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.
We’ve done Reiki before, but exorcism is in the news again [JAC: see here], and the irony of exorcists being sceptical about reiki is just too tasty to resist.
If you don’t know what Reiki is, it’s a form of “alternative healing” (aka “quackery”) based on channeling “universal energy” through the palms of the practitioner into the patient (see here). Many millions have been spent by credulous sufferers on this tomfoolery.
I’d urge you to throw a few bucks, at least, to the artist for all the amusement he/she/hir/they provide; the Patreon is here.
Reader Karen Bartelt sent us a fourth batch of birds from Cuba (see first three installments here, here and here). Her IDs are indented.
Red-legged thrush (Turdus plumbeus). This is a very common Caribbean bird. I didn’t know that when I saw this first one, on a roof across from the Hotel Ambos Mundos, where we were staying in Havana.
A nice collection of red-legged honeycreepers (Cyanerpes cyaneus) in Vinales National Park. The males have the blue heads; females are olive green.
0135 – Cuban grassquit, male (Phonipara canora). Cuban endemic. Both of these were taken at a farm that seems to attract both Cuban and yellow-faced grassquits.
Yellow-faced (Tiaris olivaceus) and Cuban grassquits.
And reader Tom Tezlaff would like an ID of this insect (I don’t have the location info):
On this day in 1431, Jean of Arc, only 19 years old, was burned at the stake by the English and the Burgundians. On May 30, 1536, Henry VIII of England married Jane Seymour, who had been a lady-in-waiting to his first two wives. She wasn’t beheaded, but died in childbirth after having given birth to a son who became King Edward VI. On this day in 1588, the last ship of the ill-fated Spanish Armada left Lisbon on its way to attack England. As you know, the Armada came a cropper, as the Brits say. On this day in 1845, a ship coming from India brought the first Indians to Trinidad and Tobago, which is why it’s Indian Arrival Day in that country (see above). In 1911, the first running of the Indianapolis 500 motor race took place; if you know your racing, you’ll know that the winner was Ray Harroun in his Marmon Wasp. It took him 6 hours, 42 minutes and 8 seconds: an average speed of 74.602 mph. Here’s the winner:
On May 30, 1943, Josef Mengele became the chief medical officer at the Romani section of Auschwitz. It is proof of the nonexistence of God that Mengele died in Brazil in 1979 (he had a stroke while swimming), never having come to justice. Finally, on this day in 1989, a 33-foot high “Goddess of Democracy” statue was unveiled in Tiananmen Square by protesting students (click on the link to see it). It was destroyed five days later by soldiers.
Notables born on May 30 include Irving Thalberg (1899), Mel Blanc (1908), Benny Goodman (1909), Nobel Laureat Julius Axelrod (1912), Irish writer Colm Tóibín (1955), and Wynona Judd (1964). Do watch this clip of Blanc on the Letterman show:
Those who died on this day include Joan of Arc (1431; see above), Peter Paul Rubens (1640), Alexander Pope (1744), Voltaire (1778), Wilbur Wright (1912), Hermann Broch (1951), Boris Pasternak (1960), Leó Szilárd (1964), and Tex Beneke (2000).
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili gives the answer which can never be given accurately.
A: Hili, are you asleep?
Hili: You guessed it.
In Polish:
Ja: Hili, śpisz?
Hili: Zgadłeś.
In Winnipeg there is splendor in the grass:
From Monika: why do snow leopards bite their tails. This tweet shows a whole thread of them. Are their tails tasty?
— Dick King-Smith HQ (@DickKingSmith) May 29, 2018
And here’s me in my new “Cats” baseball shirt, which I got new, but for a pittance, on eBay. I don’t know what team it’s from, but it does show I’m always on Team Cat:
There are still eight ducklings in the pond, and this morning only a single mallard drake appeared: the gluttonous Frank, whose girth bespeaks his consumption of corn.
I found Honey and her brood on the grass this morning, and was quite happy, for that gave me a chance to toss her a lot of corn to wolf down (it’s easier to do that then toss single kernels into the water for her to dabble). But as soon as I started feeding her, Tubby Frank appeared, chased the brood into the water, and then nommed all the corn. Honey does look too slim for me, and I hope that later today, with Anna’s help, we can separate the pair and give Mom a good feed.
In the meantime, she did get corn in the water, as well as mealworms; and the babes got all that and Cheerio fragments, too. Here they are on land (you can count all eight; one is peeking out from behind Honey):
The ducklings do seem to learn from Honey. For example, after I fed them all she went to the lily pads and began turning them over with her bill, obviously foraging. Within seconds all the ducklings were on top of the lily pads, also foraging (they’re too small to turn over a pad with their tiny bills):
After a meal, Honey invariably repairs to near the tree island and dunks herself rapidly into the water, then flapping her wings and repeating the porpoise-like dunking. I don’t know why she does this, but some of the ducklings imitate her. Here they watch her ablutions, which some of them imitated (you can see one dunking itself at upper left). They mother and brood then climbed onto the tree island and engaged in a long bout of preening.
All of you have read on this site (most recently in my critique of a dire New York Review of Books article) about the buzz concerning “epigenetics”—in particular, about the idea that human DNA can be changed by our exposure to the environment, and the view that such DNA changes can be inherited across several generations. Some people claim that this makes possible a form of non-Darwinian evolution, since the hereditary changes are actually caused by the environment, but there’s not a whit of evidence of any adaptation that arose in this way.
And, as I’ve said before, there’s no evidence that environmentally induced changes in DNA can persist beyond a few generations, making this “neo-Lamarckian” evolution very unlikely. Finally, when you actually map evolutionary differences between species, adaptive or otherwise, you invariably find that they map to changes in the DNA sequence, not to changes in “methylation” of DNA bases—the oft-cited source of the “environmental modification” of DNA. What we have is a lot of sizzle and no steak.
A new paper in Wiring the Brain, “Grandma’s trauma: a critical appraisal of the evidence for transgenerational epigenetic inheritance in humans“, by Kevin Mitchell (a professor of developmental neurobiology and genetics at Trinity College, Dublin), does what I never did: minutely scrutinize the several scientific papers that claim to show epigenetic inheritance in humans—usually an effect on grandchildren from starvation or trauma of grandparents. These are the studies widely touted as showing epigenetic modification of DNA by the environment (e.g., via famine) that gets inherited for at least one generation not exposed to the environmental stressor (the grandchildren).
Mitchell shows that every single study claiming this suffers from serious flaws. If you have any interest in epigenetics, his not-too-long article is worth reading. In general, these studies suffer from the following flaws:
1.) There’s no evidence of any epigenetic modification of DNA. For all papers but one, the sole evidence is that grandchildren of stressed grandparents differ in phenotypic traits (health, birth size, etc.) from those of non-stressed grandparents. To be fair, there’s one study showing methylation differences at just five DNA positions in a small sample of 121 people whose grandparents were or were not exposed to violence. But there’s no a priori hypothesis, and p-hacking is a real possibility (see #3).
2.) The sample sizes of humans are small, and the effects are very small.
3.) There seems to be pervasive “p-hacking”: that is, if you do sufficiently many correlations, using different aspects of grandchildren’s health, correlating with grandfather or grandmother, and so on, you’re bound to find at least one effect that is significant but is due not to a real phenomenon, but to chance deviations expected under no effect.
and, as the authors note
4.) “Lack of predefined hypotheses”. That is, they are dredging the data looking for effects.
I might add here this possibility, too:
5.) Publication bias. How many attempts to find “grandparental effects” failed, and thus weren’t published?
It’s time to put to rest, at least for a time, the claim that humans show environmental modification of their DNA that can be passed on to grandchildren. I didn’t read the original papers, so I didn’t really know how weak even these claims were, although one can dismiss the possibility of evolutionary change simply because there’s no cases in which epigenetic changes in DNA last more than a couple of generations.
So why all the buzz about epigenetics? I close by quoting Mitchell’s explanation for why do all these “grandparental famine” studies get so much publicity in the popular press:
. . . . . why do these studies get published and cited in the scientific literature and hyped so much in the popular press? There are a few factors at work, which also apply in many other fields (everything indented is a quote):
The sociology of peer review. By definition, peer review is done by experts in “the field”. If you are an editor handling a paper on transgenerational epigenetic inheritance in humans (or animals), you’re likely to turn to someone else who has published on the topic to review it. But in this case all the experts in the field are committed to the idea that transgenerational epigenetic inheritance in mammals is a real thing, and are therefore unlikely to question the underlying premise in the process of their review. [To be fair, a similar situation pertains in most fields].
Citation practices. Most people citing these studies have probably not read the primary papers or looked in detail at the data. They either just cite the headline claim or they recite someone else’s citation, and then others recite that citation, and so on. It shouldn’t be that way, but it is – people are lazy and trust that someone else has done the work to check whether the paper really shows what it claims to show. And that is how weak claims based on spurious findings somehow become established “facts”. Data become lore.
The media love a sexy story. There’s no doubt that epigenetics is exciting. It challenges “dogma”, it’s got mavericks who buck the scientific establishment, it changes EVERYTHING about what we thought we knew about X, Y and Z, it’s even got your grandmother for goodness sake. This all makes great copy, even if it’s based on shaky science.
Public appetite. The idea of epigenetic effects resonates strongly among many members of the general public. This is not just because it makes cute stories or is scientifically unexpected. I think it’s because it offers an escape from the spectre of genetic determinism – a spectre that has grown in power as we find more and more “genes for” more and more traits and disorders. Epigenetics seems to reassure (as the headline in TIME magazine put it) that DNA is not your destiny. That you – through the choices you make – can influence your own traits, and even influence those of your children and grandchildren. This is why people like Deepak Chopra have latched onto it, as part of an overall, spiritual idea of self-realisation.
So, there you have it. In my opinion, there is no convincing evidence showing transgenerational epigenetic inheritance in humans. But – for all the sociological reasons listed above – I don’t expect we’ll stop hearing about it any time soon.
When you hear these claims, then, just remember this post—and Mitchell’s analysis.
Well, yes, my title is a bit clickbaity, as of course there are several reasons why people distrust science. But according to a new post at Aeon by Dutch psychologist Bastiaan T Rutjens, shown below (click on screenshot), an article based on a scholarly paper by him and two colleagues that I haven’t yet read in detail (reference at bottom, free pdf), the main reason is religion.
Of course that’s not something people want to hear. As Rutiens notes, “religiosity has so far been curiously under-researched as a precursor to science skepticism, perhaps because political ideology commanded so much attention)”
So politics has been indicted more strongly; in fact, it’s almost a mantra of science educators (and liberals) that science denialism or skepticism comes from the Right. (I hasten to add that one study of acceptance of evolution in Alabama showed that religiosity was the most important factor in determining whether students accepted evolution; see reference and link to Rissler et al. below.)
At any rate, read either the article below or the paper on which it’s based.
The paper from Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (if you can’t download it with the free and legal Unpaywall App, after clicking on the screenshot below, ask me for it),
The initial problem with the academic study is its small sample: 105 North Americans, all employees of Amazon’s “Mechanical Turk” program (MTurk). Of course one would think these folks might be less religious than the average American (or North American), but nevertheless it’s a small sample, and hardly random. They do note in the article, though, that “a large-scale cross-national study of science skepticism in Europe and beyond will follow.”
Rutjens et al. investigated four predictors of science skepticism and acceptance: political ideology, religiosity, morality, and knowledge about science. It turns out that for acceptance of most scientific propositions, religion and politics were the most important factors (hierarchical regression analysis was used to parse out each factor independent of the others), but their conclusion was based on a general acceptance of science, not the three areas they asked about (GMOs, vaccinations, and global warming). Here’s how they judged acceptance of science, using three areas that didn’t include evolution or cosmology:
We provided participants with statements about climate change (eg, ‘Human CO2 emissions cause climate change’), genetic modification (eg, ‘GM of foods is a safe and reliable technology’), and vaccination (eg, ‘I believe that vaccines have negative side effects that outweigh the benefits of vaccination for children’). Participants could indicate to what extent they agreed or disagreed with these statements. We also measured participants’ general faith in science, and included a task in which they could indicate how much federal money should be spent on science, compared with various other domains. We assessed the impact of political ideology, religiosity, moral concerns and science knowledge (measured with a science literacy test, consisting of true or false items such as ‘All radioactivity is made by humans’, and ‘The centre of the Earth is very hot’) on participants’ responses to these various measures.
And the results (direct quotes from the paper):
“Political ideology did not play a meaningful role when it came to most of our measures. The only form of science skepticism that was consistently more pronounced among the politically conservative respondents in our studies was, not surprisingly, climate-change skepticism.”
“Skepticism about genetic modification was not related to political ideology or religious beliefs, though it did correlate with science knowledge: the worse people did on the scientific literacy test, the more skeptical they were about the safety of genetically modified food. Vaccine skepticism also had no relation to political ideology, but it was strongest among religious participants, with a particular relation to moral concerns about the naturalness of vaccination.”
So climate-change skepticism, but not the other two areas, was related to political ideology. No surprise there. GMO skepticism was related to neither politics or religion, but was correlated with science knowledge: those who knew more about science were less skeptical of GMOs. That doesn’t surprise me, either. Vaccine skepticism was related to religion, which is the one area I might have guessed would be related to the degree of one’s faith, which I think is related to religion. In fact, I think that some of the relationship between religion and science skepticism comes not from religion directly, but from the fact that religion activates a “faith” organ: a willingness to believe what you find congenial regardless of the evidence.
At any rate, given the above, how can the authors declare that religion was so important? Because they also measured “general faith” in science, and so found the following:
Moving beyond domain-specific skepticism, what did we observe about a general trust in science, and the willingness to support science more broadly? The results were quite clear: trust in science was by far the lowest among the religious. In particular, religious orthodoxy was a strong negative predictor of faith in science and the orthodox participants were also the least positive about investing federal money in science. But notice here again political ideology did not contribute any meaningful variance over and beyond religiosity.
The authors conclude this, which I agree with in general:
Additionally, these results suggest that science skepticism cannot simply be remedied by increasing people’s knowledge about science. The impact of scientific literacy on science skepticism, trust in science, and willingness to support science was minor, save for the case of genetic modification. Some people are reluctant to accept particular scientific findings, for various reasons. When the aim is to combat skepticism and increase trust in science, a good starting point is to acknowledge that science skepticism comes in many forms.
I’d disagree with the general statement that science skepticism can’t be remedied by science education. It’s true, for instance, that teaching people about evolution, as I did in my book WEIT, can’t make most Americans accept purely naturalistic evolution (only about 20% do). But it can change some minds. I have emails to this effect, and of course Richard Dawkins has many more testimonies on his “Converts Corner” (see here; there are 159 pages!) about how his evolution books “converted” people not just to Darwinism, but deconverted them from religion.
But if we want a world free from creationism, the only way to do that is to make religion disappear. Yes, there will still be a few creationists, not only because religion won’t disappear completely, but because evolution has several implications that people find unsavory. Still, if I could choose between facilitating the acceptance of evolution by having people either a.) read and understand Why Evolution is True, or b.) have their religion mysteriously vanish, I’m sure the most efficacious tactic would be b.)
These authors, if you accept their results—and I await a much larger study instead of the meager 105 subjects assayed here—imply that a more general acceptance of science will also come with the death of religion. I’m not sure why that might be, though I’ve offered one theory: the buttressing of faith through religious belief, a faith that rejects propositions that are palpably true.
Some of you may be thinking, “Well, we don’t really need science courses to remediate science denialism—we need critical thinkingcourses.” And that may be true, though I have little experience with them and big doubts about how they’d proceed. Nevertheless, if this study is replicated, we’ll have even more ammunition against religion—as if we needed any! Few people want to be seen as anti-science, and if we have stronger evidence that religion fosters that attitude, we’ll have a powerful weapon against those who constantly point out the “good” things that religion does.
From today’s New York Times (click on screenshot):
JERUSALEM — Gaza militants fired at least 28 mortar shells into southern Israel on Tuesday morning, setting off sirens, activating Israel’s air defenses and sharply raising the stakes after weeks of deadly protests, arson attacks and clashes along the border.
The barrage was the heaviest to be fired out of the Palestinian coastal territory since the 50-day war in the summer of 2014, although Iron Dome antimissile system intercepted most of the projectiles on Tuesday, according to the military, and there were no casualties.
Speaking at a conference in northern Israel at midday on Tuesday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Israel held Hamas responsible for the mortar attacks and that the military would respond “forcefully.”
Tensions have been spiraling along the border in recent weeks, during a Palestinian protest campaign called the Great Return March. The protests were intended to challenge the 11-year blockade of the Gaza Strip and to press Palestinian claims to lands in what is now Israel, which has responded to certain events with airstrikes against military targets in Gaza.
. . . One of the mortar shells fired around 7 a.m. crashed into the yard of a kindergarten in an Israeli border community shortly before the children were to arrive. Television images showed the fortified walls of the kindergarten pockmarked with shrapnel; hunks of metal from the mortar shell jutted out of the sand in the playground.
Soon after the initial barrage of 25 mortars, the Israeli authorities announced a return to normal and schools and kindergartens in the area opened, suggesting that the military was not expecting, or planning, an immediate escalation into a broader conflict.
Half an hour later, sirens sounded again as two more mortars were launched. Around 9:30 a.m., sirens blared again, and a new mortar landed in open ground.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility from Gaza militant groups, but suspicion immediately fell on Islamic Jihad, an extremist group backed by Iran that sometimes rivals Hamas, the Islamic militant group that controls the territory, but sometimes works in concert with it against Israel.
Haaretz (by no means a pro-Israeli newspaper) also reports that the projectiles fired into Israel include not just mortar shells but rockets made in Iran.
Will there be condemnation of Palestine, by the Left or the UN, for using “lethal force”, and firing mortars at a school? I don’t expect to see that. Remember, these are unprovoked attacks on civilians, designed to kill civilians. You can say, “Well, yes, Israel provoked this by firing on the terrorists trying to cross the border,” but then you’ll have to show that the border breaching, largely by members of Hamas, and some armed with Molotov cocktails, was not a provocation.
