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’s a little curious that free society has reached a point where a legal procedure, abortion, is deliberately made as inaccessible as possible to the very people who need and want to avail themselves of it.
Even more curious is that this has come to pass in a country where only 19% of people polled (Gallup 2015) are completely against abortion in any circumstance.
John Oliver reviews the situation on Last Week Tonight and it appears that it is pretty grim in certain states.
I can understand why people feel that abortion is something they wouldn’t choose for themselves. I can even understand (although it makes my blood pressure rise) why someone would decide that they ought to be able to force other people to comply with their predilections/religious beliefs. What I don’t understand is if there is genuinely little popular support for laws like this, why politicians pass them in the first place.
It’s Tuesday, and that means a wildlife video by Official Website Wildlife Cinematographer™ Tara Tanaka (her flickr page here, Vimeo channel here). And today we have one of my favorite birds, the wood duck (Aix sponsa)—a whole slew of them (or whatever the formal name is for a gaggle of ducks).
Just as a note on how much trouble it takes to do this: besides spending hours in the blind, Tara also took over twelve hours to edit this down to one and a half minutes of video.
This one’s called “a morning with my peeps”, and her notes follow:
This was shot over a few mornings – each of which began 40 minutes before sunrise in my blind, and shows a lot of the dynamics of Wood Ducks pairs and interaction between pairs.
The log is the center of their activity when they come in to feed – it’s one of the nicest “gifts” I’ve ever gotten. My husband and I were back in the woods of our swamp during the drought this past fall, and I spotted this log. I knew immediately that it was one that our Wood Ducks would love, but what I didn’t realize was how heavy it was. My husband hoisted it onto his shoulder and carried it back to the edge of the swamp for me. As the rains have returned and we have good water levels, I’ve had to move it to get it the right depth, and that’s when I realized how heavy it really is.
When you see more than one Wood Duck on the log, they’re a pair, unless they are at opposite ends, which seems to be just far enough for their comfort. Anytime one is on the log and another tries to get on it anywhere except the opposite end, the original “log occupier” goes after the “intruder.”
Very few people ever get to see how affectionate Wood Ducks are, not to mention the sense of humor that the hens have.
Be sure to go to full screen, click on HD, and push the “1060p” button for best results.
I, Professor Ceiling Cat Emeritus, am back briefly; I was busy all day yesterday at Dalhousie University, talking to W. Ford Doolittle and his group, which was great fun. We had a lovely lunch at a Turkish restaurant (lamb kabobs with yogurt, rice, and salad), more talk, and then I met with a group of biologists and philosopher to discuss (or, rather, answer questions) about Faith Versus Fact. The questions were good, though one person was upset that I neglected the concept of a deistic god, one who could motivate good actions. I did mention that in the book: it’s just not worth discussing the implications of a being a being for which no evidence is conceivable and which doesn’t interact with the world. When I analogized such a being with “garden fairies”—an undetectable Ground of Gardens without which no flowers could grow—I was criticized for comparing a deistic God with fairies. But really, worshiping a deistic god is in principle no different from worshiping a garden fairy! Further, I noted, why would one be motivated to do good by the supposed existence of a being about whom you have no evidence and know nothing? What if such a god was not good, but malicious? How would you know? People who would do good in service of a deistic god would undoubtedly do good without any religious belief. They would just be good people.
Another historian accused me of “tub thumping”, with the implication that I should just shut up about my objections to religion because it’s unseeemly, or off-putting. I responded by saying that atheist “tub-thumping” is nowhere near as pervasive or annoying as the tub-thumping of religionists (viz., all Republican candidates, many preachers). And why should we mute our disagreement with the harmful beliefs of religion? Such criticisms are what people raise when they have no substantive counteragruments to your claims. After all, nobody is accused of “tub-thumping” when they criticize the ideology or platform of the Republican party. Once again, religion is a special kind of belief that is deemed off limits to criticism. I do appreciate this kind of pushback, as “preaching to the choir” isn’t always what I want to do, and criticism sharpens the mind.
On this day in history, the Battle of the Alamo began in Texas in 1836, the Tootsie Roll was invented in 1896; and, in 1945, the famous photograph of 5 Marines raising the U.S. flag on Iwo Jima was taken. Notable births on this day included W. E. B. Dubois in 1868, and conservative atheist S. E. Cupp in 1969. Deaths on this day included John Quincy Adams in 1848, Nellie Melba (namesake of Peach Melba) in 1931, Stan Laurel in 1965, and James Herriot in 1999. Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is happy as a clam with all the attention she’s getting from visitor Sarah (you CANNOT visit Dobrzyn without giving due attention to the Furry Princess of Poland):
Hili: Fascinating. Do you know yet who the murderer is?
Sarah: This is not a murder mystery.
Hili: So what is it about?
In Polish:
Hili: Fascynujące. Czy już wiesz kto zabił?
Sarah: To nie jest kryminał.
Hili: To o czym to jest?
As lagniappe, here’s the adorable Gus playing peekaboo with staff Taskin:
Look at that face!
A tw**t sent by reader John Williamson:
When a pet cat died in Ancient Egypt, all the inhabitants of the house would shave off their eyebrows as a sign of deep mourning.
And reader Diane G. contributed a website and a video of a baby red fox growing up (note how they begin with dark color). Here are the first 35 days of its life:
Today is Cat Day, and it is (of course, where else?) in Japan.
It is celebrated on 2/22 every year, the BBC notes:
Known as “Neko no Hi”, it was chosen because the date’s numerals, 2/22 (ni ni ni), are pronounced fairly closely to the sound a cat makes in Japan (nyan nyan nyan).
I always thought it was mew, or in the case of a Siamese cat, ARGGGGHHHHHH! But nyan nyan is cute too.
The Beeb says there are a lot of things you can do to celebrate the day such as dressing up like a cat, pranking your cat (in a non-cruel way) or eating cat-shaped delicacies.
Iranian intellectuals and secularists must be shaking their heads in dismay at this news. A group of state-run media outlets in Iran have grouped together and raised an additional US$600,000.00 to renew the fatwa, originally declared in 1989, on the life of Salman Rushdie for the crime of writing a book that you can guarantee most have never even seen, let alone read.
The fatwa although in 1998 then president Mohammad Khatami declared the fatwa over, however The Guardian reports
“Imam Khomeini’s fatwa is a religious decree and it will never lose its power or fade out,” Iran’s deputy culture minister Seyed Abbas Salehi.
In the intervening years, four people who worked on translations of the novel The Satanic Verses were attacked, three of them fatally, by murderous zealots rushing to fulfil this cowardly commandment.
There’s a list of fresh new cowardly zealots on the FARS News Agency who contributed funds to the fatwa reward over here.
There is very little left to say, other than I mourn for the many people in Iran who surely do not want this, and I hope that Mr Rushdie will be safe. Instead take a look at what Muslims who have read the book have written about it. Much saner and far more interesting.
Click on the arrow to watch it work. According to Greg Mayer’s favourite source, Wikipedia, this illusion was discovered by the American psychologist Joseph Jastrow (1863-1944) in 1889, when he was only 26 (some sources say 1891; the date of publication was 1892…). Jastrow’s explanation was follows. I think in fact it describes rather than explains the illusion:
“The lower figure seems distinctly the larger, because its long side is brought into contrast with the shorter side of the other figure. … In judging areas we cannot avoid taking into account the lengths of the lines by which the areas are limited, and a contrast in the lengths of these is carried over to the comparision oft the areas. We judge relatively even when we most desire to judge absolutely.”
You can apparently get the original paper, free, from JSTOR (just accept their unonerous terms and conditions). In it, Jastrow describes a series of illusions, most of which had already been discovered, and provides explanations/descriptions of them. The ‘Jastrow illusion’ illustrated above was a development of this illusion, in which the lower parallelogram looks smaller than the upper (they are, of course, the same size):
Jastrow appears to have been quite the skeptic, spending a lot of his time both studying and debunking various forms of occultism and woo. Another section of the article in which Jastrow described these illusions is devoted to ‘a study of involuntary movements’ – slight movements of the hand that occurred while subjects were focusing on another task, such as looking at different colours, with the hand involuntarily following the movements of the eyes. This is quite dramatic in the case of someone counting the oscillation of a pendulum, as shown by this figure (the arrow denotes time – recording began at A and ended at Z and covered 80 seconds:
Although Jastrow does not say so, this provides a nice explanation for how Ouija boards can work, even if everyone is absolutely honest and not trying to move the glass (or whatever) in any direction. Unconscious effects will produce slight movements.
Jastrow’s article is quite a find for me, as another part deals with my professional area of study, which is the sense of smell. Although I primarily study maggots, I’m becoming increasingly interested in cases of anosmia (people who have lost their sense of smell, or who never had one) and of phantosmia (where you can smell things that aren’t there). Phantosmia in particular is intriguing, as it is a form of olfactory illusion. For many people it is very distressing (smelling faeces everywhere, for example), but has a primarily physical origin (to do with damage/malfunction of a subset of our 4 million or so smell cells). I have met phantosmics (that is the word) who could smell things they could not describe and had never smelt before; I had a slight insight into this over Xmas, when I had a nasty case of sinusitis and ended up smelling what I can only describe as weird smoke all the time. It wasn’t unpleasant, but it was weird. It went after a while.
Jastrow describes the case of ‘Mr. E’ a 21 year-old man who was apparently a congenital anosmic (his mother had a similar defect, although she once remembered smelling things). They carried out various tests on Mr E, who appears to have been completely anosmic, although he could respond to stimulation of the trigeminal nerve by very high concentrations of ammonia and similar substances. Above all, Jastrow looked at Mr E’s sense of taste and found that although he was unable to distinguish some tastes (eg tea and coffee), this was entirely because his sense of smell was affected. Jastrow’s conclusion was perceptive and entirely accurate:
‘The results conclusively show that a great many of the mouth-sensations, which we ordinarily speak of as tastes, are really due to smell.’
Joseph Jastrow, from Wikipedia
In other work, Jastrow studied the dreams of the blind, and interviewed many blind people about their dreams, including the amazing Helen Keller. Born in Poland, his family emigrated to Philadelphia when he was only 3 years old, and he spent most of his career at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I can’t find any reference to a biography of him, which is a shame as he sounds very interesting. My copy of Edward G Boring’s History of Psychology is at home, so I can’t check him out in there. If any reader knows any more, please chip in below.
Jastrow appears to have invented the famous rabbit-duck illusion. At the end of 2014 The New Yorker published this excellent cartoon by Paul Noth. I wonder if Noth knew how much Jastrow would probably have liked it?
As someone who hails from the land of Not-America, I was vaguely baffled when I heard that Trump was running for President of the USA. I had heard of him before, of course, as he had cropped up from time to time in Time Magazine in the 80s and 90s, and in one of the indistinguishable Home Alone movies. I couldn’t imagine what had moved him to get into politics, as his most notable features seemed to be dubious skills at managing hotels, casinos and marriages to blonde women. I also reckoned that the media, particularly the liberal media, were going to boost his campaign constantly with their indefatigable coverage of everything he did or said that they could find to be scathing or outraged about.
I certainly wouldn’t claim that their outrage is without merit, but I am still unable to accurately point at what he actually does stand for. It seems to me that he will say anything that he thinks his audience wants to hear. Moreover, he doesn’t care about the consequences of anything he says; he has after all lived a life where consequences happen to other people. What his actual policies or actions would be were he to actually succeed in being elected is anybody’s guess. He’s certainly not nearly as conservative as he likes to play, which is the point of yesterday’s Doonesbury strip by Trudeau.
Original here: http://doonesbury.washingtonpost.com/strip/archive/2016/2/21
If Trump has done anything this election cycle, it is expose the underbelly of the state of politics: money is everything. As worrying as it is that as a result certain corporations pretty much own certain politicians; it is also terrifying that money can catapult someone who appears to be accountable to no-one this close to the finish-line .
Dan Graur, who is Professor of Biology and Biochemistry at the University of Houston, describes himself on Tw*tter as “A Very Angry Evolutionary Biologist, a Very Angry Liberal, and an Even Angrier Art Lover”. His Tumblr says he ‘has a very low threshold for hooey, hype, hypocrisy, postmodernism, bad statistics, ignorance of population genetics and evolutionary biology masquerading as -omics, and hatred of any kind.’
Anyway, yesterday he tw**eted a link to a document containing what he called ‘All of evolutionary biology in 12 paragraphs, 237 words and 1,318 characters’. Here they are for your delectation. I’ve made some comments at the end – feel free to chip in (you too, Dan!).
1.Evolutionary biology is ruled by handful of logical principles, each of which has repeatedly withstood rigorous empirical and observational testing.
2. The rules of evolutionary biology apply to all levels of resolution, be it DNA or morphology.
3. New methods merely allow more rapid collection or better analysis of data; they do not affect the evolutionary principles.
4. The only mandatory attribute of the evolutionary processes is a change in allele frequencies.
5. All novelty in evolution starts as a single mutation arising in a single individual at a single time point.
6. Mutations create equivalence more often than improvement, and functionlessness more often than functionality.
7. The fate of mutations that do not affect fitness is determined by random genetic drift; that of mutations that do affect fitness by the combination of selection and random genetic drift.
8. Evolution occurs at the population level; individuals do not evolve. An individual can only make an evolutionary contribution by producing offspring or dying childless.
9. The efficacy of selection depends on the effective population size, an historical construct that is different from the census population size, which is a snapshot of the present.
10. Evolution cannot create something out of nothing; there is no true novelty in evolution.
11. Evolution does not give rise to “intelligently designed” perfection. From an engineering point of view, most products of evolution work in a manner that is suboptimal.
12. Homo sapiens does not occupy a privileged position in the grand evolutionary scheme.
I think the main thing that’s not quite right about this is 5, “All novelty in evolution starts as a single mutation arising in a single individual at a single time point”. While this is essentially true, it misses out two of the most significant novelties in the history of life, which were not created by mutation, but instead by instances of predation that went wrong and instead produced symbiosis, with one kind of cell living inside another.
The first such event took place around 2 billion years ago, somewhere in the ocean. Prior to that moment, all life had consisted of small organisms called prokaryotes which had no cell nucleus or mitochondria (these are the tiny cellular structures that help provide you and me and giraffes and mushrooms with energy). Everything changed when one unicellular life-form, known as an achaebacterium, tried to eat another, called a eubacterium. On this one occasion the eubacterium survived inside its would-be predator and became trapped, losing many of its genes to its host and eventually turning into a molecular powerhouse – the mitochondrion – that produced energy from chemical reactions and was used by the new eukaryotic cell. These new eukaryotic life-forms were a weird hybrid, composed of two different organisms. They were our ancestors.
A second, similar, event occurred around a billion years ago, when a eukaryotic cell, complete with mitochondria, engulfed a eubacterium that had long ago evolved the trick of acquiring energy from sunlight, through photosynthesis. Predation went wrong again, and another form of symbiosis eventually appeared. This gave rise to algae and eventually plants, in which small organelles called chloroplasts, the descendants of the intended eubacterial victim, turn light into energy for the benefit of the eukaryotic host.
What happened after these events took place was entirely down to natural selection, following the kind of processes that Dan describes above. But the source of the novelty – and pace his point 10 above, these were truly novel organisms – was not mutation, but an incredibly unlikely pair of events.
It is striking that these two acts of predation gone wrong were able to open up the potential of life in ways that genetic mutation + natural selection have not been able to do in 3.5 billion years of evolution. Life on Earth without mitochondria – prokaryotic life – is limited to the microscopic because of the physical limits imposed on the transport of matter, energy and information from the environment into the inside of the organism. In the absence of an additional, powerful energy source, prokaryotic life cannot carry out those operations beyond certain tiny physical dimensions. The co-option of the energy-producing mitochondria first enabled eukaryotic cells to grow large, and then, eventually, to become multicellular. Mutation and natural selection were not able to do this. Similarly, no eukaryotic organism has on its own mastered the trick of evolving photosynthesis; the only way the ancestors of plants were able to do this was through symbiosis with photosynthetic bacteria.
Other people have pointed this out on Tw*tter; Dan’s response was to redefine ‘mutation’ in point 5 as ‘any heritable change’. Which is fine, but would have been clearer had he said so from the outset
Mutation is any heritable change. Recombination for example. If mutualism is heritable, then it's a mutation. @MostlyMicrobes@mbeisen
What do you think of Dan’s list? Is it useful, either for students, for the lay person, or for clarifying differences within evolutionary biology? Could it give rise to testable hypotheses?
