A religious philosopher argues that New Atheism and fundamentalism are “secretly sympathetic”; offers lame reconciliation between science and faith

December 2, 2015 • 11:00 am

UPDATE On both Phys.org and PsyPost, I’ve made a comment calling attention to the post below, and in both cases the comment has either not been accepted or has been expunged. Here’s the Phys.org comment that wasn’t accepted:

Screen Shot 2015-12-02 at 11.30.56 AM

As you see, my comment wasn’t nasty or strident, but they were obviously too hot for these cowardly sites to handle.

________________

Liam Fraser, a Ph.D candidate in systematic theology at the Divinity School of the University of Edinburgh, and is well on the way to making his career on the backs of New Atheists. Part of his thesis, a paper called “The secret sympathy: New Atheism, Protestant fundamentalism, and evolution” has just appeared in the journal Open Theology, and it’s the usual palaver about the similarity of Christian fundamentalists and New atheists (Fraser appears to be a Christian).

Fraser’s paper has already garnered some publicity, including a mention in, of all places, Phys.org, which is a science news website (!), as well as on PsyPost, which deals with new findings in psychology. I have no idea why these websites would highlight a paper on the philosophy of religion—unless they have an implicit desire to criticize atheism.  Both sites take comments, and you can bet I’ll go there and post a link to this piece. Readers may wish to participate as well.

Fraser’s paper takes ten pages of leaden academic prose to make four simple points:

  1. New Atheists (NAs) and Fundamentalists have “secret sympathies” with each other because they tacitly agree to share a common characterization of religion.
  2. One of those characterizations is that both NAs and fundamentalists have “a literal, univocal, and perspicuous understanding of Scripture.” That’s fancy academic talk for “both see religious people as taking scripture literally”.
  3. The other is that both NAs and fundamentalists see religion as accepting “a disruptive and substitutionary conception of divine activity in nature.” That’s fancy academic talk for “both see religious people as thinking that God intervenes in the world, breaking physical law.”
  4. But liberal Christians needn’t accept this consensus of atheists and fundamentalists because there’s a Third Way: we can read scripture as if it were an allegory!

Isn’t that DEEP? This simple thesis is neither new nor correct, but it’s a sign of the times that it can not only get published, but gets highlighted on two “scientific” websites. But the paper is neither psychology nor harder science; it’s simply theology.

Here’s why Fraser’s argument is wrong:

a.  While Christian fundamentalism is indeed characterized by Biblical literalism, New Atheists don’t see all religion as being totally literalistic. Many of us have argued, as Fraser notes, that the literalist meaning may be the most honest reading of scripture, for it requires the least interpretation and the least intellectual dishonesty. After all, neither the Bible nor the Qur’an says, “This book is all allegory,” and, indeed, they read like historical narratives. If you take the Bible as allegory, as we all know, then you have to claim that some bits are to be seen as metaphor, while others, like the story of Jesus, are to be taken largely literally (virtually all liberal Christians, and surely Fraser, see Jesus and his deeds as historical). And there’s simply no guidance for how to winnow the metaphorical from the historical. There’s also the tiny problem of what you do when you decide that parts of scripture are allegorical: what is the correct reading?

Of course all NAs recognize the “sophisticated” nonliteral versions of religion, and I discuss them at length in my book Faith versus Fact. For example, I talk about the problems with theistic evolution, one of the “solutions” of liberal Christianity (see below).  But even Sophisticated Religionists™ have some literal beliefs: the divinity and resurrection of Jesus, and the idea of salvation by accepting him as Savior, are what I see as the ‘non-negotiables’ of Christianity. Few believers of any stripe have no beliefs that conflict with empirical observation and/or reason. That’s why I always say, “Some believers are literalist about everything, but nearly every believer is a literalist about something.” (That statement is trademarked, by the way.)

One last point: somehow Fraser sees the Bible as a source of truth, but not scientific truth. For example, he quotes Dan Barker saying, in his book Godless, that “I lost faith in faith. I was forced to admit that the Bible is not a reliable source of truth: it is unscientific, irrational, contra- dictory, absurd, unhistorical…” Fraser comments on that statement:

This is an uncompromising rejection, yet one which assumes that the Bible should be a source of scientific truth, a coherent whole without contradiction, providing historically precise information regarding past events. New atheists typically share the same presuppositions as fundamentalists regarding what Scripture should be, and, finding that it does not meet their assumptions, reject it as worthless.

But the only truth that is more than a subjective truth (i.e., “I had a vision of Jesus”) IS scientific truth: truth that can be verified by all rational people. The use of the word “scientific truth” instead of “truth” is meant to denigrate New Atheists.  As for “moral truth”, well, there isn’t any—at least not objective moral truths that all people can agree on. What we call “moral truths” are really behavioral prescriptions you should follow if you desire a certain (subjective) outcome. Finally, surely Fraser sees some part of scripture as “scientific truth,” like the divinity and resurrection of Jesus, or the existence of a soul or an afterlife.

b. While Christian fundamentalism is indeed characterized by God’s palpable intervention in the world, New Atheists attack the brand of religion in which God at least has some influence in the world, and that brand is ubiquitous. After all, a deistic God, or a God who does nothing, is indistinguishable from no God at all.  And even if a Deistic God makes souls or sends us to Heaven or Hell, there are in principle ways to get evidence for such claims. Of course, if you’re a Deist who claims that God either created the universe and didn’t do squat after that, with no interventions, no souls, or no Heaven, or a Sophisticated Theist™ who claims that God merely “sustains” the Universe—those are forms of God that don’t fall within the ambit of science. But neither are they gods we should take seriously, for there’s not a whit of evidence for them.

c. Fraser’s “solution” of reading scripture as a metaphor sounds good, but he offers no clue to whether we should take all scripture as metaphor—in which Christianity devolves to a fictional book like the Beowulf saga—or whether we should take parts of scripture as literal, like the story of Jesus. This tactic leads to either atheism or ambiguity.

Here’s Fraser’s solution, given in his peroration:

I therefore propose an alternative approach. Given that the belief of both groups in the incompatibility of Genesis and evolution rests on biblical and theological presuppositions whose cogency is highly questionable, those wishing to challenge the conception of the Christian faith shared by new atheists and Protestant fundamentalists should direct serious attention toward these presuppositions. This approach, which I explore in greater depth in my doctoral work, accomplishes two objectives. First, it reiterates that the Church has traditionally read Genesis in a variety of ways, of which the literal was only one. The literal, univocal, and perspicuous understanding of Scripture shared by atheists and fundamentalists can only be dated to the Reformation at the earliest, and did not attain its current form until the late seventeenth century. Second, when attention is directed toward these presuppositions, it is shown that atheist and fundamentalist readings of Scripture are more influenced by the biases they bring to the text than what the text teaches. Far from teaching the mutual exclusivity of design and evolution, passages such as Psalm 104:10-18, Job 38:39-41, John 1: 1-18 and Colossians 1: 15-20 teach the immanence of God’s activity in all natural processes, an immanence that is Christologically mediated. These texts elide any easy dualism between natural and divine activity, and engagement with them has the potential to yield Trinitarian models of creation, preservation, and concurrence that repair the faulty biblical and theological presuppositions of new atheism and protestant fundamentalism.

This is bogus.  It’s simply untrue that literalism didn’t arise until the seventeenth century. Perhaps a form of total and nonallegorical literalism arose then, but for nearly two millennia theologians took much of scripture as absolutely literal. Some theologians, who include Aquinas and Augustine, said that allegorical readings could be made as well as literal ones, but a literal interpretation always took primacy. That held for Adam and Eve, the creation, the existence of Heaven, Hell, and angels, and the divinity and resurrection of Jesus.  I both distrust and dislike scholars who say that nobody took the Bible literally until recent times, for they’re both wrong and intellectually dishonest.

As for theistic evolution, it’s unscientific in many forms, including those forms that mandate some form of creation of species, or of God-given mutations that direct species in certain preferred ways (i.e., toward H. sapiens). At any rate, I’d ask Fraser to tell us two things: a) which parts of the Bible are pure allegory and which contain historical truth (after all, he takes the Trinity as some kind of truth in the passage above); and b) what kind of theistic evolution he’s talking about. While he says this,:

The biblical and theological presuppositions of new atheists and protestant fundamentalists therefore exclude the possibility of theistic evolution, the belief that God’s creative agency is mediated in some way through variation and natural selection.

he doesn’t tell us exactly how “God’s creative agency is mediated through variation and natural selection.” Without more detail, we needn’t take this possibility seriously.

If you want to see Fraser, here is is expatiating about his Big Idea:

Fraser has a bright future in atheist-bashing. I foresee many columns in the Guardian. And his appearance, his “muscular Christianity,” and his earnestness reminds me a lot of another Scot: Eric Liddell in the movie “Chariots of Fire,” as in this clip (start at 1:20; go here if you can’t see the video below):

________

Fraser, L. J. 2015. The secret sympathy: New Atheism, Protestant fundamentalism, and evolution. Open Theology 1:445-454.

Strepsiptera – the weirdest insects?

December 2, 2015 • 9:30 am

by Matthew Cobb

Strepsiptera are some of the world’s weirdest insects. They look weird, they act weird and, like many parasites, they have a very weird life-cycle. Over 600 species have been described and they are all parasitoids, attacking insects from seven different orders – silverfish, flies, crickets, wasps… A parasitoid is an organism that lays its eggs inside another organism, often, but not always, with catastrophic effects for the host. Strepsiptera seem to be an exception, for the host is generally able to survive rearing alien offspring within their bodies – in this sense strepsipterans are closer to parasites than parasitoids.

There is a huge dimorphism between the two sexes. The tiny males (2 mm long) are free-flying with odd, forwardly-curved, twisted wings (hence the name Strepsi-ptera). Once they hatch from their pupa (Strepsiptera are holometabolous, that is, they have a full metamorphosis), males live for only a few hours, and have only one job in life: to find a mate.

In flies, as we have discussed a number of times, the rear pair of wings are reduced to form halteres or balancers, which aid in flight. In Strepsiptera, the same process has taken place but it has involved the front pair of wings. How does this affect how the male flies? Do they have exactly the same function as in flies?

Male strepsipteran, photo by Mike Hraber. Note the halteres in front of the wings.

They also have weird branched antennae, odd globular eyes and vicious scissor-like mandibles. Check it out – have you ever seen anything like it? What do the males use those mandibles for? Can you guess (answer below)?

Male strepsipteran, photo by Mike Hrabar.

Although these eyes look weird, they are similar to some nymphs in hemimetabolous insects (that is, those insects that do not have full metamorphosis but instead have a series of moults). Intriguingly, male larval Strepsiptera also develop wing buds, like some hemimetabolous nymphs.

They’ve looked like this for a very long time, as shown by this specimen, trapped in a  piece of 50-53 million year old Eocence amber from China:

Amber
Scale bar = 0.5 mm. Taken from Wang et al (2014).

Here’s a male emerging from his hapless host:

A close-up video shows exactly why the male has those snippy-snippy mandibles. Pay attention to the left-hand side of the image – you can just make out the mandibles in action from the first seconds. This is stupendous filming from Mike Hrabar:

The females are even stranger, and are rarely seen, for the simple reason that they spend virtually all their life inside their host. To mate, the female moves down to the abdomen of the host, and pushes a specialised organ out from between the abdominal plates. The poor old host can be carrying a number of these:

img_7137
Paper wasp with female strepsipterans calling from her abdomen. Photo by Sean McCann

The female then exudes a pheromone, which attracts the male. Mating, when it happens is joyless and brief, as show by this rather creepy video by Mike Hrabar:

When the host lays eggs, or returns to the nest in the case of a social insect host, the female strepsipteran lays live offspring that wriggle off and, in ways that remain obscure, locate a new larval host and find their way in; they then grow within the larva (or nymph if the host is a grasshopper), going through three larval stages before finally pupating. If the host is a holometabolous insect, the strepsipteran sits inside the pupa, finding its way to the right place when the adult insect emerges. Gruesome.

(Because this is biology there are of course exceptions; in one strepsipteran family the female is free-living and pupation occurs outside the host.)

Last year there was an excellent paper in The Canadian Entomologist by Mike Hrabar and colleagues, which described in some detail the life-cycle of one strepsipteran species, Xenos peckii which parasitizes wasps (many of the photos and videos here are taken from this paper, and from Sean McCann’s excellent accompanying blog post). Here’s a description of the life cycle of X. peckii:

Life cycle
Illustration of the life cycle of Xenos peckii: (A) nest of host wasp Polistes fuscatus gets infested with (B) first-instar X. peckii that actively seek and burrow into (C) host wasp larvae where they moult into an apodous, grub-like, second instar and develop through three successive instars within the larvae of the host wasp; (D) adult wasps eclose with X. peckii larvae concealed within their abdomen; (E) male and female fourth instar larvae extrude from the abdomen of their host wasp; (E, left) the extruded structure of the male sclerotises and forms the cephalotheca (cap of the puparium); (E, right) the extruded structure of the female sclerotises to form the cephalothorax (fused head and prothorax), resulting in a neotenic adult female; (F–G) after a 10-day to 15-day pupation period, the winged male (F) emerges, locates a receptive female (G), and mates. Note: drawings not to scale; drawing of first instar larvae adapted from a SEM in Osswald et al. (2010). From Hrabar et al (2014)

Until recently the evolutionary position of Strepsiptera was a matter of debate, although most people agreed they were related to the Coleoptera, or beetles. Over the last couple of years, however, all that has been resolved, with two separate genomic studies comparing the DNA of Strepsiptera with that of other insects. Both studies agree that Strepsiptera are most closely related to Coleoptera, but the more recent study, suggests that they are also close to the enigmatic Neuropterida, which includes many weirdos, some of which have featured on this site such as antlions, dobsonflies, lacewings and the platypus of the insect world, which we haven’t yet talked about (memo to self: must fix this), the mantisflies.

This means that the apparent developmental similarities between Strepsiptera and hemimetabolous insects is a product of convergent evolution. As the authors of the first of the two phylogenetic studies put it:

The striking similarity of the wing buds and complex eyes of the Strepsiptera late instar larvae to those of hemimetabolous insect nymphs suggests the reuse of a pre-existing developmental program (homoiology), possibly triggered by a simple change of developmental timing (heterochrony). Our analyses demonstrate that the development of wing imaginal discs and the absence of compound eyes in larval stages are ground plan features of the extremely successful Holometabola and that Strepsiptera are consequently not the “missing link” between hemi- and holometabolous insects.

Despite the fact that various aspects of their lifestyle can be creepy, these are truly amazing insects. You can even get them on a t-shirt! Here’s the design, by Ainsley Seago. At one point, you could buy it through Etsy…

h/t Mike Hrabar (@MikeHrabar) and Sean McCann (@Ibycter)

More on Strepsiptera here:

Sean McCann’s blog.

On the Tree of Life.

References

Boussau B, Walton Z, Delgado JA, Collantes F, Beani L, Stewart IJ, et al. (2014) Strepsiptera, phylogenomics and the long branch attraction problem. PLoS ONE 9(10): e107709. Here.

Hrabar M, Danci A, McCann S, Schaefer P, Gries G (2014) New findings on life history traits of Xenos peckii (Strepsiptera: Xenidae). The Canadian Entomologist FirstView: 1–14. Here

McMahon DP et al (2011) Strepsiptera. Current Biology 21:R271–R272. Here.

Niehuis O, Hartig G, Grath S, Pohl H, Lehmann J, et al. (2012) Genomic and morphological evidence converge to resolve the enigma of Strepsiptera. Current Biology 22: 1309–1313. Here

Wang, B. et al (2014) A diverse paleobiota in early Eocene Fushun amber from China. Current Biology 24:1606-1610. Here.

 

Jesus ‘n’ Mo ‘n’ Namazie

December 2, 2015 • 8:20 am

The email accompanying today’s link to the new Jesus and Mo strip said this:

Today’s comic was spurred by Maryam Namazie’s trending twitter tag #exmuslimbecause, and the backlash it has received.

According to the BBC, that hashtag was started by the British Council of Ex-Muslims (Namazie is their spokesperson) to collect statements by Muslim “apostates” about why they’d left the faith. Apparently the site has garnered over 100,000 tw**ts in the last two weeks. The report adds, “But many Muslims are taking issue, saying that the hashtag is “hateful,” and being used as an excuse for Muslim-bashing at a time of increasing fear of Islamophobia.

Here’ are two samples of tw**ts:

https://twitter.com/Mookers/status/670746655973601280

This shows graphically how much many Muslims resent criticism of their religion, to the point that they regard statements of why people left their faith as “hateful.” People who throw around those words are odious, and we must not cower in fear of their possibly violent reprisals, nor must we accommodate them—as much of the Left is doing—by conflating criticism of Islam with hatred of individual Muslims: “Muslimophobia.” When are these people, Muslims and liberals alike, going to grasp the simple point that criticizing the tenets of a religion is different from “Muslim-bashing”? Actually, I suspect many of them already know that distinction, but simply use the terms “Islamophobe” and “Muslim-bashing” as a way to silence their critics, who they know are sensitive to accusations of bigotry.

As further testimony to the hair-trigger offense culture of many Muslims, you may know that this week Namazie spoke at Goldsmiths College of the University of London, a place that’s the Mecca of British student “offense culture.” As LondonStudent reports, her topic was ‘Apostasy, blasphemy and free expression in the age of ISIS’, and the talk was was sponsored by Goldsmiths’ Atheist, Secularist and Humanist society. That’s a sure recipe for pushback, and sure enough, Namazie got it (my emphasis):

Namazie wrote after the event: “After my talk began, Isoc “brothers” started coming into the room, repeatedly banging the door, falling on the floor, heckling me, playing on their phones, shouting out, and creating a climate of intimidation in order to try and prevent me from speaking.

“I continued speaking as loudly as I could. They repeatedly walked back and forth in front of me. In the midst of my talk, one of the Isoc Islamists switched off my PowerPoint and left. The University security had to intervene and remain in the room as I continued my talk.

“Eventually the thug who had switched off my PowerPoint returned and continued his harassments. At this point, I stood my ground, screamed loudly and continued insisting that he be removed even when the security said he should stay because he was a student.” [JAC: You don’t have a right to remain at a talk if you’re disrupting it, even if you’re a student. What was security thinking?]

A student, during yesterday’s lecture, moved to turn off the main screen when Namazie showed a cartoon from the series Jesus and Mo.

Prior to yesterday’s event, Goldsmiths’ Islamic Society (Isoc) released a statement saying that it “[expressed] deep concern regarding Goldsmiths Atheist, secularist and humanist society with renounced [sic?] Islamophobe Maryam Namazie”.

. . . [Namazie] also told London Student: This very group which absurdly speaks of “safe spaces” has in the past invited Hamza Tzortzis of IERA which says beheading of apostates is painless and Moazem Begg of Cage Prisoners that advocates “defensive jihad”.

Such is the inevitable response of Muslim students in the West when someone like Namazie, who is incredibly brave, tries to discuss the inequities and perfidies of the faith she used to have. Apparently that criticism makes her an “Islamophobe.”

I have no tolerance for the protestors’ behavior, which should not only be stopped, but opposed and mocked at every opportunity. Muslims of course have every right to demonstrate peacefully when they are offended, but not to disrupt an invited speaker or issue death threats (yes, Namazie got those, too). And perhaps they might consider that while their disruptive and sometimes violent response to criticism of Islam may have temporarily cowed the Left, in the end will make the hair-trigger Muslims look petulant and ridiculous.

But I digress; here’s today’s Jesus and Mo:

2015-12-02

Readers’ wildlife videos: teamwork in ducks

December 2, 2015 • 7:30 am

I am pleased to now include Tara Tanaka, videographer and creator of the great “Big Red” egret video we saw the other day, as a Reader. With that status, she has permitted me to post her fantastic wildlife videos. Tara and her husband own a 45-acre cypress swamp, providing lots of opportunities for animal shots.

So today, in lieu of Readers’ Wildlife Photographs, I offer one of Tara’s other videos, “Teamwork.”  Its subtitle is the sentence, “If it seems to warm and fuzzy, keep watching!” Its a vivid demonstration of the power of kin selection. Here are her notes:

A new and hopefully much improved edit of a video I posted last year. Digiscoped with two independent systems, both using GH4 cameras on Swarovski scopes, shot in 4K using manual focus. Enjoy!

The duck, by the way, is a black-bellied whistling duck, Dendrocygna autumnalis.

Tara’s Vimeo website is here and her flickr site, with lots of photos and videos, is here.

And for your bird aficionados, the Cornell site gives the range of the black-bellied whistler:

BBWDmap

 

Wednesday: Hili dialogue (and Leon lagniappe)

December 2, 2015 • 4:54 am

It’s hump day, and only 22 more shopping days till Christmas (the beginning of Coynezaa) and 27 till PCC(E)’s birthday (the end of Coynezaa). On this day in history, St. Paul’s Cathedral was consecrated in London in 1697 and, in 1954, the odious Red-baiting Joseph McCarthy was censured in the Senate, later to die of alcoholism. On December 2, 1814, the Marquis de Sade died. But all is well in Chicago; I will spend most of the day writing a lecture, and am blissfully free of teaching or administrative duties. Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Cyrus are cuddled up against the chill:

Hili: Wild animals say that they do not need sofas for anything.
Cyrus: This is empty rhetoric.
P1030638
In Polish:
Hili: Dzikie zwierzęta mówią, że im sofy nie są do niczego potrzebne.
Cyrus: To jest pusta retoryka
*******

 

And in Wroclawek, Leon had a hiding place and a monologue on Monday (explanation below photo); the Andrzej is not Hili’s Andrzej, but half of Leon’s staff, which got married on the weekend.

Leon: And now a gift for Andrzej’s evening. I will jump out in an appropriate moment.
12308704_1056898707664063_6807518345294646918_n

Malgorzata’s explanation: “Today is Andrzej’s [the Andrzej who’s on Leon’s staff] name day, which is an occasion to be merry even if your name is not Andrzej. Small gifts, parties, plenty of special plays etc. It’s in honor of a Scottish saint Andrew. I think in Scotland it is a proper holiday but is is also very, very popular in Poland.”

 

Sandal cat!

December 1, 2015 • 3:20 pm

It’s been a long day, punctuated by a trip downtown to get the pearlies cleaned. Readers will be delighted to know that I’m in perfect dental health (note the “d”, which is not an “m”!).  As relief from the BioLogos nonsense of the last post, here is one of the best cat gifs I’ve seen. Matthew agrees that it’s stupendous:

tumblr_nrgrapQ4ZE1s2yegdo1_400

A teaser for BioLogos’s “Big Story” (i.e., more toxic mixing of science and faith)

December 1, 2015 • 2:15 pm

What “a miracle of love and creativity” is Homo sapiens!! Or so we’re told by this BioLogos flak in a video describing the organization’s new and super secret Big Project (possibly funded by Templeton). All we know from this teaser is the following (from the flak’s quote):

“What if we told that Grand Biblical narrative with the scientific knowledge of the origins of the Universe that the ancients did not have? What would it be like? Let’s call it The Big Story.”

I call it The Big Steaming Pile of Accommodationist Excreta—another pathetic and futile attempt to get evangelical Christians to buy biological evolution. But perhaps readers can guess about what lies in store here:

h/t: Douglas

A chemically-camouflaged frog

December 1, 2015 • 1:15 pm

By Matthew Cobb

Social insect colonies rely heavily on chemical signalling to identify members of the colony, and conversely to detect intruders. These communication systems are generally very effective, but as that great scientist Professor Ian Malcolm put it, ‘Life will find a way’. If there’s a locked system, somewhere a pesky but perspicacious parasite will find a way to crack it.

Caterpillars of the Maculinea genus – also known as Alcon butterflies – hatch on the ground near Myrmica ant nests, and are picked up by the workers. The ants take home what tastes/smells like one of their babies, except this is a carnivorous cuckoo that will munch its way through their larvae…

An unusual example of such chemical camouflage was discovered in 2013 by a group of German and Swiss researchers, led by Mark-Oliver Rödel of the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin. It’s unusual because, as the title of this post indicates, it involves a frog.

The West African Rubber Frog (Phrynomantis microps) is found throughout west Africa, and can often be found living in the underground nests of the ponerine ant Paltothyreus tarsatus (aka the African stink ant).

These are pretty aggressive ants about 2 cm long, which pack a nasty bite and an even more powerful sting. They can be found pretty much throughout sub-Saharan Africa, where they play a very important ecological role. Most ponerine ants have quite small nests of a few hundred individuals, but in a paper published in 2013 my pal Christian Peeters found that some P. tarsatus nests can be as large as 5,000 individuals.

Here’s a rather small picture of Christian with a box of these alarmingly large ants:

Although the ants are notoriously aggressive, they don’t seem to bother about the Rubber Frog, as shown by this photo:

You can see how the ants seem rather bemused by the frogs in this video stitched together from the Rödel paper by a YouTube user – the first part shows ants with an adult frog, the final section with a froglet:

Other frogs, and other arthropods, are immediately attacked by the ants when they encounter them. However, when dead mealworms or live termites were covered in extracts from the frog’s skin, they were generally ignored by the ants, or at least it took much longer for the first bite to be administered:

Figure 1. Time from first ant, Paltothyreus tarsatus, contact with termites (left; inlet A) or mealworms (right), coated with the skin secretion of Phrynomantis microps, until stinging (inlet B).
Figure 1. Time from first ant, Paltothyreus tarsatus, contact with termites (left; inlet A) or mealworms (right), coated with the skin secretion of Phrynomantis microps, until stinging (inlet B). Control groups are termites or mealworms coated with water. Boxplots show the median and the interquartiles of time from first ant contact with a termite or mealworm until stinging. Coated insects were stung significantly later than control insects. Taken from here.

When Rödel’s group examined the chemical composition of the frog’s skin, they found it contained two novel peptides – short proteins, each 9 or 11 amino acids long – with a proline-phenylalanine pair at the end. When termites were covered with either or both of these peptides, the ants took significantly longer to attack them, suggesting these are indeed the active ingredients on the frog’s skin:

Figure 3. Effect of the two peptides from the skin secretion of Phrynomantis microps applied to termite, Macrotermes bellicosus, soldiers and delaying the aggressive behaviour and stinging of Paltothyreus tarsatus ants.
Figure 2. Effect of the two peptides from the skin secretion of Phrynomantis microps applied to termite, Macrotermes bellicosus, soldiers and delaying the aggressive behaviour and stinging of Paltothyreus tarsatus ants. Maximum observation time was 20. Taken from here.

This finding is doubly surprising – most instances of chemical camouflage involve cuticular hydrocarbons, which many arthropods use for communicating (for example, these are involved in the case of the Alcon Blue caterpillars described above). In the case of Phrynomantis microps, not only were novel peptides involved, no hydrocarbons could be detected on the frog’s skin, even though the animals were living in a hydrocarbon-rich environment in the ants’ nest.

What’s in it for the frog? Protection from predators (you’d have to be very foolhardy to take on the ants) and possibly protection from dessication during the dry season. They may also eat some of the ant larvae, although that is speculation on my part.

What’s in it for the ants? Probably nothing. If the frogs found a way to hack their chemical communication system, but at low or zero cost to the ants, then it won’t matter. If there’s a substantial cost to the ants, then you would expect a chemical arms race to begin – any ant nest that used a slightly different system of communication would not sustain the cost of the frog in the room.

The final point about this rather neat piece of biology, which flowed from a field observation, is that it’s opened up a new area of study in chemical communication in ants, and potentially a way of placating aggressive insects.

You see, Professor Malcolm was right:

 

Rödel M-O, Brede C, Hirschfeld M, Schmitt T, Favreau P, Stöcklin R, et al. (2013) Chemical Camouflage– A Frog’s Strategy to Co-Exist with Aggressive Ants. PLoS ONE 8(12): e81950

Peeters C, U. Braun U & Hölldobler B (2013) Large Colonies and Striking Sexual investment in the African Stink Ant, Paltothyreus tarsatus (Subfamily Ponerinae) African Entomology, 21(1):9-14. (Abstract)