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.
It seems like only yesterday that Maru, everyone’s favorite Internet cat, was four. Now, on May 23, he became nine. Here’s the video that his staff put out to celebrate his arriving at Feline Seniority. (His companion cat, Hana, also makes an appearance.)
Was there ever a cat whose antics were as funny as this?
The letter to the editor shown below has been making the rounds; if anything can be described as “viral” on the Internet (and I dislike that word), it’s this. Of course it’s a favorite of All Regressive leftists and of my bête noir, the Huffington Post, which celebrated it with this short piece (click on screenshot to go to piece):
And here are the three glorious sentences:
I didn’t read the two anti-abortion letters that Ms. Seltz responded to, but have little doubt they were pretty right-wing and invidious. But I’m not convinced that telling men to “shut up about abortion,” without specifying what they should shut up about, is useful.
It’s incumbent on me, to avoid undeserved opprobrium, to say that I’m in favor of abortion—in fact more so that most “pro-choice” people. I not only think that abortions of all fetuses should be legal right up to birth, but, in cases where a newborn is severely deformed or diseased, and whose quality of life would be horrible, I’m even in favor of restricted euthanasia. In such case I think Peter Singer is right.
Further, although I’m not a woman, I think I can see where the sentiments in Seltz’s letter come from. Many women are simply exasperated by how men deal with the issue of abortion. Rather than discussing it, they try to control women’s actions, make laws that restrict what the Supreme Court has declared a legal act, harass women outside abortion clinics, kill doctors who perform abortions, and sometimes just plain lie in an attempt to restrict abortions (for example, spreading the myth that most women who have had abortions regret it). All of us who were heartened by the Roe v. Wade decision are dismayed about the repeated attempts of state governments to circumvent it.
But these actions, while largely promulgated by men—since men predominate in legislatures and courts—are not limited to men. If men should STFU, what about the many women who are “pro-life”? Do they have a right to speak simply because they have a uterus? What if they don’t plan to have children?
I also think that the argument for abortion has to be made not on grounds of “rights,” which are always conversation-stoppers, but on grounds of rationality and philosophy, cognizant of the problem that, at bottom, all ethics is grounded on subjective preferences. But I am convinced by the rational arguments, particularly those in Judith Jarvis Thompsons’ nice essay, “A defense of abortion,” which everyone should read.
That said, I’m unconvinced that man have to entirely shut up about abortion, and for several reasons:
Viewed this way, Seltz’s letter is a kneejerk reaction that should not be celebrated as something “glorious.”
At any rate, these are random thoughts, and readers should weigh in below about the “men should STFU” issue.
I was hoping that the Epigenetics Tsunami would have abated a bit by now, but it’s still washing over the public. And the new video below, produced by TED-Ed, doesn’t help, for it distorts what we know about epigenetics. The organization should be named “TED-anti-ED”:
Just a few of the erroneous claims that you’ll hear in the video:
Zimmer’s piece says this:
In May, Duke University researchers claimed that epigenetics could explain why people who grow up poor are at greater risk of depression as adults. Even more provocative studies suggest that when epigenetic marks change, people can pass themto their children, reprogramming their genes.
But criticism of these studies has been growing. Some researchers argue that the experiments have been weakly designed: Very often, they say, it’s impossible for scientists to confirm that epigenetics is responsible for the effects they see.
Three prominent researchers recently outlined their skepticism in detail in the journal PLoS Genetics. The field, they say, needs an overhaul.
“We need to get drunk, go home, have a bit of a cry, and then do something about it tomorrow,” said John M. Greally, one of the authors and an epigenetics expert at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York.
Among other criticisms, he and his co-authors — Ewan Birney of the European Bioinformatics Institute and George Davey Smith of the MRC Integrative Epidemiology Unit at the University of Bristol in England — argue that in some cases, changes to epigenetic marks don’t cause disease, but are merely consequences of disease.
And here’s one way that this claim has been investigated:
Some studies, for example, have found that people with a high body mass index have unusual epigenetic marks on a gene called HIF3A. Some researchers have suggested that those marks change how HIF3A functions, perhaps reprogramming fat cells to store more fat.
If that were true, then drugs that reverse these changes might be able to help obese people lose weight. But Dr. Smith and his colleagues have found that overweight subjects experienced epigenetic changes to HIF3A only after they put on weight.
And one more caveat:
Dr. Greally and his colleagues note another source of confusion: Normal genetic variation leads some people to produce different epigenetic marks than others.
If researchers were to find that alcoholics carry an unusual epigenetic mark, for instance, that wouldn’t necessarily mean that it resulted from heavy drinking. These people may have a genetic variation that puts them at risk of alcoholism and, perhaps coincidentally, creates an unusual epigenetic mark on their DNA.
Dr. Greally said these possibilities have been neglected because scientists have been so captivated by the idea that epigenetic marks can reprogram cells.
“Since you don’t talk about anything else, you interpret the results solely through that little sliver of possibility,” he said.
He and his colleagues go so far as to claim that no published results on the links between epigenetic marks and disease “can be said to be fully interpretable.”
From what I know (and I’ll admit this isn’t my field), these criticisms are on the mark. But read the PLoS Genetics article below if you want to go deeper into this field. In the meantime, it’s just irresponsible for TED to promulgate the video below, which makes about as many mistakes as can be made in a five-minute presentation. I’d suggest that TED consider removing this misleading presentation. In the meantime, my advice to the layperson reading popular articles about epigenetics is this: unless the article is by Carl Zimmer, take everything it says with a grain of salt.
The misguided TED video:
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As we all know, PuffHo is having a big campaign to not only make Islam seem like a Wonderful Religion of Peace, but (and more admirably) to show that not all Muslims are terrorists. But they repeatedly conflate criticism of the religion with criticism of its adherents, lumping both under the rubric of “Islamophobia”—a word that the PuffHo throws around as often as the words “and” and “the.” In fact, PuffHo rarely even discusses the problematic tenets of Islam; I guess those are either off limits or too difficult for its brain-dead readers.
In the article I discuss below, for instance, there are 24 pictures of people explaining why we should challenge Islamophobia. Not “Muslimophobia” but “Islamophobia.” This one clearly shows the conflation:
Doesn’t that remind you of a certain NRA-ish slogan about guns and people? The implication, of course, is that religion is not a source of violence—that terrorists are simply violent people who aren’t motivated by anything religious, nor even by any ideology. It’s about the stupidest thing one can say about the whole issue. After all, humans not only created religion and some of its violent dictates, but religions—Islam in this case—can be interpreted by people as condoning, sanctioning, or even urging violence. I feel sorry for the brainwashed young man above.
But on to the PuffHo article, and I’ll try to be brief. The piece, by Dean Obeidallah, is called “Coverage of the Istanbul bombing proves once again that American media care little about Muslim lives.” The rag describes the author as “a former lawyer turned political comedian and commentator. He is the host of SiriusXM’s weekly program ‘The Dean Obeidallah show.’ He is also the Founder and Editor of the blog ‘The Dean’s Report.com.'” I’d add that he’s a big-time apologist.
At any rate, Obeidallah’s contention is that because the Istanbul airport bombings weren’t covered as extensively as those in Paris or at the Brussels airport, this shows that either the American media, Americans in general, or both, think that the lives of Muslims are worth less than the lives of non-Muslims. It’s all a manifestation of Islamophobia.
The contention:
Many, including myself, expected media outlets to cover this incident with at least the same intensity and breadth as they covered the Brussels terror attack in March that left 31 dead. Then we saw American news media spring into action, sending a cadre of anchors and reporters to Belgium providing “wall-to-wall coverage.”
NBC’s Matt Lauer and Lester Holt anchored live from Brussels. MSNBC’s hostChris Hayes and anchor Thomas Roberts went to report from the streets of Belgium.
When outlets like CNN consider a story especially important, they tend to bring out their top anchors. For Brussels, there was extensive coverage, some anchored by Anderson Cooper, showing the gravity of the situation. “Good Morning America” featured a special edition on the attacks as well. But Istanbul wasn’t afforded the same treatment. Yes, there was widespread coverage Tuesday night on cable news channels in the hours after the incident. But come Wednesday, there appeared to be little to no anchors there from major American media outlets on the streets of Turkey. We didn’t witness an outpouring of touching stories about those lost or detailed profiles about the heroism of the several Turkish police officers killed in the attack. And as the day wore on, Istanbul became just one of many big stories covered in the news.
The message sent by the American media, intentionally or not, is that when there’s an attack on a nation like Turkey that is 99 percent Muslim and the victims are primarily Muslim, it simply isn’t that important.
. . . And shockingly even when right-wing Americans plot to kill Muslim Americans on U.S soil, there’s little media coverage. You might be asking: What terror plots on Muslim Americans? Well that’s part of the problem.
There’s Glendon Scott Crawford, a Klan member, who was convicted last August in federal court for trying to “acquire a radiation weapon for mass destruction” to kill Muslim Americans in New York State. He was convicted and facing a sentence of 25 years to life in August 2015, but we didn’t see many national headlines for this story.
. . . Is the lack of media coverage because there’s an empathy gap for Muslims lives? Or is it that the media executives simply believe Americans don’t care and won’t watch stories about Muslims killed by terror attacks?
It’s not clear, but considering the news is a business, I’d suspect the second reason is more at play. After all, this week we didn’t see an outpouring of “Je suis Turkey” type postings and Facebook didn’t create a Turkey filter for your profile the way it created a France one after the Paris attack.
You get the idea. And perhaps there’s a soupçon of truth in Obeidallah’s argument. But he hasn’t considered alternative hypotheses that I think are more important. First, it’s likely that many American don’t even know that most Turks are Muslims! Yes, about 99% of them are, but never underestimate the ignorance of Americans when it comes to other countries.
Second, it’s not as if the media ignored what happened in Turkey. It was the lead story on the NBC News three days running, and the major headline in papers like the New York Times. And, as a counterexample, the 2014 kidnapping of 276 Nigerian schoolgirls, many of them Muslim, by Boko Haram, received huge media attention, prompting the “Bring Back our Girls” campaign. The fact that many of those girls were Christians didn’t bring that attention: few people even knew the religions of those girls. What mattered is that children were abducted.
Third, there’s a reason why news organizations might deploy fewer commentators to places like Turkey: they’re farther away and thus more expensive to reach and broadcast from.
But the main reason, of course, and one that I’ve discussed before, may well be this: the the Istanbul bombings may have gotten less coverage than those in Paris or Brussels not because Americans devalue Muslim lives, but because Americans share more of their culture with Europe than with Turkey. How many Americans have visited either Brussels or Paris as opposed to Istanbul? How many Americans have lived in Europe compared to Turkey, or have friends or relatives in either Europe or Turkey? How many Americans know much about Turkish culture? This has nothing to do with dehumanizing adherents to a faith, but with feeling closer to a country that you know something about, and whose culture you’re more familiar with.
If there were similar bombings in, say, in Papua New Guinea, which is largely Christian but with a layer of (non-Muslim!) folk religions, those would probably get even less attention. Or if you’re ready to claim that that’s just because the inhabitants are largely black, substitute Vladivostok or Bucharest—white Christian cities.
As one of my friends emailed me when I pointed out this article, “Some people just have a sort of weird need to beat themselves up about things that have nothing to do with them. They are the modern-day equivalent of the old timey Catholic saints who wore hairshirts, whipped themselves and only allowed themselves small sips of warm water on hot days.” Yep, Obeidallah is certainly in that group. His article is nothing more than virtue-signaling: a way to puff out his chest and say that he’s better than the rest of us “Islamophobes.”
Reader Diane G., an avid birder and animal lover, incubated and raised a baby tortoise, documenting it with this cool story (her words are indented). Enjoy it on this holiday weekend!
The recent article about nine new babies of an 80-year-old Galapagos Tortoise at the Zurich Zoo reminded me of our own little tortoises’ blessed event, and I thought I’d send some pictures of the youngster.
In 2000, out of the blue, my 9-year-old daughter Liz decided she wanted a tortoise for her birthday. Being a family that’s gaga for animals, we did some research and concluded that the only common tortoise in the pet trade that we could possibly provide enough room and environmental richness for was the so-called Russian Tortoise, Agrionemys horsfieldii, one of the smallest available. That August we welcomed Vladimir to the family. He was absolutely captivating and so two years later we adopted a female, Anastasia.
(Despite its common name this is a tortoise of the ‘stans”—“eastern Iran, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, southern Kazakhstan, the westernmost part of Xinjiang (China), and part of northwestern Pakistan… Its range has been reported to cover 3,362,935 km2, with the Central Asian deserts containing 73% of the species range…” )
Two years later I found two eggs on the shavings in Anya’s indoor tub. Wow—cool, right? Once more we read up, found the right incubator settings, and began the first of several long slogs of trying to hatch tortoise eggs. Two years and ten eggs later, we were astounded when egg # 11 hatched! Here’s the youngster right after hatching–with a piece of eggshell covering his head, naturally.
The second, third, and fourth photos show some of his first meals, after his yolk sac was completely absorbed. The last one was taken through the side of his plastic enclosure, so it’s a bit clouded, but I just love the way he had to stand on his tippy-toes to reach the repast in his yogurt-carton lid dish!
For the next shot, we placed the hatchling in a tub with Dad (center) and Mom (right) for a size comparison.
Liz wanted to continue the Russian-name theme but it’s nearly impossible to sex these baby tortoises; thus she decided that the offspring would be either Natasha or Boris, and for the time-being we’d call it NB. A few years later we determined it was male, but after calling him NB for so long, it’s been difficult to remember to say Boris–90% of the time he’s still NB.
Anya continued to lay eggs through 2007, for a total of 21 overall, but NB was the only one ever to hatch. I dissected most of the unhatched eggs after incubating, but found only one nearly fully developed embryo, another one that died at a much younger stage, a few with barely visible evidence of fertilization, and many clear eggs.
Sadly, we lost Anya to a bad infection a few years ago; but Vladi and NB are still going strong. The little guy is nearly 12 years old now, and bigger than his father.
Jerry asked about how we keep them. Happily we had an unused chicken run at the time, which I divided in two lengthwise for them (because males and females can’t be kept together except for short periods in order to mate, nor can two males be kept together because they fight). Here’s a shot of the habitat with NB visible in the front of the left side run.
When these shots were taken he was about half grown, I’d say.
When they have to be inside, they each had a separate tub:
Now, with Anya gone and NB grown, the latter uses the former’s tub. We’ve had Vladi now for nearly 16 years, and hope he & NB stick around for many more.
It’s a three-day weekend in the U.S., with tomorrow being the Fourth of July, aka Independence Day, when we happily separated ourselves from a country that ultimately voted for Brexit. On this day in 1775, George Washington took command of the revolutionary forces, the Continental Army. On July 3, 1844, the last pair of great auks was killed, and in 1996, twenty years ago, the Stone of Scone was returned to Scotland from Westminster Abbey; it now resides in the castle at Edinburgh.
Notables born on this day include George M. Cohan (1878), Tom Stoppard (1937), Tom Cruise (1962), and and Ludivine Sagnier (1979). Those who died on this day include Trigger (the horse, 1965), Brian Jones (1969), Jim Morrison (1971) and Andy Griffith (2012). I note sadly the passing of author and Holocaust “activist” Elie Wiesel yesterday. Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is kvetching about the gardening:
Hili: An unmown meadow is more ecological.
A: You think so…
Hili: A cat creeping stealthily is invisible there.
Hili: Niekoszona łąka jest bardziej ekologiczna.
Ja: Tak uważasz?
Hili: Tak, nie widać na niej skradającego się kota.
Walking to the store the other day, I found myself bored and unable to brain. Then a woman passed me wearing sandals (it’s summer up here, after all) and bright red toenail polish. That gave me something to do: I decided to count the colors on the feet of all the women who passed me until I got to the store and then to my place. The only criteria were that I had to pass the women on the sidewalk, going either way, and that their toes were exposed so I could see if they were wearing pollish and, if so, what color. Here’s the total out of 28 women surveyed:
This is exactly the kind of experiment the great Victorian polymath Francis Galton, Darwin’s half cousin, would have done. Besides his huge contributions to statistics, he was always conducting crazy little studies to satisfy his curiosity, including surveying the women from various cities of Britain to see which city’s women were the most beautiful (as I recall, he had a card that he’d secretly punch when he saw a woman). You can see the winning and losing cities here.
My conclusion: women favor red toenail polish over other colors—by a large margin. I’m sure that one would get the same result if one surveyed fingernail polish, which I didn’t do. And, of course, it hasn’t escaped my notice that red lipstick is by far the favorite among colors. One might be able to get similar results simply by tallying the various colors on sale at drugstores or the beauty counters of department stores.
When I told one of my women friends this result, she said that she herself would never bare her toes without colored polish, and it was invariably red. When I said, “Why red?”, she answered “Because I like it.”
Well, that’s the proximate explanation, but I want to know why they like it. There has to be some reason why red is the most popular color. One explanation, of course, is simply that it’s the most visible or striking color, and thus calls attention to the toes, fingers, and lips. But then, why red rather than orange or bright yellow?
Now I’m sure that evolutionary psychologists have dealt with this question, and I’m almost as sure that the answers are varied. I would bet, knowing nothing about this question, that the answers involve either invoking the colors of berries gleaned by our ancestors, or the resemblance between the red color of the polish and the color of a woman’s excited nether parts (well, they’re not really red). Support for the latter hypothesis comes from the notion that the redder a woman’s lips are, the more sexual she is.
As for me, I’m content to have done my little survey, confident that the results are pretty general, and I’ll leave it to the evolutionary psychologists to provide hypotheses. Maybe some of them would even be testable. Can we color the nails of female chimpanzees or baboons and see what happens?
I would, of course, particularly like to hear from women readers, either adding to the tally or explaining their choice of colors (or why they don’t use color).
by Greg Mayer
I spent June 17-22 in Austin, Texas, for Evolution 2016, the annual joint meeting of the Society for the Study of Evolution, the American Society of Naturalists, and the Society of Systematic Biology, which is the premier annual gathering of evolutionary biologists from around the world. I hope to make a few posts about the goings on, and we’ll start with some natural history.
On the day I arrived I met up with my friend and colleague Steve Orzack, and we headed out to Pedernales Falls State Park, about an hour west of Austin, to do some birding and herping prior to the official kickoff of the meeting that evening. Also keeping an eye out for mammals, I noticed a sign mentioning “rock squirrels”, showing a black headed squirrel, and recalling how variable fox squirrels are, I wondered if this might be the local variety of fox squirrels. We soon came across a squirrel, which, however, was a rather interesting Eastern gray squirrel (Sciurus carolinensis).
In the northern United States, gray squirrels are typically gray above and white below, while fox squirrels are a slightly different shade of gray above and fulvous below. Very rarely a gray squirrel may be fulvous below, in which case the definitive character to look for is that gray squirrels have a white frosting or “halo” on their tails (the tips of the outer tail hairs being white). The squirrel above caught our attention because while gray above, it’s clearly ochraceous buff below, so I thought it might be a fox squirrel. We kept it under observation, and it soon showed its true colors.
Obligingly raising its tail while stopping to drink out of small puddles and pools in the spring-fed muddy track along which we walked, it revealed its gray squirrel-defining frosting on its tail, while also clearly showing it was reddish below.
I’ve never seen gray squirrels in the north drink like this, and it may reflect the scarcity of water sources in the dry scrublands of Texas. This squirrel was also of interest because the park is in Blanco County, and according to Texas Tech, Blanco County is just outside the range of the gray squirrel, so this would be a new county record. (The rock squirrel of Pedernales Falls turns out to be a rather bushy-tailed, black-headed ground squirrel, Spermophilus variegatus, but we did not see any).
The reddish ventral coloration was not a peculiarity of this individual, for the urban squirrels of Austin were also gray squirrels with ochraceous buff venters. This guy was hanging out at one of the bars on Rainey Street.
This one was in the parkland strip along Lady Bird Lake (actually an impounded strip of the Colorado River) just west of Rainey Street. The ochraceous buff venter is clearly visible.
This particular squirrel was first spotted with a mixed flock of great-tailed grackles, white-winged doves, and rock doves. Try spotting all four species in the picture below
Austin’s most famous mammals are the Mexican free-tailed bats (Tadarida brasiliensis) that roost under the Congress Avenue Bridge, and emerge by the millions (or so I am told) each evening. I went out twice to see them, once from below the bridge, and once from the sidewalk above; they came out about 9 PM. Both times large crowds gathered both above and below, and many vessels, including tour boats, gathered on the lake below the bridge. Attempts to photograph them were unsuccessful with my limited camera, but you can see them briefly in the video; listen for the murmur of the bats in the background behind the voices. The red light is a search light used by one of the tour boats, and I tried to follow this light to catch the bats on the video.
On the last day of the meetings, I walked under the bridge to get to the concluding Super Social, and found this dead bat below the bridge. You can clearly see its ‘free tail’ (i.e. the tail is not completely contained within the membrane of the uropatagium).
The deposits of bat-feces rich sediments (bat guano) below bat roosts (especially if in caves) are often important sources of fossils of bats and associated creatures; there’s a ‘rain’ of dead bats into this sediment. But with a lake and sidewalk below, this cute fellow is unlikely to be fossilized.
The pièce de résistance of the mammals of Austin for me was a new species and family of mammals for my life list: I spotted a coypu (Myocastor coypus) swimming down Waller Creek in the heart of downtown Austin, right behind Iron Works BBQ. The coypu (or nutria) is an invasive species, originally brought to the U.S. from South America. They look like large muskrats, but do not have a laterally compressed tail. I was looking for the tail, which I could not see clearly, but once I looked at my pictures and video I could easily see the distinctive, diagnostic whitish snout of the coypu.
