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.
Reader Lou Jost, a biologist who lives in Ecuador, took a walk, and I’ll show his photos today and tomorrow.
A few weeks ago I took a walk in our Rio Anzu Reserve, in the Amazon basin, to test some macro photography techniques. The insect diversity and abundance was overwhelming; it was like the African savannah in miniature.
I had heard of carnivorous katydids but knew nothing else about them, so I was excited to find one of these munching on the remains of its kill, an aposematic stick insect. Sitting quietly on the same plant was another stick insect, missing a leg in a previous battle with this or some other predator.
While the predator feasted on its kill, little vulture-like flies came in to take their share of the carcass. The katydid kept flicking them away with its front legs, but the scavengers were only a minor annoyance for it.
There were herbivorous grasshoppers too. Some were very colorful, and some were carrying parasites, tiny mites.
While I was photographing grasshoppers a jumping spider came to check me out with way too many eyes.
Life, and the remains of things once alive, was everywhere here. I found a sparkling Morpho butterfly wing on the forest floor, and began to photograph it using a focus-stacking technique. This technique gets around the shallow depth of field inherent in macrophotography, by taking many different pictures focused on different planes of the subject, and then combining the sharp parts of all the shots into a single picture that is sharp throughout.
While I was doing the shooting, things kept landing and on me and/or crawling on the forest floor. One vicious-looking ant with enormous jaws walked right across the Morpho wing as I photographed it.
It’s the start of another week, and three days until the end of Coynezaa. On this day in 1836, Mexico secured its independence from Spain, and, in 1885, the Congress Party was founded in India. That’s the good party, the Indian equivalent of America’s Democratic Party. (Think of the opposition, the Bharatiya Janata Party, as the Republicans). On this day in 1895, Wilhelm Röntgen published his first paper detailing the discovery of X-rays, and, in 1973, the Endangered Species Act was passed in the U.S. In 1893, John von Neumann was born (died 1957) and Kary Mullis (Nobel Laureate for DNA sequencing) was born in 1944. Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Ms. Hili is indulging in some post-Christmas play:
A: Hili, what are you doing?
Hili: I’m still celebrating Christmas.
In Polish:
Ja: Hili, co ty robisz?
Hili: Nadal świętuję Boże Narodzenie.
And somewhere in Poland, tabby Leon is still visiting the small black kitten. They are apparently friends, with Leon being very protective of his young friend.
Leon: Come, I will show you the flying Christmas baubles.
I’ve long been an admirer of Planned Parenthood, which is constantly under attack from Christians for its pro-choice stance on abortion and its advocacy of birth control. But in this case I think they made a serious misstep—at least if I interpret their literature correctly.
When you share your HIV status. In other words, you don’t have to share your HIV status with your partner; it’s your right not to. There’s no advice I can find that you should and must share your status with those partners.
This is odious, for regardless of the kind of sex you have with your partners, there’s always a finite chance of infecting them. Apparently, for the IPPF, the “right” to keep your status to yourself trumps the “right” of your partner to know you’re infected, knowledge that is critical since infection can be fatal, and always burdens one with long-term and expensive medical care.
In fact, many states in the US require you to tell your sexual partners if you’re HIV positive. The American Civil Liberties Union has collected those laws, and violation of the disclosure rule can land you a felony conviction. Your partner does not have to become infected for you to violate those laws. Here, for instance, is the law in Illinois:
But note that the pamphlet says that these disclosure laws violate the right of HIV-positive people to decide whether, when, and whom to tell about their status.
I’m not sure what is going on here, or why the IPPF considers nondisclosure to partners a “right”. It isn’t, at least not by any reasonable lights. The “right” of partners to know that you’re infected surely trumps whatever “right” you have to keep that status to yourself. Perhaps I’ve misinterpreted this pamphlet, but I don’t think so, although they do mention that there are laws. Nor am I sure whether the US branch of the IPPF agrees with this stand.
Clearly, if you’re not having sexual contact with someone, or otherwise putting them at risk, there’s no need to tell people you’re infected. But the line should be drawn, as it is in most states, at sex.
I’m always wary when someone asserts something as a simple “right”: all too often that’s simply a way to shut down further discussion. In fact, I’d prefer to avoid all talk of rights, and discuss why the law allows people to do some things and not others. In this case it comes down to public health and to morality, which themselves come down to what kind of society we prefer to live in. I would prefer to live in a society in which HIV infected people are required to tell their sexual partners of their status. To me, that’s better than an unproductive discussion about competing “rights.”
The seventh video in the 12-episode series produced by PBS/It’s Okay to be Smart (I’m putting them up in order) is about a question that always excited my undergraduate students: why do male mammals have nipples? One undergraduate whom I taught about two decades ago told me recently that he’d forgotten almost everything I taught in introductory evolution, but he never forgot the case of male nipples. Such is the fate of teachers.
One thing is certain, though: every male carries genes for female traits like breasts, vaginas, ovaries, and the like. People often don’t realize that, but, after all, a male has the same genome as a female except for the absence of one of the two X chromosomes and the addition of a Y chromosome. Yet all the genes for being female are in that Y-containing genome. What happens is that the Y switches development onto the male track, silencing those genes producing female traits and activating the ones producing male traits.
Likewise, females carry nearly all the genes for male traits: beards, penises, higher aggression, and so on. (There are very few genes on the Y; it acts largely as a switch to turn on or off genes on the other chromosomes.) Male nipples are simply the expression of some genes that, in females, produce an adaptive trait.
But why are they expressed in males? This video gives an explanation:
There are two problems with this video. First, it’s far more confident in its explanation for male nipples than the evidence warrants. There are at least three explanations for the trait:
Male nipples don’t impose any reproductive burden on that sex, so evolution hasn’t removed them. They are simply “neutral” features that remain, and the genes that produce them have stayed active.
If selection were to remove male nipples, it would require rewiring the developmental system in a way that can’t be done. That is, perhaps the formation of nipples in males acts as some kind of inducer or link in the rest of development, and to eliminate them would involve—at least temporarily—screwing up development. This explanation assumes that there is some reproductive cost to producing male nipples, but there is a greater cost to getting rid of them.
Male nipples are adaptive or were adaptive in our ancestors. I’ve heard it said, for instance, that, at least in the millions of years of evolution before we wore clothes, they called attention to a man’s manly chest, acting as a way for women to assess male physique.
Now we don’t know which explanation is correct, though I’m extremely dubious about #3 and think the answer may be a combination of numbers 1 and 2. This video, however, confidently asserts that #2 is the answer. It would be better to give all three explanations and say that we simply don’t know. After all, we have no idea how the development of male nipples is related to the rest of male development.
Further, the video confuses male nipples with Steve Gould’s concept of “exaptations”, which are features originally built by selection for one function, and then coopted later by selection for a different function. (As the video notes, the swimming function of penguin’s “wings” is an exaptation.)
But implying that male nipples are exaptations is an explicit acceptance of explanation #3: that they have a new function in males coopted from their original function as suckling outlets for females’ milk. Yet the video also claims they are neither advantageous nor deleterious.
All in all, the video is okay, but just. Again, I wish they’d consulted some other evolutionary biologists before making this series.
Maajid Nawaz, a moderate Muslim, has been vilified by both Muslims and leftists for his efforts to harmonize Islam and Western values, and especially for engaging in both written and spoken dialogue with Sam Harris. For these acts, as I noted a while back, Nawaz has been called a “lapdog,” a “porch monkey,” and a “native informant.” All these are simply updated synonyms for “Uncle Tom.” Yet Nawaz was once a militant Islamist, jailed in Egypt for five years for organizing radical movements. Since then he’s become de-radicalized and has founded Quilliam, a think tank devoted to reinforcing moderate brands of Islam and to opposing religious extremism. And by his own account he’s still a believer.
Many of us believe that if Islam is to truly reform, purging itself of its violent and extremist elements, that change will have to come from inside—from Islamic moderates. In other words, from people like Nawaz.
But I’m beginning to wonder if that will work. For Nawaz, who should be the poster boy for effecting this kind of change, is regularly vilified by both Muslims and Westerners. The former hate him for being too moderate, and he’s attacked from both sides for supposedly being a lackey of the colonialist West. He can’t win, and, as far as I know, receives constant death threats and requires protection.
Yet who is better placed to be a spokesman for “moderate Islam”? The man has seen radical Islam from the inside, and gave it up. Nobody can accuse him of not knowing what he’s talking about.
Here’s an example of what he now faces. In Islam, du’a is a prayer-like gesture, a submission and supplication to Allah for fulfillment of a need. So Nawaz’s fellow Muslims simply established a Twi**er site, #duaagainstmaajidnawaz, collecting du’as for Allah to bring down all kinds of violence on their moderate coreligionist. Here are a few tw**ts from that site reproduced at Harry’s Place. It’s this kind of stuff that makes Nawaz fear for his life:
But there’s good news, too. People defending Nawaz have hijacked that thread (go look at the latest ones), posting hilarious and satirical supplications that have nothing to do with Islam. The pushback has diluted the real threats to homeopathic proportions. Here are a few folks who have gone to bat for Nawaz:
I have to say that the discovery that a cookie contains raisins rather than chocolate chips seriously distresses me.
May your USB cable be inserted upside down 80% of the time…And may your shopping cart have one confused wheel. #DuaAgainstMaajidNawaz
— Ryan (@Ryan_ronron) December 23, 2015
#duaagainstmaajidnawaz may you be named the new miss universe only to have it taken away seconds later @MaajidNawaz
— Philippe Assouline (@Philassie) December 23, 2015
May your dvd player slightly scratch your copy of Mary Poppins, making it skip slightly during the good songs. #duaagainstmaajidnawaz
— Stewart Carl Bova (@StewartCBova) December 23, 2015
@MaajidNawaz May Donald Trump speak very highly of you at his next campaign rally. #duaagainstmaajidnawaz
— Margo Jones (@3DTruth) December 23, 2015
I’m always amazed at the hidden comedic talents revealed by the Internet, in this case directed at Muslims attacking Nawaz for his laudable acts.
Sarcasm may have derailed that Twi**er site, but the problem remains: if moderate Muslims like Nawaz reap vilification from their coreligionists, and if Islam’s pacification requires those very moderates, how will any change occur? Every moderate Muslim or ex-Muslim I know publicly trying to effect that change has been subject to threats of violence and death.
And of course many of us worry that truly moderate Muslims will remain silent lest they suffer the same fate as Nawaz. If Western newspapers are so fearful of retribution that they won’t reprint Danish cartoons satirizing Islam, how can we expect Muslims to take even more dangerous stands? Nawaz is a very brave man, and I revile those who label him a Muslim Uncle Tom.
Here’s an example of the kind of stuff that brings him opprobrium: an unveiling of the anti-Enlightenment sentiments of Muslims who would prefer to keep them under wraps. Contributor Grania sent me a link to the video below, commenting, “This is fricking hilarious (in an unfunny way): watch Muslims weasel out of answering whether gays and women can morally be stoned to death.” Maajid Nawaz is the interlocutor, and he doesn’t let up. I may have posted the video before, but it’s worth watching again given the flak that Nawaz is taking from both sides:
Ten years ago 40% of British Muslims favored sharia law being introduced in parts of their country (only 41% opposed it) , and even some Anglican clerics, most notably the last Archbishop of Canterbury, have said that some elements of sharia should be incorporated into British law. That’s the mindset that Nawaz is fighting against, and as yet I see little success. It’s like fighting creationism in the U.S.: just as you can’t convince many conservative Christians that evolution is compatible with their faith, so you can’t convince many conservative Muslims that democratic, nonreligious law is compatible with Islam.
Reader Ivar Husa shares more of his photos with us: three birds and a reptile today.
I could hardly resist the invitation to share more birds. I hope you and the viewers enjoy these, too.
These were all taken within reach of Tucson, AZ last May, when I attended my daughter’s commencement from ASU (MED, Masters of Educational Development, Behavioral Analysis).
I guess this turkey felt safe after Christmas, for yesterday morning it ventured into the yard of reader G. B. James, who has a security-cam video of the visit. His notes:
A turkey came to visit this morning. And I don’t refer to our governor.
(FWIW… the flag on the right is Uganda, in honor of our atheist friends who run the Kasese Humanist Primary School. A ray of non-believing help in a nation overrun with religious persecution of gays and atheists.)
GBJ was on the way to the grocery store, and I like the way he stops and watches the bird from his car. And this is in Milwaukee, Wisconsin—not a small town!
