnormous/status/1018478627611082752

And a sleeping puss:

https://twitter.com/EmrgencyKittens/status/1018451637545861120

Potential Darwin award:

https://twitter.com/AwardsDarwin/status/1018509567150514176

Here’s a geological conundrum; perhaps they really know how these are formed:

An affectionate seal gets a belly rub:

https://twitter.com/kengarex/status/1018159740621336576

And from Heather Hastie, another successful duckling rescue. I’m a sucker for these videos, of course:

100th Infinite Monkey Cage episode is now video to the world:

July 15, 2018 • 3:30 pm

The other day I put up the podcast link to the hundredth episode of the BBC comedy/science show “The Infinite Monkey Cage”, starring Robin Ince and physicist Brian Cox. Now the video is available to everyone, not just UK residents, and you can see go to its site by clicking  on the screenshot below.

Spot the geneticist! Matthew Cobb is a VIP guest sitting in the front row.

Alternative truths: math

July 15, 2018 • 12:31 pm

Here’s a humorous but not completely unimaginable video about what would happen if elementary schools were taken over by the view that there are “multiple truths”. This attitude already infects some of the social sciences and much of the humanities in universities, but math is not completely immune to the “different ways of knowing” infection.

Anyway, it’s just a bit of humor after France’s victory over Croatia in the World Cup. It was a diverse and engrossing game, even featuring an own goal, and the best team won, though Croatia didn’t go down easily. Congrats to France, and we’ll see you again in four years!

h/t: Lesley

Did modern Homo sapiens evolve in different parts of Africa?

July 15, 2018 • 9:30 am

The general view of human evolution among both scientists and laypeople is that “modern” Homo sapiens emerged from one single area in East Africa: perhaps from just a single population. That population supposedly evolved from an earlier ancestor of unknown identity—perhaps Homo erectus—underwent the transformation into the group of characters that identify our species, and then spread throughout the world. (This is independent of the evolution of what I consider other extinct subspecies of H. sapiens, like Neanderthals and Denisovans, which may have originated from single populations.)

A new paper by Eleanor Scerri and many colleagues, however, questions this conventional wisdom. The paper, an opinion piece rather than a scientific paper, appears in Trends in Ecology and Evolution (click on screenshot to see it, free with UnPaywall; the reference is at bottom, and a free pdf is here), limns what is known as the “multiregional hypothesis” for modern H. sapiens. This is the view that there were many semi-isolated populations of our ancestor scattered throughout Africa, and that each evolved quasi-independently because there were geographic and climatic barriers that reduced gene flow between the groups.

Each population then evolved different traits—of behavior, morphology, and mentation—that eventually combined through more extensive migration into one species that then spread throughout Africa and then the world. It is as if a group of tailors were to craft a garment, each responding to local tastes and materials, and then those garments were combined into one garment that became the “standard and universal” one.

“Anatomically modern humans” date from about 315,000 years ago, with the first finds being in Moroccan caves at Jebel Irhoud. These finds contravened the idea that the earliest humans evolved in East Africa, and suggest that already at that time modern H. sapiens was widely distributed throughout Africa. However, the Jebel Irhoud skulls, while having most of the features of modern human skulls, were relatively elongated. Here’s the earliest find (left) compared with a more recent (95,000 years old) modern H. sapiens skull. The elongation of the earlier one is evident.

Multiregional evolution is supported by the authors’ contention that human populations were structured morphologically as late as 15,000 years ago, with some retaining more ancestral skeletons and others being more advanced—but all considered by anthropologists to be part of the single species H. sapiens sapiens (“modern” Homo sapiens).

Likewise, different populations of H. sapiens sapiens had different stone tools at about the same time, with some being more advanced than others, and this regional differentiation also held for other cultural artifacts like bone tools and shell beads. This too suggests a subdivided species, perhaps with different populations having different degrees of mental/neurological evolution.

What caused this differentiation? The authors aren’t sure, but say a likely cause was different environments that not only isolated populations from each other, but imposed different selection pressures on them. Climate is an obvious difference, with the figure below showing big differences in precipitation among parts of Africa that housed different populations of H. sapiens sapiens (areas within colored squares). Note the variation among localities even at the same time. These would cause obvious barriers as dry places would impede migration between wet places (the Sahara region, with less precipitation, is an obvious barrier).

(from paper): Middle and Late Pleistocene African Environmental Variability in Space and Time. (Left) Map of Africa with key archaeological and fossil sites discussed in the text. Colored boxes indicate averaged regions for simulated precipitation changes from the transient glacial/interglacial LOVECLIM climate model experiment [81]. (Right) Precipitation changes (%) relative to the long-term 784 thousand year mean in the key regions highlighted in left panel, as simulated by transient 784 thousand year-long LOVECLIM climate model simulation [81]. From top to bottom the regions are eastern equatorial Africa, southern Africa, northwestern Africa, and the central Sahara region.
Precipitation would affect the vegetable and animal food available, and hence the means of foraging and food preparation, and that would affect selection for tool usage and for forming different kinds of tools. Those pressures, in turn, could affect social evolution and the structure of our brains. Further, random differences in the frequencies of genes arising by genetic drift could act as different beginning substrates for natural selection, as the course of natural selection depends on its genetic and morphological starting points.

So there is some evidence for the authors’ multiregional hypothesis, which, as Ed Yong characterizes in an article in The Atlantic like this:

The best metaphor for this [the authors’ “multiregionalism” hypothesis] isn’t a tree. It’s a braided river—a group of streams that are all part of the same system, but that weave into and out of each other.

These streams eventually merge into the same big channel, but it takes time—hundreds of thousands of years. For most of our history, any one group of Homo sapiens had just some of the full constellation of features that we use to define ourselves. “People back then looked more different to each other than any populations do today,” says Scerri, “and it’s very hard to answer what an early Homo sapiens looked like. But there was then a continent-wide trend to the modern human form.” Indeed, the first people who had the complete set probably appeared between 40,000 and 100,000 years ago.

But there’s evidence against the hypothesis as well, the most telling being genetic analyses suggesting that different populations of humans in Africa didn’t diverge from each other 300,000 years or so ago, but between 100,000 and 150,000 years ago, suggesting a genetic and populational uniformity before that.

So we have a conflict between what the genetic data tell us and what morphology and tool use tell us.  This may not be a problem since the genetic data is not yet rock-solid. Nevertheless, we should take the paper as tentative but suggestive, which is why it’s an “opinion” piece rather than a regular scientific article.

The implications aren’t that important for non-paleobiologists. Although the multiregional theory suggests that our species emerged in a patchwork fashion, like Yong’s braided rivers, we know that as that species spread throughout the world in perhaps several egresses from Africa, those spreads did not emanate from many different places in Africa. And they don’t overturn the indubitable fact that humans are, in essence, complex African apes.

_________

Scerri, E. M. L. et al. 2018. Did Our Species Evolve in Subdivided Populations across Africa, and Why Does It Matter? Trends Ecol Evol., online publication,  DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2018.05.005

Readers’ wildlife photos

July 15, 2018 • 7:45 am

Reader Joe Dickinson recently went to Australia and New Zealand (lucky guy!) and has sent us some photos. His notes are indented, and some of the IDs could use confirmation:

Sunday: Hili Dialogue

July 15, 2018 • 6:45 am

It’s Ceiling Cat’s Day: Sunday, July 15 in the Year of Our Ceiling Cat 2018. And, for crying out loud, it’s National Gummy Worms Day, an execrable comestible if ever there was one. But most important, it’s the World Cup Final, with France playing Croatia at 10 am Chicago time. (France is favored.) Google has a Doodle showing the world enjoying the game; click on the screenshot to see it:

Finally, Professor Ceiling Cat (Emeritus) is down with a nasty cold, wheezing like a bellows, so posting may be light today as I watch the game and rest.

On July 15, 1099, during the First Crusade, Christian soldiers seized the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem after a difficult siege; the Church is one of the purported places where Jesus’s tomb lies.  On this day in 1799, a French soldier serving under Napoleon dug up the Rosetta Stone in the Egyptian village of Rosetta. With the same inscription written in three languages—hieroglyphic Egyptian, demotic Egyptian, and ancient Greek—the stone (now reposing in the British Museum) was vital in helping linguists decipher hieroglyphics. Here’s what it looks like (click to enlarge):

On this day in 1834, the Spanish Inquisition was disbanded after over 350 years. Nobody expected that!  Exactly four years later, Ralph Waldo Emerson gave an address at Harvard’s divinity school which, according to Wikipedia, discount[ed] Biblical miracles and declar[ed] Jesus a great man, but not God. The Protestant community reacts with outrage.”  And they’re still reacting that way, but get even more outraged if you maintain, as I do, that the evidence for a historical person on which Jesus was based is thin.  On this day in 2003, AOL Time Warner disbanded Netscape and established The Mozilla Foundation. Finally, exactly 12 years ago Twitter was launched, enabling everybody to weigh in on everything, launching innumerable and inconsequential internet battles, having a marginally positive effect on spreading non-fake news, and, most important, helping spread cat memes throughout the planet.

Notables born on July 15 include Inigo Jones (1573), Rembrandt (1606), Jean-Baptiste Charcot (1867), Iris Murdoch (1919), Robert Bruce Merrifield (1921; Nobel Laureate for devising a way to synthesize small proteins), Carl Woese (1928), Jacques Derrida (1930; much worse than Twitter), Jocelyn Bell Burnell (1943), Linda Rondstadt (1946), and Diane Kruger (1976). Those who expired on this day include General Tom Thumb (1883), Anton Chekhov (1904), Hermann Emil Fischer (1919; Nobel Laureate), and General John J. Pershing (1948).

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is practicing obscurantism, but, as one might expect, it has something to do with food. Malgorzata explains:

Hili’s heard a new word “imponderables” and she liked it. She thought it means “important”, “indispensable”. You know cats: they have a mind of their own and Hili likes to brag about her superior intellect. So when Andrzej was supposed to go shopping she wanted to remind him about “imponderables”.

Hili: Let’s not forget about imponderables.
A: Which ones?
Hili: The most important ones.
A: Most important for whom?
Hili: For me.

In Polish:
Hili: Nie zapominajmy o imponderabiliach.
Ja: Których?
Hili: Tych najważniejszych.
Ja: Dla kogo najważniejszych?
Hili: Dla mnie.

A tweet from Grania, who notes something I missed in yesterday’s post. As she said, “A tweet pointing out an inconsistency in trans activism: either trans women are women or they are not. You can’t claim that they are for the purposes of bathroom usage and being assigned prisons and then claim they are a special “sui generis” class when it comes to being cast in a movie.”

Now Scarlet Johansson was to play a trans man before she was forced to resign from that role in the movie “Rub and Tug,” but the point is the same, because the same opporobrium would have come down on a cis male actor who wanted to play that role. You can’t say a trans man is both a “genuine man” and in a “special class of man.”

Also from Grania, an Official baby raven at the Tower of London:

Tweets from Matthew:

Wild pig and young. How many teats does that mom have?

Please be sure to watch this lovely story of a whale rescue. Who can say that the whale didn’t feel gratitude? As Matthew said, the world would be a better place if it had the Dodo Philosophy, and I agree:

Be sure to watch the beetle step delicately over moss:

This is a form of mimicry new to me: a beetle can reverse its elytra (wing covers) to become a bee mimic when necessary!

The tailless whip scorpion from yesterday lets its babies go:

A disturbing display in a bookstore:

I’d love an office like this!

The Trump protests continue in the UK, but do they do more than express outrage?

From Heather Hastie, an Egyptian tomb throne: