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.
This video of one tiger waking up another, with a reaction by foreign visitors, was taken at the Dublin Zoo and posted on YouTube April 9. It already has nearly a million views.
Listen to those roars!
Here is a brave woman. In this video, reported by the BBC and placed by MEMRI on Facebook, Kuwaiti professor of philosophy Sheikha Al-Jassem discussed Islamic extremism in a show broadcast March 8th on Kuwait’s Al-Shahed TV. Because of what Al-Jassem said—that the constitution of Kuwait should supercede Qur’anic sharia law—she was called into the prosecutor’s office and may be tried. As the BBC reports:
Her remarks provoked a storm of attacks against her, spearheaded by Islamist members of Kuwait’s parliament.
“They were terrifying me – everywhere, not just from Kuwait, even from Saudi Arabia,” she told the BBC. “They were talking against me, they were saying bad things, they were ridiculing me. But I’m used to it now.
Calls were made for Ms Jassem’s dismissal from Kuwait University, where she is a professor of philosophy. and a legal complaint was issued against her.
The public prosecutor told her that the complainant said he had been psychologically damaged by her remarks.
Other legal complaints may also be filed.
Ms Jassem faces charges of blasphemy but it is up to the public prosecutor to decide whether to proceed to trial. If convicted, she could be jailed for one year.
But she is undaunted, buoyed by the support she has received as well as abuse.
Here’s the video; the exchange that got her in trouble begins at 3:18. At about 3:52 she really gets into it.
So much for a supposedly “liberal” Muslim country. And don’t pin this form of censorship on Western colonialism. It’s purely a result of religion. The concept of “blasphemy” is not one that we exported to the Middle East.
h/t: Kenan Malik
It’s refreshing to see an anti-accommodationist piece like the one published by Ross Pomeroy in Real Clear Science: “Will science drive religion extinct?” The piece violates Betteridge’s Law of Headlines (“Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no“), for Pomeroy’s answer is clearly “yes.” He first adduces data that religion is on the wane not just in America, but throughout the Western world:
“. . . statistical models going so far as to predict [religion’s] eventual extinction in nine countries: Australia, Austria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Switzerland.”
And then, looking for a cause, Pomeroy says: “While a variety of factors are likely at play, I’d like to focus on what may be the most significant contributor: science.” One of the other causes, of course, is because much of the world is becoming more prosperous, and with prosperity comes the waning of religion, whose flourishing depends largely on dissatisfaction with life leading people to accept and supplicate the divine. That’s not really what Pomeroy means, for although science is largely responsible for our improved well-being, what he means is that science is becoming a more satisfactory explanation of the universe than the old religious myths, which science has simply not supported:
We are perhaps the first generation of humans to truly possess a factually accurate understanding of our world and ourselves. In the past, this knowledge was only in the hands and minds of the few, but with the advent of the Internet, evidence and information have never been so widespread and accessible. Beliefs can be challenged with the click of a button. We no longer live in closed, insular environments where a single dogmatic worldview can dominate.
As scientific evidence questions the tenets of religion, so too, does it provide a worldview to follow, one that’s infinitely more coherent.
Sir James George Frazer, often considered one of the founding fathers of modern anthropology,wrote that — when stripped down to the core — religion, science, and magic are similar conceptions, providing a framework for how the world works and guiding our actions. He also noted that humanity moved through an Age of Magic before entering an Age of Religion. Is an Age of Science finally taking hold?
He says, “yes,” and I agree—to a lesser extent. I’m not sure that an Age of Science is taking hold in places like the Middle East or much of sub-Saharan Africa, areas where the hold of religion is sufficiently strong that science, while it can be used, is largely powerless to displace faith. But surely in the West the verities of science, and their ability to bring real, testable understanding of the Universe, has outcompeted religion’s inability to find any truths. More and more, religion is becoming a childish thing that we should put away.
I’d take issue with only one claim in Pomeroy’s piece, and it’s by someone else:
Bemidji State University psychology professor Nigel Barber expounds upon Frazer’s thoughts even further.
“[He] proposed that scientific prediction and control of nature supplants religion as a means of controlling uncertainty in our lives. This hunch is supported by data showing that more educated countries have higher levels of non belief and there are strong correlations between atheism and intelligence.”
Frazer’s hunch is also supported by a recent study published journal Personality and Individual Differences. Querying 1,500 Dutch citizens, a team of researchers led by Dr. Olga Stavrova of the University of Cologne found that belief in scientific-technological progress was positively associated with life satisfaction. This association was significantly larger than the link between religion and life satisfaction.
Well, material well-being is correlated with absence of religious belief as well as with life satisfaction, and also (probably) with belief in scientific-technological progress (one can observe its effects in better-off societies, and of course education is correlated with the “success” of societies). In the absence of a multifactorial analysis of what’s affecting what, it’s just as likely that the improvement of well being (granted, largely through science) is at least as important as “improved scientific acumen” in dispelling faith.
As for the “strong correlations between atheism and intelligence,” I’d like to believe that, of course, but am wary of accepting things that I’d like to believe. Readers who know about that study can weigh in.
JAC: Both Matthew and I had forgotten about Matthew’s 2013 post here on mites, describing a phenomenon that might explain the the “Kite Runner fossil that received a lot of attention. At that time the Kite Runner wasn’t known, but biologist/author Ross Piper submitted a post (he’s a friend of Matthew) arguing that the objects tethered to the Kite Runner arthropod might not be progeny, but phoretic symbionts (“phoretic” animals are ones that used members of other species to transport them). Pity that Derek Briggs and his colleagues didn’t read WEIT before they published their paper!
By Ross Piper
Last week Jerry posted a discussion of the ‘Kite Runner’ fossil, an intriguing 1 cm-long fossil arthropod that was found in 430 myr old volcanic ash. Aquilonifer spinosus is intriguing because of the small objects that are tethered to the animal, which Derek Briggs and his colleagues interpret as the animal’s offspring. They conclude that the fossil represents a unique form of brood care unknown in the animal world, something that Jerry agreed with. Here it is again in all its glory:
I am a little sceptical, as there is another possibility that the authors did not fully consider. I think that the smaller organisms may be using A. spinosus to hitch a ride, rather than being babies. This kind of behaviour is known as phoresis.
Briggs et al. discussed the possibility that the attached structures are phoronts/epizoans/parasites, and dismissed this idea (again, Jerry found their arguments convincing). However, in looking for potential phoretic candidates they only looked at crustaceans. But if we look at mites, specifically a stage in the life-cycle of Uropodina mites known as the deutonymph, we can find a very good match. Furthermore, these mites and their weird life-style have been discussed here about three years ago!
These mites are fond of habitats that are very patchily distributed in space and time, such as mounds of dung, carcasses, dead wood and other similarly attractive places. Mites are small and wingless, so to reach new habitats they enlist the help of animals they share these habitats with, in particular various beetles (Aphodiidae, Geotrupidae, Scarabaeidae).[1]
To attach themselves to the shiny exoskeleton of a beetle that can fly very swiftly Uropodina mites have evolved the ability to tethering themselves to a beetle using a long anal pedicel (Figure 1 and 2).
Like the silk of a spider, the pedicel is secreted by glands in the rear part of the mite’s body and extruded from its anus.[2] The mite rubs its anus against the beetle before extending its hind legs or walking away from the anchor point to extend the tether.3
Both the glands from which the pedicel is produced, and the way it hardens, suggest it the pedicel is made of some form of silk. As an entomologist I have seen these deutonymphs atop their pedicels on numerous occasions, often a profusion of them on a single beetle (Figure 2).
In the post from 2013, WEIT published these photos from Daniel Llaveneras from a beetle he found in the Andes, which he posted here:
I think something like these mites is a better interpretation of the Aquilonifer fossil ‘babies’.
Briggs et al argued that the relatively large number of small individuals associated with the fossil was evidence against these being hitchhikers: “[Aquilonifer] is unlikely to have tolerated the presence of so many drag-inducing epizoans”.
But the Deutonymphs shown in the photos travel in groups and are often found in profusion on their host. Frequently, one deutonymph is attached next to the other, even if other beetle body parts are free of mites.2 In fact, these phoretic deutonymphs atually prefer places already infested by deutonymphs.3 [iii] The impact of these passengers on the flying ability of a beetle is unknown, but it must be at least as significant as the potential impact on an aquatic host.
Something else that points to a phoretic interpretation for the A. spinosus fossil is the location of the tethered individuals. If they were genuinely offspring you would expect them to be clustered in one area to limit their impact on the parent’s swimming/foraging abilities (this is what we can see in the modern crayfish with attached embryos, which Jerry included in his post). Instead the tethered individuals are scattered across the body of Aquilonifer, which is very similar to mite deutonymphs (Figure 2).
I was also struck by this the description of the attached individuals in the Briggs et al. paper:
‘The very small size and consequent lack of detail revealed by the grinding technique make the individuals attached to Aquilonifer difficult to interpret….The outer covering of the capsules resembles a carapace that encloses the body and opens at one extremity.’
The deutonymphs of some other mites with their extended carapace are good fit for this description, as per this image from the excellent macromite blog:
Although there are no known mites of the same age as this Aquilonifer fossil, mites are known from the early Devonian4 and there are marine mites today. Having hitch-hikers rather than babies would still be pretty exciting, and a consideration of modern mites would have enriched the paper. That having been said, it is hard to see how we could test between the baby and the hitchhiker hypotheses.
Cutting edge technology and the ability to visualise small specimens in three dimensions has revolutionised palaeontology, but in the clamour to interpret how these long dead animals lived we sometimes run the risk of overlooking the insights offered by the remarkable adaptations of living organisms.
References
1. Bajerlein D, Witaliński W (2014). Localization and density of phoretic deutonymphs of the mite Uropoda orbicularis (Parasitiformes: Mesostigmata) on Aphodius beetles (Aphodiidae) affect pedicel length. Naturwissenschaften 101:265–272.
2. Bajerlein D, Witaliński W, Adamski Z (2013). Morphological diversity of pedicels in phoretic deutonymphs of Uropodina mites (Acari: Mesostigmata). Arthropod Struct Dev 42(3):185-96.
3. Faasch H (1967). Beitrag zur Biologie der einheimischen Uropodiden Uroobovella marginata (C. L. Koch 1839) und Uropoda orbicularis (O. F. Müller 1776) und experimentelle Analyse ihres Phoresieverhaltens. Zool Jahrb Abt Syst 94: 521–608.
4. Hirst S (1923). On some arachnid remains from the Old Red Sandstone (Rhynie chert Bed, Aberdeenshire). Annals and Magazine of Natural History (Series 9), 12: 455-474.
In a curiously pointless editorial in yesterday’s New York Times, “What’s a European liberal to do?“, Sylvie Kaufman, the editorial director of Le Monde, dithers about the veil controversy in France. As you may know, France has banned the headscarf in public schools (but not universities) and by workers in hospitals, as well as full-face coverings in public anywhere. This is part of France’s commitment to secularism, and is not limited to Islamic garments: the school ban, for example, includes Jewish yarmulkes and big crosses, though discreet religious symbols are permitted.
And, as Grania reported here earlier, the controversy spread to Air France, which was requiring its flight attendants to cover their heads and wear loose jackets and trousers on flights to Iran. The flight attendants didn’t object to such dress when they were off duty, but did as part of their required uniform, for it violates the French principle of on-the-job secular dress. Air France eventually relented, but only insofar as allowi8ng its female flight attendants the option of not working on flights to Tehran. My feelings about that were mixed: although I know that such garb is required under Iranian law, and we’re supposed to obey the laws of lands we visit, in the end I decided that Air France should not fly that route so long as the government insisted that its flight attendants obey the Islamic law and therefore, as Grania said, “insult women.”
Insofar as banning the headscarf in public institutions goes, I’m pretty much in favor of it, so long as similar bans are enforced equitably for all religions. I well remember when I visited the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey a few years ago, and chatted with students who were Muslims. In that school headscarves were banned, and every Muslim woman I asked about it was in favor of the ban. “Why?”, I asked. The answer was uniform: if headscarves were allowed, the more conservative Muslim women would shame the liberal ones, saying that they “were not good Muslims.” All women would thus feel pressured to wear the headscarf.
As for face-covering garments worn in public, I’m not sure. Like headscarves, these are not only a symbol of oppression of women, but in many cases aren’t voluntary. (Remember what happened during the “ditch the headscarf” days on Facebook? And, of course, it’s only since the Iranian revolution, and the increasing fundamentalism in Afghanistan, that women have covered up. That shows for sure that they don’t do so by choice.) When women say they wear headscarves, niqabs, burqas, and hijabs out of “choice,” I think that’s sometimes making a virtue of necessity. Surely face-covering apparel shouldn’t be worn in courts, in banks, and in places where identification is necessary, but I haven’t decided if, like the French have done, such garb should be banned on the streets.
But all these difficulties are elided in Kaufman’s editorial, which seems to be a 1000-word exercise in virtue signaling. She says nothing new, but merely rehashes the French controversies, throwing in the Cologne sexual harassment/assault episode, in which hundreds of women were sexually harassed by Middle Eastern men on New Year’s Eve. That is not nearly as hard to judge as the veil laws, but Kaufman tips her hand by making the incidents seem controversial:
Confusion also reigns in the continuing debate over the New Year’s Eve attacks on women in Cologne, Germany, and the way they were analyzed by the Algerian author Kamel Daoud. In an essay published in Le Monde in January, he blamed the “sexual misery of the Arab-Muslim world” and its view of women for the attacks. “In Allah’s world,” he wrote, “the woman is denied, refused, killed, veiled, locked up or possessed.” He wrote later, in a similar vein, in The New York Times. But while many praised his argument as brilliant, some European academics, most of them French, attacked it as Islamophobic. The quarrel still rages.
Seriously? Islamophobic? While it’s surely invidious to use those episodes to cast all Muslim immigrant men as rapists, it’s also clear that many of these men were Muslim, that their acts were deplorable, and that these acts surely grew in part out of the Muslim tradition of sequestering women on the grounds that they excite uncontrollable sexual lust in men. (That’s the reason, by the way, that women are also covered and veiled.) It’s not Islamophobia to condemn the harassers, nor to argue that religious mores might be behind their actions. Kaufman is simply wrong to compare this “dilemma” with that of the headscarves.
In the end, she just throws up her hands at what she sees as a profound dilemma for liberals, producing a non-editorial with no conclusion:
If you live in France, you may be experiencing a degree of veil fatigue. Yes, the agonizing of liberal democracies over which values to safeguard first has been around far too long. Yet if moderates, both Muslim and non-Muslim, cannot solve these issues, the battle over culture and identity will be left to far-right populist movements or Islamist fanatics. If so, the terrorists will have won.
You know, I’m bloody sick of the “If we do X, the terrorists will have won” nonsense. The object of Islamist terrorists is not to make the West dither over whether Muslims should be allowed by law to wear headscarves, niqabs, hijabs, or burqas. The ultimate object of the terrorists is to take over Western democratic societies, converting them to societies ruled by sharia law. If we manage to keep terrorist actions at a low level (lower than now), and keep our societies secular and democratic, then the terrorists will have lost, regardless of what the West does about Muslim clothing.
Feel free, in the comments, to give your take on whether or what religious garb should be banned in the West.
We have some odds and ends today, including some photos that have been in the queue too long. The tank of photos is dropping, so do send your good wildlife photos (remember, astronomy and landscape photos also count).
Reader Barn Owl sent some bird photos taken in Japan
I’m pretty sure that the bird in this last photo is a Carrion Crow (Corvus corone): it didn’t have the domed head profile characteristic of the Large-billed Crow (we saw a lot of those too). The crow is perched atop the phoenix roof ornament on the Golden Pavilion at Kinkaku-ji in Kyoto.
Also in the moat at the Imperial Palace was this Grey Heron (Ardea cinerea):
A Tufted Duck (Aythya fuligula) from the Koishikawa Korakuen Garden in central Tokyo:
Reader Randy Schenck in Iowa sent some photos of the black squirrels that frequent his property. And he’s not the only one interested in them:
Stephen Barnard in Idaho is sending us the fruits of his experiments with digiscoping, apparently helped with advice from another reader. So far, so good!
This is a Killdeer, Charadrius vociferus. This is one of the first photos I’ve taken with a new lens I just got for the Panasonic Lumix GH4 that Tara Tanaka recommended for digiscoping. The lens is a just-released Leica 100-400mm zoom (200-800mm equivalent). The shot was hand-held at 800mm (equivalent). Your readers probably aren’t interested in camera and lens details, but I was excited because the shot is so sharp, and the camera/lens is FAR lighter and more compact than my huge DSLR rig. I have a hunch that with a little more improvement in electronic viewfinder (EVF) technology the mirrorless design will replace the SLR design entirely.
Finally, reader Don McCrady sent us another galaxy:
Here’s another astrophoto submission for your consideration. This one is called M51, or the Whirlpool Galaxy. The flickr link is here.
The Whirlpool galaxy is actually a pair of galaxies, the larger one in the slow process of consuming the smaller dwarf galaxy. When galaxies collide, there is no “impact” per-se. There is too much empty space between the stars and objects in each galaxy, so essentially they pass right through each other. Not that there isn’t any damage done, because the gravitational influence of the bigger galaxy tends to fling stars out into tidal tails, such as the one that is barely visible streaming out of the right side of the small dwarf. Our galaxy has done this to several smaller galaxies throughout its own history.
The Whirlpool galaxy is just a few degrees south of Alkaid (the last star in the Big Dipper’s handle), and lies about 23 million light years away.
It’s April 14 in the U.S., and on this day in 1828, Noah Webster copyrighted the first edition of his famous dictionary. On this day in 1865, Lincoln was shot in Ford’s Theater; he died the next morning. In 1881, the famous “Four Dead in Five Seconds” Gunfight took place in El Paso Texas. In 1927, the first Volvo car was offered for sale in Sweden, and, in 1986, a terrible hailstorm, with 1 kilogram hailstones, killed 92 people in Bangladesh. Finally, it was on April 14, 2014, that 276 Nigerian schoolgirls were abducted by Boko Haram; as far as I know, most of them are still missing. (UPDATE: Malgorzata sent this link, which includes a video made by Boko Haram. It shows that some of the girls are still alive, but want to become suicide bombers to escape their horrible lives of being continuously-raped sex slaves.)
Notables born on this day include Christiaan Huygens (1629), Loretta Lynn (1932), Julie Christie (1940), Francis Collins (1950), and David Buss (1953; wish him a happy birthday if you’re at UT Austin). Those who died on April 14 include John Singer Sargent (1925), Rachel Carson (1964), Simon de Beauvoir (1986), Burl Ives (1995), and Percy Sledge (2015; I believe he topped our poll for The Best Soul Song).
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili’s up in the trees again:
A: What are you looking at?Hili: I have a feeling that in another week cherry trees will flower.
Ja: Czemu się tak przyglądasz?
Hili: Mam wrażenie, że jeszcze tydzień i wiśnie zakwitną.
Over at Evolving Perspectives, reader Pliny the in Between takes up the issue of “a meaningful life,” something we discussed yesterday. Click to enlarge this cartoon, called “Monsters under the bed”:
