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.
When I wrote my post on Sept. 24 dissecting Ben Carson’s ignorance of cosmology and evolution, I realized at the end that the people who would read here it already agreed with me, and that I had spent over two hours basically entertaining myself. Still, at least the problems with his creationist views of the cosmos and evolution were on the record somewhere.
Well, Lawrence Krauss has put them on the record in a much bigger venue, the New Yorker. If you want to see a small but loud fish blasted to bits in a barrel, read Krauss’s piece “Ben Carson’s scientific ignorance.” Krauss concentrates more on Carson’s physics arguments—including his mushbrained claims about entropy—than on evolution, but that’s okay, as I’ve done the evolution work.
Here’s one excerpt from Krauss’s takedown:
Last week, when he was confronted, during a speech at Cedarville University, about his failure to understand basic and fundamental scientific concepts, Carson responded, “I’m not going to denigrate you because of your faith, and you shouldn’t denigrate me for mine.” What Carson doesn’t seem to recognize is that there is a fundamental difference between facts and faith. An inability to separate religious beliefs from an assessment of physical reality runs counter to the very basis of our society—the separation of church and state.
Carson continues to insist, as do many religionists, that science, like religion, is simply a form of faith. I’ve picked the meat off that canard before, both in Slate and in Faith versus Fact, and we needn’t belabor it here. What’s funny about that argument is that it boils down to this claim by believers: “See! Science is just as bad as religion!” If they truly were equivalent, theology would have made as much progress in understanding God as science has in understanding the universe. But the score is zero for the former and a gazillion for the latter.
Krauss is probably preaching to the choir as much as I did, for in the end there are few creationists who read The New Yorker, and virtually no supporters of Carson, but it’s still good to get the scientific objections on the record. Krauss concludes, as do most rationalists, that having a man like Carson in the White House is unthinkable:
While many may debate whether his lack of public-service experience disqualifies him from serious consideration in this race, Carson’s ideas about religion, science, and public office, as revealed in the past week, suggest that there are far deeper reasons to be concerned about his candidacy for the highest office in the land.
But of course that goes for nearly every Republican candidate, for as far as I know there is no GOP candidate who openly endorses the truth of evolution.
In a previous post here at WEIT, I’d reported on some toads and a painted turtle that I’d rescued from stair and window wells, and then released back into the wild last spring. I’d mentioned at the time that I periodically check these places, especially a deep (ca. 20 feet down) window well on the west side of the building my office is in, because it faces a pond and woods, and animals coming out of the woods regularly fall down into it. So at the beginning of the semester in early September, I took my vertebrate zoology class out during our first lab period, and we investigated the window well. There was a pretty good ‘crop’ this fall– eleven American toads (Bufo americanus), and 23 green frogs (Rana clamitans).
American toads just outside Greenquist Woods, Kenosha, Wisconsin, 17.ix.2015. There are clearly six of them, the same ones as in “Spot the toads“.
The toads fell into two size classes: medium (in picture above), about 55 mm snout-vent length, and small, about 40 mm. The green frogs were all about the same size– 35 mm. These latter were probably all a single age class, having metamorphosed from tadpoles earlier in the summer, and then hitting the building and falling in the window well as they began to disperse away from their natal pond. Bullfrogs (Rana catesbeiana) are also common in the pond, but we’ve never found them in the window well– they must have different dispersal behavior.
Chris Noto helps to release American toads in Greenquist Woods, 17.ix.2015.
Frogs and toads are collectively known as anurans— it means “not having a tail”– and adult frogs and toads do, of course, lack tails. The anurans we rescued from the window well had been there varying lengths of time, but most were in at least decent shape, though some were thin and dehydrated. We kept them in the lab for a couple of weeks, feeding them and rehydrating them. We then released them on two warm days just as autumn was about to begin. My colleague Chris Noto was teaching a lab on a floor looking out over the woods, and he saw me encumbered with toads as I attempted to take their pictures and carry them back out to the woods. He came down and helped with the pictures and the release (which were featured in two “Spot the __” posts, on frogs and toads).
Small American toad, about to be released into Greenquist Woods, 17.ix.2015.
The green frogs were released a few days later.
Green frogs anxiously await their transfer to the pond, 20.ix.2015.One last picture.Well, maybe just one more.And then it’s time to re-enter the pond.Green frogs queue up to enter Greenquist Pond, 20.ix.2015.
[JAC: a video of the release. I have to commend Greg for both taking the time to rescue these frogs and also calling them to our attention. Frogs are not only underappreciated animals, but are harbingers of human damage to the environment, climatic and otherwise. And I’ve always said that if frogs hadn’t evolved, we simply wouldn’t be able to imagine them!]
There are at least a dozen or more different sorts of anurans around the world that are worthy of their own vernacular name, but because only two sorts occur in England, we are stuck with calling them all either “frog” or “toad” in English. The American toad and the green frog do, however, correspond to the two sorts found in England (what are sometimes called the “true toads” and the “true frogs”, respectively).
Anurans are amphibians, and like most amphibians, have a complex life cycle. The word “amphibian” alludes to this– it means “both lives”, because a typical amphibian lives both on the land and in the water. Reptiles and their descendants (the amniotes, including birds and mammals), do not have this dual life cycle. One of the former candidates for the title of “first reptile” was the 270 million year old Seymouria, which has reptile-like features; but when it was found that its close relatives had aquatic larvae with gills, it was clear they were not reptiles, but rather led the “both lives” of an amphibian.
“Both lives” does not seem to adequately summarize the life of a typical amphibian, such as the American toad. They begin life as eggs in water, hatch out as tailed, gilled, tadpoles, that then swim about, eventually losing their tails and gills and sprouting legs to transform into toadlets, which then move onto land. After sexually maturing, they return to the pond each spring, to resume an amphibious existence, there to mate and reproduce. The adults then leave the pond for the summer to live wholly on land, while their eggs begin the complex cycling again. To paraphrase The Who, “Amphibians? They’re bleeding Quadrophibians.”
Psychology Today sometimes publishes some pretty wonky stuff, but this article, about the emotional resilience of American college students—or rather its decline—rings true from the kind of incidents (granted, anecdotes) documented on this site. Further, its author, Peter Gray, a psychologist at Boston University and expert in educational psychology, has impeccable credentials.
In his piece, “Declining student resilience: a serious problem for colleges,” Gray first documents the growing problem of the emotional fragility of students, and, at the end, suggests a cause. As I said, I’m not aware of any concerted psychological studies of students’ emotional states, although Gray implies that there’s documentation about growing problems with student mental health. Nevertheless, it’s pretty clear that students seem increasingly more upset by things that challenge them, and are demanding accommodation, whether that accommodation involves getting higher grades or suppressing disturbing ideas. I’ve written a lot about “trigger warnings”, “safe spaces,” and student protests against what’s call “hate speech”: these are phenomena of the last decade or so, and anyone who’s been teaching for a long time recognizes that. But Gray documents it with more examples:
A year ago I received an invitation from the head of Counseling Services at a major university to join faculty and administrators for discussions about how to deal with the decline in resilienceamong students. At the first meeting, we learned that emergency calls to Counseling had more than doubled over the past five years. Students are increasingly seeking help for, and apparently having emotional crises over, problems of everyday life. Recent examples mentioned included a student who felt traumatized because her roommate had called her a “bitch” and two students who had sought counseling because they had seen a mouse in their off-campus apartment. The latter two also called the police, who kindly arrived and set a mousetrap for them.
Faculty at the meetings noted that students’ emotional fragility has become a serious problem when in comes to grading. Some said they had grown afraid to give low grades for poor performance, because of the subsequent emotional crises they would have to deal with in their offices. Many students, they said, now view a C, or sometimes even a B, as failure, and they interpret such “failure” as the end of the world. Faculty also noted an increased tendency for students to blame them (the faculty) for low grades—they weren’t explicit enough in telling the students just what the test would cover or just what would distinguish a good paper from a bad one. They described an increased tendency to see a poor grade as reason to complain rather than as reason to study more, or more effectively. Much of the discussions had to do with the amount of handholding faculty should do versus the degree to which the response should be something like, “Buck up, this is college.” Does the first response simply play into and perpetuate students’ neediness and unwillingness to take responsibility? Does the second response create the possibility of serious emotional breakdown, or, who knows, maybe even suicide?
The dilemma of the last two sentences is something I’ve faced. My first response, which of course is based on my own experience in college, is to tell the students to “tough it out.” But that’s uncharitable, for we receive these students with their emotionality already formed by what happened to them before college (see below). I suggest one solution below, but that’s only a quick fix to a problem that runs deeper.
That head of counseling mentioned by Gray reports that this trend appears to be nationwide, accompanied by a growing number of reports of mental health issues among students. He added, “The lack of resilience is interfering with the academic mission of the University and is thwarting the emotional and personal development of students.” And that is indeed the case.
What is going on here, and what do we do about it? One solution, I think, is to train students not only in “sensitivity” to diverse viewpoints when they enter college, but also to train them in listening to differing opinions without taking offense. That, to me, seems an eminently viable tactic: let incoming students read, for instance, the University of Chicago’s “free expression” standards, and then let them discuss them. We must somehow teach students why universities should be places where all viewpoints should be aired, and that viewpoints that seem offensive or incorrect can be countered with other speech.
Here’s Geoff Stone, the law professor at the U of C and chair of the committee that produced our standards:
But this alone won’t solve the problem, for students arrive at the University already hypersensitive and dependent:
We have raised a generation of young people who have not been given the opportunity to learn how to solve their own problems. They have not been given the opportunity to get into trouble and find their own way out, to experience failure and realize they can survive it, to be called bad names by others and learn how to respond without adult intervention. So now, here’s what we have. Young people,18 years and older, going to college still unable or unwilling to take responsibility for themselves, still feeling that if a problem arises they need an adult to solve it.
Gray suggests that the cause of this problem is “helicopter parenting”: the tendency of parents to hover about their children, protecting them from all possible ills, dangers, and offenses. Those of us of a certain age know this: when I was a kid of 10 or so, I was allowed to walk to school on my own and, after school, ride my bike over to my friends’ houses, where we’d then take off in juvenile packs to explore our surroundings. There was no adult supervision save the order that we be home by dinner. That not only doesn’t happen any more, but parents who permit such roaming can (and have been) arrested.
Gray adds, though, that “helicopter parenting” reflects of other social trends, including “the continuous exhortations from ‘experts’ about the dangers of letting kids be, victims of the increased power of the school system and the schooling mentality that says kids develop best when carefully guided and supervised by adults, and victims of increased legal and social sanctions for allowing kids into public spaces without adult accompaniment.”
Yes, but why now? If Gray is right, what has happened in society to create people’s need to protect children from everything?
This morning, Matthew Cobb sent me the needle’s-eye photo below, and then reader Dom conveniently sent the article from which it was taken: a new paper in ZooKeys by Barna Páll-Gergely et al. (reference below) describing what are among the smallest snails in the world. And when I say “small,” I mean TINY!
The group of researchers described seven new species of snails recently collected in Guangxi Province, China. One of them, Angustopila dominikae (photo below), has a shell height of about 0.9 millimeters, and a width of about 0.8 mm, with an aperture about 0.3 mm across. As the authors note, these are close to the smallest land snails ever found, but don’t quite hold the record:
These data suggest that Angustopilasubelevata sp. n. and A.dominikae sp. n. are amongst the smallest land snails ever reported if the largest measurement of the shell is considered. If however, shell volume is calculated according toMcCain and Nekola (2008) and Nekola (2014), there are even tinier land snails (e.g.Punctidae spp) occupying the lowest rung of the volume/size scale.
Here’s the holotype (the specimen used to name the species, and which will serve as its representative in a museum) of A. dominikae:
Holotype of Angustopila dominikae Páll-Gergely & Hunyadi, sp. n. (HNHM 99435). All images: B. Páll-Gergely.
Well, the key gives an idea of how small it is, but the picture below really tells the tale. Remember, that’s an adult snail! A camel might not fit through the eye of a needle, but these snails can; ergo they can go to Heaven.
The holotype of Angustopila dominikae sp. n. in the eye of a sewing needle to picture its extraordinary small size. Photo: B. Páll-Gergely and N. Szpisjak.
But these aren’t close to the smallest of all snails: that record goes to marine snails less than half the size of the one shown above:
. . . The smallest snails are, however, certainly marine species. The smallest recorded gastropod seems to be Ammoniceraminortalis Rolán, 1992, ranging in size from 0.32 to 0.46 mm.
You can find a paper on this species, found in Cuba, Florida and the Caribbean, here. And here’s a photo with scale:
Lots of folks have gone gaga about the discovery of salty water on the surface of Mars, and the excitement centers on one thing: the possibility that there could be life there. Well, we can’t rule out life yet, but the four Mars Rovers haven’t found any. What they have found are organic chemicals on the planet and sedimentary rocks with features resembling those formed by microbes on Earth, like stromatolites, stony structures built by cyanobacteria and—with some dated about 3.5-3.8 billion years old—the oldest definitive evidence of life on Earth. But what we see on Mars are only sort-of-similar rock structures; so far there has been nothing remotely resembling strong evidence of life (either past or present) on the Red Planet.
In a really nice post at the Planetary Society website, senior editor and “planetary evangelist” Emily Lackdawalla assesses the new evidence of briny water on Mars, and how it relates to the Big Question.
First, some photographic evidence for liquid water, with the caption:
Recurring slope lineae are narrow (0.5-5 m wide), relatively dark-toned features that form on steep (25-40˚), southern-hemisphere slopes, and that appear in early spring, grow longer in the downslope direction during spring and summer, and fade during autumn and winter.
The “linae” are the dark streaks that look like broomstraws; you can see them better in the black and white photos below.
Photo: NASA / JPL / UA / Emily Lakdawalla
Here are some of the seasonal changes that suggest moving water, as the “linea” (putative water channels) get longer over a season as they “flow” downhill toward the left (length of lines increases by the length of the white overlays). As noted below, these are probably growing channels of damp soil caused by moving water, rather than water rivulets themselves:
Photo: NASA / JPL / UA / Joe Levy
Here’s some of Lackdawalla’s summary, taken directly from her text (my emphasis):
Past work on slope lineae, with the HiRISE camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, showed that they form in warm seasons when temperatures reach 250-300 kelvin [JAC: on Earth pure ice melts above 273 kelvin, or 0°C], which strongly suggested that a volatile species like water was responsible.
The newly published work involves data from the CRISM spectrometer on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and shows spectral evidence for hydrated salts (minerals containing molecular water in their structures) during the times when the slope lineae recur.
The best mineral matches to the spectral data are magnesium perchlorate, magnesium chlorate, and sodium perchlorate.
The presence of perchlorate salts could lower the melting temperature of water at Martian conditions by 40 kelvins, making it much easier for water to melt.
This work is considered very strong evidence that at widespread locations on present-day Mars, conditions sometimes arise for brief flows of briny liquid water — probably not rivulets, just spreading wetness in the soil.
The widely varying locations and geologic settings where slope lineae have been observed to form and recur make it difficult to identify a single mechanism for replenishing liquid water to drive the recurrent activity.
The science team including Ojha and Alfred McEwen favor deliquescence as the source: perchlorate salts adsorb water vapor from the atmosphere until enough water is available to form a liquid and dissolve the salts.
That’s all pretty clear, but what does it mean for the possibility of life? Lackdawalla doesn’t see these seasonal rivulets as propitious, but perhaps there’s life elsewhere on Mars:
Personally, I don’t think extant life on Mars is any more likely because of today’s announcement than it was before. An incredibly salty, corrosive, transient water environment is not a very good place to look for life. I think a much more habitable environment is available in the thin films of water that Phoenix observed in the soil at its near-polar landing site. A less-accessible, but also less-radiation-fried and more-continuously-habitable place would be deep underground, where Mars’ internal heat could keep groundwater liquid for very long periods of time.
Lackdawalla points out one concern that I hadn’t absorbed, also discussed by Lee Billings in a post at Scientific American: how can we find out whether there’s life on Mars if there’s a chance that, by visiting the planet, we ourselves could infect it? As Billings notes, spacecraft are scrupulously sterilized before launch, but that doesn’t solve the problem:
Microbes that stubbornly refuse to die nonetheless turn up with regularity in NASA’s supposedly sterile clean rooms for preparing interplanetary spacecraft. Apollo astronauts even found bacteria on the moon that had survived an almost total vacuum inside the robotic Surveyor 3 lander that had touched down more than two and a half years earlier. If terrestrial microbes could live in places like that, why not in some of the more habitable parts of Mars?
The issue becomes worse if humans, who are of course ridden with microbes, are sent to the planet, something that Lackdawalla, but not I, see as inevitable.
I’m not sure how serious this problem is, for, after all, all life on Earth shares certain features implying descent from a common ancestor. That includes the similarity of the genetic code, the use of L-amino acids, and the similarity of gene sequences among diverse species. Presumably if we found Earth-derived microbes on Mars, their DNA—and again, Mars-evolved life probably wouldn’t even contain DNA as we know it—would tell us. I suppose a greater problem is if Earth-derived life were to extirpateor outcompete Martian life, rendering us unable to detect the latter, but that seems unlikely as well. Martian life would probably be competitively superior to that from Earth, though we don’t know for sure (think of all the island species on our planet wiped out by colonizers!).
To cover my tuchus, let me add that it’s not impossible that life on Earth could have descended from life that evolved on Mars, or vice versa. In that case we’d see fundamental similarities among the genomes of species upon each planet, but big disparities between the heredity material of organisms from the two planets, reflecting their independent evolution since the colonization event.
Finally, Google has honored the finding in today’s Google Doodle:
Today we have the birds and the bees. First, reader Mark Sturtevant sent some hymenopterans—bees in the family Halictidae, sometimes called “sweat bees.” His notes are indented:
The halictid bees would often go spelunking into the trumpet vine flowers that cover one end of our house. When I would loom in to take a picture, for some reason they would often stop and just stare at me for up to several minutes. I would always lose these stare-down contests since they seemed willing to just sit there forever. I wonder if they were just admiring their reflection in the lens.
Some halictid bees form nests in wood burrows. I found one digging its nest in a nearby forest.
I can usually at least roughly identify an insect to family, but sometimes I am stumped for a time at even the insect order. In our garden I kept seeing these largish insects bossily zooming around our garden, concentrating especially on a patch of lambs ears. They would often chase each other, and they would also chase other species of bees which led me to wonder if these were some kind of bee fly (a fly that parasitizes insects, including bees). They could also hover in place and turn with amazing precision. They showed very little interest in the flowers, so definitely un-bee-like since bees love those flowers. Only after I captured a few (which was noteasy) did I discover that they were bees. They were damn difficult to photograph in the garden since they hardly ever landed and were always very wary of me. I later managed to get this not-so-good picture from a distance. I think this captures the personality that they seemed to project – not very friendly, and wound up very tight.
And the birds from reader Colin Franks (Facebook page here, please “like” if you want to follow it, photography website here, and and on Instagram under the name colinfranksphotography):
It’s Tuesday, and there’s big news tomorrow (well, big for yours truly, not the planet as a whole). Meanwhile, life goes on in Dobrzyn, and, after much tutelage, Hili seems to have finally grasped the concept of naturalism, although it’s not clear exactly what she’s sniffing. (Nor does it much matter, since anything she’s sniffing must ahve evolved.)
A: What are you looking at?
Hili: I’m looking at how all this just has evolved by itself.
In Polish:
Ja: Czemu się tak przyglądasz?
Hili: Patrzę jak to wszystko sobie wyewoluowało.
And reader Ken sent a photo of “Cat in a Hat”—his cat:
I wanted to share this pic I took of our cat, Zizou. My wife placed this hat on his head for a laugh, and surprisingly Zizou sat long enough for me to snap a couple of shots. His demeanor typically is one of intolerance toward this sort of shenanigan, but on this day he treated us with just enough forbearance for us to enjoy a chuckle at his expense. Don’t worry, he was rewarded with his favorite kitty snacks immediately afterward.
Submitted for your approval: the top 20 Twi**er accounts with the most followers (go here for the top 100). I don’t think of myself as an intellectual snob, but I’m still disturbed by the list. With the exception of Barack Obama, YouTube, and CNN (how did that get on there?), all are pop-rock stars, with the rest comprising one sports star (Ronaldo) and one talentless hack (Kim Kardashian). What a world! What a world!
