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.
Recently we had a story which almost certainly wasn’t about a Sciuridaen nut thief. This time round it appears the feathery-tailed rodent actually is a miscreant. Well, maybe.
Squirrel breaks into pub, gets drunk and causes hundreds of pounds worth of damage.
When Sam Boulter, the secretary of Honeybourne Railway Club, came in the next morning, he thought that there had been a burglary and was about to call the cops, when he discovered the real culprit.
The floor was covered in broken bottles of beer, and he stated that the place had been “totally ransacked”, but when a squirrel staggered out from behind a box of crisps, he realised who was the guilty party.
I’m beginning to think we need to re-evaluate our trusting relationship with squirrels.
I apologize for two open threads in two days, Jerry’s back on the road and I had Stuff & Things to do today.
Here’s another question that Jerry posed for us to discuss.
If you could change one thing in your society that would lessen religiosity or cause it to gradually disappear*, what would it be?
Again, this very much depends on the country or state in which you live, given the wide variety of laws and the state of individual liberty there.
Here in Ireland, I think the thing that most needs to be changed to undermine an already rapidly dwindling interest in religion is the separation of Church and State in schools across the country.
The vast majority of the primary schools in the Republic of Ireland (approximately 3,300) are church controlled, over 90% by the Catholic church and about 6% by Protestant churches. The Irish State provides for education through the Department of Education and Skills and nearly all schools are publicly funded (teachers salaries, school operating costs, school transport, school repairs and building) but essentially privately controlled. The Irish Catholic Bishops say that “Catholic schools seek to reflect a distinctive vision of life and a corresponding philosophy of education, based on the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”
Essentially, nearly all schools in Ireland are paid for by the State, and yet are freely used by the Catholic Church as its main resource for evangelizing and instructing students in its faith and preparing them for Catholic ritual ceremonies during the school day.
If schools followed a multi-denominational model (at worst) or a secular model (preferably) and kept faith instruction as a voluntary after-hours activity, then I suspect that interest in religion would wane even further.
We have two more Trumped cats for your delectation. If you still are planning to send in your Trumped felid, get it in to us soon. When the cats find out what is really going on, there will be retribution.
Ben Goren sends us one of Baihu saying:
Not sure if this counts, but….
And here’s one from Ann Braden who writes:
Here is Fletcher, “trumped” with locally sourced Alaskan Malamute fur donated by his canine bestie, Finnegan.
It’s time to take a look at some of the weirder searches that brought people to this website. As always, we can expect some of humanity’s baser proclivities to shine. In fact, it seems to have taken a distinctly scatological turn this month.
theories that disprove evolution – none, zip, nada. There are hypotheses that could disprove evolution if there was any evidence for them, but so far they have turned up empty.
penis – in endless and varied iterations, as always, including jerry seinfeld penis size. That’s rather personal and probably none of your business. Here, go read some science.
prager university full of shit – I hope not, sounds like a serious plumbing issue to me.
man has sex with parrot – not likely, but you can’t put anything past humans. Poor parrot. Unless you mean parrot has sex with man, which has happened. It was also painful, don’t try this at home kids.
screaming tennis players,why do they let maria sharapova scream in her tennis match? – ah, it was Wimbledon season again, wasn’t it? Yes, they are damned annoying. Just imagine the squawks and grunts and howls to be the result of really bad hemorrhoids and you will find the whole experience a lot more entertaining.
is the supernatural scientifically possible? No, because then it would be natural, not supernatural by definition.
is she male produce naturally? – I’m not sure exactly what you’re looking for but you might try this link.
my boyfriend says he cums in my mouth but i don’t taste or feel anything. is this possible? – Seriously TMI. It’s not impossible but he should probably see a GP about it.
Okay, and now I am going to go and put my brain into bleach for a bit. Never change, humanity.
WEIT regular Mark Sturtevant has sent us a veritable seminar on flies and spiders. He writes:
Stilt legged fly (possibly Rainieria antennaepes). I encountered this little character strutting back and forth on some forest leaves, persistently waving its whitened front legs before it. This fly was so intent on its display that it would not be distracted from it, even after I bumped its leaf trying to hunker down on the forest floor to take pictures. It was for this reason that I thought at first that this was a male ‘strutting its stuff’ to entice a female, but I have since learned that it was likely mimicking various species of ichneumon wasps which wave whitened antennae. An example of the kind of model is here: http://bugguide.net/node/view/997201/bgimage
In point of fact, this fly was a female (I could tell from other pictures), and both males and females spend a lot of time marching around waving their tiny white feet to pretend they are wasps. But sex is never far from the minds of an insect, and this female was possibly also advertising for a conjugal visit from a male. In the animal kingdom it is generally the males that have to dance and carry on for mating because females choose their males and males must vie to be chosen. This makes sense because usually it is the females that bear the higher reproductive costs. But in some animals the costs are more balanced or even reversed. In stilt legged flies both sexes have high reproductive costs, and so here we have a female who might be trying to get the attention of any passing males. This is all explained in the following short video about a tropical species of stilt legged fly, and the readers can sort out from this why mating is costly for males (it is kind of gross). I do recommend that people watch this video. Although it does suffer a bit from video quality, it is exceptionally charming in how it patiently describes the rather unusual (and kind of funny) sex lives of these little insects.
I mentioned in my previous posting that robber flies have a special talent. It is said that the preying mantis is the only insect that can turn its head, but of course that is not true. Other insects can turn their head a little, but I learned this summer that robber flies can turn their heads a lot. These pictures were taken with the wrong kind of lens, but they do show a robber fly (Laphria grossa) looking forward and then up. It also looked several times over its left and right shoulders (!) but I failed to get pictures of that. Robber flies are fearsome predators with excellent vision, and so I think that their ability to swivel their heads around like this makes it even more terrifying to be an insect.
The tiny basilica spider (Mecynogea lemniscata) is about the size of a fruit fly. It builds a dome web close to the ground, and they are very common around here. The first picture shows a female and slightly smaller male.
The next pictures show them mating. Male spiders store their sperm in their pedipalps, which are the swollen ‘boxing gloves’ on the head. The two loaded pedipalps are used to separately enseminate the two reproductive openings on the female, located near the base of her abomen. Here you can see the very moment when the male is first inflating the left pedipalp to pump in sperm, and then the right pedipalp is inflated to do the same.
Good morning! It’s Friday! Even here in Ireland the clouds have parted (for now) and the sun is shining (for now) and I’m taking things slowly after spending the evening frolicking with the local Skeptics group who actually have their own castle/observatory instead of just a pub.
Today is the day when the Swedish inventor of the three-point seatbelt Nils Bohlin was born in 1920, TWA Flight 800 exploded over Long Island in 1996 and in 1955 Disneyland opened its doors. Oh, and Jimi Hendrix refused to be the opening act for The Monkees in 1967. I’m not surprised, that was a really weird combination which would probably have caused a black hole to form spontaneously, so Hendrix probably saved the world there.
Over in Poland, Hili’s mind is on loftier things.
Hili: How do I get a grant?
A: What for?
Hili: For a study of the mouse population in the orchard.
In Polish:
Hili: Jak zdobyć grant?
Ja: Na co?
Hili: Na badania populacji myszy w sadzie.
David Raup, one of the leading figures in the return of paleontology to the “high table” of evolutionary biology in the late 20th century, died this past Thursday, July 9, at the age of 82. Raup attended the University of Chicago as an undergraduate, got his doctorate at Harvard, and was associated most prominently first with the University of Rochester, and then again the University of Chicago, from which he retired in 1995.
David M. Raup (1933-2015) in 1981.
Beginning in the 1970s, paleontology was rejuvenated by a renewed interest in what the fossil record shows about both the broad scale patterns of changes in biodiversity through time, and the details of how particular lineages change through time. Raup was one of the most influential figures in this recrudescence, along with his colleagues Stephen Jay Gould, Tom Schopf, and Jack Sepkoski. The great British geneticist John Maynard Smith, said in 1984 of this flowering of paleontology, “The paleontologists have been too long missing from the high table. Welcome back.”
Raup’s most distinguished contributions came in two areas, both marked by a sophisticated, quantitative, approach. In the first, he made great strides in the area of theoretical morphology, developing mathematical descriptions of the possible shapes of mollusk shells, and then asking which parts of the morphological space defined by these equations are occupied, which are not occupied, and why. In a popular exposition based on Raup’s work, Richard Dawkins called this morphological space “The Museum of All Shells”. The mathematical description of shells that don’t exist (i.e. those that are in the parts of the morphological space not occupied) might seem odd or unnecessary, but understanding the possibilities of morphological transformation is key to understanding what it is that constrains, and what it is that enables or directs, evolutionary change. As A.S. Eddington put it, “We need scarcely add that the contemplation in natural science of a wider domain than the actual leads to a far better understanding of the actual.”
Raup’s (1966) morphological space– “The Museum of All Shells”.
In the second, and more extensive, area of his distinguished contributions, Raup looked at levels of diversity, origination, and extinction through time in order to describe the pattern of these events and to model processes that could account for them. He was particularly interested in the relative influences of random versus deterministic factors in explaining the broad patterns in the history of diversification and extinction, notably detecting a periodicity in the history of mass extinctions.
A 26 million year periodicity of mass extinction (still debated) from Raup and Sepkoski (1984).
In addition to his intellectual contributions, Raup had a significant effect on the institutional development of the field. In 1975, he was one of the founding members of the editorial board of Paleobiology, a journal dedicated to advancing, and a marker of, paleontology’s growth and renewed influence in the broader discipline of evolutionary biology. He had two papers in the inaugural issue, one coauthored with Schopf, Gould, and Daniel Simberloff. His other major contribution to the institutional development of the discipline was the publication, with Steven M. Stanley, of the influential textbook, Principles of Paleontology (1971; second edition 1978). Unlike previous paleontological textbooks, Principles had nary a key for identifying fossils or a compilation of taxa and their geological distributions: it was about the principles: systematics, biostratigraphy, paleoecology, evolution, and biogeography. On my own bookshelf, it sits inches away from an earlier influential text– Moore, Lalicker, and Fischer’s Invertebrate Fossils— which has a lonely chapter on principles, followed by 22 chapters and 700 pages of dense taxonomic and morphological detail. Raup stood out from traditional paleontologists, even among his fellow young Turks, for doing little or no descriptive systematic and stratigraphic work– even Gould had a long (and little-known) parallel publishing career on the systematic and zoogeographic nitty gritty of West Indian land snails of the genus Cerion— and his textbook reflects this.
Principles of Paleontology (2nd edition, 1978).
The University of Chicago remained a hotbed of palebiology after Raup’s retirement, and his influence there is still strongly felt, with luminaries such as Dave Jablonski and Raup’s former student Mike Foote carrying on the tradition; Mike, with Arnold Miller of the University of Cincinnati, has brought out a third edition (2006) of Raup’s textbook.
h/t Bob Richards
Dawkins, R. 1996. Climbing Mount Improbable. W.W. Norton, New York.
Foote, M. and A.I. Miller. 2006. Principles of Paleontology. 3rd edition. W.H. Freeman, New York.
Maynard Smith, J. 1984. Palaeontology at the high table. Nature 309:401-402 pdf
Moore, R.C., C.G. Lalicker, and A.G. Fischer. 1952. Invertebrate Fossils. McGraw-Hill, New York.
Raup, D.M. 1966. Geometric analysis of shell coiling: general problems. Journal of Paleontology 40:1178-1190. pdf
Raup, D.M. and J.J. Sepkoski. 1984. Periodicity of extinctions in the geologic past. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 81:801-805. pdf
Raup, D.M. and S.M. Stanley. 1971. Principles of Paleontology. W.H. Freeman, San Francisco. (2nd edition, 1978).
