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.
I don’t know why we’re suddenly inundated with a spate of “find-the-panda” images, but here’s a difficult one—with a Star Wars theme. Can you spot the Ailuropoda melanoleucans? Click to enlarge.
h/t: Mark Sturtevant
I’ve received some birthday greetings from the Dark Tabby of Wroclawek:
Leon: I wonder when the bottle with my birthday wishes to Jerry will float by.
Don’t expect much substantive today, as I may take a birthday break and actually have some fun.
Remember to send in your wildlife photographs (landscapes count, too)! They’re slowly accumulating, so the tank has risen about my comfort level. Today we’re featuring Jacques Hausser’s photographs of cerambycid (“longhorn”) beetles. They show the variety of this family, which, with over 26,000 described species, is huge. But not all cerambycids have long antennae, though today’s do. In the last panel below, Jacque shows his talent in natural-history drawing. His notes are indented:
Aromia moschata, the musk beetle, a splendid and large (up to 34 mm) species. The larvae live in willow wood, and the species is therefore more easy to find in wet areas – here on Angelica, a plant very attractive for nectar feeders. The odiferous name of this beetle reflects the rather nice smell it emits when caught.
Rutpela maculata, the spotted longhorn. A very common and open-minded species: the larvae feed on dead wood of almost every tree, and the adults visit every flower, with a preference for Apiaceae (Umbelliferae).
Love on a wild carrot: Stenopterus rufus, another polyphagous and rather bizarre species. I would be glad if somebody has a good evolutionary hypothesis for the reduced elytra and the puffy femora. The small beetles around it are probably Anthrenus verbasci [the varied carpet beetle], a Dermestid.
Stenocorus meridianus. This species lays eggs in the soil, and the larvae feed on the roots of cut deciduous trees, young and tiny ones starting on between bark and wood of thin roots (hence the name: Stenocorus means “narrow place”) and progressing toward the stump when growing, finally boring their tunnel to freedom.
Stictoleptura rubra, the Red-brown longhorn beetle. A sturdy species growing in rotten coniferous wood. This one is a female; the male has a black pronotum.
Stenurella melanura mating on Knapweed (Centaurea scabiosa).
I didn’t do any insect photography before the digital era – but I did like to draw them occasionally. PCC(E) allowing, here is a composite scan of drawings of four additional Cerambycid species (not to scale). Clockwise from top left: Agapantia violacea, Saperda scalaris, Leptura bifasciata and Pachyta quadrimaculata.
Today we’ve arrived at the end of Coynezaa: on this day in history, Professor Ceiling Cat (Emeritus) was born in a manger in St. Louis, Missouri in 1949. The world did not take notice, and his self-designed holiday, Coynezaa, is also largely ignored, for the largesse has been thin on the ground. Among the less important things that happened in this day are these: Subhash Chandra Bose (later killed in a mysterious plane crash), first raised the flag of Indian independence in 1943 on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands; India wasn’t to achieve independence until four years later. In 1972, the U.S. finally stopped bombing North Vietnam and, in 2006, Saddam Hussein was hanged. Notables sharing my birthday include Rudyard Kipling (1865), Bert Parks (1914), Jack Lord (1920), Bo Diddley (1928), Skeeter Davis (1931), the great Sandy Koufax (1935), two Monkees (Michael Nesmith in 1942 and Davy Jones in 1945), Patti Smith (1946), and Tiger Woods (1975). It was clearly a day auspicious for the births of musicians, writers, and athletes, Capricorns all. One beast who did take notice of the day’s celebrations is the Furry Princess of Poland:
A: Is there any chance that the whole cat will be either inside or outside?Hili: Yes, the moment I decide whether to wish Jerry happy birthday while here or there.
Ja: Czy jest nadzieja na to, że cały kot będzie albo w domu, albo na dworze?
Hili: Tak, jak się zdecyduję, czy składać Jerremu życzenia urodzinowe tu, czy tam.
Leon: Why are there no greetings for me on this card?
by Greg Mayer
My Okinawa correspondents spent Boxing Day at the Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium, and sent me a bunch of pictures. The aquarium is a sprawling complex on the coast in northwestern Okinawa, and includes large areas of gardens and park land, and a recreation of traditional Okinawan homes and buildings, as well as the aquarium proper.
It reminded me, as I’m sure it did many of you, of the Sausalito Cetacean Institute. That’s Ie Shima island in the background.
One of the main attractions at the Aquarium is the Kuroshio Sea Tank. It’s enormous.
When my correspondents told me they were going to the Aquarium, they mentioned something about “whale sharks”, but I didn’t query them further. It turns out the Aquarium actually has whale sharks (Rhincodon typus), the world’s largest species of fish!
And not just one!
Although whale sharks are, for sharks, specialized feeders– they feed on plankton– they are “typical shark” shaped.
Sharks are cartilaginous fishes (Chondrichthyes), which are of two main types: the Holocephali, comprising the ratfishes and chimaeras (we’ve mentioned them here before at WEIT), and the Elasmobranchi, comprising sharks and rays. Most people have a good idea of what sharks and rays look like. Here are some more typical sharks (I don’t know what species– any shark people out there?) Note that the gill slits are on the side of the head; the fellow in the middle is male, as you can tell by the large claspers medial to the pelvic fins.
And here’s a typical ray (again, no ID). Note the flattened shape, and the spiracles (whitish bits) behind the eyes– these are the vestigial first pair of gill slits. The flat body of the ray is mostly the greatly enlarged pectoral fins.
Most people also know the manta ray (Manta birostris). It’s a little unusual for a ray, being pelagic and filter feeding, so the mouth is at the front tip of the body– and, it’s got those crazy cephalic fins or “horns”, from whence it gets the alternative vernacular name “devil fish”. Do note that the gills are on the bottom of the head.
There is more diversity among sharks and rays than most people realize. Sawfish, which look a lot like sharks with a saw strapped to their snout, are actually rays, but shouldn’t be confused with the similar looking saw shark, which is a shark. There are also angel sharks, which look a lot like rays, and guitarfish, which are rays that look a lot like sharks– in fact, more shark-looking than angel sharks.
I’ve never seen either angel sharks or guitarfish in any aquarium, and thus was delighted to find that Okinawa Churaumi has guitarfish (which, remember, are rays). Here’s a guitarfish surrounded by three sharks, with a typical ray off to the right (and a shadowy form below and to the right). If you look carefully, you can see the spiracle (again, whitish looking) on top of the head, behind the eye.
In the following picture, we get a really good view of why it’s a ray. Note that the gill slits are on the bottom of the head, as is the mouth (the latter is typical, but not diagnostic, of rays). And, the pectoral fin is joined seamlessly to the head– at a point above, in fact, of the gill slits (which is why the slits are on the bottom of the head). The spiracle, already spatially distant from the other gill slits in sharks, is thus, in rays, separated from the other slits by the interposition of the enlarged pectoral fin.
In the next (and last) picture, note that the dorsal, caudal, and pelvic fins all are at least passably shark-like, but that the enlarged pectoral fin is being flapped for locomotion in the manner of a ray. (Also, it’s a male– you can see the free distal ends of the claspers below the second dorsal.)
More on the Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium tomorrow.
One of the more sophisticated claims of creationists, especially used by advocates of intelligent design—I don’t think this term merits capitalization, for we don’t capitalize “creationism”, which is exactly what ID is—is that evolution “can’t create new information”, therefore, insofar as the process produces organisms doing novel things, God must have done it.
This ninth short video of the series produced by NPR and “It’s Okay to be Smart” attacks that claim. And once again I’m disappointed. I didn’t start putting up these videos to criticize them—they were simply a way to bring new pro-evolution material to public attention, but I haven’t seen one that isn’t either flawed or garbled. And I don’t much like this one, either, though it sort of makes the case:
The example they use for creating new information: gene duplication followed by divergence based on mutation followed by natural selection in the duplicated genes, is the common response, and a good one, but it would have been better if they’d given at least one example, such as the creation of new forms of globins that do different things, all descendants by gene duplication form an ancestral globin gene. As with other videos in this series, the narrator simply refutes the creationist question by assertion (“Evolution has no problem with adding new pages to the book of life”) rather than by giving good, comprehensible examples.)
I would have omitted the capture of retroviruses, as most of these have become inactivated once incorporated in our genome (and creationists would call that “the loss of information”), and concentrated not just on gene duplication, but on how new genes can arise, doing new things, from combination of bits of genes taken from the rest of the genome. My colleague Manyuan Long and his colleagues in my department, for instance, has traced the origin of many genes having brand new functions (ergo new “information”) from their origins elsewhere in the Drosophila genome. I wrote about the Long lab work in December of 2010.
For more examples, see this article in New Scientist, and this one in Scientific American. Both of these could have furnished tangible examples for the video.
First a caveat: the following document, captured by US Forces during a raid in Syria, has not independently been authenticated. If it proves to be a forgery, I’ll write a followup post. But for the moment I can’t imagine why ISIS, whose theologians supposedly created this fatwa (translated by the US), would forge such a document. Now there are the Greenwalds and W*******s among us who will claim that the US created this document to gin up hatred against the Islamic State, but the fatwa comports well with what we already know about the sex slavery of ISIS and how it deals with captured women such as the Yazidis. (Women who have been released have verified the practices, and we even have video of men discussing the sale of sex slaves.)
Reuters reports on the document:
Fatwa No. 64, dated Jan. 29, 2015, and issued by Islamic State’s Committee of Research and Fatwas, appears to codify sexual relations between IS fighters and their female captives for the first time, going further than a pamphlet issued by the group in 2014 on how to treat slaves.
The fatwa starts with a question: “Some of the brothers have committed violations in the matter of the treatment of the female slaves. These violations are not permitted by Sharia law because these rules have not been dealt with in ages. Are there any warnings pertaining to this matter?”
It then lists 15 injunctions, which in some instances go into explicit detail. For example:
“If the owner of a female captive, who has a daughter suitable for intercourse, has sexual relations with the latter, he is not permitted to have intercourse with her mother and she is permanently off limits to him. Should he have intercourse with her mother then he is not permitted to have intercourse with her daughter and she is to be off limits to him.”
Other orders: no intercourse during menstruation, no anal sex, and a son cannot copulate with the slave of his father—and vice versa. Note that while the fatwa does urge compassion towards these slaves, they are still slaves, and theologians say you can have sex with them. It is unthinkable for such rules to exist in an enlightened society.
Here’s the fatwa:
Of course there are those who claim that ISIS is not “real Islam,” but then what is real Islam? Is it Sunni or Shia? Does it include the belief that sharia law should be the law of the land, as many Muslims hold throughout the world? Does it include the belief that apostates should be killed, as many British Muslims believe? (Or are they “not real Muslims”?)
The fact is that because religion is just a bunch of made-up stuff, anything can be a religion if it holds to stories of the divine and supernatural, especially if it also invokes divine reward and punishment and promulgates a moral code, as does the Islamic State. Saying that ISIS has nothing to do with Islam is like saying that Methodists are not real Protestants. It’s a variant!
Reuters also quotes the Islamic apologists:
Professor Abdel Fattah Alawari, dean of Islamic Theology at Al-Azhar University, a 1,000-year-old Egyptian center for Islamic learning, said Islamic State “has nothing to do with Islam” and was deliberately misreading centuries-old verses and sayings that were originally designed to end, rather than encourage, slavery.
“Islam preaches freedom to slaves, not slavery. Slavery was the status quo when Islam came around,” he said. “Judaism, Christianity, Greek, Roman, and Persian civilizations all practiced it and took the females of their enemies as sex slaves. So Islam found this abhorrent practice and worked to gradually remove it.”
Of course I approve of those Muslims who publicly reject ISIS’s warped and brutal “morality,” but I think they’re barking up the wrong tree when they assert that it’s not a form Islam. It’s certainly a variant of Islam, just as Lutheranism is a variant of Protestantism and the extremist, polygamous sects of Mormons are variants of Mormonism. Such “no true Muslim” arguments serve only to exculpate religion, and, as far as I can see, do little to sway those lured by ISIS. The way to de-fang ISIS, in my humble opinion, rests not on arguing about forms of Islam are “proper” and which “improper”, but rather about which ways of behaving are to be permitted and encouraged in a civilized society.
Oh, and one last point. This behavior has nothing to do with Western colonialism. And those who would argue that it also has nothing to do with religion—nothing at all—are ignorant.
h/t: Steve
You can tell without reading the review of Faith Versus Fact by Paul Nelson—a young-earth creationist and a Fellow of the Discovery Institute—that he’s not gonna like it. His review in Biola Magazine (a publication of the evangelical Christian Biola University, euphemistically renamed from The Bible Institute of Los Angeles) is called “How to make evidence for God disappear” (subtitle: A tutorial for atheist magicians”). According to the review’s notes, Nelson now has a sinecure at Biola, for he’s listed as “an adjunct professor in Biola’s Master of Arts in Science and Religion program.”
When reader Richard sent me a link to his review, I didn’t even have to read it to know that Nelson, since he’s a pious believer and already committed to the profoundly antiscientific view of a 6,000-10,000 year old Earth, would find “issues”. But I was a bit surprised at the issue that bothered him.
I won’t go into detail, as you can read the review yourself, but the charge that Nelson levels at me is hypocrisy. On one hand, he says, I am refreshingly willing (for a scientist) to claim that we can’t a priori rule divine or supernatural explanations out of court, for science can never say that something is absolutely impossible. What I did is argue that our reliance on naturalism and dismissal of godly influence is a result of experience—that entertaining the divine has never advanced our knowledge of the cosmos one bit. Therefore, we no longer invoke God when doing science. As Laplace supposedly said, “We don’t need that explanation.”
Remember that there was once a time when divine explanations were a proper part of science, as in Newton’s invocation of God’s hand guiding planetary orbits. He couldn’t think of a naturalistic explanation. Likewise, before Darwin divine creation was probably the best explanation going for the remarkable adaptations of plants and animals, and so I see creationism as a valid scientific hypothesis in the early 19th century. Similar divine explanations once held for many phenomena: disease, epilepsy, lightning, and so on. But as science, time after time, found naturalistic explanations for phenomena once imputed to God, we gradually abandoned divine explanations. That was not an a priori decision, but a result of experience: learning what practices helped us understand stuff, and what didn’t.
And so, when we don’t yet understand something like consciousness, or what early rabbits looked like, or the precise origin of human moral sentiments, history tells us that the best route to understanding is to admit that we don’t know the answer, but to seek scientific (e.g., naturalistic and materialistic) explanations. Nelson calls this a form of hypocrisy on my part, even though in the book I give the kind of data that would provisionally convince me of the existence of gods.
Here’s Nelson defending why some of those gaps may really contain God:
Say that any explanation invoking divine action is a God-of-the-gaps.
Let’s say we have some longstanding puzzle, such as the origin of life, which many theists see as evidence for God’s existence (that is, the complexity of the first cell requires a non-physical cause with purpose, creativity and the power to bring into existence information-bearing molecules such as DNA). Why isn’t this evidence for God?
Because, Coyne contends, “science” — by which he actually means applied materialism or naturalism — must never be foreclosed by hasty appeals to divine action, or to God-of- the-gaps explanations. What is more likely, he asks, “that these are puzzles only because we refuse to see God as an answer, or simply because science hasn’t yet provided a naturalistic answer? … Given the remarkable ability of science to solve problems once considered intractable, and the number of scientific phenomena that weren’t even known a hundred years ago, it’s probably more judicious to admit ignorance that to tout divinity.”
Master this conjuring trick, and one can’t lose. No matter how remarkable the evidence for God’s action might be, either in cosmic history or today, one can always make that evidence disappear into the bottomless bag of “the God of the gaps” objection.
Note though, that I don’t say science will give us the answers here, only that, over history, God has never given us a satisfying answer, while science has. And if we don’t know the answer, we should admit it—one important way that science differs from religion.
Nelson continues:
Calling Trickery What It Is
There’s a simple reply to this sleight of hand. If God is a real cause, he may have left “gaps” in the natural order as his signature. These gaps — call them designed or created discontinuities — won’t go away, or be dissolved into strictly material or physical causes. The discontinuities exist, not because of the incompleteness of our scientific knowledge, but rather because they are real markers left in the world, indicating the handiwork of a divine intelligence.
There are many better ways that God could have left us his signature than by leaving us scientific mysteries. Why couldn’t he have just made a literal signature in the sky, writing “I am that I am” in the stars in Hebrew. Why, Dr. Nelson, didn’t got leave us more obvious and convincing evidence for his existence? Of course Nelson won’t answer, except perhaps to say that “God works in mysterious ways,” but if theism is to explain anything, it has to do better than that. Nelson concludes:
Science as a genuinely open enterprise, where all the causal possibilities, including design, are on the table for discussion, must consider that we can discover and map these discontinuities. Coyne shouldn’t pretend that he’s truly weighing the evidence for God’s existence if he intends to sweep everything puzzling to materialism into his magician’s bag. [JAC NOTE TO NELSON: I TOLD YOU WHAT I’D TAKE AS PROVISIONAL EVIDENCE FOR GOD, AND IT’S NOT GAPS IN OUR UNDERSTANDING BUT REAL OBSERVABLE PHENOMENA.]
Science — not to mention philosophy and theology — deserves better.
Sorry, but I disagree. In fact, science, and especially theology, deserve better than Nelson. He’d do well to look at what a savvier theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, said about Nelson’s “God’s-in-the-gaps” argument:
“If in fact the frontiers of knowledge are being pushed farther and farther back (and that is bound to be the case), then God is being pushed back with them, and is therefore continually in retreat.” (Letters and papers from Prison, 1997, p. 311)
Can we trust a young-earth creationist—someone who’s palpably ignored all the scientific evidence of our planet’s age in favor of Scripture—to tell us exactly which gaps contain God, and which will eventually be filled with science? Nelson apparently thinks that God has told us that the Earth is actually young, and all the scientific evidence to the contrary is both wrong and deceptive. And that’s what he’d do if, for example, we were able to produce life in the laboratory under conditions resembling those on the early Earth. He’s ignore that evidence in favor of what Genesis has told him.
Re Nelson’s statement, “If God is a real cause, he may have left ‘gaps’ in the natural order as his signature,” why have so many of those gaps erased God’s signature and replaced it with (horrors!) naturalistic explanations. Can Nelson please tell us with some confidence which are the real gaps that reflect God’s signature, and which were the deceptive gaps that, being divine forgery, fooled so many earlier theologians? And by the way, can he give us convincing evidence for God’s existence beyond the stuff we don’t yet understand. For unless we have independent evidence for God, there’s no need to consider him as an explanation.
I don’t think Nelson could answer these questions. He is a willfully ignorant man, for he knows that all the evidence points to a 4.6 billion-year-old Earth—and yet he rejects every bit of it in favor of Jesus. That’s intellectual duplicity: a profound double standard in how he treats evidence. So why should we put any trust in his ability to accept any scientific explanation at all? Perhaps Nelson still thinks that diseases reflect God’s disfavor, and all those nasty microbes that cause syphilis and plague are just as deceptive as the scientific evidence for Earth’s age. Does Nelson take his kids to doctors? Why not just pray? After all, if the evidence for the Earth’s age is deceptive, so could the evidence for any scientific conclusion.
Finally, remember the Discovery Institute’s promise that the evidence for ID was right around the corner? I believe that was about 20 years ago. And the many promised peer-reviewed papers giving evidence for a Designer haven’t appeared either. So much for the intellectual fertility of the God hypothesis!
Rational intellectual discourse deserves better, but Biola University deserves what it gets. What it gets is a passel of students who think the Earth is only a few thousand years old: another generation of the benighted. Ceiling Cat have mercy on them, and on Nelson for his intellectual duplicity.
