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.
Good morning; we’ve reached midweek because it’s Wednesday, January 10, 2018: National Bittersweet Chocolate Day, a form of chocolate I’m increasingly appreciating (take that, those of you who say my sweet tooth is somehow immoral!) It’s also Majority Rules Day in the Bahamas (read the link).
This is again one of those days depauperate of historical events. On this day in 49BC, Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon, beginning the civil war that led him to become dictator. “Let the die be cast” is what he’s supposed to have said on that day. On January 10, 1776, Thomas Paine published his famous pamphlet Common Sense. In 1870, John D. Rockefeller incorporated Standard Oil, and in 1920 the Treaty of Versailles took effect on this day, officially ending the First World War. On January 10, 1946, the first General Assembly of the UN met in London, including 51 nations. Finally, on this day in 1985, the Sandinista Daniel Ortega became president of Nicaragua, and remains so despite the U.S.’s earlier attempts to overthrow him.
Notables born on this day, which include several rockers, include Barbara Hepworth (1903), Max Roach (1924), Sal Mineo (1939), evolutionary geneticist Godfrey Hewitt (1940), Jim Croce (1943), Donald Fagen (1948), Linda Lovelace (1949, died 2002), Pat Benatar (1953), and Jared Kushner (1981). Those who died on this day include botanist and systematist Carl Linnaeus (1728), Buffalo Bill (the first one; 1917). Sinclair Lewis (1951), Dashiell Hammett (1961), Coco Chanel (1971), and, of course, David Bowie, who died on this day two years ago.
Sal Mineo was, of course, an actor in “Rebel Without A Cause,” also starring James Dean and Natalie Wood. Here’s the scene where he dies at the planetarium:
And Croce singing my favorite of his songs, “Operator” (I’m a sucker for songs about lost love). Croce died in a plane crash in 1973; he was only 30. It was a great loss to music:
Today’s Hili has a backstory, which involves Malgorzata’s recent bout with a virus. The explanation:
This was when I was ill in bed. I haven’t seen Hili for ages and asked Andrzej where she was. He didn’t know and went looking for her. He found her upstairs and told her that I asked about her. As she knew that the upstairs needed cleaning, she wanted to please me, so she announced that she was cleaning up there.
A: Malgorzata is asking what are you doing.
Hili: Tell her that I’m cleaning.
In Polish:
Ja: Małgorzata pyta co ty tu robisz?
Hili: Powiedz jej, że sprzątam.
A tweet from reader Matthew:
Have you seen a flying-fox get a drink?
They belly-dip, & then drink the water off their chest
The palm cockatoo,Probosciger aterrimus, is a gorgeous bird found in New Guinea, the Aru Islands of Indonesia, and northern Australia. They can live for ages; there’s one report that a female gave birth for the first time at age 65, though I’m not sure I believe it since the oldest confirmed age in captivity is 56, and they probably have shorter lives in the wild. (Wikipedia notes “anecdotal evidence indicates a palm cockatoo reaching 80 or 90 years of age in an Australian zoo”.)
Regardless, the birds are long-lived. They are likely Australia’s largest parrot, have the most massive beak of any parrot (part of their diet consists of very hard nuts and seeds, but they also eat grubs and fruit). They are also “basal” cockatoos; that is, molecular evidence show their ancestors to have branched off earlier than any other living cockatoo from the common ancestor of all cockatoos. Here’s a pair:
The species is sexually dimorphic, but apparently only in that females have a slightly smaller upper mandible. They pair up during the breeding season (I’m not sure if they pair for life), and females lay one egg every two years—an incredibly low reproductive rate that makes them vulnerable to extinction, particularly as their habitat disappears.
And here’s their range in green. The birds studied here, which show an unusual drumming behavior, came only from one area on Cape York, the Australian peninsula shown below. That behavior apparently isn’t seen in New Guinea populations (see the implications of this below).
What makes these birds extra special is that they are apparently the only species in the world besides humans that produces a rhythmical beat using a tool. (Not even primates do this.) They drum on tree trunks with a trimmed stick or seed pod. (Of course other animals, like crickets, produce rhythmical sounds, but do so using their body, not tools.) Why the palm cockatoos do this isn’t yet clear: it could be territory-marking or some kind of sexual display, since apparently only males do it, and do so significantly more often when females are around.
This also may be the only report of tool use in an animal when foraging isn’t involved.
The report of this behavior is the subject of a six month old paper in Science Advances by Robert Heinsohn et al. (reference below, full pdf free here). The authors analyze the drumming, show that it’s rhythmical and differs in speed among males, and then engage in what I consider unwarranted speculation that this is somehow connected with the origin of human music. The paper itself is quite good, but the speculations about its connection to human music are premature and probably wrong.
Here’s what the birds do. The males (and perhaps occasionally some females) break off a piece of stick about 2.5 cm (1 inch) wide and 15 cm (6 inches) long, and use either that or a seed pod from Grevillea glauca(“Bushman’s clothes peg”) as a drumstick to beat out a rhythm on a hollow tree trunk or branch. The twig is held in the left foot (why not the right?). The behavior was first described in 1984, but studied intensively only recently, with the results published in this paper. Here’s a G. glauca seed pod:
Below is a video made by the authors summarizing their work and showing the drumming. It also plays up the notion that this study sheds light on human music because, like our music, cockatoo music a). involves tool use, b). is rhythmic, c). has a beat that differs from drummer to drummer, and d). is amplified by beating against a hollow tree. Note that the authors witnessed only one drumming event per 100 hours of observation, and that the study took 7 years of hard work! Kudos to them.
In this video, the only episode of drumming shown, using a seed pod, starts at 2:05:
And two more videos of the drumming behavior. In the one below, drumming is shown at 8:32:
This one shows more instances of drumming, and is shorter:
Next, some details of the work. The authors looked at 18 wild male cockatoos performing 131 sequences of drumming; apparently they can identify individual males and tell males from females. The males varied in their frequency of drumming: the range of average rates of tapping goes between one tap every 0.09 seconds to one every 2.77 seconds. The analysis below, which compares the actual rhythm with that expected under a pure Poisson distribution (random beats of a given average frequency). These are six males, with the actual rhythm shown at the top and the Poisson-generated rhythms (using the mean rate) at the bottom of each rectangle. You can see that the real beats are much more regular than a random distribution of beats. This is the evidence for rhythmicity, and it’s strong. It also shows the variation among males:
Now it’s not clear why they do this, but it appears to be some kind of sexual display, since it’s performed significantly more often when a female is present than when she’s not (p < 0.001), though they still drum when the the ladies aren’t around (26% of the time compared to 68% of the time in the presence of females). This may be either a pair-bonding ritual or a form of sexual display: perhaps the male’s rate of tapping or its loudness tells the female something about her putative mate. It may also serve a territorial function, too.
Is this genetic or learned? We don’t know, for all observations were made on wild species. It may well be a learned cultural phenomenon, as it’s only found on Cape York, but in that case its use as a display trait to attract females becomes less likely, for females would have to learn what the different beats and loudness say about a given male, and sexual selection like this is almost invariably based not on learning but on the coevolution of a male trait and female preferences—both are genetic. Or, the trait and preference could be genetic, but have evolved only in Australia. Hand-rearing birds in the absence of any sound cue would reveal whether the trait is “hard wired”.
What about its bearing on the origin of human music? The authors report that chimps have been seen to drum, but using their hands, not tools, and, with the exception of one captive male, don’t do so rhythmically. Given the absence of the crucial features of “human music” in our closest relatives, but only in distantly related cockatoos, what does this say about the origin of our own music? To me, not much—this may well be a convergent behavior in humans and palm cockatoos. But the paper relentlessly harps on the relevance to human music, and here’s the authors’ spiel:
Our demonstration of a nonhuman species using manufactured tools to produce rhythmic sounds has broad implications for understanding the evolution of music. Palm cockatoo drumming conforms to several musical features that are statistically universal among human societies, including the use of percussion, a regular beat, and repeated components. However, it differs in a key characteristic. Among humans, a regular beat is significantly associated with dance, group-based activity, and percussion. In palm cockatoos, a regular beat is usually the product of a solo activity linked to percussion but not to group-based activity or dance. This difference between humans and palm cockatoos is important because, whereas the present-day tight associations between rhythm, dance, group-based activity, and percussion make the origins of human rhythm difficult to disentangle), palm cockatoos indicate that regular percussive rhythm can evolve as part of a solo performance by males to females.
In conclusion, our analysis demonstrates that the tool-assisted drumming displays of palm cockatoos have key hallmarks of human music as distinct from other forms of communication, most notably language. These include performance in a consistent display context, regular beat production over long sequences, repeated components, and individual signatures or styles. Regular rhythm is widespread among human societies and is strongly linked to dance, group-based activity, and percussion, but the origins of our preference for a regular beat remain obscure. The simple, regular drumming displays of palm cockatoos in just one population in northern Australia may provide a much needed comparative clue to help solve this riddle. Palm cockatoos suggest an evolutionary link between regular rhythm and solo-based percussive performances by males to females. This supports Darwin’s contention that a regular beat has primeval aesthetic appeal across species, and points to the distinct possibility that the preference for a regular beat in human societies had other origins before being co-opted into group-based music and dance.
If a “regular beat has primeval aesthetic appeal among species”, why doesn’t that appear in any primates, if it has to do with the origin of human music? And, as the authors note, palm cockatoos don’t dance (though the famous cockatoo Snowball does dance to a human-generated musical beat, and I’ve seen him do it). Further, if this has to do with the evolution of music, there has to be a genetic component to the birds’ behavior, and that hasn’t been shown. (Note again that it’s seen in only part of the species’ range, though that doesn’t rule out genetic differentiation among areas.)
The authors are trying to sell their results by saying that it has “broad implications for understanding the evolution of music,” but I don’t see that it does. That’s just sizzle to boost the appeal of an already palatable steak. The data are interesting enough as they are, and raise other and more answerable questions. Why do the birds do it? Do females prefer a certain rate of drumming? Are the interpopulation differences cultural, genetic, or a mixture of both? So far all we have is a convergent behavior, one that, to me at least, says nothing about the origin of music in Homo sapiens.
by Professor Ceiling Cat and Matthew Cobb (Matthew did the bits below the picture).
I missed today’s Google Doodle, which celebrates what would have been the 96th birthday of Har Ghobind Khorana (1922-2011), a molecular geneticist, biochemist, and Nobel Laureate. He was born in the Punjab, India, on what is supposed to be this day in 1922 (all we have is some sketchy documentation). His background was humble: he was the son of a tax clerk, but one devoted to educating his kids. After getting a degree at Lahore University, Khorana moved to England, where he got a Ph.D. at Liverpool University in 1948. After a postdoc in Zurich, he moved back to independent India, then to UBC in Vancouver, and then to the University of Wisconsin, where he became an American citizen. He wound up at MIT in 1970, having had a peripatetic life.
The doodle (which. intriguingly is visible primarily, in North America, India, Australia, Japan, Austria Sweden and Iceland – how do they decide these things?) shows Khorana carrying out the research that led to him winning the Nobel Prize in 1968—along with Marshall Nirenberg (who made the decisive breakthrough in 1961, with Heinrich Matthei) and Robert Holley—for his work on cracking the genetic code: how the information in DNA is turned into a protein.
Khorana was able to use his superior biochemical skills to synthesise small bits of RNA that were essential for working out what each ‘codon’ (3 letters of DNA or RNA) stood for in the genetic code. It was that insight and drive, expressed in particular in the years 1963-1966, that won him the Nobel. [JAC: How biologists cracked the coding is the topic of Matthew’s fine book, Life’s Greatest Secret: The Race to Crack the Genetic Code. I recommend it highly if you want a good biological detective story.]
The drawing of him in the center doesn’t show him playing some kind of odd musical instrument – he is ‘mouth pipetting’, so sucking up small quantities of often radioactive or otherwise noxious liquids to distribute them into various test tubes. This kind of procedure would be completely forbidden in any laboratory today.
One question that was raised on Tw*tter by Mike Nitabach of Yale University is what exactly the Doodle is supposed to represent. It shows two strands of RNA that are binding together. We know it’s RNA because the four bases are A, C, G and U (if it were DNA, U would be replaced by T). But it isn’t clear what biological process or experiment this is supposed to represent. Khorana’s key breakthrough was to synthesise very short pieces of RNA composed of only 3 bases. Even the process he was able to provide insight into – protein synthesis – doesn’t involve two complementary strands of RNA. The Doodle appears to be a bit of artistic licence.
The lead story on the NBC Evening News last night—the lead story—was the widespread call for Oprah to run for President in 2020. I was appalled: that’s the news I usually watch, and why should that be the most important story of the day.
Indeed, the network issued this tweet, and then deleted it after pushback, saying that it was posted by a “third party”:
Clearly the readers of this site don’t agree (yes, I know this isn’t a random sample of people, much less of readers). As of 6:30 this morning, these are the results of yesterday’s poll:
80% are on the “unenthusiastic” side, compared to only 9% “enthusiastic”. Frankly, I can’t understand those who are at all excited about Oprah’s running on the basis of a speech that, in retrospect, was not very original, getting approbation because it preached to the choir, and even called up the specter of Rosa Parks. (Can we let that poor woman rest instead of becoming a symbol for every form of social justice?) I hasten to add that, if the election were today and these were the candidates, I’d vote to Oprah over Trump and nearly all Republicans. But we can do better. For example, we could run someone who has political experience.
Further, I’ve become a lot less enthusiastic about Oprah’s candidacy (I never was enthusiastic and voted “very unenthusiastic”) after several readers reminded us of Oprah’s history of endorsing dubious science, like that pushed by Dr. Oz, her promotion of the unctuous Dr. Phil, her hosting of anti-vaxer Jenny McCarthy, her pushing of the numinous “The Secret” (see below), and other antiscience or odious stunts she’s pulled. She has a weakness for woo, and that doesn’t bode well for a President.
If you watched her Golden Globes speech and said “She should run,” then the 2016 election and the first year of the Trump presidency have addled your brain.
That’s not to say Oprah didn’t give a great speech, because she did, and speech-making is indeed part of running for and serving as president. Oprah has spent a career talking on television and connecting with audiences, and she’s very good at it. On the other hand, I could argue that she should be disqualified simply on the basis of her promotion of “The Secret,” a multimedia juggernaut that claimed that the entire universe and every moment of human experience are governed by “the law of attraction.” This is the idea that if you wish really hard for something — say, washboard abs or a new Birkin bag — it will, through the magical power created by your thoughts, find its way to you. With Oprah’s help, and because America produces an endless supply of gullible nincompoops, “The Secret” was a gigantic hit.
Politics has never been immune to other brands of magical thinking, and there are few more powerful ideas among voters than the notion that there’s really nothing to being an officeholder, whether it’s a member of Congress or the president. An election never goes by without a healthy number of candidates claiming that they’re the best person for the job because they have no relevant experience and know nothing about it. “I’m a businessman, not a politician,” they declare, to the nods of their future constituents. If you needed a new roof put on your house and somebody came to you saying, “I’m a computer programmer, not a roofer,” going on to explain that the roofing business is a mess and all you need is some outside-the-box thinking to make your roof better than ever, you’d be a fool to hire him. Yet somehow the same logic doesn’t seem to apply when people think about whom they should elect.
. . . It’s true that Democrats have underappreciated the importance of charisma in presidential politics. But the answer to those electoral failures isn’t to stop caring about substance. It’s to find candidates who are both charismatic and serious, who would be able both to win and to do the job once they took office.
Guess what: Democrats have done this before! Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were fantastically compelling candidates who could also talk your ear off about policy. They knew how to work the political system, and they also knew how to sell. And it isn’t as though Democrats are going to have any shortage of choices in 2020. There will likely be at least a dozen people running, and if you’re a Democrat you’re probably going to like at least some of them.
I hope so! I’m curious to see who will come to the fore among the Democrats.
As I’m writing this listening to the morning local news, there was just a big segment on the local CBS affiliate talking about Oprah’s potential bid, and not mentioning anybody’s reservations. Waldman finishes this way:
It’s a free country, and Oprah can run if she wants. If she does, she’ll have the chance to make her best argument for why she should be president. But if she runs, the idea of a Trump-Oprah throwdown will make the news media positively vibrate with glee. There’s a strong possibility that, just as Trump did in the 2016 primaries, she could suck up every ounce of media attention, limiting the ability of the more experienced and serious candidates to make their case to primary voters.
Obama’s route to the presidency started with a great speech, too. But over the ensuing years, he proved he was worthy of the outsize expectations that had been placed upon him. It’s possible Oprah could prove herself worthy of the attention being put on the idea of her running for president. But she certainly hasn’t done it yet, and we should all be extremely skeptical unless and until she shows us why, beyond just being rich and famous, she’d actually make a good president.
This movement is embarrassing to all progressives. It shows how desperate we are to seize on anybody with a public presence, regardless of whether they’d be a good person to lead our country.
Yesterday I put up part I of reader Joe Dickinson’s wildlife photographs from India. Today we have part II, and Joe’s notes are indented. This shows some of the urban wildlife that abounds in India:
Continuing with India, here are shots from diverse locations as specified.
We saw the ring-necked parakeet (Psittacula krameri) many places. These are one the grounds of the Taj Mahal.
This red-wattled lapwing (Vanellus indicus) was on the grounds of the Jai Mahal Palace Hotel where we stayed on the road from Delhi to Jaipur.
This young Rhesus macaque (Macaca mulatta) was inside the Agra Fort.
Some bats (species unknown), a palm squirrel (Funambulus palmarum) and a swarm of bees (species unknown) were all at the remarkable carved temples at Kujuraho. I had to include one of the temples because they are so wonderful. [JAC: see my post on the Khajuraho temples here.]
Here are two more rhesus macaques. The first, giving a threat display (from which I hastily retreated) is on a trail above the Woodstock School in Mussoorie. The second, apparently trying to drink from the wrong end of an empty coke bottle, is along the trail to Surkanda Devi, a popular pilgrimage spot in the Himalaya foothills.
Grey langurs (probably Semnopithecus schistaceus) hang around the Woodstock School.
Finally, a view in evening light from the top of the trail where we encountered the aggressive rhesus.
Good morning. It’s Tuesday, January 9, 2018, and it’s warming up in Chicago today, with a predicted high above freezing: 39° F (4° C). Big Apricot has managed to get today declared National Apricot Day, but it’s also National Cassoulet Day, celebrating a very fine dish indeed. Posting will be light today as, having no food in the house (I fasted yesterday), I must leave early to go shopping.
On this day in 1349, with the population of Basel, Switzerland infected with bubonic plague, the city fathers decided that it was caused by Jews poisoning the wells (their mortality rate was lower), and so all 600 of the resident Jews were gathered together and stuck in a barn, which was burned down. Speaking of incineration, on January 9, 1431, the trial of Joan of Arc for treason began in Rouen, France. She was convicted, of course, and burned at the stake on May 30 of that year. Here is her death scene from the famous and superb 1928 silent movie “The Passion of Joan of Arc ” with Maria Falconetti in the title role. it’s a bit gruesome, but you should really see the entire movie, which is free online here (not embeddable). I think it’s the best silent movie I’ve ever seen.
On this day in 1806, Admiral Horatio Lord Nelson got a state funeral, with his remains placed in St. Paul’s Cathedral. He is of course memorialized (and pooed on by pigeons) in Trafalgar Square. On January 9, 1916, the Battle of Gallipoli concluded: a disaster for the Allies but a great victory for the Ottomans (the only one of WWI) and a career-making triumph for their commander Kemal Atatürk, who went on to become Turkey’s first President.Those Allied soldiers who hadn’t been slaughtered were evacuated from the Gallipoli peninsula. On this day in 2005, Mahmoud Abbas won a Palestinian election to succeed the expired Yasser Arafat as president of the Palestinian National Authority. Finally, it was only eleven years ago today that Steve Jobs introduced the first iPhone at a Macworld conference in San Francisco. Seems like longer, doesn’t it?
Notabes born on this day include Richard Nixon (1913), Bob “Maynard G. Krebs” Denver (1935, died 2005), Joan Baez (1941), Billy Cowsill (1948), Crystal Gayle (1951; real name Brenda Gail Gatzimos, and younger sister of Loretta Lynn), reclusive NYT book reviewer Michiko Kakutani (1955), and Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge (1982).
Those names include two “one-hit wonder” singers: Billy Cowsill, whose group, the Cowsills, had this hit, “The Rain, The Park, and Other Things” in 1967, the year I graduated from high school. I remember it well and still like it a lot. (Actually, the group had two other hits: “Indian Lake” and the title song from “Hair”.) This is a superb live reunion version from 2004—37 years after the first release. It’s as good as the original.
And of course Crystal Gayle’s big hit was the 1977 country crossover, “Don’t It Make my Brown Eyes Blue“, a hit during the same weeks as Debby Boone’s schmaltzy “You Light Up my Life”. Here’s a live version of Gayle’s Big Hit, and I believe it’s introduced by Andy Gibb:
This is another day when few people of note died. The only one I want to highlight is New Zealand-born author Katherine Mansfield, who died in 1923 of tuberculosis at the young age of 34. She was an immense talent.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is entranced by a picture on Andrzej’s computer screen. I didn’t recognize the photo, but Malgozata explained (Gosia was their non-paying boarder for several years, brought home after they picked her up hitchhiking):
Didn’t you recognize her? This is Hania, Gosia’s daughter. Gosia got a wonderful picture of her jumping high up with her hair flowing. Andrzej loves both the girl and the picture and he has this picture permanently on his screen.
Hili: Do you know a more wonderful girl?
A: No, absolutely not, how could you even ask?
In Polish:
Hili: Znasz wspanialszą dziewczynę?
Ja: Nie, skąd, jak możesz tak myśleć?
Today’s tweets, beginning with one that Matthew liked. Look at those hidden choppers!
Another from Matthew: a BBC Earth tweet about of the world’s smallest wild cat. The Rusty-spotted cat (Prionailurus rubiginosus) a denizen of India and Sri Lanka, weighs between 2 and 3.5 pounds (0.9-1.6 kg). That’s about a third the weight of a house cat! It’s very secretive and not much is known about it. Be sure to watch the video.
Professor Ceiling Cat continues to be distressed at the lack of interest (reflected in comments, at least) on the science posts: those posts that are the hardest to write. Nevertheless, he persists.
Here is a likely example of aposematic (warningly colored) mimics in different orders of insects having evolved to resemble each other (tweet courtesy of Matthew Cobb). This phenomenon is well known in biology, and is known as Müllerian mimicry after the German zoologist Fritz Müller.
If distasteful, noxious, or dangerous species share a common predator, they may evolve a convergent pattern or color that the predator recognizes and avoids. The presumed advantage is that if these species have a common pattern, the predator has to undergo less “learning” to recognize and avoid the shared pattern. What that means to one of these insects like those below is that if an individual of species 2 gets a mutation that somehow resembles a pattern that predators have already learned to avoid in species 1, it has a reproductive advantage over individuals of species 2 with some other aposematic mutation. Do you see why that is? It’s because the first few individuals of species 2 with a different aposematic pattern stick out in the environment, and the predator hasn’t yet learned to avoid them. Learning means that it has to sample the insect (likely killing it) before it learns to avoid the new pattern. You have a survival advantage if you fit in to an already-evolved/learned system rather that starting another one with a mutation that hasn’t been “learned.”
This, biologists presume, is the reason why members of different species evolve to resemble each other when they’re all noxious to predators.
Here we have species from three different insect orders—Coleoptera, Diptera, and Lepidoptera—which have evolve a common orange and black striped pattern.
While we can’t observe the evolution of this convergent pattern, we can make predictions from our evolutionary scenario.
First, these insects have to share a common predator: that is, there should be one or more species of predator that lives in the area that all these species inhabit, and has learned to recognize and avoid the pattern. That, of course, can be tested. (There are some twists here, but not important enough to mention.)
Second, that common predator has learned or can be taught to learn to avoid the pattern.
Third, if you have trained a predator (say, a naive, hand-reared bird) to avoid the pattern, introducing the predator to a different species with the same pattern should show that it’s avoided more often than a brightly colored species with a different pattern.
I know that the second prediction has been tested and confirmed for some aposematic insects, but I’ve no idea whether the first and third have been for members of Müllerian mimicry rings. (Hypothesis three has been tested and confirmed for members of singe aposematic species.)
The important thing is that the evolutionary hypothesis is testable. Creationists, of course, could just say “God made a group of insects this way so they’d survive”, but that assertion can lead to different predictions. I won’t go into those, but perhaps you can think of some.
