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.
Remember the world’s saddest raccoon from yesterday? Given a big hunk of cotton candy (known as “candy floss” to Brits), it tried to wash it in a puddle, where it instantly dissolved. Result: one puzzled and flummoxed raccoon. I’m pleased to give this update, though:
https://twitter.com/rachelzarrell/status/684503261387354112
This has been an emotional roller coaster.
We’ll finish up today with two light items. First, another find by Matthew Cobb: an amazing and complex wooden sculpture of a hummingbird sipping from a flower. Apparently it’s anatomically correct:
And if you want to make one (proceed at your own risk), you can read about the sculpture and buy the plans (for $99!) here. You can either crank it or power it with a motor. Being ham-handed about these things, I’d just prefer to buy one or get one as a gift!
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the journal Genetics, still the premier journal of genetical research in the world. I subscribed to it for decades until e-journals became common, and was proud to have published in it a few times (its peer review was notoriously tough).
For the year 2016, the editors decided to reprint 24 of the most influential papers published in the journal over the last century, and solicit people to write commentaries on them.(Two commentaries per month.) I think that’s a great way to mark the anniversary.
Here’s the first issue of 2016, much of it available free online (click on the screenshot for the contents). The cartoon cover is a first for the journal, depicting the first paper in the journal’s first issue, a classic paper—by Calvin Bridges—whose title is at the lower right:
Bridges (1889-1938) is still a legend in fly genetics: brilliant, unorthodox, and wickedly handsome—a great favorite with the ladies.
The issue starts off with an essay by editor-in-chief Mark Johnston, “A new century of Genetics,” giving a short but lively history of the journal. Then there are the two “classic” papers, and I was honored to be asked to give the commentary on one of them. That paper was published in 1936 by my academic grandfather, Theodosius Dobzhansky, the Ph.D. advisor of Dick Lewontin, my own Ph.D. advisor. It was one of the first attempts to genetically dissect the reproductive barriers between species. (In fact, for most evolutionist those reproductive barriers are what constitute different species.) Click on the screenshot below to see the paper.
I won’t go into detail about what Dobzhansky did except to say that he used genetically marked chromosomes to cross two species, and then used the markers to figure out which chromosomes carried genes making the hybrid males sterile. In that era you had to use chromosomes marked with visible mutations, causing changes in traits like eye color, body color, or wing shape, so you were limited by the number of chromosome regions you could study (too many mutants kills a fly or makes it weak). Now, with molecular markers, the number of potential chromosome sites to study in this way is in the hundreds of thousands.
Below from the paper is a figure that we call a “Doby-gram” (Dobzhansky was known as “Doby” or “Dodek” to his students and friends), showing the effect of chromosomal constitution on the fertility (estimated as testis length) of backcross males. The white chromosomes are from the fruit flyDrosophila pseudoobscura, and the black from its sister species D. persimilis (then known as “race B” of D. pseudoobscura). You can see that every chromosome has an effect, but that of the X chromosome is HUGE. This is the famous “X effect” that my students and I studied, and the reason for it is now pretty well known. Note the crude hand-drawn graph with wobbly lines, typical of those days. Such a figure would never be accepted for publication in today’s journals.
Why is the paper important? Well, I’ll refer you to my very short precis, which you can get for free by clicking the screenshot below:
From CNN, re the cover:
In its commentary this week, L’Osservatore Romano, the newspaper of the Vatican state, said it’s not impressed.
“This episode isn’t something new because, behind the deceitful flag of an uncompromising secularism, the French magazine once again forgets what religious leaders of different beliefs have been repeating for a long time to reject violence in the name of religion.
“Using God to justify hatred is an authentic blasphemy, as Pope Francis repeatedly said.”
Except when it’s hatred of gays. And who is the Pope to say what an “authentic blasphemy” is for Muslims? For many Muslims, an “authentic blasphemy” involves drawing satirical pictures of Islam,or even mocking Islam. Further, many religious leaders have promoted violence in the name of God, including the Church when it had universal political power. Does Pope Francis deny that all over the Middle East, people are using God to justify murder?
Finally, the very idea of blasphemy is ridiculous, implying that some speech about God is off limits.
And from the Guardian:
The commentary added: “In Charlie Hebdo’s choice, there is the sad paradox of a world which is more and more sensitive about being politically correct, almost to the point of ridicule, yet does not wish to acknowledge or to respect believers’ faith in God, regardless of the religion.”
I’ll acknowledge believers’ faith in God,but I won’t respect it.
A brief report at Pew Research shows at least one statistic of interest to nonbelievers: American Millennials (people born after 1980) have shown a big drop in only the last five years in how favorably they view religion and its effects. As they report (see graph below):
Younger generations tend to have more-positive views than their elders of a number of institutions that play a big part in American society. But for some institutions – such as churches and the news media – Millennials’ opinions have become markedly more negative in the past five years.
Since 2010, Millennials’ rating of churches and other religious organizations has dipped 18 percentage points: 55% now say churches have a positive impact on the country compared with five years ago, when nearly three-quarters (73%) said this. Views among older generations have changed little over this time period. As a result, older generations are now more likely than Millennials – who are much less likely than their elders to be religious – to view religious organizations positively.
As Pew noted, the views of older age groups about religion didn’t change much, but the approval rating of “silents” actually rose 7%, as one might expect given that older Americans are more religious. There are also data on falling respect for news media and rising respect for banks, labor unions, businesses, and large corporations, but you can go to the report to see those “trends”.
Pew defines generation X as those now between 35 and 50, Boomers between ages 51 to 70, and Silents as those older than 70. Here are the data:
That comports with a Pew study from December showing that many more Millennials than older folks see Christmas as a cultural than as a religious holiday:
What does it mean? To me, an increasing secularization of America as fewer young people buy into established faith. It’s especially heartening that only a little more than half of Millennials see churches and religious organizations as having a positive effect on the U.S., and that the drop over the last five years was so large .
h/t: Les
Given that gun control is largely in the hands of a Republican Congress subservient to the National Rifle Association, and adjudicated by an intensely conservative Supreme Court, there’s very little President Obama can do to stem the tsunami of pistols, assault weapons, and open-carry laws inundating the U.S. But he did what he could yesterday. Undoubtedly advised by the Justice Department, he issued an executive order mandating the following:
These are, as Obama admitted, baby steps but it’s the best he can do given that there are two other gun-loving branches of government. Remember, too, that 90% of Americans support universal background checks for gun buyers, and yet the Republicans and the NRA oppose this. They are thus opposing the will of the people in their odious attempt to enforce a misconstrued Second Amendment.
Here’s part of Obama’s announcement:
Several times during his talk Obama teared up, especially when remembering the children who’ve been killed in mass shootings. Here’s one instance of his emotionality:
Who can doubt that Obama’s emotion is real? This is, after all, a man who teared up during Aretha Franklin’s performance of “Natural Woman” at last year’s Kennedy Honors!
Who can doubt that? The goddam NRA and Republicans, that’s who. First, the NRA issued a reprehensible statement (quoted in the New York Times):
The National Rifle Association, targeted by Mr. Obama in his speech, mocked his tears.
“The American people do not need more emotional, condescending lectures that are completely devoid of facts,” said Chris W. Cox, the group’s top lobbyist.
Condescending? Seriously? Didn’t sound like it to me. But emotional? Yes, of course, for every gun death leaves behind a wake of distraught friends, lovers, and relatives. Are we not supposed to be passionate about saving the lives of the innocent?
But it gets worse. On a talk show, Fox News hosts Andrea Tantaros, Melissa Francis, and Meghan McCain made fun of Obama’s tears, with Tantaros saying that they “should check the podium for a raw onion” and McCain adding that the weeping “didn’t seem horribly authentic”. How dare they? Have they no sense of decency, at long last? They may dislike Obama’s policies, but it’s lower than a snake’s belly to question whether he was sincere:
MediaMatters reports other mocking reactions of conservatives, including tw**ts by John Nolte and Ben Shapiro of Breitbart and Charles C. W. Cooke of The National Review:
But forget Obama’s tears. Even assume that he surreptitiously applied Ben-Gay ointment to induce them, as Nolte suggested in a later tw**t. Just remember the tears that were real: those of the parents of the children killed in all those school shootings, those of the friends, spouses, and relatives of the 14 people killed in San Bernardino, and the tears of others left alive when thousands of people they knew and loved died in unnecessary gun violence.
According to the NRA and the Republicans, though, that violence is really necessary—an unfortunate but inevitable byproduct of our pressing need to defend ourselves. But that’s bogus, for, as Obama said, America has far more gun violence than countries with stricter gun control: 30 times that of the UK, for instance. (And in the US in 2012, 90% of murders were by guns, compared to only 10% in the UK). When countries like the UK and Australia get serious about guns, homicides and accidental shootings drop.
I have to restrain myself here to avoid cursing at Republicans and the NRA for their callousness and love of shooting. All I can say is that if 90% of Americans want background checks, why won’t Congress allow it? And that’s only the first step toward doing what we should do: implement the kind of stringent controls on firearms that other First World countries have.
It hardly seems a year since the Paris terrorist attacks on the Charlie Hebdo office and the kosher supermarket, but yes, tomorrow it will be the “anniversary,” if you can call it that. Today’s Jesus and Mo is about the cover of the anniversary issue, which I posted about yesterday and reproduce below. The email with the Jesus and Mo link came with the artist’s note:
The anniversary is tomorrow, but today’s Wednesday so here’s a comic. I do like the Charlie Hebdo cover, which has rubbed all the right people up the wrong way.
That’s the thing about religious satire – it automatically delivers offence in the right dose: the amount of offence you take is exactly the amount you deserve.
The cartoon needs no commentary:
The cover (Translation: “One year on. The assassian is still with us.”)
Today I’ll catch up on some photos submitted by the most regular of photo regulars: Stephen Barnard and Diana MacPherson. Diana first:
Here are a couple of photos I took of a female downy woodpecker a red squirrel. The red squirrels are rare at my feeder (I guess they prefer the woods where pines are) but this one seems to want some seeds. The red squirrels are cute because they are so small but they are really high strung and this one was afraid of the grey squirrel under the feeder so it scurried up a nearby maple tree & looked like this. I often hear red squirrels in the woods are work chattering angrily.Female Downy Woodpecker (Picoides pubescens) on fat:
American Red Squirrel (Tamiasciurus hudsonicus) Hides from Grey Squirrel in Maple Tree:
Today he got his noms though there was a hawk around & he would suddenly get freaked out & run to the maple tree, flicking his tail. I didn’t see the hawk when he did this (I saw it earlier) and the birds didn’t seem to see anything earlier. I like how you can really see the red on his back & tail in these pictures! He’s so dainty!
And Stephen’s photos from Idaho (more to come this week), featuring landscapes, woodpeckers, and eagles:
Hairy Woodpecker (Leuconotopicus villosus):
I lost the caption for this, but I believe it described Desi, one of the two bald eagles (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) resident on Stephen’s property (the other is Lucy), eating the remains of a Canada goose (Branta canadensis, which it probably didn’t kill), surrounded by black-billed magpies (Pica hudsonia) hoping for scraps.
I don’t think I sent this before. Idaho high desert, midwinter.
