Obama breaks pledge, will leave US troops in Afghanistan until after his term expires

October 15, 2015 • 8:45 am

Now this political decision was predictable, but it’s also ineffectual. Remember when President Obama promised that U.S. troops would be out of Afghanistan when he was out of office? That made sense: we’re not accomplishing anything, and, despite the U.S.’s misguided trust in a corrupt and disorganized regime and an untrained army to fight the Taliban, it makes no sense to leave a handful of troops in a country that can’t stem the insurgent tide, while continuing to kill both civilians and an ever-replenishing enemy.

Afghanistan has been the longest war in U.S. history: now over 14 years. What have we accomplished? Precious little except to vent our ire about the 9-11 attacks.

But, according to today’s New York Times, Obama has decided that, well, the war isn’t over yet. We now have 9800 troops in Afghanistan, originally scheduled to drop to 1,000 troops stationed at the Kabul embassy in January, 2017. Today’s announcement says we’ll draw them down to roughly half of the existing number (5500), and now by the end of 2016 or beginning of 2017.

The Times comments:

In abandoning his ambition to bring home almost all American troops before leaving office, Mr. Obama appears to be acknowledging that Afghan security forces are still not near ready to hold off the Taliban on their own.

The insurgents are now spread through more parts of the country than at any point since 2001, according to the United Nations, and last month the Taliban scored their biggest victory of the war, seizing the northern city of Kunduz and holding it for more than two weeks before pulling back on Tuesday.

And yes, the drones will keep flying:

Now, instead of falling back to the embassy — a heavily fortified compound in the center of Kabul — the administration officials said on Wednesday that the military would be able to maintain its operations at Bagram Air Field to the north of Kabul, the main American hub in Afghanistan, and at bases outside Kandahar in the country’s south and Jalalabad in the east.

Why we should be excited by 100,000 year old human teeth from China

October 15, 2015 • 7:10 am

by Matthew Cobb

I told you all the other day – discoveries in recent human evolution are appearing at an astonishing pace. I just gave my final lecture of the year to the students on the first year Genes, Evolution and Development course at the University of Manchester; last night, at around 23:30, I had to change the lecture because of a discovery that had just been reported in Nature.

47 teeth, clearly from modern humans, have just been found in a massive cave system in southern China. They are dated to over 80,000 years ago – the date range is 80-120,000 years. There were no tools associated with the find, so the researchers asssume that people were not living in the cave system, but rather these teeth came from bodies that were dragged into the caves by large predators (hyena bones were also found). Here are the teeth – these could have been pulled from your mouth (although they probably show less decay than would be in your teeth – much less than in mine!).

Photo: S. Xing and X-J. Wu (Nature).

Why is this a big deal? Because we weren’t supposed to be there at that time. Although there was archaeological evidence of humans having left Africa at around this time – there are traces of 100,000 year old human settlements in Israel – it had been argued that the expansion never got any further, and that the key wave of migration took place around 50-60,000 years ago.

These 47 teeth show that humans successfully left Africa and colonised an important part of the planet, tens of thousands of years earlier than we thought.

This figure from Liu et al (2015) shows the location of the material in the cave system:

a, Location of the Daoxian site. Late Middle Pleistocene and Late Pleistocene localities with human remains that have been included in the morphological and/or metric comparison with Daoxian are also marked on the map. 2: Tianyuan Cave; 3: Huanglong Cave; 4: Liujiang; 5: Zhiren Cave; 6: Tubo; 7: Xujiayao; 8: Luna; 9: Chuandong; 10: Malu Cave; 11: Lijiang; 12: Longlin; 13: Huli Cave; and 14: Xintai. The map is adapted from the original Chinese map from National Administration of Surveying, Mapping and Geoinformation of China (http://219.238.166.215/mcp/index.asp). b, General view of the interior of the cave and the spatial relationship of regions IIA, IIB and IIC, with some of the layers marked. c, Plan view of the excavation area. d, Detail of the stratigraphic layers of region II of the Daoxian site. All human fossils come from layer 2.

The key question now is what happened to that first wave of migration – did they die out, or did they meet up with subsequent migrants and exchange their genes? For the moment, there is no DNA to be analysed from these teeth. Furthermore, if people went to China, why didn’t they also spread up into Europe at this earlier date? We are confident this is not the case, because all the archaeological evidence argues against it.

Maybe Western Eurasia was too full of Neanderthals at the time, and it was only later, around 50,000 years ago that it was ecologically possible for hunter-gatherers to spread northwards – this would suggest that when we did successfully colonise Western Eurasia, either the Neanderthal population had already diminished for unknown reasons, or we had decisive cultural advantages that enabled us to rapidly spread into their areas.

As I said in a previous post, if I had my time over again, this is the area of science I would study. It is simply amazing.

This infographic from Nature sums up the new way of thinking:

 

References:

Callaway (2015) ‘Teeth from China revea early human trek out of Africa’. Nature website

Liu, W. et al. ‘The earliest unequivocal modern humans in Southern China’ Nature http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature15696 (2015).

Thursday: Hili dialogue

October 15, 2015 • 6:09 am

It’s Thursday, and I’m cooling my heels in Atlanta until the AAA convention begins tomorrow. But there is much work to do and many foods to eat. Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is blowing everything off:

A: Let’s get down to work.
Hili: I’m lodging dissenting opinion.

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That sofa should also have me on it!
In Polish:
Ja: Hili, zabieramy się do roboty.
Hili: Zgłaszam votum separatum.

And as lagniappe, reader Hempenstein sent this swell cartoon by artist Leo Cullum (1942-2010), a pilot for American Airlines who aspired to draw cartoons for the New Yorker, and eventually succeeded, all while keeping his day job:

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Jail for faith-healing parents who killed infected infant through prayer treatment

October 14, 2015 • 1:45 pm

In March I wrote a piece for The New Republic, “Faith healing parents who let their child die should go to jail,” highlighting the egregious American laws that allow parents who kill or injure their child by neglecting medical care on religious grounds to be largely exempt from criminal or civil prosecution. Those exemptions, which hold in 43 states (with 39 giving criminal exemptions) are NOT allowed for parents who withhold medical care on nonreligious grounds; for that you can go to jail for child neglect, abuse, or even manslaughter. Such is the unwarranted privilege that religion gets in America: it allows you to kill your kid in the name of God, and then get off the hook.

A good bit of the last chapter of Faith versus Fact is devoted to this issue, which is associated with more harm than most people realize. Christian Scientists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and many pentecostal Christian sects abjure, in whole or in part, medical care, and that has led to the deaths of hundreds of kids. It’s completely unnecessary, it can be largely avoided with legislation and punishment, and it’s based entirely on religion. What person would not give antibiotics to an infected child unless it had something to do with religious belief? Further, it’s largely our own fault, for it’s our legislatures that make laws allowing these faith-addled parents go free, and it’s our courts and juries who slap them on the wrist even when they’re convicted. It’s time to eliminate all religious exemptions from prosecution for faith-healing parents who hurt their children.

In the last bit of my book I recount the story of a member of the Followers of Christ (FoC), a particularly nasty faith-healing sect in the Pacific Northwest that has been responsible for the death of many children. Most members are in Idaho or Oregon. In Idaho they’re not prosecuted because of exemption laws, but in Oregon, enlightened state that it is, they are. (Oregon eliminated its religious-exemption law in 2011.)

And, according to both The Daily Beast (which cites my TNR piece) and an earlier piece in OregonLive.com, two parents who were members of the FoC, Dale and Shannon Hickman, have just been sentenced to at least two years and three months in the state penitentiary for letting their premature infant son die of staphylococcus pneumonia—something that would almost certainly have been cured had they sought medical care. (The Oregon State Medical Examiner’s Office estimates a 99% chance of cure.) The Hickmans were originally prosecuted and convicted for second-degree manslaughter. The conviction was appealed, and was just upheld by State Supreme Court judge Virginia Linder. Her decision can be found here.

The defendants apparently argued that their conduct, because it was motivated by religion, exempted them from the state statutes that parents are culpable if they were aware that their conduct would harm the child.  The Hickmans’ lawyers claimed that because the parents relied on faith healing, they were not knowingly harming the child, and so should not have been convicted. Linder found that argument insupportable, as they should have known what would happen. Her decision explicitly cites the state laws for second-degree manslaughter:

“(1) Criminal homicide constitutes manslaughter in the second degree when:

*****(c) A person, with criminal negligence, causes the death of a child under 14 years of age or a dependent person, as defined in ORS 163.205, and: “

***** “(B) The person causes the death by neglect or maltreatment, as defined in ORS 163.115.”

She did not find religion a factor that reduced criminal negligence.  Curiously, though, Justice Linder noted that had the Hickmans mounted a truly religious defense, they might have either gone free or gotten a lighter sentence. From her decision:

As we stated in Brumwell and reiterate in this case, parties who present an as-applied challenge to a generally applicable and neutral law must make “an individual claim to exemption [from that law] on religious grounds.” Brumwell, 350 Or at 108 (citing Cooper, 301 Or at 368-69). Defendants have not requested a religious exemption from the second degree manslaughter statute. Instead, they have—from pretrial and consistently since—argued that, under Meltebeke, the state bears the burden of proving a culpable mental state higher than that required by ORS 163.125. This case does not present—and accordingly we decline to consider—the broader question of when a generally applicable and neutral law must yield to an individual’s claim for exemption on religious grounds.

That’s a cop-out, I think: deciding the case on the narrowest possible grounds so that future religious defenses (which, again curiously, aren’t allowed under Oregon law) might be feasible. At any rate, I think this decision should serve as a deterrent to sects like the Followers of Christ to stop withholding medical care from children either too young or too indoctrinated to make their own healthcare decisions. We simply must stop allowing religious people to kill their kids by relying on faith instead of scientific medicine.

Here’s a picture of the defendants from 2011; apparently the sentence was reduced by four years after the appeal:

faith-healing-couple-sentenced-21436f650173e023
OREGON CITY, OREGON- Oct. 31, 2011– Dale Hickman looks to deputies waiting to take him and his wife, Shannon, into custody after they were sentenced in Clackamas County Court Monday to six years in prison for the death of their son, David. The couple are both members of the Followers of Christ church. POOL PHOTO/THE OREGONIAN: RANDY RASMUSSEN

h/t: daveau

Question for readers

October 14, 2015 • 11:00 am

I’ll eventually tell you the reason I’m asking this, but right now I’m gathering reader sentiments to widen my expertise.

Here’s the issue:

Some people maintain that privatization of things like healthcare, education, and transportation (like railroads) is always better than things like government-controlled education, national rail systems, and national health systems (like the NHS in the UK and national healthcare in Sweden) because “market forces” will always do a better job than “control from above”. And indeed, at least for healthcare, in Sweden, the UK, and Poland there have sprouted parallel systems of private medicine because (presumably) the national healthcare system can’t do a good job. (Waiting lists for treatment can be very long.) I think Canada has largely avoided privatization of medicine.

Here’s my question to readers: do you agree with the privatization of healthcare, education, and transportation are almost invariably better than government-regulated or government-run entities?

What about funding for science research: should it also be taken out of the hands of the state and left to the private sector?

If you have good reasons for your opinion besides anecdotes or your gut feeling (e.g., studies of the effects of privatization), that would be appreciated.

Uppsala

October 14, 2015 • 10:15 am

. . . well, there’s one picture from Poland: the Last Meal. Malgorzata and Andrzej’s friend Monika, a gourmet cook (and student of linguistics and translation) met me in Warsaw before taking me to the airport hotel, and we went to a lovely restaurant for lunch. I had a delicious breast of duck (rare, as it SHOULD BE) with a berry/wine reduction, berries, and mashed potatoes. The presentation was lovely:

Duck breast

Then on to Uppsala University, the oldest university in all of Scandinavia (founded 1477). It has, I was told, about 45,000 students and is one of the best schools in Europe, especially for biology. In fact, I can’t think of another university in Europe with as large and diverse a group of researchers on evolution and ecology as Uppsala. And, lucky for me, many of them are working on speciation, so I had some lively chats with professors, postdocs, and grad students.

Many of the old buildings still remain in the old town of Uppsala, near the cathedral. This is University Hall, described on its page as “university main building”,  “built in the 1880s and today. . . used for lectures, conferences, concerts and academic festivities.”

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This old 17th-century building below is crowned by the second oldest “anatomical theater” in Europe (Padua is the oldest, from 1594, and I’ve visited that one). These theaters were used or dissection and occasional operations, and many remain in original condition. The plan is the same in most old schools in Europe: a circular space with a central table where the dissections/operations were performed, surrounded by rising tiers of seats for students.

Behind the building you can see the Cathedral, where Linnaeus is buried. It was closed the day I walked around, but I saw his tombstore in the cathedral floor on a previous visit to Uppsala.

Go peruse the page on these theaters in Atlas Obscura to see their historical importance (and beauty). The two pictures below the building, showing the interior of Uppsala’s theater, are from the AO page (I didn’t see it myself).

Church, tjeater

The Atlas Obscura describes the Uppsala theater like this:

Located in what’s now the Gustavianum Museum in Uppsala, Sweden, is the world’s second oldest operating theater. It was constructed in the mid-17th century as part of Uppsala University. Its muted-hued viewing tiers descend down to an octagon operating area.

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Operations would of course have been performed without anesthetic, making their viewing a grueling experience:
image

Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778; also called Carl Linné) is of course famous as the Swedish naturalist/biologist who introduced the binomial system of animal and plant classification. With the publication of Systema Naturae (1735), he founded the modern science of taxonomy. He was a student at Uppsala and later returned to become a professor. He had a home in town (photo below) and one in the country where he spent his summers. We ate dinner one night right across the street from town house, which had extensive gardens (HUGE!) where he grew his plants for instructional purposes.  Linnaeus later became rector of Uppsala University, and delighted in teaching students. I was told the story below by my host, and, sure enough, the Telegraph verified it:

As a champion of nature as popular entertainment, Linnaeus stood father to a pastime of which his country has never tired. On Wednesdays and Saturdays, he used to escort 200 volunteers on expeditions to record the plants and animals around 18th-century Uppsala.

They took music and picnics; they returned with flowers in their hair, waking the citizenry with drums and trumpets. These were triumphal marches; nature had yielded up more of her secrets.

What larks; what lust for learning; what a legacy for an old studentska of a city, still fresh and green of aspect but with a feisty intellectual heart.

Imagine coming back from a field expedition with drums beating and trumpets blaring! Now that’s a love of nature!

innaeus house

Uppsala, even the central part, contains lovely private homes in sylvan settings. Here are two I photographed:

House 1

House 2

For lunch before my talk, I ate with Jochen Wolf’s group: about 12 students and postdocs from about 10 different countries (EU fellowships allow an amazing and enriching diversity of students: at my table there were students from Colombia, Finland, Germany, England, and Taiwan). We ate at a fancy hotel dining room (you can’t fault the Swedes for their hospitality!), beginning with the main course: a classic Swedish dish of barely-warmed salmon in a mustard and dill sauce with boiled potatoes and vegetables. On the buffet there were about seven different kinds of salads and delicious Swedish bread:

Salmon

Reader Laura Parducci from the Department of Ecology and Genetics, who works on plant evolution, sent this photo, the only one in existence of my talk in Uppsala. You can see the people lining the walls; I was gratified that the room was filled to overflowing (especially in a group as renowned as that in Uppsala). Laura’s caption:

I send you a nice photo of you (with no cats unfortunately) taken during your recent talk in Uppsala.

Jerry lecturing

They put me up at the Academihotellet, just a stone’s throw from the Cathedral. It was a simple but homey place, and excelled in its breakfasts (there was also a free cappuccino/latte/espresso machine going all day, with cookies). Breakfast consisted of a variety of cold meats and cheeses, freshly baked bread (still warm!), hard- and soft-boiled eggs, juices, yogurt, and Swedish pancakes with a variety of toppings. The hard-core Swedish stuff:

Breakfast 1

And the toppings for Swedish pancakes and/or yogurt: fresh lingonberries and blackcurrents, nuts, raisins, preserves, Nutella, fresh fruit, honey, and all manner of stuff. I opted every day for a soft-boiled egg and Swedish pancakes with lingonberries: another classic dish.

Breakfast 2

What a fine breakfast! (I washed it down with two cappuccinos.)

My breakfast

I give my thanks to the good folk of Uppsala University for inviting me to give the Svedberg Lecture, and especially to my genial host, Jochen Wolf, for making all the onerous arrangements and taking time to escort me around.

Jesus ‘n’ Mo ‘n’ Xenu

October 14, 2015 • 8:45 am

Today the Jesus and Mo artist has reprinted a cartoon from 2008 (I didn’t know it had been going that long), with a link to Tom Cruises’s Scientology babble that is amazingly stupid. First the cartoon:

2015-10-14

It’s odd that Mo shows such self-awareness, or maybe he’s just completely, ironically oblivious. At any rate, below is the very famous Tom Cruise rant on Scientology that the artists links to. For a long time it was removed from YouTube under threat by the Church of Scientology (why on earth would they want such a video extolling their faith removed?), but is now back up. If you haven’t seen it, do watch it in its entirety. It shows the lunacy of not only the faith (really, no crazier than most other faiths), but of Cruise himself, whose crazy eyes illuminate his crazy words.

What arrogance! If you know the Scientology lingo, you’ll recognize words like “orgs”, “KSW” (“keep Scientology working”), Dave Miscavage (the off-the-rails head of the Church), “SP” (“suppressive person”: a church enemy), “tech” (the Church’s method of training its brainwashed adherents), and so on.

Readers’ wildlife photos

October 14, 2015 • 7:30 am

Reader Mark Sturtevant, whose arthropod photos always shine, sent three pictures with extensive biological detail THAT YOU WILL READ. First, remember that aphids are in the insect order Hemiptera, or “true bugs”; Greg posted yesterday about a hemipteran imported with some furniture from Europe. By now, from just looking at “Readers’ Wildlife,” you should have learned at least ten orders of insects (Hemiptera, Diptera, Hymenoptera, Coleoptera, Lepidoptera, Orthoptera, etc.  Mark’s notes are indented:

I have a lot of pictures and interesting tales from one fabulous summer of macrophotography. Enough that I can do themes, so today the theme is aphids (part I).

I knew that aphids were rather interesting little plant suckers with an odd life cycle and all, but once I starting photographing them and looking up info to identify species, I began to stumble upon some very bizarre “aphid phacts”. So here is what I know so far. First, many species of aphids are all females during much of the summer, and these give live birth of young that are made asexually. Winged females begin to appear as things begin to get crowded, as seen here in this colony of red aphids (possibly Uroleucon sp.) that were on on sunflower. The winged aphid in this group is filled with pale blobs, and according to info that I found these are the developing babies that are visible through her transparent skin. Among my many goals in macrophotography is to try to get highly magnified pictures of such aphids to see if I can make out the eyes and legs of the babies inside, and to photograph a live birth.

1AphidPregnant

Next is a group of yellow aphids (I suspect Aphis nerii) on milkweed. Different aphid species tend to have one bright color or another. It is now known that the source of these colors are from carotenoids that they make, which is a photosynthetic pigment normally found in plants. It turns out that aphids have genes for making carotenoids, and they possibly got the genes from horizontal gene transfer from their plant hosts. The function of the pigments in aphids is not known, but one speculation is they are for camouflage (some of their predators cannot see the colors that they employ). Another speculation is that the pigments help aphids make more ATP. This is the role of carotenoids in plants, since there they add to the light reactions of photosynthesis and a product from the light reactions is ATP (carbohydrates are made in a separate, coupled reaction). Although this is certainly what I would call an extraordinary claim, there is circumstantial (but not ‘extraordinary’) evidence for light reactions in these insects  because aphids with carotenoids make more ATP than those that lack it, and more ATP is made when pigmented aphids are exposed to light. Here is an article about this if anyone is interested.

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Finally, there are numerous insects that associate with aphids. They of course include friends and foes, a subject of another set of pictures that I would like to send one day, but other aphid groupies are just there for the sugary plant sap that aphids leave behind once they move on. That is probably the story with this wasp feeding on the aphid drippings on milkweed. I thought this wasp would be a species of yellow jacket, but it turns out that it is the European paper wasp (Polistes dominula) which has been introduced to the U.S. and is now greatly expanding its range here.

The reason for all the aphid drippings of course is that aphids live on a sugary diet of plant sap, and they need to expel excess water from this diet. This brings me to my final aphid phun phact which is that they have cells packed with bacteria that produce amino acids from this restricted diet. The aphids of course benefit from these bacterial endosymbionts.

3aphid paperwasp

And some lagniappe from reader darrelle—a lovely bird:

I was cleaning up my Google+ picture folder when I came across this picture of a Tricolored Heron, Egretta tricolor, that caught my eye so I thought I’d send it to you. I like the lighting and the droplets of water thrown off by the feet. The picture was taken about a year ago by my daughter, Brianna, early one morning while we were exploring a wild life reserve that is part of the Indian River Lagoon. The camera was a Nikon D3200 with a Nikkor 55-200 mm zoom lens.

Click to enlarge; the full detail is best shown when it’s bigger:

Darryl Ernst