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.
The Lone Star College Book Fair starts tomorrow in Houston, Texas, and if you live there, drop by and say hi. I’m speaking (or rather discussing) on Saturday at 12:30; it will be a conversation with Dan Barker, who’s discussing his own new book, God: The Most Unpleasant Character in All Fiction, at 3:15 the same day. There will be a book signing (they may have both FvF and WEIT) right after my event; if you give me the Latin binomial for a felid native to Texas, you can get a cat drawn in your book.
I think it’s free for everyone. If you know any good places to eat (I’m going to Goode Co. for BBQ already), let me know.
I don’t know what to do about this except to tell public secularists (or critics of Islam) living in Bangladesh (especially Dhaka) to get the hell out of there. This is at least the fourth case I remember, but Wikipedia, in its article on “Attacks on secularists in Bangladesh” lists at least nine victims as well as several more (e.g., Taslima Nasreen) who have been targeted.
In this case the victim, first hacked up with machetes and then shot (his brains were said to have splattered the sidewalk), was 28-year-old Nazimuddin Samad, said to have criticized Islamism on his Facebook page. And he also promoted evolution! As the Guardian reports:
“At least four assailants hacked Nazimuddin Samad’s head with a machete on Wednesday night. As he fell down, one of them shot him with a pistol from close range. He died on the spot,” deputy commissioner of Dhaka Metropolitan police Syed Nurul Islam told AFP.
“It is a case of targeted killing. But no group has claimed responsibility,” Islam said, adding police were investigating whether Samad was murdered for his writing.
The Dhaka Tribune said the assailants shouted Allahu Akbar (God is greatest) as they attacked Samad on a busy road near Dhaka’s Jagannath University, where he was a law student.
Samad was known to have been critical of state religion in the Bangladeshi constitution. In the first two lines detailing his religious views on Facebook, he stated: “Evolution is a scientific truth. Religion and race are invention of the savage and uncivil people.”
Here’s part of his “about me” statment on his Facebook page, mostly in Bangla but with some English:
Imagine getting killed for saying stuff like that! A bit more from the Guardian:
Imran Sarker, who leads Bangladesh’s largest online secular activist group and is the head of the Bangladesh Bloggers Association, said Samad had joined nationwide protests in 2013 against top Islamist leaders accused of committing war crimes during the country’s war of independence.
“He was a secular online activist and a loud voice against any social injustice. He was against Islamic fundamentalism,” said Sarker.
[Mustakur] Rahman said he had warned Samad about his social media posts that were critical of Islamism and religion: “Whatever he posted, I would see as fun. But people are taking it seriously and taking revenge. As a friend I warned him about the posts, I don’t want anyone to die early. But he said he can’t change his opinion against any religion.
This is probably not the last killing by any means; there’s reportedly a hit list of 84 Bangladeshi bloggers, though its authenticity isn’t guaranteed. But several on it have been killed, and the rest surely know the danger they’re in. Nevertheless, some keep on writing. Really brave peopl.
Here’s Samad’s photo from his Facebook page:
And really, are Islamic apologists going to blame this one (and the others) on the West? That’s not credible, for public secularism is more or less a capital crime in some Islamic countries.
I’m late today; I overslept while recovering from jet lag, and am preparing for a trip to Houston. On my way to work, there were police cars and helicopters everywhere, for President Obama is speaking today at the Law School (only law students and profs allowed) about his Supreme Court nomination. But on to the photos:
Reader Stephen Barnard has been experimenting with video, and I’m chuffed to present his first one. His notes:
When a Bald Eagle (in this case Desi —Haliaeetus leucocephalus) carries a load to the nest (in this case a Rainbow Trout — Oncorhynchus mykiss), he first swoops below the nest to pick up air speed, then rises to a perfect stall before landing, gently. It’s a beautiful maneuver.
To see it in full size rather than the reduced version below, go to the flickr page.
And reader Mark Sturtevant sent some lovely photos of arthropods:
First we have the lovely orchard spider (Leucauge venusta), which spins a distinct orb web that is somewhat horizontal.
The next picture is of another orchard spider. I really like how the abdomen resembles antique porcelain, and check out those beautiful translucent green legs. This picture took many hours to prepare because as an experiment I combined two pictures that were focused slightly differently. The final picture was assembled manually by transplanting focused parts from one picture onto the 2nd picture, and blending the pieces together. The surgical operation was done with a free program called Gimp, which is very much like Photoshop (only its free). To complete the process, many of the tiny bristles that are silhouetted against the background are drawn in. If you double click and zoom in further you might be able to detect my deception.
Next is a colorful two-striped grasshopper (Melanoplus bivittatus.), named after the two parallel stripes running down its prothorax I have not had much success taking pictures of Orthopterans since they always jump away, but this one was kept overnight and released the next day. It was hungry, so it allowed me to take pictures while it was munching on plants.
This wasp was extremely hard to identify, but I think I finally got it. It belongs to the family Thynnidae (a family I do not recall hearing about), and it is a five-banded Tiphiid wasp (Myzinum quinquecinctum) – so apparently it was once in the Tiphiid family (?). These wasps are parasitoids of beetle larvae in the scarabeid family. Perhaps this one parasitizes June bugs, for example.
Finally, a viceroy butterfly (Limenitis archippus) which is a well known Müllerian mimic of the monarch butterfly. I had seen this male repeatedly over a period of a couple weeks, sitting at his favorite perch along a field path that I used regularly in my photo safaris.
JAC: Mark got it right here. It used to be thought that the viceroy was a “Batesian mimic” of the monarch: a tasty butterfly that gained protection from bird predation by evolving the warning colors of the unpalatable monarch butterfly. In other words, it deceived the predator about its palatability. This is the way the system was taught by evolutionists (including me) for many years. Now, however, recent experiments suggest that the viceroy is also unpalatable to birds, and that it’s a case of Müllerian mimicry, in which two unpalatable species converge in color and/or pattern, which reduces predation by making the butterfly’s appearance easier to remember (and avoid) by birds.
It’s Thursday, April 7, and I get to do a video interview with the estimable Gad Saad on his new show, which will eventually be posted (stay tuned). On this day in 1805, Beethoven premiered his Third Symphony (the odd-numbered ones are best) in Vienna, and, in 1829, Joseph Smith began his translation of the bogus “golden plates” that became the Book of Mormon. On April 7, 1994, the Rwandan genocide began, with the 100-day death toll ranging between half a million and a million citizens. Notables born on this day include William Wordsworth (1770), Billie Holiday (1915), and the great sitar player and composer (and, of course, influencer of rock music) Ravi Shankar (1920), and Jackie Chan (1954). The Google Doodle celebrates Pandit Shankar’s birthday (he died in 2012 at 92), and if you click on the Doodle screenshot below, you’ll go to an Independent article giving five little-known facts about the man:
Those who died on April 7 include El Greco (1614), P. T. Barnum (1891), Henry Ford (1947), and Peaches Honeyblossom Geldof-Cohen (2014).
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is pampered (as usual):
Hili: It’s great to bury onself in a still-warm bed after a night on the tiles.
A: Shall I cover you?
Hili: No, thank you, this is perfect.
In Polish:
Hili: To wspaniałe, po nocnych szaleństwach zagrzebać się w jeszcze ciepłym łóżku.
Ja: Przykryć cię?
Hili: Nie, dziękuję, jest optymalnie.
And in nearby Wroclawek, Leon is puzzled:
Leon: The birds are strangely timid.
Extra lagniappe: reader Amy sent a photo, taken from Facebook, of a snowy owl admitted to Raptor Rehab for a broken wing. Lovely, eh? (It looks a bit like Gus!)
Stressed out about Special Snowflakes? Unwind with some humor from BuzzFeed: nerdy science jokes. There are 22, but I’ll give just four. The article notes that only the “nerdiest science nerds” will understand them, but I take strong issue with that. And it’s by Tom Chivers, once a respectable journalist who appears to have now been corrupted by the BuzzFeed clickbait ethos.
ThinkStock / BuzzFeed Via @drrichjlaw.Unsplash / Will Langenberg / BuzzFeed / Via unsplash.com Via @schroedinger99.
This one’s for Brits:
ThinkStock / BuzzFeed Via @jackdeeth.Mikael Kristenson / Unsplash / BuzzFeed / Via unsplash.com
The really nerdy bit is the explanation that follows the cartoon just above:
Via @kerihw, who wishes to point out that, technically, 2D shapes don’t have faces, they have sides, so his joke doesn’t work.
Several readers alerted me to this incident, but at least one of them thought it was an April Fool’s joke. It was not. But that’s how close the actions of college students in the U.S. and U.K. come to parody. And this kind of stuff is getting so common that it’s barely worth noting. The reason I’m putting it up is not only because it’s so ludicrous, but also because it was reported (with unfavorable comments about Authoritarian Leftists) in major media outlets like Newsweek, PuffHo UK, and The Torygraph.
The story is brief. Imogen Wilson, 22, is a music student who happens to be vice-president of the Students Association at Edinburgh University (EUSA). She attended one of their meetings discussing the BDS movement (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions), whose goal is to change Israeli policy towards Palestinians by boycotting Israeli products, meetings, and so on. The pro-BDS motion passed during that meeting by a vote of 249-153.
Wilson is opposed to BDS, believing it to be anti-Semitic, at least in part, and divisive on college campuses (you can see her published viewpoint here). At some point in the meeting, someone criticized her for failing to respond to an open letter, thereby somehow letting down handicapped students. Wilson, who says she tried to contact the letter’s writers and organize a meeting about it, then tried to raise her hand to get attention and rebut that point. That’s when the trouble started.
Here’s the troublemaker:
Imogen Wilson, in Teviot debating hall at Edinburgh University in March 2015, where she was accused of violating ‘safe space’ rules at a student council meeting on Thursday night. IMOGEN WILSON/FACEBOOK
At that point, a “safe space complaint” was made noting Wilson’s arm-waving violated the EUSA safe space policy. And indeed it did! Here’s the relevant regulation from that policy. Pay attention to sections c, e, and f:
EUSA safe space policy:
6. All members are expected to conduct themselves in a manner which is respectful and considerate of the contributions of others. This is defined as:
a. Allowing Council members to speak when called upon by the chair.
b. Refraining from speaking over, interrupting, heckling, laughing at or otherwise distracting from the speaker who holds the floor.
c. Refraining from hand gestures which denote disagreement or in any other way indicating disagreement with a point or points being made. Disagreements should only be evident through the normal course of debate.
d. Avoiding using gestures which are not generally known or accepted by Council.
e. Gestures indicating agreement are permissible, if these gestures are generally understood and not used in an intimidating manner.
f. Applause is acceptable when a motion is passed only, not if a motion fails to pass. Otherwise, agreement should be made clear within debate contributions.
The meeting was halted while the participants voted whether to expel Wilson from it for violating the policy. Fortunately, common sense prevailed, but only by a vote of 18-33.
Wilson almost got into hot water a bit later for another unsafe gesture: head shaking! As she explains in the Torygraph:
Ms Wilson said she believed that safe space rules banning gestures of disagreement, which were drawn up under the tenure of previous sabbatical officers, were “a little extreme” and had been used as a “political” tool against her after she spoke out against anti-Semitism.
“I totally do believe in safe space and the principles behind it,” she told the Telegraph. “It’s supposed to enhance free speech and not shut it down, and give everyone a chance to feel like they can contribute.“Safe space is essential for us to have a debate where everyone can speak, but it can’t become a tool for the hard left to use when they disagree with people.”
She said: “At that meeting we were discussing BDS, the movement to boycott Israel. I made a long and passionate speech against us subscribing to this, on the basis it encourages anti-Semitism on campus. It was only after I made that speech that someone made a safe space complaint. I can’t help but think it was a political move against me.
“Later on in the meeting, someone threatened me with a second complaint because I was shaking my head – but when I was addressing the room about my worries about Jewish students, there were plenty of people shaking their heads and nothing happened.”
Two points. Edinburgh University? I thought the Scots were a sober and hard-working folk, not prone to craziness like this (yes, I know that many EU students aren’t Scots). And the fact that this was reported so widely, and not with approbation, shows that people are starting to take note of, and deplore, the excesses of Authorian Leftist college students.
As for Ms. Wilson, I’m sure she can take care of herself. But I’m not so sure about the Edinburgh Snowflakes, who need dumb rules like the above (I do agree with the no-heckling and speak-when-called-upon rules) to keep their spaces “safe.”
Finally, one indicator of how fed up everyone’s getting with this nonsense is Monday’s editorial in the moderate Chicago Tribune, “Defending free speech on college campuses“. A snippet:
Free expression is not faring well on American college campuses these days. In some places, the problem is students taking grave offense at opinions that merit only minor umbrage or none at all. In others, it’s official speech codes that chill discussion. In still others, it’s administrators so intent on preventing sexual harassment that they avoid open discussion of gender-related matters.
There is a lot to be said for making people aware of the ways in which their words and deeds can do harm. No one wants to go back to the days when casual expressions of racial prejudice were common, or when women were mocked for taking places that should have gone to men, or when some professors made passes at students.
But it’s important not to go so far in protecting undergraduates that they lose the spontaneous and open interactions they need to understand the world and the society in which they live. An education that spares students from unwanted challenges to their thinking is not much of an education.
The piece then gives some examples of ludicrous safe-space policies and actions, and ends like this:
. . . . The University of Chicago has taken the lead in defending free speech on campus. Last year, a special committee issued a statement noting the importance of civility but upholding “the principle that debate or deliberation may not be suppressed because the ideas put forth are thought by some or even by most members of the University community to be offensive, unwise, immoral, or wrong-headed.”
We hope the administrators, faculty and students of other universities are listening.
Not long ago I posted about Joy Karega, who appears to be an unhinged anti-Semite, bigot and conspiracy theorist who fits right in at perhaps the most Authoritarian Leftist college in the U.S.: Oberlin (Ohio). If she had posted stuff about Muslims the way she has about Jews, she’d have been subject to far greater approprbrium. But never mind, for as I noted before, however hateful and ridiculous she is on social media, that shouldn’t impinge on her job, for it’s freedom of speech. The only issue for Oberlin is this: is she doing her job teaching as an assistant professor of rhetoric and composition? Or is she bullying, brainwashing, or censoring what her students say? Does she promulgate stuff like this (highlighted by Inside Higher Ed) in her classroom?:
Well of course what’s highlighted is a lie: ISIS is not run by the CIA and Mossad (the Israeli equivalent of the CIA). But if she wants to promulgate lies and delusions on her Facebook page, she should be able to do so without penalty. But she can’t do it in the classroom. (Note too that the spelling and style above is not exactly what one would want from a professor of rhetoric and composition!)
I have no idea about that, but I wasn’t aware what she was teaching until I saw the post above and Grania called my attention to an article about Karega in The Tablet (a Jewish website). Yes, “Social Justice Writing”!
Were I an administrator or department chair at Oberlin, I’d be just a wee bit worried about what’s going on in this classroom, for it sounds like she’s propagandizing her students. And that, as opposed to her extracurricular delusions and hate, is what could affect her professional fate. Tablet agrees:
As the New York Times reported, Karega, a professor of rhetoric and composition, teaches “social justice writing courses.” According to Oberlin’s course catalog, one such class is “RHET 204 – Writing for Social Justice.” In it, “Students will develop, negotiate, and revise their own writing strategies and ethics as they write on social justice issues relevant to their interests.”
In other words, Oberlin hired an unrepentant bigot to teach undergraduates to write about justice and guide them in their moral development.
This astounding fact suggests that the entire hiring process for social justice-related fields at Oberlin is fundamentally broken and easily gamed. After all, it’s difficult to imagine a greater or more systemic failure than Karega being chosen to teach students how to communicate about moral causes.
Seen in this light, the debate over whether Oberlin should discipline or fire Karega is a distraction from an even more serious reckoning. Because whether Karega herself leaves or stays on, Oberlin must account for itself far beyond one individual professor. It must ask how its hiring committees missed the signs that they were contracting a bigot to teach ethics. What questions did they fail to pose during the interview process? What areas of the applicant’s background and past work did they fail to investigate? Did any members of the faculty who chose Karega share her prejudices and thus allow them to slide? If Karega could slip by, who else might have?
On the other hand, if the school merely scapegoats Karega while letting off those who enabled her to come in contact with undergraduates in the first place, Oberlin will have demonstrated that it is not interested in addressing its prejudice problem, but rather suppressing its symptoms.
Now it’s not always clear what constitutes propagandizing and what constitutes a professor’s own viewpoint, one that must be justifiable. Regardless, though, in matters like ISIS, a professor must allow some dissent in the classroom. It’s not clear that Karega is doing that.
On the other hand, because she’s teaching at Oberlin, it’s entirely possible that her entire class is composed of people who think like her—though it’s hard to imagine a classroom of kids who all think ISIS is being run by Israel and the CIA. The fact that Karega is “proud” of the apparent ideological agreement among her students is something that should raise alarms.
But, as you recall, Oberlin is the home of the Great Cafeteria Scandal, in which students raised a ruckus about General Tso’s Chicken being made with steamed rather than deep-fried meat, and gustatorially incorrect banh mi sandwiches. It’s perhaps the most extreme example of what happens when virtue signalling and victimhood promotion dominate higher education.
Lord help these students when they try to get jobs! With luck they could get a sinecure like Karega’s, but it’s more likely that they’ll wind up as unemployed (and unemployable) Authoritarian Left bloggers, begging for money on Patreon.
Briggs et al. describe a Silurian fossil (about 430 million years old) from a formation in the UK, a fossil that appears to have a unique method of brood care. It was a tiny fossil, only 1 cm long, and finding out what it really was took careful preparation: grinding it away bit by bit (and of course destroying the specimen), and imaging it at each stage to produce a three-dimensional reconstruction. The animal proved (see below) to be an early arthropod.
What Briggs et al. found in the reconstruction was remarkable. Tethered to the “tergites” of the specimen (the post-cranial segments of the beast) were ten capsules, each attached by a long filament. And each of those roughly triangular, kite-shaped capsules (ranging 0.5 to 2.0 mm in size) consists of an outer shell containing a mass of tissue, some with limbs visible. The capsules are tethered to the parent specimen with long filamentous threads. Here’s what it looks like in reconstruction:
What were these weird attachments? The most likely explanation is that they’re offspring of the specimen, being carried around—perhaps for protection of the developing embryos.
Although weird, this is not completely unknown in animals. As the authors point out, the developing embryos of the freshwater crayfish Astacida are atttached to the mother by smaller stalks, and I’ve managed to find a photo of that in a paper from 2004:
However, these aren’t the long filaments (or tough embryo-containing capsules) described in the Briggs et al. paper. In that respect, what they found in this specimen, named Aquilonifer spinosus, is unique among animals. By the way, the source of the name is described by the authors:
The name of the new taxon refers to the fancied resemblance between the tethered individuals and kites, and echoes the title of the 2003 novel The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini (aquila, eagle or kite; –fer, suffix meaning carry; thus aquilonifer, kite bearer; spinosus, spiny, referring to the long lateral spines on the tergites).
I can’t think of any other animal named after a novel, but I’m sure there must be at least one.
The authors suggest, and reject, two other possibilities for these tethered kite-like structures: they could be parasites, or they could be epizoans (nonparasitic organisms that colonize others). They rule out parasites because there doesn’t appear to be any advantage for a parasite to absorb nutrients from a host through such long threads, and because the places where the threads attach to the “host”—on its spines—aren’t a great place to suck nutrients from.
They also argue that epizoans are unlikely because none are known that attach in this way, because ten epizoans probably would have killed the specimen (which was apparently alive and healthy when preserved), and because A. spinosus could have cleaned off such epizoans with its long head appendages. I agree with the authors that these capsules, particularly because some contain tissue with legs, are likely to represent a heretofore unknown form of brood care.
Finally, where does this new species fit? As I noted above, it’s an arthropod, at least based on the cladistic analysis conducted by the authors. The cladogram based on many morphological characters puts it with the arthropods (node 1), but in particular with the Mandibulata (node 4), the subgroup that includes centipedes, millipedes, crustaceans, and “hexapods” (insects and three other and much smaller groups):
Fig. 2. Cladogram showing the phylogenetic position of A. spinosus gen. et sp. nov. Shown is a strict consensus of the 12 most parsimonious trees of 142.16612 steps (consistency index = 0.513; retention index = 0.870), produced using New Technology search options in TNT (tree analysis using new technology) and using implied character weighting with a concavity constant of three. Numbers above nodes are GC support values. 1, Euarthropoda (crown- group); 2, total-group Chelicerata; 3, Artiopoda; 4, total-group Mandibulata; 5, Mandibulata (crown-group).
The upshot: the paper doesn’t really produce new generalizations about life, but rather the discovery of a particular way of life that was completely surprising. There’s nothing wrong with such an anecdotal observations, for that’s the kind of thing—the multifarious and unexpected variety of life—that keeps our wonder alive.
h/t: Barrie
Addendum, by Greg Mayer: Jerry did not get a chance to go to hear Derek Briggs at the Field Museum yesterday but I did, and Jerry asked for a report.
Briggs talked mostly about his work on the “kite runner” (which, he noted, he named after Khaled Hosseini’s 2003 novel), so I won’t restate what Jerry covers admirably above. Briggs mentioned that the reviewers were less certain than he was that the ‘kites’ were juveniles, rather than parasites or something else, and that he did see the reviewers’ point, but still thinks they are juveniles. He showed a number of neat 3-dimensional rotating videos of their fossil reconstructions. For a museum audience, it was a bit wince-inducing, but understandable, to know that the method of preparation destroyed the specimen. Briggs is a also a museum guy, and is working to develop non-destructive forms of imaging, and was consulting on this trip with physicists at Argonne National Laboratory. Such imaging would also be enormously time saving, as the specimens come in nodules, and they don’t know what fossil is in a nodule till it’s ground through a considerable ways. He also quipped that PNAS (where his paper was published) stands for “Probably Not Acceptable in Science“, which is a “nerdy science joke“. (BTW, I think Jerry’s Artie O’Dactyl also eminently qualifies as a “nerdy science joke“!)
He made two other interesting points. First, the apparent extinction of many of the unusual soft-bodied forms at the end of the Cambrian seems to be a preservational artifact. There is a period from the late Cambrian into the Ordovician from which no lagerstatten are known. (Lagerstatten are deposits with unusual preservation in which soft parts are fossilized, such as the Burgess Shale of British Columbia.) Cambrian “weirdos” are now turning up in these later lagerstatten. For example, anomalocarids (well known in the Burgess Shale), are also now known from the Fezouata, Morocco, lagerstatte, which is Ordovician. There are a lot of taxa represented in the Ordovician, which is the peak of diversity origination, referred to as “GOBE” (the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event).
Second, he talked a fair amount about limb evolution in arthropods, and noted that an early horseshoe crab, Dibasterium, had an extra row of legs compared to modern Limulus. In Limulus, it turns out that important “leg genes” are also activated in the embryo in a row of small spots parallel and lateral to the actual legs– in just the places where Dibasterium‘s extra legs are! (The developmental work was done by someone else.) This reminded me of the phenomenon in vertebrates with reduced numbers of toes in which toe primordia develop a bit, and then regress.
