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.
I believe my boots are almost done, but we’re behind on the photographs. All will be revealed! The boots are by Lee Miller of Austin, Texas, and the photos and captions (indented) by Carrlyn Miller. I have no idea how anyone manages to stitch in such intricate ways!
Here we are going to begin to stitch around the name.
At this time we’ll also sew the linings to the back of the tops.
On the right side, you can see that the name has been stitched on the outside with blue, and the “stitch in the ditch” in rust, blue around the rose, with the detail and again the “stitch in the ditch” on the stem and leaves of the rose. The left side name only has the blue outline of the name.
Here is a better view of the stitching around the rose.
Charlotte is trimming the excess lining from the top panels.
Here’s one panel done and ready to start the fancy stitching. [JAC: All the stitching is fancy, of course, but Carrlyn’s referring to the decorative stitching on the shafts.]
Here Lee has started stitching. One row at a time.
A closeup.
One panel is done! [JAC: the clefts are at the front and back of the boots, with the panels sewn together at the sides. Thus the names will be mirror images of each other along the sides, forming two divergent curves that touch in the middle. This style, in which a name is turned into art, was pioneered by Charlie Dunn, with whom Lee apprenticed. The pinched yellow roses in leather, whose construction is a trade secret, also came from Dunn. Note that there are 4 rows of “fancy stitching,” all perfectly lined up, and all done by hand on a single-needle sewing machine.]
Now he burns off the thread ends.
And Lee uses this particular hammer to press them down.
We’ll have only a few animal photos today, as there are boots to show. Today’s theme is “Urban wildlife of Ontario.”
This comes from reader Ken McKeen, who hails from Amherstburg, Ontario and sent one photo on June 16. Readers are invited to identify the species (the rabbit looks wet). Ken’s notes:
This rabbit appeared moments ago, munching on weeds at the edge of my garage. I purchased a super zoom/bridge camera over the winter and have been fooling around with it for several months. This is the first good wildlife pic I’ve taken with it. No idea on the species etc., sorry.
Brave bunny, we live with three cats, one of which is a psychopathic hunter/killer.
Good morning; the weekend is here, albeit the end of a very tough week for Britain. It’s Saturday, June 25 in the U.S. where it’s also National Catfish Day! Readers who nom catfish today should weigh in below. On this day in history the Battle of Little Bighorn took place (1876), and Stravinsky’s The Firebird was premiered in Paris (1910). In 1940, France officially surrendered to Germany, and the very last strip of Krazy Kat, one of my all-time favorite comics, was published in 1944.
Krazy Kat, Ignatz the mouse, and Offisa Bull Pupp. Krazy always interpreted Ignatz’s hurled bricks as signs of love.
On this day in 1978, the rainbow “gay pride” flag was flown for the first time, during a Gay Freedom Day Parade in San Francisco, and in 1984 Prince released the album Purple Rain.
Notables born on this day include George Orwell (1903), Carly Simon (1945), Sonia Sotomayor (1954), and Ricky Gervais (1961). Those who died on this day include George Custer (1876; see above), Thomas Eakins (1916), and Michel Foucault (1984). Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is inspecting the cherries, which, I’m told, are coming along nicely.
Hili: A farmer’s life is not an easy one.
A: Oy, you are right.
In Polish:
Hili: Życie rolnika nie jest łatwe.
Ja: Oj, masz rację.
Reader Anne-Marie Cournoyer in Montreal made herself some toasted coconut as a snack, and wanted to see if the squirrels would nom the leftovers. What do you think?
He’s a chubby one!
Finally, two cat-related cartoons sent by reader Diane G. First, a strip from the wonderful Ten Cats series by Graham Harrop:
I’m sorry to have forgotten who sent this clip to me, but the three-minute excerpt from the BBC’s “Life in the Air” series is enthralling. It’s a Eurasian sparrowhawk (Accipiter nisus), with some of the most amazing video I’ve seen of bird flight. I have no idea how they filmed it, but suspect the bird was trained. I loved how the bird flew through the gate without missing a beat. (Note that this species is not the same as the American “sparrowhawk”, Falco sparverius, now known as the American kestrel.)
And the kill, from Wikipedia:
Small birds are killed on impact or when squeezed by the Eurasian sparrowhawk’s foot, especially the two long claws. Victims which struggle are “kneaded” by the hawk, using its talons to squeeze and stab. When dealing with large prey species which peck and flap, the hawk’s long legs help. It stands on top of its prey to pluck and pull it apart.The feathers are plucked and usually the breast muscles are eaten first. The bones are left, but can be broken using the notch in the bill.
Molecular cytogenetics is hardly my field, so this paper was a bit hard for me, but the results were so interesting that I’ll do my best to present it. The paper is by Quingua Zhou et al. and was just published in the early, non-print edition of Science. (reference and free download below). It’s about what happens to mitochondria in embryos. There’s another paper in the same issue that shows the same thing, by S. Al Rawi et al, (reference below), but I didn’t read that one. There’s also a perspective on both papers by Beth Levine and Zvulun Elazar, which I also haven’t read (I’m busy!)
As you may remember from your biology courses, mitochondria are “organelles” in the cell that function in respiration and metabolism (the generation of energy) and in “apoptosis,” or programmed cell death. They contain a circular DNA molecule that produces gene products (proteins) as well as transfer RNAs—the small molecules that lock onto amino acids and help assemble them into proteins. One of the big findings of my lifetime, suggested by Lynn Margulis among others, is that mitochondria are actually the evolutionary remnants of bacteria-like prokaryotes that were ingested (probably by another prokaryote), forming a mutualistic relationship that led to the first “true” cell: a eukaryote.
The interesting thing about mitochondria is that in nearly all sexually reproducing species they’re inherited purely maternally: while both mother and father have them, only the mother’s mitochondria are passed to its adult offspring. This is why, for instance, we’re able to identify a “mitochondrial Eve”: the ancestral woman from whom all the mitochondrial DNA of living humans is descended. (Of course the rest of our DNA, which is far greater in extent, comes from a diversity of other “Eves,” so this doesn’t support the Biblical narrative in any way.)
Although a late-stage developing embryo contains only the mitochondria from the mother, sperm that penetrate the egg do have paternal mitochondria, and, at least in the “model organism” studied (the tiny worm Caenorhabditis elegans), they are present in early embryos. But then something happens—something that is amazing. You can see it happening in the photograph below.
The first photo, “A,” shows normal mitochondria in C. elegans sperm. B-C are the paternal mitochondria, derived from sperm, in embryos. Shortly after the embryo is formed, abnormal aggregates begin to form in those mitochondria (blue arrows; scale bars are 300 nanometers, or 0.3 microns, long). The cristae, or internal mitochondrial membranes, begin to break down (B & C). Then an “autophagosome” (yellow arrow) begins to form around the paternal mitochondrion (C); this is a membrane that the cell puts around structures that it intends to destroy. The contents of the autophagosome are subsequently degraded by special organelles called lysosomes. In photo “D”, the mitochondrion is on its way out; its membrane has broken down and it will soon degenerate. The paternal mitochondria are all destroyed in this way. Only the maternal ones remain as the embryo develops into an adult worm.
There are four questions here:
Why does the embryo destroy the paternal but not maternal DNA? There are evolutionary theories for this based on preventing the spread of selfish DNA in organelles (see here for one example), but these are only untested speculations. But there is almost certainly some evolutionary reason for it, since uniparental inheritance of mitochondria is so common.
How does the embryo distinguish between paternal and maternal mitochondria, and destroy only the former? Short answer: we don’t know. But I bet we will within a few years.
What are the genes involved in the destruction of paternal mitochondria? The authors of the Zhou et al. paper answered that one using clever techniques. By genetically removing RNA of genes involved in mitochondrial membrane production, they showed that one gene, cps-6, is probably involved. When the RNA product of that gene is deleted from the embryo, the paternal mitochondria persist until the late embryo stage, something that doesn’t happen with the product of any other gene. It turns out that the cps-6 gene is a nuclease (it destroys chains of nucleotides, like RNA and DNA) and is imported into paternal mitochondria by the cell, where it breaks them down.
What happens to the cell if paternal mitochondria aren’t destroyed? If you inactivate the cps-6 gene so that paternal mitochondria remain in the embryo intact, there’s elevated mortality of those embryos. It’s not total, but increases by 5.9%—a serious loss of offspring in evolutionary terms. This suggests that it’s to the cell’s advantage to destroy paternal mitochondria, and directs us again to an evolutionary explanation, one still not fully understood.
Al Rawi, S., Louvet-Vallee, S., Djeddi, A., Sachse, M., Culetto, E., Hajjar, C., Boyd, L., Legouis, R., & Galy, V. (2011). Postfertilization Autophagy of Sperm Organelles Prevents Paternal Mitochondrial DNA Transmission Science, 334 (6059), 1144-1147 DOI:10.1126/science.1211878
As you know, the UK has just voted in a referendum to leave the EU. Prime Minister Cameron, who called the referendum to quell dissent within the ranks of his Tory party, has stated that he will resign by the beginning of October. Billions of dollars have been taken off the paper value of the UK economy as the pound has crashed and the stock market has fallen.
There will almost certainly be a second referendum on Scottish independence (Scotland voted overwhelmingly for remain, and can legitimately argue it does not want to be taken out of the EU), with it being highly likely that this time the Scots would vote to leave the UK. Even more worryingly, it seems probable that the Good Friday Agreement, which led to peace in Northern Ireland, and which was entirely based on EU money and support, will come undone, perhaps with catastrophic consequences. A new right-wing Brexit government, which no one has voted for, will come to power in October, probably led by the cynical pretend-buffoon Boris Johnson, who opted for Leave because it gave him the best chance of becoming Prime Minister.
I voted Remain, not because I think the EU is a perfect institution, but because membership has transformed the UK for the better. I lived for 18 years in France, and when I returned to the UK I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the country had changed, and the little England tendencies I grew up with had been overlain by a relative sophistication in most things. The Leave vote suggests that I was mistaken.
Since the 2008 crash in particular, UK politics has increasingly been dominated by the anti-EU UK Independence Party (UKIP) led by Nigel Farage, a millionaire stockbroker who has somehow managed to persuade people that he’s an ordinary bloke because he smokes, likes a pint and flirts with racism. The campaign was widely disliked, marked by lies and distortions (primarily on the Leave side, but the Remain side focused its campaign on ‘project fear’ and failed to give a positive reason for staying), and by populist rabble-rousing by Johnson, Farage and the odious Michael Gove, who spent his time contemptuously dismissing the views of ‘experts’.
The culmination of this awful atmosphere was the unveiling of a vile UKIP poster which coincided with the terrible murder of Labour MP Jo Cox, who was shot and stabbed a week before the vote. The man charged with her killing gave his name in court as ‘death to traitors, freedom for Britain’.
The results of the referendum are complex. Remain was a majority in Scotland, London, and some of the major cities – Manchester, Liverpool, Bristol… Leave dominated the countryside (including Wales) and in particular the once-industrial areas which have been in crisis for decades, and in particular since 2008. The main sociological factors that explain the voting pattern were age – young UK citizens voted overwhelmingly for Remain, while the older generations (who, to be frank, will not have to live for long with the consequences of their vote), voted Leave – and educational level (72% of university-educated people voted Remain).
The Leave campaign was focused on the slogan of ‘getting back control’, in particular over immigration – the free movement of workers in Europe has led to a substantial influx of young workers, in particular from Eastern Europe who have kept the economy ticking over. This growth (less than 0.5% per year) was portrayed as being the cause of problems in the National Health Service in particular, problems which were in fact due to the government’s austerity policies. Migrants are more likely to be working in the NHS rather than spongeing off it, plus migrants are more likely to be in work than UK citizens, but these are just some of the facts that were ignored in favour of demagogic slogans.
People voted Leave, it appears, for many different and complex reasons (that’s one of the problems with referendums: people do not necessarily answer the question in the way that was intended). Among the factors cited are dissatisfaction with a bureaucratic EU, fears about immigration (often expressed in areas with the lowest levels of migration) and a deep feeling from those in the more impoverished communities of being left behind. It is interesting, however, that areas of Scotland that are also affected by these factors nevertheless voted Remain.
So British society is fractured. It is fractured along age and geographical lines. Workers in areas that are relatively prosperous voted Remain, those in poorer areas – ironically those that rely most on EU financial support – voted Leave. The Leave victory is being portrayed as a victory over ‘the establishment’, and yet the Leave leaders – and the probable future political leaders of the country, are the usual Eton, Oxbridge and millionaire gang.
Although the referendum is not legally binding – the UK will only begin the process for leaving the EU when it invokes Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty – I do not believe for an instant that there is any prospect of the UK not leaving. That decision has been taken, with a clear majority, and I do not expect there to be any shift in the situation in my lifetime.
The Leave camp are confident that the UK will move into bright uplands, as they trash the regulations that the EU has put on business, leading to lower wages, fewer workers’ rights, less environmental protection and riskier business practices. The Remain camp predicted dire consequences for the UK economy – indeed for the world economy. We will see who is right.
If the promises made by the Leave campaign are not realised – and I do not see how they can be – then those disaffected and poor sections of society who voted Leave will have to turn to some other scapegoat, apart from Europe, migrants, the Establishment, or whatever motivated their Leave vote. As we can see in France, this could turn very nasty indeed.
On a parochial level, UK universities, and science in particular, are going to be clobbered. Funding will drop, interactions with Europe will decline, and there will be bad times all around. I predict that many colleagues who are European will be looking for jobs elsewhere – why stay in a country that doesn’t want you? If I had known what was going to happen, I would never have returned to the UK in 2002.
If you are an academic outside of the UK looking to recruit some bright young people, I suggest you start trawling through UK university websites – I suspect you will find many people eager to discuss moving.
What are the lessons? For me, I should have taken out French nationality when I could easily have done so, some time in the 1990s. I didn’t because I couldn’t see what the point was. How stupid of me. For US voters, think very carefully before you dismiss the possibility of Trump becoming President. There is a right-wing populist movement going on, feeding off fears and discontent, potentially transforming them into something even more dangerous. Use your vote in November, even if you loathe Hillary and all she stands for. The unthinkable could happen – it just did here.
Readers are welcome to chip in and argue the Leave case below. I won’t be replying though. I’m done with this.
To sum up my mood, here’s a very moving video by the Bristol-based trip-hop band Portishead. It’s a cover of Abba’s ‘SOS’ and is a tribute to murdered MP Jo Cox, closing with words from her first speech in parliament, last year: ‘We have far more in common than that which divides us’. It is very hard to feel that way today.
There was a special Education section in Wednesday’s New York Times, and you can get there by clicking on the screenshots below. If you’ve already used up your ten free NYT articles for the month, as I have, you can always access any article by simply typing its title into the search box, and maybe adding “NYT’ (without quotation marks) to be sure.
The rightful passing of that paradigm [the “faculty as priesthood”] created a need for new ones, and Mr. [Jonathan] Haidt said that the two in vogue now were “the therapeutic model and the consumer model.” In accordance with the first of those, students regard colleges as homes and places of healing. In accordance with the second, they regard colleges as providers of goods that are measurable and of services that should meet their specifications.
And that has imperfections all its own, the best laundry list of which appeared in “Customer Mentality,” an essay by Nate Kreuter, an assistant professor of English at Western Carolina University, that was published by Inside Higher Ed in 2014.
He noted a “hesitance to hold students accountable for their behavior,” be it criminal or a violation of what is too frequently a “laughable university honor code.” He noted an expectation among many students that their purchase of a college education should be automatically redeemable for a job, as if college were that precisely vocational and the process that predictable.
“That’s simply not how life works,” he said in a recent interview. “So we have a lot of students who are disenchanted.”
It is, therefore, an oddity of the debate over affirmative action that even as the status quo is challenged, few dispute the ways in which a variety of beliefs and perspectives yields better ideas than would emerge from a single vantage point. Without a truly diverse student body and faculty, a university simply will be unable to achieve the highest levels of excellence in teaching, research and intellectual discovery. And without the instrumental consideration of race in admissions currently allowed by the Supreme Court, that diversity will become an elusive goal for many universities and colleges.
As important as it is to preserve this holistic consideration of race, that goal is insufficient. I believe that the court and society must also come to grips with the fact that any discussion of the constitutionality of affirmative action necessarily forces us to consider a larger question: namely, whether one of America’s greatest engines of individual and communal advancement — our institutions of higher education — shall be enlisted in achieving a racially integrated society that transcends the nation’s legacy of slavery, Jim Crow and segregation.
I was a member of the Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences, put together by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The report we produced, The Heart of the Matter, discussed this issue in depth, outlining three goals that America’s educational institutions should advance:
Educating Americans in the knowledge, skills and understanding that they need to thrive in a 21st century democracy; fostering a society that is innovative, competitive and strong; and equipping the nation for leadership in an interconnected world.
The commission took the position — and I agree wholeheartedly — that “these goals cannot be achieved by science alone.”
No doubt we have to improve our schoolchildren’s performance in math and science; we need more homegrown engineers of varying types. But not everyone wants to be an engineer, or can be. And, as leaders in science and the tech industry have acknowledged over the years, innovation is spurred by people who are creative in different ways. The gathering of ideas from seemingly disparate fields often brings new ways to think about problems and allows creativity to flourish.
“Teaching inclusion in a divided world,” by Nicholas Christakis, the beleaguered Yale sociologists who, with his wife, was hounded by students out of their residential masterships at Silliman College at Yale. An excerpt:
Students are demanding greater inclusion, and they are absolutely right. But inclusion in what? At our universities, students of all kinds are joining traditions that revere free expression, wide engagement, open assembly, rational debate and civil discourse. These things are worth defending. In fact, they are the predicates for the very demands the students have been making across the United States.
Conversely, it is entirely illiberal (even if permissible) to use these traditions to demand the censorship of others, to besmirch fellow students rather than refute the ideas that they express and to treat ideological claims as if they were perforce facts. When students (and faculty) do this, they are burning the furniture to heat the house.
. . . And so the faculty must cut at the root of a set of ideas that are wholly illiberal. Disagreement is not oppression. Argument is not assault. Words — even provocative or repugnant ones — are not violence. The answer to speech we do not like is more speech.
If we fail to see this, we risk confirming for our students the old joke that we wouldn’t want to join a club that would have us.
