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.
Already Thursday? So it is—May 26, 2016, and the rains have begun in Chicago, inundating the succulent plants and cacti that I forgot to bring inside from the lab fire escape. And I have no idea what I’ll write about today.
On this day in history—in 1828—the “feral child” Kaspar Hauser showed up in Nuremberg, a child whose origins were completely unknown and who had a short and unhappy life (read at the link). On May 26, 1896, Nicolas II became Russia’s last Tsar, executed in 1918 along with his entire family by the Bolsheviks.
Photographer Dorothea Lange was born on this day in 1895, jazz musician Miles Davis in 1926, and actress Helena Bonham Carter in 1966. Notables who died on this day include Martin Heidegger in 1976 and filmmaker Sydney Pollack in 2008. Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Andrzej pause in the fields for a friendly discussion about evolution:
Hili: Does every butterfly also come from an unbroken line of life for four billions years?
A: Of course.
Hili: They must work very hard.
In Polish:
Hili: Czy każdy motyl to też nieprzerwana linia życia od czterech miliardów lat?
Ja: Oczywiście.
Hili: Te się muszą napracować.
I saw this as a gif on Facebook yesterday, and today it’s all over the Internet, getting half a million views in just two days. Well, we needn’t reject a video because of its popularity, and this one is lovely. It shows two safari-goers in Botswana being awakened by lions licking the condensed dew off their tent. (My first theory is that they wanted the booze inside!).
. . . the footage shows three parched lions licking water off a tent from rain the night before. The lions appear to be completely indifferent to the tent’s occupants, or their bottle of Scotch.
The video was shot by Francie Francisca Lubbe earlier this month while camping at the Khiding campsite with her partner in Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park, Botswana. While many would understandably be pretty shaken up by having a lion lick as an alarm clock, Lubbe described the occurrence as “a privilege.”
Poor thirsty lions—they should put out a big bowl of water for them.
In this video Ami Horowitz, who does short scam videos along the lines of “Candid Camera”—but with a political theme—approaches students at Portland State University (PSU), asking them to give money to fund Hamas attacks against schools, hospitals and cafes in a campaign to destroy Israel. In other words, he’s asking students to support terrorism. Surprisingly, many students agreed to give money for the murder of civilians. Horowitz has made a number of these videos, including one in which Yale students signed a petition to scrap the First Amendment.
Of course these videos were surely selected from a larger number in which students sloughed him off, but I’m surprised that any student was amenable to Horowitz’s pitch. Peter Boghossian, who works at PSU, has a big job ahead of him!
Now were these students approving terrorism in general, or terrorism against Israeli civilians in particular? Almost certainly the latter. If Horowitz were to say that he was a Christian anti-abortionist and, failing legal success to stop abortion, he was asking for money to send suicide bombers against abortion clinics, he would certainly not have gotten this kind of reaction.
UPDATE: A bit of digging shows that donation wasn’t rare. As The Examiner reports:
Appearing as a guest on the Sean Hannity’s radio show, Horowitz noted that he managed to raise $300 within one hour. He also claimed that at least half of the students he spoke to offered to donate financially.
Yes, this video has been shown by Fox News and touted by The National Review. It’s a sad state of affairs, but telling, when the Right publicizes stuff like this, but the Left ignores it.
And so ServerGate continues, this time with a new govrnment report that Donald Trump will surely make hay from. The State Department’s Inspector General has been looking into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private server to handle her email when she was Secretary of State, and has issued a severely critical report. The Washington Post article has a link to the Inspector General’s report (you can see the whole thing here)—a report commissioned by John Kerry—and notes this:
The State Department’s independent watchdog has issued a highly critical analysis of Hillary Clinton’s email practices while running the department, concluding that she failed to seek legal approval for her use of a private email server and that department staff would not have given its blessing because of the “security risks in doing so.”
The inspector general, in a long awaited review obtained Wednesday by The Washington Post in advance of its publication, found that Clinton’s use of private email for public business was “not an appropriate method” of preserving documents and that her practices failed to comply with department policies meant to ensure that federal record laws are followed.
The report says Clinton, who is the Democratic presidential front-runner, should have printed and saved her emails during her four years in office or surrendered her work-related correspondence immediately upon stepping down in February 2013. Instead, Clinton provided those records in December 2014, nearly two years after leaving office.
Among the dissimulating things that Clinton and her associates said about this were:
No sensitive material was sent from her server (WRONG)
The use of the server was approved by a lawyer’s review (NO EVIDENCE FOR THAT)
All official emails from the private server were turned over to the government (NOT TRUE)
The Post also notes that Clinton refused to speak to the commission investigating her emails, which looks pretty shady.
The FBI has a separate investigation going on, and that will take some time. The upshot? I don’t see any deliberate malfeasance here, just poor practice, and, most important, post facto lying about what had happened. Hillary Clinton is not an honest person, and we knew that starting from her lies about being under sniper fire in Bosnia. I think Americans sense this, one reason why her approval ratings are so low.
I’ll vote for her—what choice do we have?—but I won’t do so happily.
Oy! Neil deGrasse Tyson can be as misleading as Siddhartha Mukherjee when it comes to epigenetics. Here’s a video from NOVA Science (2012) showing Tyson stating—completely erroneously—that epigenetic phenomena, like gene methylation and histone alterations, are the important factor controlling the expression of genes. As he says, they constitute “a second genome: the epigenome.”
As we’ve seen over the past three weeks, that’s not correct. What we know is that gene regulation is effected by proteins called transcription factors as well as by small RNA molecules. This is the mistake Mukherjee made when, in his New Yorker piece, he touted changes in the “epigenome” the DNA’s histone scaffold as the new Big Finding in gene regulation.
Tyson ‘s discussion of epigenetics begins at 4:30, and soon goes downhill as he asserts, “It’s the epigenome that tells our cells what sort of cells they should be.” Wrong. It’s the transcription factors and small RNAs that tell our cells what they should be. Mukherjee finally admitted that, but I don’t know whether Tyson has corrected the information in this four-year-old video.
Tyson presents a pair of identical twins that have different methylation patterns, and implies that the differences between those twins resulted from the differential methylation. There’s no any evidence for that. The twins’ different environments could have produced differential expression of genes by activating or repressing RNAs and transcription factors, and the methylation patterns could be a downstream correlate of that action without any causal effects on gene expression.
Likewise with Tyson’s misleading claim that cancer could result from epigenetic differences. That, he says, is good news because it’s much easier to change methylation patterns than gene sequences. But we have no idea if what he says about the cause of cancer is true: everything goes haywire in cancer cells, including the signaling pathways of genes that involve transcription factors. As far as I know, cancer drugs that affect methylation patterns have not been shown to have consistent effect on cancers.
Finally, Tyson implies an epigenetic form of Lamarckian evolution (6:50), getting researcher Randy Jirtle to argue “What you [humans] eat can affect future generations”, though Tyson does note that such environmentally induced methylation patterns are effaced after a generation or two. That, of course, means that environmental changes of methylation cannot be the basis for adaptive evolution—or any evolution. But he doesn’t say that—hardly anybody says that except for petulant evolutionists like me.
Have a look for yourself:
Why is this important? First, because Tyson is an immensely popular and influential science communicator, and people will believe what he says. When he gives a misleading view of gene regulation, as did Mukherjee in his New Yorker piece, that is the view that filters down to the public, who of course doesn’t read the primary scientific literature. It then becomes the responsibility of journalists and other scientific popularizers to correct this misinformation. So far they haven’t done a very good job.
Second, the idea pushed in this video—that cancer is caused by differential patterns of methylation, and might be cured by altering methylation—is dangerous. While it might turn out to be partly correct, there’s almost no evidence for it so far; and promoting epigenetic theories of cancer might well lead people to quacks who promise to cure them by changing their epigenome. I don’t know if this is a present danger, but misinformation about medical issues can be far more dangerous to people’s well-being than misinformation about pure science.
The “nones” in England rose from 25% in 2011 to the figure quoted by Jesus in 2014. That is a huge increase in only three years—nearly a doubling? Can anyone doubt that religion is on the way out, at least in the UK? Remember, though, that “nones” include a lot of people who believe in God, but don’t belong to an established church, as well as those who accept a “higher power”. And when established religion is on the wane, so is religion as a whole.
If it can happen in England and Wales, it can—and will—happen in the U.S.
Everyone loves mimicry (well, don’t you?), so we can all appreciate the photos sent by Tony Eales from Australia (his captions indented). Mimicry is not only an outstanding example of how well natural selection can mold the shape (and behavior and pheromones) of unrelated species, but also served as some of the first evidence for natural selection. After all, if you’re a creationist, there’s no obvious reason why God would create a tasty species to resemble one that is distasteful and dangerous. Check out the ant-mimicking spider in the fourth picture!
I know you like mimicry and I’ve been getting into insect photography of late and have found a few nice examples of mimicry
First a couple of ant mimics [and an ant]
This is a beetle, probably of the family Anthicidae, but I haven’t traced it further than that:
And this is a common sort of ant around here, often called Golden Bum or Gold Tail but, it’s a Polyrhachis sp.
Here is a species of jumping spider that imitates these ants so well it’s quite extraordinary, right down to waving their front pair of legs like antennae. This can’t be to fool the ants as they are nearly blind and work off chemical cues but probably to fool parasitic wasps which commonly catch spiders to feed their flesh-eating larvae.
Here is a species of wasp, probably Callibracon sp.:
