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.
We have birds and arthropods today, the latter from reader Mark Sturtevant:
A female crane fly (Tipulasp.), [I am reasonably sure of the genus but there are tons of species that look pretty much like this]. This large insect was so heavily gravid with eggs that it could barely fly. She had a long way to go to lay eggs in water, as the nearest such supply was over a half mile away.
I love the green eyes of this species of Square headed wasp (possibly Tachytescrassus). If so, then this species burrows in the ground and provisions it with paralyzed grasshoppers.
A Slaty Skimmer dragonfly, with the mysterious name: Libellula incesta. Probably a story in there somewhere.
Hatching Leaf-footed bugs (Leptoglossussp.). The egg shells were iridescent gold. Leaf-footed bugs have a defensive smell and taste, and I suppose that explains the aposematic coloration of these youngsters. Their synchronized hatching may provide them with a degree of group protection. These common insects will gradually expand their hind tibia into expanded ‘leaves’ from which they are named. I am not sure of the use of that structure, but since they are generally camouflaged by then perhaps it adds to that effect.
Reader John Harshman supplemented our Thanksgiving photo of the ocellated turkey with some other photos, including the gross-looking caruncles (what function do they serve?):
Here are some ocellated turkey photos [Meleagris ocellata], all taken at Chan Chich in Belize, where they are dirt common. The first one really shows off the caruncles (which is the technical term for those colorful warts).
On this date in 1925, the Grand Ole Opry, Mother of Country Stars, started its radio broadcasts in Nashville, Tennessee, and, four years later, Motown magnate Berry Gordy, Jr. was born. It’s another overcast and chilly day in Chicago, though not as bad as yesterday, when, in near-freezing temperatures and drizzling rain, the battery of the Ceiling Catmobile chose to die in a strip mall where I had gone to get nomz. Only two hours later, with a new battery, was I on my way, frozen and drenched. But that’s a First World problem; let us instead give thanks that The Furry Princess of Poland is thinking deep thoughts:
Hili: How time flies. A: What do you mean?
Hili: Today is yesterday’s tomorrow.
In Polish:
Hili: Jak ten czas leci.
Ja: Co masz na myśli?
Hili: Dziś już jest wczorajsze jutro.
And meanwhile in Wrocklawek, tabby Leon is fretting about his appearance (note the bow tie):
Leon: I’m not sure I’m elegant enough. I would prefer a red bow tie.
Brian Keith Dalton has become God again in the latest episode of his Mr. Deity series. This time he shows what it’s like to be All Knowing, and how horrible it would be to hang around someone who’s omniscient. I like the bit where Jesus asks him if he finally understands the Trinity. At 4:30 the bit ends and Dalton does three minutes of self promotion and asking for Patreon-age—an ad that goes on a bit too long. But, to be fair, I’ll direct you to his Patreon page: here.
If you’ve followed these pages, you’ll know that, among the welter of college protests, student activists at Princeton have asked for expunging the name of a Princeton icon, Woodrow Wilson, from its infrastructure. Wilson was not only president of Princeton, but President of the United States, and apparently a progressive one. But he was regressive in an important respect: he was an unrepentant racist, and as President took deliberate actions to disenfranchise black government employees. Because of this, the protesting students at Princeton, many of them black or minority, have asked for changes in the name of the school’s elite Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, of its residential part, Wilson College, and for a public admission of Wilson’s racist legacy. (The New York Times reported on this issue on November 22.)
In a major editorial three days ago, “The case against Woodrow Wilson at Princeton,” the Times‘s editorial staff took sides with the protestors. Without discussing Wilson’s positive accomplishments as President of both Princeton and the U.S., the editorial concluded:
In a few short years, Mr. [historian Eric] Yellin writes, the Wilson administration had established federal discrimination as a national norm.
None of this mattered in 1948 when Princeton honored Wilson by giving his name to what is now called the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Black Americans were still viewed as nonpersons in the eyes of the state, and even the most strident bigots were held up to public adulation. This is certainly not the case today.
The overwhelming weight of the evidence argues for rescinding the honor that the university bestowed decades ago on an unrepentant racist.
The counterargument, one made by my colleage Geoffrey Stone at the University of Chicago Law School, is that Wilson was a man of his time, and most white men of his time were, by and large, also racist. In a piece at PuffHo, “Woodrow Wilson, Princeton University, and the battles we choose to fight,” Stone not only argues that we should judge Wilson by the mores of his time, but also enumerates Wilson’s progressive contributions:
During his presidency of Princeton, Wilson renewed and reinvigorated the institution. In only eight years, he increased the size of the faculty from 112 to 174, paying special attention to both teaching and scholarly excellence.
Wilson also made progressive innovations in the curriculum, raised admissions standards to move Princeton away from its historic image as an institution dedicated only to students from the upper crust, and took strides to invigorate the university’s intellectual life by replacing the traditional norm of the “gentleman’s C” with a course of serious and rigorous study. As Wilson told alumni, his goal was “to transform thoughtless boys . . . into thinking men.”
Wilson also attempted (unsuccessfully because of the resistance of alumni) to curtail the influence of social elites by abolishing the upper-class eating clubs, appointed the first Jew and the first Catholic to the faculty, and helped liberate the university’s board of trustees from the grip of tradition-bound and morally-conservative Presbyterians. Given that record of achievement, it’s easy to understand why Princeton has chosen to recognize Woodrow Wilson as one of its greatest and most influential presidents.
. . . As President, Wilson oversaw the passage of a range of progressive legislation previously unparalleled in American history. Among the bills he signed into law were the Federal Reserve Act, the Federal Trade Commission Act, the Clayton Antitrust Act, the Adamson Act, which for the first time imposed a maximum eight-hour day for railroad workers, and the Keating-Owen Act, which (before it was held unconstitutional by the-then-very-conservative Supreme Court) curtailed child labor. Samuel Gompers, the most visible labor leader of the time, described Wilson’s achievements as a “Magna Carta” for the rights of the workingman.
Among his other accomplishments, Wilson, over bitter opposition from anti-Semites, appointed the first Jewish member of the Supreme Court – Louis Brandeis, and offered his Fourteen Points and his strong support of the League of Nations in the hope of promoting international peace and averting future world wars.
Unlike the Times, though, Stone also looks at the other side, arguing that “Wilson’s support of racial segregation was deplorable.” Let me add here that Stone is a progressive himself, a liberal, and someone who’s been mentioned as a possible Supreme Court Justice, though that’s unlikely given the relatively young age of conservatives currently on the court. Whatever you may say about Stone—and I’m an admirer—he’s neither racist nor reactionary. And yet, he claims, “Wilson should be judged by Princeton, as he has been judged by historians, not only by the moral standards of today, but by his achievements and his values in the setting of his own time.” If we judged Wilson solely by today’s standards, then tributes to many other famous American figures would also need to be removed from the public arena:
After all, if Woodrow Wilson is to be obliterated from Princeton because his views about race were backward and offensive by contemporary standards, then what are we to do with George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, and Andrew Jackson, all of whom actually owned slaves? What are we to do with Abraham Lincoln, who declared in 1858 that “I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races,” and that “I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people”?
What are we to do with Franklin Roosevelt, who ordered the internment of 120,000 persons of Japanese descent? With Dwight Eisenhower, who issued an Executive Order declaring homosexuals a serious security risk? With Bill Clinton, who signed the Defense of Marriage Act? With Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, both of whom opposed the legalization of same-sex marriage?
And what are we to do with Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who once opined in a case involving compulsory sterilization that “three generations of imbeciles is enough”? With Leland Stanford, after whom Stanford University is named who, as governor of California, lobbied for the restriction of Chinese immigration, explaining to the state legislature in 1862 that “the presence of numbers of that degraded and distinct people would exercise a deleterious effect upon the superior race”?
And what are we do with all of the presidents, politicians, academic leaders, industrial leaders, jurists, and social reformers who at one time or another in American history denied women’s right to equality, opposed women’s suffrage, and insisted that a woman’s proper place was “in the home”? And on and on and on.
Not having any personal connection to Princeton (other than my affection and respect for its current president), I don’t really care one way or the other whether Princeton erases Woodrow Wilson from its history—except to the extent that such an action would inevitably invite an endless array of similar claims that would both fundamentally distort the realities of our history and distract attention from the real issues of deeply-rooted injustice in our contemporary society that we need to take seriously today. This, quite frankly, is not one of them.
As Stone implies, women could make an equally strong case for the removal of names of figures who would, by today’s lights, be seen as misogynistic or sexist.
I don’t really have a dog in this fight, but I can see points on both sides. Were I a black student, I’m not sure I’d be happy being around the name “Woodrow Wilson” given his racism, which was not only deep, but on which he was able as President to act, ruining (as the Times editorial recounts) the lives of many black people. On the other hand, if we’re to judge historical figures in light of today’s mores, and (as Steve Pinker shows) those mores have grown ever more liberal, inclusive, and progressive, then you’re going to have to completely revamp our institutions. Do we take Lincoln off the five-dollar bill and slaveholder George Washington off the single? Do we blast the face of Thomas Jefferson off Mount Rushmore? How racist or sexist must someone be before we bow to the demands of the offended that we efface them from history, or at least from public adulation?
If Wilson was simply a racist who expressed his views in public, I’d side with Stone. But he actively injured black people through his racism, and that’s different. On the other hand, Jefferson, Washington, Jackson (on the $20 bill), and many “founding fathers” actually kept black people in bondage, which is even worse.
So I throw this one to the readers: should Princeton get rid of the honorifics bestowed on its former President? And how far should we judge historical figures and their legacy according to our ever-expanding circle of morality?
I’ve made this point before, but have revisited it after my recent post on animal suffering and how we shouldn’t ignore it. When thinking about how to judge human versus animal suffering, I realized that there’s no objective way to do this, and that when trying to figure out how to treat animals, we must ultimately rely on subjective judgment. While science can help us make such judgments, it cannot give us objective answers, even in principle.
For example, is it right to do animal experimentation on primates? In so doing, primates and other mammals are injured or suffer, and yet there may be some ultimate benefit for humanity (this, of course, isn’t guaranteed). How many mouse lives or monkey lives are worth one human life, especially when animal testing doesn’t always provide cures? We think it’s okay to swat mosquitoes or kill a nonvenomous snake that’s simply annoying or scaring us, but we don’t think it’s right to kill a dog who’s barking at us. Where do you draw the line?
Or if, like Sam Harris, you think that “well being” is the objective criterion for morality, so that the most moral act is the one that maximizes overall well being, then your difficulty becomes this: how do you determine the relative weights of animal well being versus human well being? Science can’t answer such a question because we have no idea how to quantify well being among species, which depends on knowing how an animal subjectively perceives and values its existence. (I also question how science can judge the relative weights of different kinds of human well being, but I’ll leave that aside.) Is it immoral to swat a fly only because it’s annoying you with its buzzing? Is it immoral to kill a harmless spider simply because you don’t like spiders?
I am still traumatized at having seen a golf-course employee, several decades ago, flooding mole tunnels with water, and then killing the moles who came out by whacking them with a wrench. I’ll never forget that sight, which made me weep. Is the increased well-being of golfers worth more than the reduced well being of the whacked moles?
But it gets more serious when you come to food animals. Is it immoral to eat animals? How do you measure their reduced well being at losing their lives versus our increased well being when we eat a nice chicken or steak? Is it immoral to eat eggs from battery chickens? If so— because you weigh their suffering as heavier than our increased well being—then what about humanely raised animals? They may have a nicer life and be killed more humanely, too, but don’t they value their own lives? They’ve evolved, after all, to avoid death, and yet we kill them. To me that means that they don’t want to die, but we don’t know what “want” really means in an animal whose brains we can’t fathom.
I see no way to arrive at objective answers to these questions, for even in principle I can’t see how one can give relative values to the well being of different species. Of course one could punt and say that morality applies only to humans, but we know that’s untrue. We prosecute people who torture cats and dogs, and we have, by and large, stopped using animal testing for cosmetics. The latter is an explicit judgment that animal suffering outweighs the increased well being produced by applying blush or mascara.
Now I admit that I’m not a trained philosopher (though I do have one paper in a real journal to my credit), and perhaps others have considered this question in light of the notion that we can have objective moral truths. I’ve read Peter Singer, who’s told me personally that he thinks there are such truths, but I’ve never asked him to tell me how one can objectively arrive at his notion (which I share) that “animal liberation” is a very important cause.
In the end, like all morality, animal “rights” comes down to issues of preference and subjective judgment. Science and empirical observation can feed into those issues, but at bottom it’s still subjective. I agree with Sam that in general our moral judgments, at least in our own species, correspond to utilitarian notions of overall well being, but I don’t agree that one can make such judgments objectively.
My title may reflect a bit of hubris, but I invite readers to tell me where I’m wrong.
Your eyes are growing heavy; you are growing sleepy; and now you WILL read this post!
Tardigrades, or “water bears,” are some of the world’s weirdest—and toughest—animals. They’re so bizarre that they constitute their own phylum, Tardigrada, but are related to arthropods and nematodes (roundworms), with whom—along with a few other beasts—they’re grouped in the “clade” Ecdysozoa.
Although they’re small, tardigrades are also very cute, and this photo shows why they’re called “water bears” (they’re also called “moss piglets” because of their snouts and frequent occupation of damp moss):
Source: American Museum of Natural History
Here’s a video of what they look like bopping around in the water:
What’s most remarkable about tardigrades is their toughness, which Matthew describes below. Wikipedia also notes this:
Tardigrades are notable for being perhaps the most durable of known organisms; they are able to survive extreme conditions that would be rapidly fatal to nearly all other known life forms. They can withstand temperatures from just above absolute zero [JAC: they can survive at -272°C, one degree above absolute zero] to well above the boiling point of water (100 °C) [JAC: they can survive at 151°C!], pressures about six times greater than those found in the deepest ocean trenches, ionizing radiation at doses hundreds of times higher than the lethal dose for a human, and the vacuum of outer space.They can go without food or water for more than 10 years, drying out to the point where they are 3% or less water, only to rehydrate, forage, and reproduce. They are not considered extremophilic because they are not adapted to exploit these conditions. This means that their chances of dying increase the longer they are exposed to the extreme environments, whereas true extremophiles thrive in a physically or geochemically extreme environment that would harm most other organisms.
If we ever destroy the planet with nuclear weapons, and only one form of life remains, it will not be cockroaches but tardigrades.
As we’ll see, their ability to dry out and then revive after rehydration may explain the remarkable result given in the paper I’ll describe today. First, though, Matthew Cobb, who knows a lot about tardigrades (he lectures on them) volunteered to supply us with some Fun Tardigrade facts, below:
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Fun Tardigrade Facts (by Matthew Cobb)
• There are over 1000 species, all which are aquatic. They mainly live in terrestrial water-films, although one order is classed as ‘marine’ as it lives on the edge of the sea.
• They are disappointingly small: 0.05 – 1mm in length.
• They have four pairs of appendages, which are lobopod-like legs. They have a layered cuticle which appears to be chitinous, and grow by moulting, shedding their skin through their mouth opening.
• They are not arthropods, and although their bodies have indentations, they are not segmented. They belong in their own phylum, Tardigrada (named by Spallanzani in 1777, the word means ‘slow-stepper’), and are thought to be the closest relatives of Onychophora (velvet worms) and Arthropoda.
• They are a very ancient lineage – their ancestor separated from the ancestor of the arthropods over 700 million years ago. Some tardigrade lineages split around 630 million years ago, before the Ediacaran period, which is generally seen as being the first moment that multicellular organisms appear in the fossil record.
• Some of them are detritivores (i.e. they eat crap), others are carnivorous, eating rotifers and similar prey.
• They show a variety of modes of reproduction: sexual, parthenogenetic and even self-fertilisation in some hermaphroditic species.
• The weirdest thing is that during tough times they can shrivel up into what is called a ‘tun’ – a cold-resistant winter form. They do this by losing all but around 3% of their body water. This effectively turns them into something like a seed or a spore – alive, but only just, with minimal respiration (hence the technical term ‘cryptobiosis’). Just add water, and you revive the little beast. Here’s a scanning electron micrograph of a tun:
• In the tun state, tardigrades can resist temperatures as high as +149 C and as low -272ºC. You can immerse them in alcohol or ether, and they will still recover.
• In 2008, the TARDIS project (‘Tardigrades in space’) shoved some of these beasts on the outside of the Foton 3 satellite. There they were, whizzing round the planet in the hard vacuum and -272ºC in low Earth orbit for 10 days, holding onto the satellite as though their lives depending on it (NB artistic license here – they were in a box, in the tun state). When they were returned to Earth, tardigrades that had been exposed to space could be revived with the same frequency as control tardigrades. About the only thing that would kill them was if they were also exposed to all the electromagnetic radiation that bombarded the satellite. However, if they were protected from UV A and B rays, then about 15% of the tuns could initially be revived.
To learn more, including access to virtually every paper ever published on tardigrades, go to the delightfully retro Tardigrade Newsletter site. You’ll party like it’s 1999.
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JAC: What I want to highlight today is a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Thomas Boothby et al. (reference and free link below; see also the summary on Science Alert). The upshot is that they sequenced the DNA of one species of tardigrade, Hypsibius dujardini, and found—astoundingly—that more than one-sixth of its genome, 17.5%, was from completely unrelated species—mostly bacteria. (This is the proportion of all genes coming from non-tardigrade species). This is nearly twice the proportion seen in the species previously known to have the most foreign genes: the rotifer Adinata ricciae (9.6% of its genes of foreign origin).
Here’s an individual of H. dujardini:
I’ll try to be brief here, though the results are truly astounding. In fact, you could consider them a dramatically new expansion of evolutionary theory, for they show that organisms can evolve not just via mutations in their own DNA, but by taking in genes from completely unrelated species.
Although we already knew this from studies of aphids, rotifers, and bacteria—the phenomenon known as “horizontal gene transfer” (HGT) has been described for some time—we had no idea that so much of a species’ genome could comprise genes taken from distant relatives. Although this doesn’t drastically change evolutionary theory (one could consider the uptake of these genes as a form of drastic “macromutation”), it does show that adaptations can in some cases evolve very quickly, and that these might (but usually don’t) screw up the branching phylogenetic trees that depend on assuming evolutionary change within lineages and no cross-lineage “genetic pollution.”
The authors simply sequenced the tardigrade genome (it didn’t used to be so simple!), and compared the sequence with the database of genes from other groups. They found that, as I said, about 17.5% of the tardigrade’s genes had their closest sequence match in completely unrelated species. The authors did controls, of course, to be sure that the DNA really was in the H. dujardini genome rather than being a contaminant from bacteria in the lab or in the tardigrade’s gut, and also to be sure that the foreign genes weren’t simply something that had been in the ancestor of the tardigrades and the putative source species, and was later lost in tardigrades. Everything was copacetic: all the genes were really taken in from distant species and incorporated into the H. dujardini genome.
Here’s the proportion of genes sequenced that came from different sources (note that they didn’t have data on 31.5% of the genes, so the 17.5% foreign-gene figure may well be an undestimate). The vast majority of genes acquired by HGT came from bacteria, with some from viruses, fungi, plants, and archaea:
(From paper):: Source of genes in the H. dujardini genome as determined by HGT index calculations following Galaxy tools taxonomy extraction
Some other results:
Is the retention of foreign genes random? The kinds of foreign genes taken in were not random: they tended to be those involved in stress resistance, like heat-shock proteins, immune response genes (catalase genes), and genes producing proteins involved in DNA repair and protection of membranes. This makes sense, for tardigrades regularly undergo desiccation and rehydration in the wild, and when this happens their systems are shocked, their membranes stressed, and their DNA tends to fragment. The selective uptake of genes, then, suggests that there has been natural selection on the tardigrades to take in foreign genes that protect them from and help them recover from stress.
How does the horizontal gene transfer occur? When tardigrades dry out, losing 97% of their body water, and then rehydrate, they take in water from the environment, and that water may contain foreign DNA. We also know that the tardigrade nuclear membrane becomes porous when this occurs, so that foreign DNA could enter the nucleus and integrate into the species’ genome. After that, natural selection would occur, with those animals having foreign genes that help them survive this process leaving more offspring. In that sense it’s pretty normal natural selection, but with the “mutations” comprising absorbed DNA from distantly-related taxa rather than coming from random errors in the tardigrade’s own DNA.
Have the foreign genes evolved since being taken into the tardigrade genome? Yes, certainly. The sequences are different from those in bactria, and in tardigrades they’ve also evolved “introns” (spacer DNA that separates parts of a single gene, which is present in tardigrades and other eukaryotes but not bacteria). Further, the “codon usage”—the particular triplets used to code for an amino acid—have also changed to correspond more closely to the frequency of usage in tardigrades than in the source bacteria. So after the foreign genes were incorporated and spread by natural selection, a more conventional process of natural selection tweaked the sequences of those foreign genes.
Now the million-dollar questions:
How common is this phenomenon, and does it tend to occur in certain types of species? While geneticists have found other cases of HGT, and it seems to take place in rotifers as well as at least this species of tardigrade, it doesn’t seem to be so common as to overwhelm the genomes of most species. For if it were that common, we simply wouldn’t be able to make credible evolutionary trees (“phylogenies”)—trees that depend critically on assuming that genetic change occurs by mutations within lineages, not by the wholesale movement of DNA among diverse lineages. Because trees are usually easy to construct, and don’t show signs of much HGT, we can be pretty confident that this phenomenon does not take place often in most species. (Bacteria, however, undergo HGT more often, making it harder to construct bacterial phylogenies.)
As for why it occurs in rotifers and this tardigrade (researchers need to look at more tardigrade species to see if H. dujardini is exceptional), there are two theories. One is that the absorption of foreign DNA is an adaptive response to the absence of sexual reproduction—a way to get genetic diversity in the absence of being able to swap genes among members of your own species. The authors discount this because, although this species includes mostly females who reproduce parthenogenetically (without sex), males are known to occur and the species does undergo reduction division, or meiosis. Also, there don’t seem to be special mechanisms that have evolved for taking in DNA. Rather, that DNA absorption appears to be a byproduct of what happens when tardigrades dry out and rehydrate, being stressed in the process.
I tend to go along with the authors’ theory that HGT in this species is simply a byproduct of what happens when tardigrades dry out—one aspect of cryptobiosis, a form of metabolic shutdown that occurs when organisms dehydrate, freeze, or are subject to other stress. In the case of tardigrades, I noted that this breaks their DNA and injures their membranes. When they rehydrate, they could take in some genes from foreign species that would help them repair their DNA and overcome their stress. Those foreign genes that aided in this survival would be those that get passed on. That’s natural selection.
To test this idea, we need to sequence the DNA of other species that undergo crytobiosis and rehydration, organisms like the brine shrimp (Artemia salina). One would predict that HGT would be more common in such species. In fact, the brine shrimp genome might already have been sequenced, although I can’t find any reports on it. If it hasn’t, scientists should get off their butts, sequence it, and look for evidence of HGT.
Finally, how much does this affect our view of evolution? As I said, although this doesn’t overturn the conventional theory of evolution by natural selection, it does expand it in two ways. First, we have to realize that “mutations” can include more than slight tweaks in an organism’s genome due to errors in replication, exposure to radiation, and so on. There can be “macromutations” in which a whole new gene is suddenly spliced into your genome. But after that happens, evolution will proceed as it always does: if the macromutations are adaptive, they’ll spread by natural selection; if they have no effect on the organism’s fitness (i.e., they’re “neutral”), they’ll be subject to the random sampling of genetic drift; and if they’re deleterious, natural selection will weed them out.
Second, if HGT were common and pervasive, it would make it hard to judge how organisms were related, which we do by making phylogenetic trees. Such trees would be hard to make if HGT were frequent, for trees are, as I said, based on the assumption that each lineage changes by mutation, drift, and selection in its own DNA, not by taking up foreign DNA from very unrelated species. The fact that such trees are usually made in eukaryotes without evidence of HGT suggests that HGT is not so common as to overwhelm the normal accumulation of genetic change within lineages. In this view of life, what we have is an amazing and unexpected phenomenon, one never conceived of by either Darwin or his immediate successors. It’s a view that expands our understanding of how evolution works but that doesn’t produce a new “evolutionary paradigm.”
You might recall that when HGT was found in bacteria and a few other species, New Scientist published an infamous edition with this cover claiming that DARWIN WAS WRONG:
He was supposedly wrong because the tree of life, so the article said, was based on the palpably false assumption that there was no movement of genes among distantly-related. Well, that’s not the case, and New Scientist simply suffered from Kuhn Envy. Darwin wasn’t wrong. He was mostly right, but didn’t anticipate something that could occasionally but rarely complicate the making of trees.
h/t: jsp
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Boothby, T. C., J. R. Tenlen, F. W. Smith, J. R. Wang, K. A. Patanella, E. Osborne Nishimura, S. C. Tintori, Q. Li, C. D. Jones, M. Yandell, D. N. Messina, J. Glasscock, and B. Goldstein. 2015. Evidence for extensive horizontal gene transfer from the draft genome of a tardigrade. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Published online before printNovember 23, 2015, doi:10.1073/pnas.1510461112
We have several contributors today; the first is Anne-Marie Cournoyer from Montreal:
These photographs were taken at at the Parc National du Mont St-Bruno (on the south shore of Montreal), and the last squirrel (the one with the nuts) was taken in Brossard.
While walking close to a lake, we saw some turmoil on the water, far from us. Our new Nikon Coolpix P900 gave us the answer: Harle couronné, Hooded Merganser: Lophodytes cucullatus. [JAC: Those are not chicks and adults; it’s a sexual dimorphism with the males having the white-and-black heads.]
The Aubrey Spring Ranch eagles have been hanging around their nest. I think there are renovations going on, or about to begin. I think this is Lucy, the female, but I can’t be certain. Shot this morning [last Monday].
And reader Peter Gardner sent what I think is our first photo of a monotreme in the wild:
You might be interested in this photo of an echidna [Tachyglossus sp.—there are four living species] which I took near Bicheno, on the east coast of Tasmania. You recently featured the giant freshwater crayfish from Tasmania (my home State) so I’m hoping that this is the start of a surge in the world-wide popularity of Tasmanian fauna. I really like your website, by the way.
As I sit here in my crib, the winds are howling outside and the rain is pelting down. Soon I will brave it, as there is work to be done. I hope American readers had a good Thanksgiving and a big feed. And we have three pictures of cats enjoying Thanksgiving dinner prepared by their staff. Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Cyrus is giving thanks for Hili:
Hili: Why are you standing over me like that?
Cyrus: Because I still feel like eating you but now out of love.
In Polish:
Hili: Czemu tak nade mną stoisz?
Cyrus: Bo nadal mam ochotę cię zjeść, ale teraz z miłości.
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Cat thanksgiving, first from reader Jonathan Harvey:
Actually an old friend’s cat at whose house I had Thanksgiving, and for whom I have house-sat tending this and other cats over a dozen times, but technically not my personal cat.
Reader Sarah Crews gives her many feral cats a special tuna treat on Thanksgiving, which she calls “Tunagiving”:
Reader George Scott sent several photos:
I didn’t get around to sending you any pictures of our black cats for Halloween, but managed to get a couple of shots of them eating (or ignoring) dinner today. They didn’t really want to eat together today, so I had to send separate pictures. Samantha (a.k.a. Miss Skinny Cat at 5 lbs) is recovering from some medical issues and is suddenly eating everything in sight. Christopher (Mr. Fat Cat at almost 3 times her size) seems to have put himself on an early holiday diet. I’ve also included a couple of scans of the dedication and art work you did for my copy of WEIT so you can see how good your likenesses are.
ChristopherSamantha
George et al. got an autographed copy of WEIT for having been the first readers to visit and send photos of the Denver Cat Company (a recently opened cat cafe):
