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.
The UK Office of National Statistics tw**ted this graphic showing the frequency of births in England and Wales around the year. As my pal, BBC TV producer Gideon Bradshaw, tw**ted, Merry Sexmas everybody!
Non-UK readers should realise that many people find themselves stuck with family for several days over Xmas. Rail travel is nigh-impossible (Network Rail chooses the holiday period to do major repairs on our 19th century infrastructure), and in the past many shops were closed (that has changed, but the feeling that we are living under siege conditions persists). Under those circumstances, what else is there to do but to increase our fitness?
Or perhaps people get so drunk at New Year that they forget to use contraception… Can readers provide figures for any other countries which would act as a useful comparison?
Just in: a cool fossil courtesy of reader James Blilie:
This photo isn’t of a living thing; but rather its traces: A tetrapod trackway in Permian or Carboniferous sedimentary rocks, Cedar Mesa, southern Utah. 2001, Kodachrome 64, probably a Pentax A 20mm f/2.8 lens. Probably f/11 at 1/125 sec. Pure speculation, but it could be from Eryops, or a similar animal. Scale: Those marks are probably 3-4 inches in diameter (7.5 – 10 cm). This first (and only) trackway I’ve found “in the wild” on my own. I might not have noticed it if it hadn’t been for the angle of the sun.
Here’s a reconstruction of the large Eryops (up to 3 meters), a semi-aquatic carnivore that lived about 300 million years ago:
Reader Kevin Voges, a retired university professor in New Zealand, sent a photo of a bird I didn’t know existed (or, if I did—and I probably posted about it years ago!—I’ve forgotten). It’s the tui (Prosthemadera novaeseelandiae), once called the “parson bird” because of its striking white collar, and it’s endemic to NZ. Kevin’s notes:
Just the one photo from me. We’ve been planting natives on our property in the Wakatipu (New Zealand), as well as trying to keep the predator population down, and I put in some bird feeders. This Tui has just moved in this year, apparently they tend to stay once they’ve arrived. The early Europeans called it the parson bird! The yellow on its head is pollen from a flax plant (you can see them at the back).
Tui is the Maori name, not sure of its origin. The Maori have a range of other names, depending on location and age, but Tui is the most common name. The tufts are called poi. We put sugar water in the feeders (one cup per litre), which helps them through the winter when there are less blossoms about. There are a few food sources on our place, flax and fuchsia, with more on the way as the trees mature, but he obviously likes the sugar as well.
Kevin adds, “They are good mimics as they have two voice boxes. Apparently the Maori taught them quite complex speeches“. Here’s a video of a permanently injured (and therefore captive) tui named “WoofWoof,” who speaks prolificially in a Kiwi accent, makes kissing noises, and even whistles “Pop goes the weasel”:
And while we’re on birds from down under, reader Ben Batt (who sent us “spot the stone curlew”), provides more photos:
Bush Stone-curlew (Burhinus grallarius). These birds were quite tame, and would usually just walk away or crouch down and freeze as we approached. They skulk about in an amusingly shifty way, freezing whenever you look at them:
One week from today it will be Christmas Day and, more important, the beginning of Coynezaa. That means you have only seven shopping days left before the annual orgy of materialism. As for yours truly, I am still suffering from a sore throat, but a day in bed was so incredibly boring that I am going to hie myself to work and see how I do. On this day in history, Charles Dawson announced the finding of Piltdown Man, a staple of creationists although it was later revealed—by scientists!—to be a hoax. It is still used to discredit every ancient hominin skull ever found. On December 18, 1917, Congress approved the language to inaugurate the ill-fated era of Prohibition: no alcohol in the US! Brad Pitt was born on this day in 1963, making the heartthrob 52 (already?). And in this day in 1829, French biologist Jean Baptiste Lamarck died at the ripe old age of 85. Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is avoiding the cold weather outside by going to sleep.
Cyrus: Did you notice that they were complaining about the weather again?
Hili: No, I slept through it.
In Polish:
Cyrus: Czy zauważyłaś, że oni znowu narzekali na pogodę?
Hili: Nie, przespałam to.
Reader Anne-Marie Cournoyer of Montreal, who lately has specialized in photographing squirrels, sends us an early warning from her northern outpost:
Squirrel of the day says: be ready for the winter. No snow yet, but it’s coming!!!
Professor Ceiling Cat (Emeritus) adds: There is beauty all around you, no less in the squirrels than in the flowers. Pay attention to our friends in the Sciuridae, and give them sustenance for the winter.
I’ve just noticed that this is post #12,002 since we began nearly six years ago. That’s a lot of posts!
“It’s okay to be smart” and PBS are producing a series of short videos, “Twelve days of evolution.” I’ll put up one a day, which should ultimately take us close to the end of Coynezaa.
This first one explains what evolution is. There are a few problems, though: it conflates evolution with natural selection (you can have common ancestry without natural selection), it equates natural selection with differential survival (actually, the differential reproduction of genes, whose vehicles are organisms, is the key), it doesn’t define “allele”, and there’s a long blurb for Dropbox at the end.
To me, the modern theory of evolution is as follows, and this is what I’d prefer to have seen in the video:
Evolution occurs, and by that we mean genetic change in populations.
That change is usually gradual, i.e., substantial change requires lots of time: more than just a generation or two. What evolves are populations of organisms, not an individual itself.
A lineage can not only change, but split, producing new species and new lineages.
(Flip side of the previous): If you take any two species or individuals, you can go back in time to find their common ancestor. The more recently in time that that ancestor existed, the more closely related the species. All living species descend from a single form of life that lived between three and four billion years ago.
The only process that can produce the appearance of design that so amazes and delights us is natural selection: the differential ability of genes to get themselves copied into the next generation. But there are also processes beyond natural selection that cause evolution, including genetic drift. Those processes, however, don’t cause adaptation.
Well, check out the video and tell me if you find it enlightening:
Since the death of Christopher Hitchens, Nick Cohen is the closest thing we have to a latter-day Orwell. It’s refreshing to read him amidst the flatulent apologetics of Reza Aslan, Glenn Greenwald, and other blame-the-Westers who argue that every terrorist act, every malevolent deed of ISIS and Al Qaeda, is the fault of colonialism, and those deeds include the repression of women and the murder of gays, Yazidis, apostates, and Shia Muslims. (The latter acts can also be excused as aspects of Muslim “culture”.)
In a new and longish piece in Standpoint, “Shame on the liberals who rationalize terror” (access free), Cohen tells it like it is, heaping scorn on those Leftists who cower before Islam while refusing to cower before Catholicism or any other faith. I’m still under the weather, but that’s convenient because Cohen’s piece speaks for itself, rife with his usual eloquence and clear thinking. I’ll give just one excerpt. The piece takes off from some mealymouth remarks uttered by John Kerry after the Charlie Hebdo massacre, more or less implying that the writers and cartoonists brought it on themselves.
Instead of encouraging Muslims to break with extremism, we left liberal Muslims and ex-Muslims isolated. We adopted the language of the extremists, and censored the very arguments they needed to use against fundamentalism. Instead of damning religious totalitarianism, we invented rationales that obscured rather than enlightened.
As John Kerry showed, anyone can play the game. You can say the attacks on the World Trade Centre and Pentagon were a rational response to American support for Saudi Arabia and Israel. If America wanted to be safe, it should stop supporting Saudi Arabia and Israel. The British Left claimed that the 7/7 attacks on London were a rational response to British involvement in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. It wasn’t true: Mohammad Sidique Khan, the terrorist cell’s leader, was training in Islamist camps long before the Iraq war. Nevertheless, the point still held: you can suppose that Western foreign policy provides a “rationale” for Muslims who become terrorists. You can say, as John Kerry implied, that if Charlie Hebdo had steered clear of Islam, it would never have been bombed. You can say that Jews would not be targets if they renounced Judaism. You can say that Islamic State would not have attacked Paris if the French had stayed out of Syria. You can say that the existence of Israel explains Hamas. You can say that IS would not treat Yazidi women as sex slaves if they had embraced its version of Sunni Islam. You can say there is a rationale for the Iranian subjugation of its Sunni minority and the Saudi subjugation of its Shia minority, for both are potentially dangerous to their respective states. You can say that Muslim countries would not persecute homosexuals if they went straight, or order the death of apostates if they remained good Muslims. There is no limit to the number of reasons you can find. Every time you rationalise, however, you miss the obvious and ignore an often openly fascistic ideology whose appeal lies in its supernatural certainties and totalitarian promise of a new heaven on earth.
Every step you take in explaining radical Islam away is apparently rational and liberal. Each takes you further from rationalism and liberalism. In your determination to see the other side’s point of view and to avoid making it “really angry about this or that”, you end up altering your behaviour so much that you can no longer challenge the prejudices of violent religious reactionaries. As you seek rationales for the irrational and excuses for the inexcusable, you become a propagandist for the men you once opposed.
Indeed. Read the whole piece; you’ll like it—that is, if you’re not an Aslanophile or Greenwaldian.
The platypus is the most extraordinary animal. It lives in Eastern Australia, and when samples of it first arrived in Europe, people assumed it was some kind of spoof, a duck’s bill and webbed feet stuck onto an otter. It is, of course, a monotreme mammal (the other member of this group is the echidna): it lays eggs and suckles its young by oozing out milk through glands in a network under its belly skin, rather than focused into nipples. Their fur is remarkably thick (I have touched a stuffed one).
Males have sharp horny spurs on their rear feet that are venomous. The other day, the Official Tw*tter feed for Threatened Species Commissioner at Australian Govt Dept of the Environment (yes, that’s what it’s called), tw**ted this:
I had never seen the spurs on a live platypus before – pretty amazing, eh?
Now look closely just above the spur. See those little blobs? They are ticks, which are specific to platypuses, Ixodes ornithorhynchi. These ticks can transmit a nasty red blood cell parasite… Vets in Australia often have to treat platypuses having those nasty parasites.
Here’s a rather more cheerful tw**t, a video showing a platypus being released into the wild. This one has more or less the same build as my ex-kitten, Harry, who is getting a bit porky…
I was aware that the field of Biblical archaeology was vaguely dubious, at least insofar as it was devoted to finding archaeological evidence of things said in the Bible. Well, we know that much of the “history” claimed in the Bible is dubious (there was, for instance, no Exodus), so that part of the field is tendentious. But clearly scientifically motivated excavations can be of great value in illuminating the era in which Biblical events are thought to have taken place, or about when and how the Bible was composed (e.g., the Dead Sea Scrolls). But, sadly, at least some of the field is devoted to buttressing an ancient book of fiction.
And that appears to be the case for the “discovery” of a first-century home in Nazareth, Israel that has been widely touted as being the likely residence of young Jesus. That this house was the domicile of carpenter Joseph, his virgin wife Mary, and young Jesus is about as likely as the “Biblical anthropology” study of three random and ancient skulls from Israel tells us what Jesus looked like. In other words, both are exercises in confirmation bias.
The article in question, “Has Jesus’ Nazareth House been found?” is by Ken Dark, director of the Research Centre for Late Antiquity and Byzantine Studies at the University of Reading, and appeared in last year’s Biblical Archaeology Review, the online organ of the Biblical Archaeology Society (reference below, no free link, but there’s a short summary here and a longer one at LiveScience). The finding was touted widely (just like the new reconstruction of Jesus’s appearance), even showing up at LiveScience.com, where it got this headline:
Yeah, and all the air molecules in this room may, by chance, move to one side of the room.
The whole enterprise, both the original paper and the LiveScience piece, conflates possibility with probability: witness the headline above and the title of Dark’s paper. Both ignore the possibility, for instance, that the Jesus-person is pure fiction, and even if he did live as some messianic rabbi, never lived in Nazareth and wasn’t the son of Joseph and Mary. Remember that Mary is said to have gone from Nazareth to Bethlehem (the Birthplace) and then back to Nazareth, where Jesus grew up—but given the confusing Biblical narrative, even that is contested by some. Nevertheless, the fact that there was a real Jesus, and if he lived he grew up in Nazareth, are things assumed to be true in both articles.
Dark’s piece rests on historical examination of documents, of accounts by pilgrims to the Holy Land, and on his own examination of an excavation site below a convent. That Nazareth site revealed the following:
There was a Byzantine church with mosaic floors and other fancy trappings built during the “Crusader period,” as well as two early Roman-era tombs and two rectilinear “courtyard houses” dated by the pottery they contained to the first century A.D. Here’s one of the houses, whose structure was preserved when the churches were built.
The pottery in the houses contained limestone vessels like the one below. Dark notes that limestone was considered a “pure” container under Jewish law, and “were popular in Jewish communities at this time.” He doesn’t say whether such vessels were also used by Romans or other “gentiles.”
(From paper): Israel Museum, Jerusalem STAYING PURE. Limestone vessels were common in first-century Israel because they were not subject to impurity according to Jewish law; thus a stone cup like the one pictured here could be continually reused rather than destroyed, unlike vessels of pottery that had contracted impurity.
From this evidence Dark and others conclude that the houses were part of a small Roman-Jewish town served by between three and seven springs.
Excavation of the nearby area of Sepphoris revealed a more Roman panoply of pottery and other artifacts. From this the authors conclude—and I suppose this is reasonable, though it’s above my pay grade—that Nazareth was a largely Jewish town near a Roman town, and there was no “close connection” between the settlements.
So far so good. But why—even assuming that Jesus was real and grew up in Nazaret—would he have lived in one of these two houses? Here’s what Dark says (my emphasis):
The first-century evidence that we do have from Sepphoris suggests an urban center with an administrative function, domestic occupation and public buildings. It may have been relatively cosmopolitan, in the sense that it was open to Roman provincial culture, but it remained a Jewish community.
By contrast, Nazareth was a local center without the trappings of Roman culture, perhaps analogous to nearby Capernaum or Chorazin in its facilities and scale, rather than to Sepphoris (which, incidentally, is not mentioned in the New Testament). The description in the Gospels of the Nazareth synagogue (Mark 6:1–6; Matthew 13:54–58; Luke 4:16–30) is exactly the sort of building we would expect in an Early Roman provincial “small town.” Such a small town was also exactly the sort of place where one might expect to find a rural craftsman—a tekton (Mark 6:3;Matthew 13:55)—like Joseph.
This evidence suggests that Jesus’ boyhood was spent in a conservative Jewish community that had little contact with Hellenistic or Roman culture. (It is extremely unlikely to be the sort of place where, as some have argued, one would have encountered “cynic” philosophy.)
Then Dark admits that “none of this, of course, has any explicit connection with Jesus.” But he finds his evidence not from the archaeology itself, but from the fact travelers seven centuries later regarded the site as Jesus’s boyhood home (my emphasis):
A seventh-century pilgrim account known as De Locus Sanctis, written by Adomnán of Iona, describes two large churches in the center of Nazareth. One is identifiable as the Church of the Annunciation, located just across the modern street from the Sisters of Nazareth Convent. The other stood nearby and was built over vaults that also contained a spring and the remains of two tombs,tumuli in Adomnán’s “Insular Latin.” Between these two tombs, Adomnán tells us, was the house in which Jesus was raised. From this is derived the more recent name for the church that Adomnán describes: the Church of the Nutrition, that is, “the church of the upbringing of Christ,” the location of which has been lost.
At the Sisters of Nazareth Convent there was evidence of a large Byzantine church with a spring and two tombs in its crypt. The first-century house described at the beginning of this article, probably a courtyard house, stands between the two tombs. Both the tombs and the house were decorated with mosaics in the Byzantine period, suggesting that they were of special importance, and possibly venerated. Only here have we evidence for all the characteristics that De Locus Sanctis ascribes to the Church of the Nutrition, including the house.
And in the final paragraph Dark makes a special plea for this to be Jesus’s house, because a). “there’s no good reason to dismiss it out of hand” and b). Because people believed it was Jesus’s home:
Was this the house where Jesus grew up? It is impossible to say on archaeological grounds. On the other hand, there is no good archaeological reason why such an identification should be discounted. What we can say is that this building was probably where the Byzantine church builders believed Jesus had spent his childhood in Nazareth.
Well, if everything that people believed was taken as truth, the shroud of Our Lady of Guadalupe would indeed have been miraculously found on a hilltop in Mexico, and The Dome of the Rock was where Mohamed landed on his reputed Night Journey.
I don’t doubt that the excavation described by Dark is interesting, and may even denote a Jewish settlement separated by culture and faith from a nearby Roman one. What I do doubt is whether it was Jesus’s home. And I question a mindset that desperately needs to shoehorn this discovery into the narrative of the New Testament.
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Dark, K. 2015. Has Jesus’ Nazareth house been found? Biblical Archaeol. Rev. 41:02.
