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.
If you click on the screenshot below, you’ll see a short video from FIFA showing highlights of yesterday’s game in which Mexico defeated the present World Cup champions, Germany, 1-0. A great pass and a great goal. The German papers are already analyzing the sociological meaning of their defeat.
Contest Boss George has persuaded me to re-open the closed World Cup contest, in which you were asked to guess the two teams in the final as well as the final score (see rules here; where you should also post your entry). The rules have been updated now in light of the Boss’s stipulations, although the rules about tie guesses and penalty kicks remain. NOTE: These are new modified rules:
If you pick Brazil to be in the final (win or lose), their opponent cannot be Germany, Portugal or Spain.
If you pick Germany to be in the final (win or lose), their opponent cannot be Brazil, Portugal or Spain.
That will help cut down the duplicates. There is room for people to pick Argentina.
George adds: “I would like to see people pick Mexico. Two entries have El Tri losing in the final. I think Denmark and Croatia deserve some love.” But of course the winner will be decided simply on the final game and its score, not on George’s preferences.
I will extend the deadline until Wednesday, June 20, at 3 pm Chicago time. Please put your entries on this thread.
Today reader Andrée Sanborn (Tumblr blog here, Flickr page here, Facebook page here) sent some nice photos of moths from the northeastern U.S.; her notes are indented:
This moth is not spectacular, but is special. Three-Spotted Sallow (Eupsilia tristigmata); Northeast Vermont; April 10, 2017. We call these sap moths because they show up in the sap buckets every year. They float on top of the sap in the bucket. My husband will gently take them out and let them dry near the evaporator while he cooks the sugar. I photograph them when I get home from school. It’s amazing that they don’t drown. I guess they just float and sip. I can’t blame them. Pure, uncooked sap from the sugar maples is the most delicious thing on earth and I love it when I get some, snowy cold, before it is cooked. Seeing this moth means that the new season is on.
Tissue Moth (Triphosa haesitata); Northeast Vermont; April, 2017. This ID has been confirmed by bugguide.net. These adults overwinter in caves. We have caves on Barton Mountain behind us. I’d go look for the moths up there but the bears and bobcats also live in those caves.
Sigmoid Prominent (Clostera albosigma); Northeast Vermont; May 19, 2017. There is a pretty strict protocol for moth photography: close crops, dorsal shot with head up, lateral shots with head to the right. If you can’t get it right in the field, you can rotate the image in the computer. Or you can use your hand. I like that much better than chilling the moths in the refrigerator (and frequently forgetting they are there; I think I still have a wasp in my freezer.) Hand shots of moths also give viewers more context; the moths are more accessible to moth-phobics. I hope. It’s also wonderful to feel them walk on your skin. I try to get the face and eyes of moths.
Baileya doubledayi – Doubleday’s Baileya, Northeast Vermont; May 30, 2017. According to bugguide.net, this is uncommon to rare.
A pretty moth from the genus Symmerista. Always one of my favorites. Genital dissection needed to ID to species. I am not doing that, but I’ve been thinking of learning how. Hosts: Quercus, Acer, Castanea, and Fagus. Northeast Vermont; June 10, 2017.
We’re back at Monday again: June 18, 2018. It’s International Picnic Day, but didn’t we just have that? It’s also Autistic Pride Day. And in Botany Pond, all eight ducklings were afoot (or apaddle) this morning and everyone, including Honey, got a substantial three-course breakfast. There were no signs of raccoons or drakes.
On this day in 1178, there was a report of monks seeing an asteroid or comet strike the Moon. As Wikipedia reports: “Five Canterbury monks see what is possibly the Giordano Bruno crater being formed. It is believed that the current oscillations of the Moon’s distance from the Earth (on the order of meters) are a result of this collision.”
It is a banner day in the history of evolutionary biology, for it was on June 18, 1858, 160 years ago, that Darwin got in his mail a letter from Alfred Russel Wallace describing the theory of evolution by natural selection. Flummoxed and distressed by another biologist independently hitting on those ideas, Darwin sent the letter to his close colleagues asking what to do. This wound up with Darwin’s hastily written paper and Wallace’s letter being read on the same day (July 1) at the Linnaean Society in London and subsequently published together. Darwin went on to get most of the credit because he followed up the paper with The Origin in 1859. On June 18, 1873, suffragette Susan B. Anthony ws fined $100 for trying to vote in the previous year’s Presidential election. And on June 18, 1940, Winston Churchill delivered his “Finest Hour” speech in the House of Commons. Here is the highlight, but you can hear the complete 30-minute speech here.
On June 18, 1948, the LP, or long-playing record album, was introduced by Columbia Records in a demonstration in New York City. Finally, on this day in 1983, Sally Ride became the first American woman in space, helping staff the STS-7 Space Shuttle. This was 20 years after the first woman in space, Russian cosmonaut Valentina Tershkova. Sadly, Ride died of pancreatic cancer in 2012, aged only 61.
Not a lot of notables were born or died today. Births include Roger Ebert and Paul McCartney (both 1942), Carol Kane and Isabella Rosellini (both 1952), and physicist Lisa Randall (1962). Those who died on June 18 include Samuel Butler (1902), Roald Amundsen (1928), Ethel Barrymore (1959), John Cheever (1982) and I. F. Stone (1989).
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili, being a Jewish cat, is perpetually dissatisfied and dolorous—except when she has a bowl of cream.
A: Why do you look like that?
Hili: I’m waiting for better times.
In Polish:
Ja: Czemu masz taką minę?
Hili: Czekam na lepsze czasy.
And right across the pond, in London, Theo the Coffee Drinking Cat communes with Gethyn, part of his staff. Theo shows his often-hidden eyes and makes purry little meows:
Some tweets from Matthew, who is in Zermatt and sent his own tweet:
A butterfly caught in a spider web escaped, but left behind some remnants:
The ghost of a speckled wood butterfly that briefly landed in a spiders web in Crab Wood SSSI before flying away (a few hairs and scales lighter) – what do you make of that @savebutterflies@DJHbutterflies? pic.twitter.com/OdY9IkJlbJ
Sea dragons, which aren’t really seahorses but are related. This one, the common seadragon ((Phyllopteryx taeniolatus) is found off Australia. They mimic seaweed and lack the prehensile tails of seahorses.
All is still well at Botany Pond, though it’s hot today (about 35°C), and I fed everyone early so they could nap during the heat of the day. When I was approaching the pond this morning, a rather large mammal was walking on the nearby sidewalk. I thought, “Holy jeez: that’s a big cat!” before realizing it was a honking huge raccoon. I didn’t get a picture but I’m a bit worried it could snack on a duckling. I drove it away with a few shouts.
The pond is looking well, thanks to Spring and the landscaping crew. This is the small and shallow part of the pond, where I often feed the ducklings while sitting on the platform in the foreground. It’s also shallow enough for them to dabble and reach the bottom (see photos below):
The ducklings are growing, and are getting closer in size to Honey. They’re also shaped like adult ducks instead of round bathtub rubber ducks:
They’re growing their feathers in too, starting from the neck backward and the butt forward. There’s only a bit of yellow down left now; they’re becoming brown ducks:
But they’re still cute:
Here’s mom, her lovely appearance marred by a grain of corn that landed on her. It’s like having spinach in your teeth.
Yesterday the ducklings started to dabble big time, going upside down in the shallow end of the pond where they can reach the bottom for food. I’m not sure whether they learned any of this from Honey or whether it’s instinctive (I suspect mostly the latter), but she observes their dabbling intently:
The Economist has an article (click on the screenshot below) that describes five epochal moments in the World Cup. You can read the article, but I’ve also dug up videos of all five moments and put them below. I’ve also added the Economist’s introduction (indented) and an excerpt from each event
PELÉ was nine years old when he first saw his father cry. It was 1950, the year of the Maracanazo—Brazil’s devastating loss to Uruguay, at the Maracanã stadium in Rio, which cost the team the World Cup. The child promised his father that he would avenge the defeat. When the two countries next met in the tournament, in the semi-final of 1970, Pelé was playing. With the scores tied at 1-1, he chased a pass deep into Uruguay’s half. The goalkeeper rushed from his line. Their foot race was also the climax of a story, or rather several: the story of the game, of Pelé’s career, of his country’s recovery from the Maracanazo.
With its mortifications and sense of worldwide communion, the World Cup—which begins on June 14th—is a kind of global religion. It is a form of soft diplomacy and a safe outlet for nationalism. For many fans, it is a potent quadrennial madeleine, each tournament summoning memories of previous ones, the lost friends with whom they were watched, past selves. Sometimes the football itself can be cagey and boring. But, especially on its biggest stage and canvas, sometimes football is art. Individual moves can be balletic, a team’s routines exquisitely choreographed. Grand narratives unfold and crescendo, tragedies and unlikely triumphs that feature heroes, villains and occasionally players who contrive to be both.
. . . In 1982 Britain defeated Argentina in a war over the Falkland Islands. Four years later, having emerged from a military dictatorship, Argentina faced England in a quarter-final in Mexico. “We were defending our flag, the dead kids, the survivors,” Maradona, the team’s captain, said later. In the space of four minutes he scored the most scandalous goal in history and the finest. First he surreptitiously punched the ball into the net (the “hand of God”, he called it afterwards). For the second goal, he seemed to function on a different plane to the hapless Englishmen. He pirouetted away from two defenders, ran half the length of the pitch, rounded the keeper and guided the ball home. Argentina won the game and, redemptively, the cup.
Before and afterwards, Maradona’s life was chequered. . .
Greatness in sport, as in art, often comes from unseen, grinding effort. But sometimes it arises from sheer inspiration—a wind awakening a coal to brightness, as Percy Bysshe Shelley put it, or the “flash in the brain” that Johan Cruyff said he experienced at the World Cup in Germany in 1974.
Cruyff was a master of flicks, feints, impudent shots and passes that described arcing lines of beauty. But it was his improvisation in a match against Sweden that made him immortal. By his own account, he had not practised what he did upon receiving the ball near the corner flag, a Swedish defender in close attendance. Cruyff appeared to be heading away from the goal, until, in a quicksilver feat of dexterity and imagination, he tucked the ball behind him, swivelled and set off in the other direction. For an instant he seemed to be running in both directions at once.
The “Cruyff turn” has since been attempted by players everywhere. . .
[Tofiq] Bahramov officiated at the World Cup final of 1966, played between England and West Germany at Wembley Stadium in London. With the scores level in extra time, a shot by Geoff Hurst, England’s striker, rattled the crossbar and bounced down over the goal line. Or perhaps it didn’t: the German players claimed to have seen chalk dust, indicating that the ball hit the line and thus that the goal should not be given. The referee jogged across to consult Bahramov, who briskly nodded an affirmative.
England won 4-2. English fans mostly remember the fourth goal, scored in the final seconds as the joyous crowd spilled onto the pitch. But it is the third that is a work of art.
I remember this well; it was in the final between Italy and France in Berlin, 2006:
The match in Berlin was heading for a penalty shoot-out; Mr Zidane, France’s captain, had already scored one in the game. With ten minutes to go, an Italian defender muttered something to him (about his mother, Mr Zidane alleged; only about his sister, the defender maintained). Mr Zidane headbutted the Italian in the chest. He was sent off. France lost the shoot-out.
This implosion was a tragedy in the purest sense.
And Pelé tries to get his revenge against Uruguay in 1970:
According to the Japanese aesthetic known as wabi-sabi, beauty is not perfect but flawed and incomplete. Leonard Cohen expressed the same thought in “Anthem”: “Forget your perfect offering/There is a crack in everything/That’s how the light gets in.” So, inadvertently, did Pelé, after he won the race with the Uruguayan goalkeeper.
Perhaps no one but Pelé would have done what he did next. He did nothing. His mind whirring faster than his feet, he did not touch the ball, as the keeper expected, but let it run on—hastily collecting it, after his coup de théâtre, on the other side of his opponent. Pelé shot towards the unguarded goal—but scuffed his kick and missed.
He still avenged his father and the Maracanazo. Brazil beat Uruguay and won the final, in which Pelé scored. Still, much later he said he had dreams in which, after that audacious moment of restraint, his aim was true: “It would have been so much more beautiful had it gone in.” He may be the greatest football artist of all time, but, about this, Pelé is wrong. The kink in the masterpiece is what makes it human.
There’s a lot of kerfuffle this week about a female professor—a feminist professor—accused of a Title IX violation (sexual harassment or malfeasance), and how feminists and other authoritarian Leftists are defending her in a way that they presumably wouldn’t defend a male professor. Much of the tale is laid out in the Chronicle of Higher Education article below (click on screenshot):
All we know about the “violation” is that Avital Ronell, a very famous professor of Germanic Languages and Literature and comparative literature at New York University (NYU), and also a feminist philosopher, was apparently accused of a Title IX violation. The details are murky, though if you read the addenda of the Leiter report (link below) you can get a hazy idea of what might have happened. Naturally, and as is proper, NYU is not giving details, but that didn’t stop a group of Ronell’s supporters, including 9 NYU professors, from writing a letter to the President and the Provost of NYU defending Ronell (again, they know nothing about the nature of the investigation), urging her to be exculpated, and saying that because she is famous and accomplished, as well as having “grace, keen wit, and intellectual commitment”, she should be accorded “the dignity rightly deserved by someone of her international standing and reputation.” Whether Joe Schmo or some other non-famous defendant should be given extra special consideration is apparently not on the table.
The letter was apparently composed by Judith Butler of Berkeley, a scholar and obscurantist I have no use for (I’ve written about her before), and then sent around to various people for their signature. Brian Leiter got a copy of the letter, apparently really angering Butler, who denies on flimsy grounds that it’s the right letter. You can see the letter here from Leiter’s link: Download BUTLER letter for Avital Ronell. It will download to your computer.
Indeed, the victim is blamed right at the outset of the letter, which says this:
We have all seen [Ronell’s] relationship with students, and some of us know the individual who has waged this malicious campaign against her. We wish to communicate first in the clearest terms our profound an enduring admiration for Professor Ronell whose mentorship of students has been no less than remarkable over many years. We deplore the damage that this legal proceeding causes her, and seek to register in clear terms our objection to any judgment against her. We hold that the allegations against her do not constitute actual evidence, but rather support the view that malicious intention has animated and sustained this legal nightmare.
Yep, that’s victim-blaming. The astounding hypocrisy and mendacity of this group of scholars must be seen to be believed: just read the letter. (Leiter also notes that if Ronell had anything to do with the letter, or even if she didn’t, the presence of nine NYU faculty signing it could constitute legal grounds for a suit asserting retaliation against the complainant.) Leiter winds up in high dudgeon, and I agree with him:
Imagine that such a letter had been sent on behalf of Peter Ludlow, Colin McGinn, John Searle, Thomas Pogge or anyone other than a feminist literary theorist: there would be howls of protest and indignation at such a public assault on a complainant in a Title IX case. The signatories collectively malign the complainant as motivated by “malice” (i.e., a liar), even though they admit to knowing nothing about the findings of the Title IX proceedings–and despite that they also demand that their friend be acquitted, given her past “mentorship of students”. (I imagine many faculty members found guilty, correctly, in a Title IX proceeding have also mentored lots of students, chaired a department, and produced notable scholarship.) If Professor Ronell had any role in soliciting this letter, it looks to me like a clear case of retaliation against the complainant that will compound her and the university’s problems.
But you get a real sense of the hypocrisy and entitlement of these precious “theorists” in the concluding paragraph of the letter addressed to the NYU President and Provost:
We testify to the grace, the keen wit, and the intellectual commitment of Professor Ronell and ask that she be accorded the dignity rightly deserved by someone of her international standing and reputation. If she were to be terminated or relieved of her duties, the injustice would be widely recognized and opposed.
We may put to one side that Professor Ronell’s “grace,” “keen wit” and “intellectual commitment” are irrelevant in a Title IX proceeding. What is truly shocking is the idea that she is entitled to proceedings that treat her with “the dignity rightly deserved by someone of her international standing and reputation.” Apparently in the view of these “theory” illuminati dignity in Title IX proceedings is to be doled out according to one’s “international standing and reputation.” So while Professor Ronell “deserves a fair hearing, one that expresses respect, dignity, and human solicitude,” other “lesser” accused can be subject, without international outcry, to whatever star chamber proceedings the university wants. Moreover, only one outcome of the process is acceptable, regardless of the findings: acquittal. Any other result “would be widely recognized and opposed,” I guess because grace, wit and intellectual commitment are a defense against sexual misconduct and harassment.
This is one of the problems of Title IX violations being judged by universities: men are assumed to be more guilty than women, and if the accused is a famous feminist woman, she’s assumed to be innocent from the get-go and deserving of special, kid-glove treatment—indeed, complete vindication.
If these things are adjudicated by universities rather than courts (and I prefer courts), it is at least fair to treat all people the same, regardless of their gender or their fame. Butler and her minions are trying to short-circuit whatever justice can come from such proceedings by writing directly to the higher authorities—and not knowing anything about the case. They are trying to get differential treatment for one of their friends and ideological compadres. That stinks.
A new study in PLoS Biology by Moonsung Cho et al. (free pdf here; reference below) uncovers some of the mysteries of how spiders (in this case crab spiders) balloon. “Ballooning” is an amazing form of spider dispersal. The spiders, usually very young ones, climb up on some high spot like a blade of grass or a twig, and then emit long strands of silk from their spinnerets on the abdomen; those strands then catch the wind and carry the spiderlets for long distances—even hundreds of miles.
Why do they do this? There are a number of reasons mentioned by Cho et al. including:
Reducing cannibalism by fellow spiderlings
Reducing competition for local resources
Dispersing to new and more favorable sites
Searching for mates and food
According to the authors, ballooning spiders have traveled hundreds of kilometers this way, colonizing distant “oceanic” (volcanic) islands, and have even been seen as high as 4.5 km above sea level.
Here’s what ballooning looks like (this Nat. Geo. video mentions the new results):
Despite this well known phenomenon, a number of questions remained. How do they know if the wind is right? What kind of “sail” do they produce, and how do they do it?
The PLOS biology paper is long, and I’ll summarize just a few interesting results: these were taken from observations in nature, from wind-tunnel experiments, and from outdoor experiments in which spiders were put atop artificial platforms that emitted a powder that showed the wind speed and direction.
First, the spiders actually test the wind conditions before they take off by raising one or two front legs into the air—just like humans test the wind direction by wetting a finger and raising it. They keep the legs up for about 6-8 seconds, thereby seeing if conditions are right for takeoff. If they are—and that means the winds are less than about 3 meters per second—they then turn their body around, get on “tiptoe”, raising their butts into the air, and emit a series of silken threads, several meters long, to form a triangular parachute. Here’s a figure from the paper showing the wind-testing, body rotation, and tiptoe posture. (All captions come from the original paper.)
(From paper): Sequence of active sensing motion with front leg (leg I) (negative images). (A) The spider first senses the condition of the wind current only through sensory hairs on its legs. (B) Then, if the condition seemed appropriate, the spider sensed more actively by raising leg I and keeping this pose for 8 sec. (C) If the spider decided to balloon, it altered its posture. (D) The spider rotated its body in the direction of the wind and assumed tiptoe posture.\
While the spider is standing on its blade of grass or leaf, it anchors itself to the substrate with a “drag line”, which is then passively severed after the spun “balloon” carries them away. The drag line not only anchors them firmly (they do this normally), but keeps them from blowing away before they’ve spun a sufficiently large parachute.
Below you can see the triangular shape of the balloon, spun on the tiptoe posture. The chute is several meters long and so light that it can take the spider long distances even with fairly gentle winds.
Three new facts about ballooning were uncovered. First, the crab spider does not evaluate the wind condition passively, but actively by raising 1 of its legs I. Second, this adult ballooner anchors its drag lines on the platform not only during its rafting takeoff but also during tiptoe takeoff. Third, the crab spider postures all its legs outward and stretched, when airborne, not only at the takeoff moment but also during the gliding phase.
One mystery discussed by the authors, and shown in the supplementary figure below, is that while ballooning the spiders keep their legs outstretched. That would seem to be aerodynamically inefficient. Wouldn’t it be better to curl up?
I have no answer here, but perhaps adjustment of body shape can help the spider “decide” where to land. It’s still not clear whether the spider has any say where it winds up, in terms of deciding where to settle, or just passively touches down when the wind abates. Clearly many spiders die when their balloons put them in the water or unfavorable habitat (of course spiders often have huge broods), but for this behavior to evolve by natural selection, the reproductive advantage of ballooning must exceed the costs of accidental death as well as the costs of staying put (getting eaten by your siblings, competing for food, etc.).
See how the keep their legs stretched out when flying?
Spiders’ posture in takeoff and flight. (A, B) An anchored line was found during a tiptoe takeoff. As soon as spiders were airborne, they stretched the legs outward. (C) To ensure the behavior of outstretched legs during flight, the pose of a spider was observed during its gliding phase. (D) The spider kept its legs outstretched.
There is a lot of information in the paper about the nature of the silk used to make the balloons, but I suspect you, like me, would find this less interesting. The coolest part is the description of how the spider does this, especially their testing of wind direction and speed by raising their legs into the air. That wasn’t known before, and I find it amazing.
Here’s a video, put out by the magazine Science, that describes the paper’s results. I’ve put it here at the end because if you watched it you might not want to read any further!
