PuffHo tries accommodationism, but can’t quite get it right

February 4, 2016 • 11:00 am

PuffHo has a “Religion and Science” section, but virtually every post therein is accommodationist; there’s never anyone claimingthat science and religion are at odds or incompatible. (When he was alive, Victor Stenger used to write such posts.) Here’s a sampling of what’s on that page now (posts are fairly infrequent):

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Yep, and here’s Professional Accommodationist Elaine Ecklund:Screen Shot 2016-02-04 at 9.04.30 AM

Now there’s a new accommodationist article, “12 famous scientists on the possibility of God” by Carol Kuruvilla, an associate editor of the PuffHo Religion section, which, curiously, appears in the “Religion” section but not in the “Religion and Science” section. She gives a list of 12 famous scientists, and, sure enough, most turn out to be atheists or agnostics. And Kuruvilla’s gloss on each scientist is honest about their beliefs. As we know, scientists are far more atheistic than nonscientists, both in America and the UK, so this isn’t a surprise. What is distressing, though, is the way Kuruvilla introduces her list of scientists, for she makes gaffe after gaffe in characterizing the “conflict”. Here’s her entire introduction (indented) with my gloss (flush left):

When President Barack Obama nominated the Christian geneticist Francis Collins to head the National Institutes of Health in 2009, some American scientists questioned whether someone who professed a strong belief in God was qualified to lead the largest biomedical research agency in the world.

The first link goes to the Pew Poll that shows the figure below, the tenfold higher proportion of atheists among scientists than among the general public. There is no link to any specific scientist who questioned Collins’s qualification to head the NIH, as the Pew page just notes that scientists objected to Collins’s nomination (“a number of scientists and pundits publicly questioned whether the nominee’s devout religious faith should disqualify him from the position”). While there may have been such scientists, neither I nor any other nonbelieving scientist I know objected to Collins’s nomination.

Scientists-and-Belief-1

Kuruvilla continues:

This argument — that scientific inquiry is essentially incompatible with religious belief — has been gaining traction in some circles in recent years. In fact, according to a 2009 Pew Research Center survey, American scientists are about half as likely as the general public to believe in God or a higher, universal power. Still, the survey found that the percentage of scientists that believe in some form of a deity or power was higher than you may think — 51 percent.

Well, thanks, Ms. Kuruvilla, for the shout-out at the “gaining traction” link, but shouldn’t you also note that the number of scientists who reject the idea of a deity or higher power is at least 41%, ten times higher than for the public as a whole? Why do accommodationists always find solace in the number of scientists who are believers, rather than find distress in the huge proportion of scientists who are nonbelievers (Ecklund does this, too)? And why don’t they ever wonder why scientists are more atheistic than nonscientists? Whether it be due to nonbelievers being drawn to science or to science turning people into nonbelievers (I think both explanations hold, but the latter may be more powerful), this disparity shows some kind of incompatibility between science and religious belief.

Kuruvilla:

Scientists throughout history have relied on data and observations to make sense of the world. But there are still some really big questions about the universe that science can’t easily explain: Where did matter come from? What is consciousness? And what makes us human?

Here we get the Templetonian “Big Questions” argument, a gussied-up form of the “God of the gaps argument”. To wit: science hasn’t explained some phenomena, therefore the explanation must be God. There’s no need to discuss that rotten old chestnut.

As for “what makes us human?”, that question needs to be framed far more carefully before it can even begin to be answered, and science already has answers for some ways to construe it (e.g., natural selection, bigger brains, and so on).

Kuruvilla:

In the past, this quest for understanding has given scientists both past and present plenty of opportunities for experiencing wonder and awe. That’s because at their core, both science and religion require some kind of leap of faith — whether it’s belief in multiverses or belief in a personal God.

Here Kuruvilla shows her complete misunderstanding of the notion of religious versus scientific “faith”. It is not “faith” to “believe in multiverses”, and no physicist would accept the multiverse hypothesis with the same tenacity that, say, John Haught accepts the hypothesis of a divine being or a resurrected Jesus. What Kuruvilla calls a “leap of faith” in science is really either a “hypothesis supported by evidence” or “confidence based on experience.” Religious faith is neither of those. I wrote an article in Slate expressly to show the difference between how the term “faith” is used in science and religion, but it doesn’t seem to have made much of a dent in this perennial and seemingly deliberate conflation by accommodationists.

Kuruvilla then lists her 12 scientists; I’ve characterized how she describes them:

  • Galileo: religious but claiming that God gave us the ability to understand the natural world
  • Sir Francis Bacon: scientifically minded but religious.
  • Charles Darwin: an agnostic at best
  • Maria Mitchell (America’s first woman astronomer): a “religious seeker” (probably would be described today as a “none”)
  • Marie Curie: atheist or agnostic (no difference, really!)
  • Albert Einstein: not characterized as religious, but said to “separate himself from the ‘fanatical atheists'”
  • Rosalind Franklin: atheist
  • Carl Sagan: an atheist, but Kuruvilla emphasizes his “spirituality”, which of course, as we know, was simply awe at the universe. Frankly, I’m sick of people coopting this form of spirituality as evidence for someone’s “religious nature.”
  • Stephen Hawking: atheist
  • Venkatraman Ramakrishnan (Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, 2009): apparently a nonbeliever, but it’s not clear
  • Neil deGrasse Tyson: Kuruvilla says that he’s more of an agnostic than an atheist, but we know better, don’t we?
  • Francis Collins.  Kuruvilla chose to end with him, perhaps because he’s an evangelical Christian who finds evolution absolutely compatible with his faith.

So, people should read about the scientists and ignore Kuruvilla’s introduction. And then they should look at the Pew data and ask themselves, “Why are scientists so atheistic compared to nonscientists?” I’m not sure that I’ve heard many believers explicitly discuss this interesting statistic. (Remember, too, that the more accomplished the scientist, the less likely they are to be religious, and that holds in both the U.S. and UK. Further, the older the scientist in America, the more likely he/she is to be atheistic, exactly the opposite trend for nonscientist Americans.)

 

A new paper showing the usefulness of the kin-selection model

February 4, 2016 • 9:45 am

There’s a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA by David A. Galbraith et al. (free link and reference at bottom) that has a very cool result: one predicted by kin-selection theory. Kin selection, as you may know, is the idea that the adaptive value of a gene (and hence its evolutionary fate) must include information about how that gene affects its copies in relatives (e.g., a gene in parents for taking care of offspring can promote the replication of the copies that also occur in those offspring). Wikipedia describes this idea pretty succinctly.

Kin selection has been a very useful concept in understanding things like behaviors directed at offspring and relatives, and particularly in understanding the evolution of altruism and of one of its forms: eusociality—the behavior in which a colony of individuals is divided up into castes, some of which reproduce and some of which are nonreproductive but tend the “queen’s” brood (honeybees and naked mole rats are examples).

There are a few people, though, most notably Martin Nowak and E. O. Wilson at Harvard, who have questioned the usefulness of kin selection, arguing that group selection theory (or “multilevel” selection theory) is the only way to study the evolution of eusociality. I’ve written a lot on this site questioning their ideas (see some links below) as well as their claim that kin selection is not a useful way to study evolution in nature. The paper below, I think, shows the usefulness of the kin-selection paradigm, which seems to make predictions—ones that are verified—that don’t flow in any obvious way from a perspective of group or multilevel selection.

Because the paper is complex, I’ve asked my friend Phil Ward, a professor of entomology at the University of California at Davis (and a student of insect evolution) to explain its predictions and results. His explanation may be a bit difficult for non-biologists, but there is no simpler way to explain the study. Give it a go!

 

by Phil Ward

There has been a vociferous debate over the relative merits of group selection theory and inclusive fitness theory (or kin selection theory) as explanations for the evolution of altruistic behavior, especially following a contentious paper by Nowak et al. (2010) which claimed the superiority of the group selection approach. This was met with a resounding rebuff by a large group of evolutionary biologists who argued for the much greater explanatory power and heuristic value of inclusive-fitness thinking (e.g., Abbot et al. 2011). Some previous postings on WEIT about this topic have appeared here, here, here and here.

One fruitful area of inquiry in which kin selection theory makes explicit and testable predictions is in the study of genomic imprinting, a form of intragenomic conflict in which there is differential expression of genes inherited from the mother versus the father. In a theory paper published more than a decade ago, David Queller pointed out that this form of intragenomic conflict can be expected to be particularly widespread in colonies of social insects, and he employed kinship theory to predict the outcome of such conflict under different social contexts.

Now a recent empirical paper by Galbraith et al. (2016) provides convincing evidence that intragenomic conflict in honey bees indeed reveals itself in a way predicted by kin selection theory.

The authors first point out that genes inherited from mothers (matrigenes) and those inherited from fathers (patrigenes) are expected to be in conflict in honey bee workers that have an opportunity to reproduce. Why? Because a honey bee queen mates with multiple males, and the resulting workers are mostly half-siblings. These half-sibling individuals share half of their matrigenes but none of their patrigenes (see Figure 1 of the paper). So, consider a colony in which the queen has died, and half-sibling workers begin to compete over egg-laying (this behavior is inhibited by the queen while she is still alive). A worker’s matrigenes can be passed on when either she or her siblings reproduce, but her patrigenes are present only in her own offspring. Hence, as the authors put it, “compared with matrigenes, patrigenes will favor worker reproduction and exhibit enhanced activity on worker reproductive traits”.

This prediction was tested by quantifying the extent of genomic imprinting, i.e., the differential expression of genes of paternal origin.

The authors’ predictions were upheld. Using a series of genetic crosses that allowed them to distinguish matrigenes from patrigenes, they found that workers in queenless honey bee colonies showed greater expression of paternal than maternal genes, and this patrigene-biased expression was even higher in those workers that actually reproduced. In addition, when comparing parent-of-origin effects on reproductive traits such as ovary size and ovarian activity, patrigenes were shown to exert a much greater influence than matrigenes.

It should be emphasized that the worker reproduction occurring in queenless honey bee colonies produces only one sex: males.The workers lay unfertilized eggs and, as a consequence of the peculiar genetic system (haplodiploidy) found in bees, wasp and ants, these haploid eggs develop into males (which thus carry only one set of chromosomes). With no further production of workers, the colony will soon decline.

So, this last gasp of haploid reproductive effort that occurs when a queen dies (and is not replaced) will have selective significance only if the males that are produced have an opportunity to mate with queens from other colonies, something that takes place in population-wide mating swarms. Presumably this process of rearing and releasing drones (male bees) in a timely manner works best if some workers reproduce while the remainder continue to forage for food and feed the developing drone brood. Thus, colonies in which all reproductively capable workers give in to their patrigenic impulses might produce fewer reproductively successful drones than those in which there is some degree of reproductive restraint by the workers. One could argue that this is a kind of “colony-level” selection that weeds out disruptively high levels of patrigene expression, but inclusive fitness theory would explain this as a consequence of cost-benefit ratios that moderate the expression of both matrigenes and patrigenes.

Finally, for the small fraction of workers in a honey bee colony that are full siblings, the genetic interests of matrigenes and patrigenes are quite different: patrigenes can be equally well propagated through a worker’s own reproduction or that of a full sibling. Most competition for reproduction in honey bees is among half-siblings, however, so this should have little effect in honey bee colonies. Nevertheless, among other social insects in which the queen mates only once (such as bumble bees and many species of ants) all workers are full siblings and, as the authors note, the prediction is reversed: matrigenes should favor worker reproduction and show enhanced gene expression relative to patrigenes. Apparently this has not yet been studied, but it would constitute an elegant complementary test to the ground-breaking results of Galbraith et al.

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Honeybee workers surrounding their queen, who’s been marked with a dot

__________

Galbraith, D. A., S. D. Kocher, T. Glenn, I. Albert, G. J. Hunt, J. E. Strassmann, D. C. Queller, and C. M. Grozinger. 2016. Testing the kinship theory of intragenomic conflict in honey bees (Apis mellifera). Proc Nat. Acad Sci. USA 113:1020-1025. doi:10.1073/pnas.1516636113

 

 

 

Rare footage of only jaguar living in the U.S.

February 4, 2016 • 8:30 am

I had no idea that any jaguars lived in the U.S., but there appears to be at least one.

The species, Panthera onca, is the largest cat in the New World, and the third largest in the world after lions and tigers. Its former range extended from the southern U.S. through Central America to southeastern South America, but has been severely reduced by habitat loss (it prefers dense forest) and slaughter by ranchers and farmers. Wikipedia reports that there may be a few individuals left in the U.S., but its present range map shows no dark orange in that country:

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The last jaguar spotted in the U.S. was in 2006, and the construction of a barrier fence between Mexico and the U.S. will further reduce what small population there is in our country, for the cats must ultimately come in from the south.

But, now a jaguar has been videotaped in Arizona. From the Guardian via Matthew Cobb, we have this information, and if you clock on the screenshot below, you’ll go to a rare 40-second clip of El Jefe, the American Jaguar!

Footage of the only known jaguar living wild in the US is captured on remote sensor cameras. The video, filmed by Conservation CATalyst and the Center for Biological Diversity in the Santa Rita Mountains, Arizona, provides a glimpse into the secretive life of the big cat, who has recently been named ‘El Jefe’ [“The Boss”] by local students.

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Here’s what the cat looks like (there are several subspecies); this photo, with cubs, was taken in the wild—in Colombia:

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Lagniappe: A cat stealing a neighbor’s plush tiger to play with it. Click on screenshot to go to video:

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h/t: Timothy

Note to readers

February 4, 2016 • 7:50 am

I ask again that readers send me at most one email per person per day. Lately I’ve not been able to keep up with emails, and it’s harder when individuals send me three or four emails each day. These are well-meant, and usually contain links or things that I might be interested in, but I’d appreciate it if you could combine such items into one email. Otherwise you risk being inadvertently overlooked.

One exception: if I make a typo or other error in a post, please call it to my attention ASAP.

Thanks,
PCC(E)

Readers’ wildlife photographs

February 4, 2016 • 7:30 am

Jacques Hausser in Switzerland (the World’s Happiest Country) sent some lovely insect photos and one mountainscape. The beetle he shows has a truly bizarre life history, so do read about it below:

Recently (December 26) Mark Sturtevant showed us a very strange Coleopteran with a very strange life cycle, Rhipiphorus. Here is another one, Stenoria analis, family Meloidae [“blister beetles”], which shows an even more complicated kleptoparasitic life cycle:

1) The female lays her eggs on plants.

2) After two weeks, the larvae (called triungulins) hatch, but remain closely packed together (although they are highly mobile). Their work: producing bee’s sexual pheromones to deceive males of solitary bees, usually Colletes hederae. When a drone lands on the heap of triungulins, the little larvae quickly jump on the bee and cling on its hairs.

Here’s a photo of the aggregated tiungulins that I [JAC] took from flickr:

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3) When the male finds a real female and attempts to copulate, the triungulins transfer themselves on the female – and so they are carried to her nest.

I found a photo (from a paper by Veerecken and Mahe) showing a bee flying toward a larval swarm (8) and trying to copulate with it (9), whereupon the triungulins jump on the bee:

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4) In the nest, the triungulins install themselves in a cell, and wait until it is filled with honey; then the bee’s egg is deposited and the cell is closed.

5) They eat the egg and moult several times, transforming themselves in a kind of white grub, slowly growing on the honey and finally producing a nymph that will hatch next september. This process is called hypermetamorphosis and is well illustrated for another species here.

The triungulins who didn’t have the opportunity to attract a drone will form a “drop” of individuals mixed with silk. The drop will ultimately fall on the soil and the little larvae, apparently, will look for a second chance, tiny pedestrians walking around to find a suitable bee nest by themselves.

An adult Stenoria:

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Female laying eggs on a dry Armeria maritima:

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Another one on a Festuca:

Steno-3

I met Stenoria on Sark Island (C.I.) in the beginning of September, on a bank of loess riddled with solitary bees’ holes. But I didn’t see any Colletes [a ground-nesting bee]: the active bees were mostly Dasypoda hirtipes (here a female). Perhaps the Colletes were present, but didn’t hatch yet – or Stenoria is more euryoecious than described in the books.

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And a lagniappe: Sunset on the Mont-Blanc seen from my home yesterday evening [Jan. 27] (with a F100 tele, it is actually 80 km away):

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Reader Jim Thompson sent some mountain goat photos (we had some a few days ago, but you can’t see enough of these noble beasts). The species is Oreamnos americanus. Jim’s notes:

Curious goats following me up Maroon Peak in Colorado a few years ago.

DSCF0393-MountainGoatsMonitorClimbersMaroon2

There are some really tame ones on summit of Evans.  There is a road up to very near the summit and there are public restrooms there; the goats just hang out for handouts. Somtimes you have to shoo them away to get into the restrooms.

DSCF0394-MountainGoatFamily1

Thursday: Hili dialogue

February 4, 2016 • 6:15 am

First, don’t forget to charge your cat today if its energy is low. On this day in 1789, George Washington was elected the first President of the United States, and, in 2004, Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook. On this day in 1902, Charles Lindbergh was born and, in 1913, Rosa Parks. Betty Friedan was born on February 4, 1921. Death came on this day to Neal Cassady (one of my role models) in 1968; he was not only Jack Kerouac’s BFF, but driver of the bus that ferried Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters around the U.S. Liberace died on this day in 1987, and Betty Friedan in 2006—she was born and died on the same day of the year. Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili has a First World Problem:

Hili: There are two options.
A: What options are those?
Hili: I can either go to sleep or eat something.

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In Polish:
Hili: Są dwie możliwości.
Ja: Jakie?
Hili: Albo się prześpię, albo pójdę coś zjeść.

Oh, and Ceiling Cat was spotted in New Zealand yesterday. I think this is a sign that He wants me to go there and spread The Good News:

Ceiling cat

Finally, here’s a Furbonacci spiral:

tXK24RJ

h/t: Samuel, Amy

How to humiliate a cat

February 3, 2016 • 3:30 pm

Just pile a bunch of mice around it while it’s asleep, and wait for the fun when it wakes up! Or, better yet, send the pictures out on social media to the cat’s friends.

This is Mimo, a tabby in Japan:

USA: Feature Rates Apply MANDATORY CREDIT: Mimoza/REX Shutterstock. Only for use in this story. Editorial Use Only. No stock, books, advertising or merchandising without photographer's permission Mandatory Credit: Photo by Mimoza/REX/Shutterstock (5579480c) Mimo the cat remains asleep despite 21 toy mice placed about his body Mimo the cat sleeps soundly despite toy mice, Japan - 01 Feb 2016 A cat owner was so impressed by their pet's ability to sleep soundly they tested him out - by placing toy MICE all over his body. The Japanese feline fan snapped Mimo the cat in a typically laid-back snoozing position. Lying on his back and sprawled on a comfy duvet, Mimo didn't flinch a whisker when one plush rodent was gently plonked onto his head. A further TWENTY meeces liberally placed about the head? Not a flicker. So, a full-body mouse blanket ensued, with a top-to-toe covering in the critters. The mysterious - and michevious - 22-year-old owner, known only as Mimoza, tells REX Shutterstock: "He didn't wake up, so I played a trick".
PHOTO CREDIT: Mimoza/REX Shutterstock. 

And this story at The Dodo, which I offer in the spirit of conciliation, will warm the hearts of d*g lovers.

 

Obama’s coddling of faith

February 3, 2016 • 1:30 pm

President Obama just paid his first visit to a mosque, which is good insofar as it lets people know that Muslims are Americans too, that they enjoy the same rights as other Americans, that demonizing Muslims as individuals will not be tolerated in a diverse society, and that all religions enjoy the same Constitutional freedoms. What I didn’t like was this bit:

“An attack on one religion is an attack on all religions,” President Barack Obama says while visiting a U.S. mosque for the first time as president.

Seeking to rebut what he views as perilous election-year bombast about Muslims, Obama spoke at the Islamic Society of Baltimore on Wednesday.

If by “attack” Obama meant “physical attack,” it just isn’t true; in fact, it’s meaningless. Besides, there’s no physical attack on a religion: there are physical attacks on believers or religious structures or books.

But I don’t think he meant that; I think he meant “verbal attack.” And if that’s the case, then he’s dead wrong. You can attack one religious doctrine without necessarily attacking other religious doctrines, as not all religions make the same claim. Nor are all religions equally pernicious. If you attack Catholicism for its stand on abortion, or Islam for its stand on homosexuality, you’re not attacking Quakers or Buddhists. In fact, because not all Catholics or Muslims believe the same thing, or even the accepted dogma of their sects, you’re not even attacking the beliefs of every adherent to a given faith.

There’s only one way that what Obama said can be construed as true. If he meant that “attacking the basis for belief in one religion is attacking the basis for belief of all religions,” then what he said is largely true. For, with a very few exceptions, the basis for belief in all religions is dogma, revelation, authority, and wish-thinking.