Readers’ fieldwork pictures

January 15, 2018 • 8:45 am

I’ve put up posts before from Dorsa Amir, a graduate student in biological anthropology at Yale. Here’s her latest contribution: a set of photos from her fieldwork (more photos here). Dorsa’s notes are indented:

As an anthropologist, one of my goals is to explore human behavioral variation across diverse contexts. In conjunction with the larger Shuar Health & Life History project, I have had the amazing opportunity to work with the Shuar, a population indigenous to the Ecuadorian Amazon. The Shuar are forager-horticulturalists who still hunt, fish, and cultivate crops for most of their subsistence, and largely function as small-scale societies. Working with communities of people still living in many ways like their ancestors has been an eye-opening experience when pondering human evolution and culture change. One of the most salient differences between their way of life and ours, in my experience, has been the resilience and independence of Shuar children, who furnish many of their own calories, care for their siblings, and live a much more independent life than their Western counterparts. (I’ve written a bit more about this in a piece for Nautilus). Below are some photos from several summer fieldwork trips.

Note the tamarin:

In the spirit of wildlife photos, here’s Shuar woman with her pet kinkajou [Potos flavus]:

Dorsa had an orange and white cat named Emerson, but wants us to know she’s expanded the felid family to include Hamilton (“Hammy”), named after the late evolutionary biologist W. D. Hamilton. Here’s the happy couple:

 

Snow!

January 15, 2018 • 7:30 am

It snowed in Chicago last night and this morning, blanketing us with between 3 and 5 inches. That’s not a lot for here, but I put my car in the University garage (one of the perks of being Emeritus) since further snow is predicted. Here are a few shots I took on the walk to work (my car was parked, as it often is, in front of my building). Quality is minimal as these were hand-held in the dark, and two were taken on an iPhone.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House in snow:

Plowing the sidewalks (I think the University is open today, despite the holiday):

Botany Pond, future home of (I hope) Honey the Duck. Turtles and goldfish dwell beneath the snow-covered ice.

The tower of the Reynolds Club, the student union and theater next door:

The entrance to Hull Court, the biology quadrangle. Note the famous gargoyles:

I’ll leave the light on for you! (This is my office on the third floor, showing MAN AT WORK):

 

Monday: Hili dialogue

January 15, 2018 • 6:30 am

Good morning on a snowy Monday (January 15, 2018); I’ll have some snow pictures shortly. It’s holiday in the U.S. since it’s Martin Luther King Day (always the third Monday in January, and, as you’ll see below, it’s also King’s actual birthday). Here’s today’s Google Doodle about King.

Here are the final minutes of King’s famous “I have a dream” speech (full speech here), delivered at the March on Washington on August 28, 1963, a march shown in the Doodle. I’ve never heard a more stirring piece of rhetoric in my life, although some of Churchill’s wartime speeches come close. This was televised live to the nation, and I watched it.

This was King’s moment, and he took it big time. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed the next year. I ask you to spare five minutes to listen to this, and remember that when it was given, there was still rampant and legal segregation in America:

It’s also National Pastrami Sandwich Day, which is weird because we just had National Pastrami Day. I sense the machinations of Big Pastrami.  And in Indonesia it’s Ocean Duty Day.

On this day in 1759, the British Museum opened. On January 15, 1870, Thomas Nast published in Harper’s Weekly a cartoon that first symbolized the Democratic party with a donkey. Here it is:

On this day in 1889, the Coca-Cola Company (then called the Pemberton Medicine Company) was incorporated in Atlanta, Georgia. Exactly three years later, James Naismith published the rules of “basketball.” On this day in 1919, two events happened: Rosa Luxemberg and Karl Liebknecht German socialists, were murdered by the Freikorps (German mercenaries); and the Great Molasses Flood occurred in Boston, an explosion that loosed a huge tsunami of the sweet stuff, killing 21 people and injured 150. On January 15, 1943, during WWII, the Pentagon was dedicated in Arlington, Virginia. On this day in 1967, the first Super Bowl was played in Los Angeles, with the Green Bay Packers beating the Kansas City Chiefs 35-10. And on this day in 2001, only 17 years ago, Wikipedia went online.

Notables born on this day include Molière (1622), Josef Breuer (1842), Osip Mandelstam (1891), Aristotle Onassis (1906), Edward Teller (1908), Gene Krupa (1909), Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918), mountaineer Maurice Herzog (1919), and Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929, assassinated 1968).

Those who expired on this day include Mathew Brady (1896), Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg (1919; see above), Jack Teagarden (1964), Ray Bolger (1987), and Harry Nilsson (1994).

Teagarden is one of only two jazz trombonists I can name (the other is Juan Tizol of Ellington’s Band). He could also sing, and here he is with Louis Armstrong peforming the classic “Basin Street Blues” (Barney Bigard on clarinet):

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is about to finish the last of the Japanese “cat’s snacks” sent her by Hiroko:

Hili: If I eat the last Japanese treat now, will I be sad later?
A: Probably.
Hili: Oh well, I will suffer later.
In Poliah:
Hili: Czy jak teraz zjem ten ostatni japoński przysmak, to potem będzie mi przykro?
Ja: Prawdopodobnie. 
Hili: Trudno, będę cierpieć.

A tweet from Matthew. Spot the longhorn beetle. (Translations of the Japanese welcome.)

And three more from Dr. Cobb:

https://twitter.com/historylvrsclub/status/952279620044369920

Be sure to watch the video. I’ve seen something like this in Scotland:

https://twitter.com/AMAZlNGNATURE/status/952554438421442560

A hedgehog comes alive when it smells food (h/t: Barry):

And a last-minute contribution by Grania:

Officials of several San Antonio colleges: Hate speech is not free speech

January 14, 2018 • 1:00 pm

There are 23 institutions in the Higher Education Council of San Antonio (Texas), and last month 13 officials in that system, including 11  college presidents as well as the Mayor of San Antonio, signed a bizarre statement that appears on the HECSA website. Here it is in its entirety:

Hate Speech Is Not Free Speech

American colleges and universities have always embraced diverse points of view, leading to a multitude of new discoveries and cultural understanding. Higher education is a phenomenal place for minds to be challenged, to inquire, explore, discover and question the status quo.

But from time to time, American colleges and universities are subject to witness hate speech or activity that is disguised as free speech. Such has been the case in recent weeks at several colleges and universities in San Antonio and throughout Texas.

As members of the Higher Education Council of San Antonio (HECSA), we – the presidents of colleges and universities throughout this community and supporters – feel that it is important for us to speak out and make a distinction between diversity of thought and disingenuous misrepresentation of free speech. We further attest that hate speech has no place at our colleges and universities. Inappropriate messages, banners and flyers that are meant to provoke, spread hate, or create animosity and hostility, are not welcome or accepted.

Teaching, research, and critical thinking are the founding pillars of higher education. Each and every day, we witness incredible learning opportunities for our students, faculty, staff and community members.

San Antonio’s colleges and universities are stronger and more diverse than ever before. During the upcoming tricentennial, there are many events, activities and symposiums being planned at our colleges to honor the city’s multicultural heritage, as well as current and future residents. San Antonio colleges and universities have played an enormous part in the city’s history. We are proud to have been a part of this great accomplishment and will further ensure that it continues to be our focus in the next 300 years.

Please join us in celebrating the power of higher education in the lives of San Antonio residents!

This is the usual “we love free speech, but. . . ” statement, and has a lot of problems. First, it doesn’t define “hate speech”.  Is speech that hates on Nazis, Trump, or Israel “hate speech”? After all, that kind of speech is indeed meant to “provoke, spread hate, and create animosity and hostility”!

Instead, it just says that hate speech is “disingenuous misrepresentation of free speech” rather than “diversity of thought.” But what is the difference? Is the “diversity of thought” that questions affirmative action, unlimited immigration, or the DACA program considered “hate speech”?

Finally, the statement, signed by the mayor of a big U.S. city, fails to recognize that “hate speech” IS free speech, for U.S. courts have recognized this as the going interpretation of the First Amendment.  What the signatories are saying—and some of the HECSA colleges are public, and so must abide by the Constitution—is this: “Screw the Constitution. We’re gonna prohibit speech that is legal but that we don’t like.”

Shame on these officials, and shame on the mayor, for signing such a nebulous and Constitution-flouting document.

Hybrid speciation in Amazonian manakins?

January 14, 2018 • 11:15 am

Rather than give a long introduction to hybrid speciation, I refer you to a recent post I did on diploid hybrid speciation in the Galápagos finches; just have a look at the introduction, which talks about the commonness of hybrid speciation in plants (via polyploidy) and its rarity in animals.  The Galápagos finches may be a case of diploid speciation following hybridization, but it’s not clear, for they don’t get a chance to mate with one of the two ancestral species (i.e., we don’t know if it’s reproductively isolated from one parent), and it’s also likely, I think, that this small-population hybrid species won’t last very long, but will be “mated to death” by its one sympatric parent.

But there’s a new report of a hybrid species in manakins from the Amazon, and this one looks pretty good. Published in PNAS (reference below, free access, and pdf here), its first author is Anfredo Barerra-Guzmán, and the last author is Jason Weir, a postdoc in Trevor Price’s lab who was next door to me for a few years.

The paper is long and complex, with some genetic details that aren’t necessary for general readers, but I’ll summarize the results as succinctly as I can.

In the Brazilian Amazon, at the headwaters of the Cururu-ri River in Pará state, exist three species of manakins: Lepidothrix vilasboasi, L. nattereri, and L. iris, which has two subspecies.  L. vilasbosi, which I’ll call LV, lives in an area intermediate between L. nattereri (“LN”) and L. iris (“LI”); all are separated by rivers, which for many Amazonian birds constitute geographic barriers because birds simply don’t like to fly over water.  Here are their geographic distributions from the paper:

You can see that LV, the putative “hybrid species” lies in between its two parents LN and LI (two subspecies). When LV was first found in 1957, was thought to be simply a “hybrid zone”: an area of hybridization between the two parental species.

The three species differ most markedly in the color of their head crowns. As the paper notes:

The crown patch in L. iris is iridescent and varies from brilliant white (its usual look, which is very similar to L. nattereri) to blue or purple, depending on the angle of light. Males of the two subspecies of L. iris distributed on either side of the Xingu River are almost identical in plumage, with L. iris iris possessing a thin green strip between the upper mandible and the crown patch and with the crown patch extending all the way to the mandible in L. iris eucephala. Females (not shown) appear like males but lack the contrasting crown and rump patches and do not differ appreciably among species.

In contrast, LV has a yellow crown patch, very distinct from that of the two parental species (see below).

Here’s LV (the “golden-crowned manakin”) with its yellow crown:

And LN (the “snow-capped manakin”) with its white crown:

Well, what is the evidence that LV was formed after hybridization between LN and LI? That rests on genetics. The genome of LV is a mixture of genes from the two parental species, and attempts to reconstruct the ancestry of these birds, using both standard phylogenetics and “coalescent” simulations, show that it’s far more likely that LV came from mixed genes from LN and LI than that it branched off from one or the other species (the conventional “branching” scenario for speciation). Between 15% and 38% of the LV genome comes from LN and 62%-85% of the genome from LI, depending on what method is used to do the calculation.

One problem is that LV could still represent an isolated hybrid population, or a hybrid zone, between the two species. The authors say this is unlikely because pure F1 hybrids of the two species (that is, first-generation offspring), would have 50% of the genes from each species rather than this skewed distribution.  But that would be the case only if the F1 hybrids are sterile so that they couldn’t form a “hybrid swarm” by further reproduction. It’s still possible that we have here a hybrid zone or swarm in which members are not reproductively isolated from the two parental species, so that LV is not really a “species”. The crucial evidence is whether LV is reproductively isolated from LN and LI (note: it’s already geographically isolated, but that doesn’t count as a reproductive barrier in the “biological species concept”, for in that case any geographically isolated population would be a species).

So is LV reproductively isolated from the two parents? We don’t know for sure, for they don’t coexist in the same area. Barrera-Guzmán et al. suspect that LV would be isolated—by its differently colored crown. Crown colors are used by birds as ways to identify mates from their of own species, and to discriminate against the wrong ones, so the authors suppose that LV males would not be recognized as appropriate mates by females from LN and LI because of LV’s novel yellow crown. Likewise, it’s possible that LV females wouldn’t recognize the iridescent crowns of its parental species, so there would be reproductive isolation on all fronts.

The interesting thing about the LV crown is its novel yellow color. The authors found that the iridescences of the LN and LI crowns is caused by different structural properties of their feathers, and that the LV crowns are intermediate between these two sets of properties. The interesting thing is that if you make a pure F1 hybrid between LN and LI, you get a dull crown with the same intermediate structural properties of the putative hybrid LV, but it’s not yellow!

The authors then speculate—reasonably in my view—that what happened in this scenario was that the two parental species hybridized, producing a population that lives in the forest (where LV does) but had a dull crown. Sexual and/or natural selection then caused carotenoid-retaining structures to evolve in the hybrid population so that males would be visible to females in the forest. (Female preferences for yellow would, by sexual selection, go along with this.) Thus, hybridization itself wasn’t sufficient for speciation: the reproductive isolation would have to have involved some post-hybridization selection.

The upshot: I think the authors have a good case for having uncovered a rare diploid hybrid species of bird. It’s not an absolutely compelling case, as it’s still possible we have a hybrid swarm that is not a new species and is not reproductively isolated from the parents. If they could demonstrate strong mate discrimination among species based on crown color (or anything else), the data would be more convincing. But I still think they’ve uncovered a possible (even probable) case, which, with some follow-up work, could represent one of just a handful of diploid hybrid species in animals.

Some people may say, “well, this is a new evolutionary paradigm, for speciation is supposed to occur by branching of lineages, not by anastomosis (fusion) of separate branches into one.” And yes, if this is the way species normally formed, it would mandate a pretty big revision of Darwinian theory. But the evidence is that this is not the way most diploid species form, for if it did, phylogenetic analysis would not resolve any bits of the tree of life: we’d just get a spaghetti-like mess. In Drosophila, the group I know best, this is clearly not the case: branching rather than fusion is the rule. Although there is more leakage of genes between animal species than we suspected two decades ago, that is “introgresssion”, not speciation. We still see little evidence that the formation of new species in animals occurs by the fusion of already-existing branches (species).

______

Barrera-Guzmán, A. O., A. Aleixo, M. D. Shawkey, and J. T. Weir. 2018. Hybrid speciation leads to novel male secondary sexual ornamentation of an Amazonian bird. Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA 115:E218-225. Published ahead of print December 26, 2017, doi:10.1073/pnas.1717319115

“Authoritarian Leftism is an impossible project”: Nick Cohen on censorship

January 14, 2018 • 9:00 am

Nick Cohen’s new piece in the Guardian, “Censorship wins no arguments and just helps the right“, makes the same point that Steve Pinker did in his remarks at the Spiked discussion at Harvard: by deeming some subjects taboo to discuss, or dismissing them as unworthy of discussion, the Left drives people rightwards. While this claim has been dismissed by some, you’ll hear from the full Spiked discussion (worth watching!) that it’s true to at least some extent. Some examples: the attempt to censor or deplatform people (since 2010 mostly from the Left) on college campuses, the attempt to dismiss and demonize people without engaging them by using epithets like “alt-right” and Nazis, the curt dismissal of arguments about group differences as reflecting either  “evolutionary psychology” (a supposedly discredited discipline) or “sexism”, and so on.

I’ve argued before that such censorship does the Left no good because it renders us unable to even hear the best arguments of our opponents, which in turn makes us unable to ponder and answer them, and because it constitutes a slippery slope. As Hitchens often asked, “Who has the right to decide what speech is unacceptable?”

Further, free speech is a historical tenet of Leftist politics, and it’s unseemly to abandon it now, especially if it makes us look censorious and intolerant—which, indeed, many Leftists are. If anyone thinks that censorship is effective in promulgating your own views, just remember the Streisand Effect. Or look at college students’ failure to give answers when faced with the arguments of more articulate conservatives like Ben Shapiro. Like the students confronting Bret Weinstein at Evergreen State, they’re often reduced to babbling, screaming, or thuggery.

Cohen uses two examples to demonstrate the ineffectual nature of Leftist censorship. The first is Richard Branson’s refusal to sell the Daily Mail on his Virgin Trains because the paper is “not compatible with the VT brand and our beliefs”, and the PinkerGate episode itself. A few quotes:

You don’t argue to convert your opponents. You argue to persuade the undecided audience watching on in silence, as it judges which side is worthy of support. I doubt that waverers nod their heads in approval when universities, of all places, do not allow speakers to appear on platforms, or when the state capitalists of Virgin Rail refuse to stock the Daily Mail. Look at them, and maybe look at yourself too. It’s not a compelling sight.

For all their bombast, censors give every appearance of being dictatorial neurotics, who are so frightened of their opponents that they cannot find the strength to take them on in the open. I can’t imagine many saying, “I’ll side with the people who tell me what I can and can’t think.” I find it equally hard to picture readers turning away from the Mail because Sir Richard Branson and “alternative” comedians who haven’t had an alternative thought since Blair’s second term tell them to.

“Liberals” still do not understand that when they censor they are falling into their enemy’s trap. The alt-right is as much a satirical as a political movement: more South Park than The West Wing. It is at its happiest trolling liberal culture rather than governing, which is why Brexit and the Trump administration are so shambolic. The alt-right wants to and needs to provoke liberals into showing they are repressive, so it cast itself in the role of transgressive rebel. Why play the part it has allotted you?

Indeed. Cohen’s second example even cites Professor Ceiling Cat (who’s very chuffed, even though the link—”creepy American leftists”—is a bit deceptive):

Pinker said that if only universities had the courage to face awkward facts they could make perfectly good rejoinders against the apparent justifications for racism and anarcho-capitalism. The most successful capitalist societies have strong welfare states rather than unregulated markets, for instance. Most American terrorists are white supremacists. Ethnicity isn’t destiny and the propensity of a group to commit crimes changes over time.

Inevitably, creepy American leftists cut his explanation out when they edited a video of his talk to present him as a fascist. They should have thought harder about the failure of US campuses to impose their taboos in a setting where liberals have power. It is a warning that authoritarian liberalism is an impossible project.

Let’s try a thought experiment. Even if you were to suppress the rightwing press and rightwing social media, as so many “liberals” appear to want to do, you would not ban rightwing ideas, merely win them more converts by investing them with a dissident glamour. What’s next? Vet candidates for office to make sure they conform to your desires? Stop your opponents voting?

The motivation behind much modern censorship is essentially religious: an affirmation of the urge to parade your righteousness. It is an egocentric and frivolous emotion to indulge at a time when the stakes could not be higher, and every opponent of the populist status quo ought to be concentrating on winning converts rather than driving them into the arms of their grateful opponents.

The locus of this authoritarianism is college campuses. While some commenters here have argued that these censorious students will grow up and stop the censorship when they enter the real world, that is proving untrue. Authoritarian Leftism is already infecting the mainstream media, including the New York Times, and these students will simply move into positions of power where they can instantiate the censorship they absorbed in college. It is from the young people on the Left that we hear the famous phrase, “I’m in favor of free speech, but . . . “. It is from the young people on the Left that we hear that “hate speech is not free speech.” It is young people on the Left who object or riot when speakers like Charles Murray, Betsy deVos, James Watson, Chelsea Manning, or even Eugene Volokh are invited to college campuses (all were banned). (Remember, Watson was deplatformed when he wanted to talk about biology and not race.)

If you look at just 2017 on the FIRE “Disinvitation Database” of deplatformed speakers (here and here), you’ll see that of the 28 campus speakers on the list who were deplatformed by an identifiable segment of politics, all but four came from the Left. (Chi-square under equal expectation ≈29, 1 d.f., p < 0.0001). This is a shameful statistic.

Nick Cohen is a national treasure. Sadly, he’s not America’s national treasure, for few Americans even know who he is—or read him. I recommend again his two books What’s Left?: How the Left Lost Its Way and, even more relevant, You Can’t Read this Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom.

Here’s a video of Cohen on Dave Rubin’s show, and I just know I’ll get excoriated because Rubin is considered “alt-right”: