Readers’ wildlife photos

February 13, 2017 • 7:30 am

Reader Mark Sturtevant sent some nice insect photos; his captions are indented.

I have a new crop of pictures here taken last summer. I hope you enjoy them.

The first two pictures feature female Eastern amberwing dragonflies (Perithemis tenera) These are very small—and I think adorable—dragonflies with heads that look like they could go into a cartoon. Males are beautifully highlighted by solid amber wings, but like many Odonates the males are more shy about being approached. I have several close-up pictures of females as they are pretty tolerant of me, but I have so far failed to get acceptable pictures of a male.

1amberwing1

2amberwing2

Next is the rather weird long-tailed dance fly, Rhamphomyia longicauda. These insects have an interesting mating behavior which I would really like to see. Males entice females to mate by catching a small insect and presenting it to her as a ‘nuptial gift’. Males prefer to choose females with a lot of eggs, and I have read that females sometimes inflate their abdomen with air to entice males to choose them.

3dancefly

Here’s a remarkably plain and rather worn-out looking butterfly: the hackberry emperor (Astrocampa celtis).

4emperorbutterfly

This is the two-spotted treehopper (Enchenopa binotata). It is perhaps trying to blend in with the thorns of a wild rose.

5hopper2

And finally, I had been getting my feet wet last summer because I had previously neglected to take pictures of the many insects that inhabit the water surface. In truth, I had been avoiding that because I really hate hanging over or standing in water with my camera. But this water strider (Aquarius remigis) was in only a few inches of water, and I took the chance. These very familiar predatory insects are famous for skating around on the water surface tension, and they use the water much like how a spider uses its web to catch insects. If an insect falls into the water, its struggles will send out little waves that are detected by the water strider. If hungry, the strider will zip over and make a meal of it. The adults of this species are almost always wingless, but other species can have wings.

6waterstrider

Monday: Hili dialogue

February 13, 2017 • 6:30 am

Good morning—it’s Monday, February 13, 2017. Remember that tomorrow is Valentine’s Day, so there’s just one shopping day left for cards, flowers, chocolates, and the like. It’s a double food holiday according to Foodimentary: both National Tortellini Day, and National “Italian Food” Day (I have no idea why they put scare quotes around “Italian Food,” unless it’s to imply that it isn’t real food). It’s also World Radio Day, which according to Wikipedia is “about celebrating radio, why we love it and why we need it today more than ever.” But do we really need it, in the age of the Internet?

On this day in 1542, Catherine Howard, fifth wife of Henry VIII, was beheaded for adultery; she had been Queen for 16 months. And in 1633, Galileo arrived in Rome for his infamous trial by the Inquisition. (As the accommodationists always tell us, it had absolutely nothing to do with religion.) On February 13, 1935, Bruno Hauptmann was found guilty of kidnapping the Lindbergh baby, and was executed the next year. Finally, in 1960, civil rights activists conducted their first lunch counter sit-in in Nashville, Tennessee. Their courage and nonviolence stands in marked contrast to today’s student protesters.

Notables born on this day include Thomas Malthus (1766), William Shockley (1910), Tennessee Ernie Ford (1919), and Chuck Yeager (1923, still with us). Those who died on this day include Benvenuto Cellini (1571), Richard Wagner (1883), Georges Rouault (1958), Waylon Jennings (2002), and Antonin Scalia (one year ago today). Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is cracking jokes:

Hili: Are these from our cherry trees?
A: Yes, it’s wood from our orchard.
Hili: I think I sat on this bough once.
dsc00006a-1
In Polish:
Hili: To z naszych wiśni?
Ja: Tak, to drewno z naszego sadu.
Hili: Chyba siedziałam kiedyś na tej gałęzi.
As lagniappe, we have some baby Malayian tiger cubs born at the Cincinnati Zoo on February 3, and since mom wasn’t maternal, they’re being hand raised. I can’t resist showing several photos of them;  just once in my life I’d like to hold one. These photos were sent by reader jsp, but I don’t know who the photographer is.
10 days old! Is there anything cuter than a tiger cub?
16487825_10154831538335479_8645614098412453979_o
16587254_10154831538470479_4944741341619229455_o
16602079_10154831538325479_5984965836785499656_o
16602378_10154831538465479_4722135632990933034_o
16707517_10154831540180479_5947540333881379920_o

Tweets from Darwin Day

February 12, 2017 • 4:15 pm

I thought I was through with Darwin Day, but I’ve got Chuck on the brain.  It may seem odd for biologists to hold him in such esteem (creationists often say, mistakenly, that we worship him and find no flaws in his work), but the fact remains that, more than any other scientist, he got things right at the outset. Yes, his genetics was wonky, and his book doesn’t really deal with the origin of new species, but it’s remarkable how well his main ideas have held up over the last 158 years. Even Newton, his rival in the “best scientist ever” category, didn’t anticipate quantum mechanics, but Darwin did allude to genes having no differential effect on fitness; i.e., the “neutral theory” that was devised only in the 1960s.

I read The Origin about once every two years, and each time I do I’m amazed at the thoroughness and novelty of Darwin’s thinking: working out the parallel between artificial and natural selection, anticipating objections to his theory, realizing that biogeography and embryology provided strong evidence for evolution, and so on.

If you haven’t read the book yet, I recommend it highly. As I always told my students, you can hardly consider yourself educated if you haven’t read The Origin, which not only tied together all areas of biology and dispelled the myths about life that had reigned forever, but also changed our view of ourselves in a way that Newton couldn’t.

At any rate, here are a few tweets from #DarwinDay and #darwinday2017:

 

Darwin’s only selfie

February 12, 2017 • 3:30 pm

Darwin scholar John van Whye put this on Facebook: it’s Darwin’s only known depiction of himself. John’s notes:

Darwin sketched himself as this little stick man on the island of St Helena in July 1836 as the Beagle was sailing home. The sketch represents the strong winds blowing up the sea cliffs while the air on top of the cliff, where Darwin was standing, was perfectly still. Only by holding his arm out over the cliff could he detect the strong winds. The text reads “gale of wind to hand not to man”.

The sketch is in one of Darwin’s Beagle field notebooks, the Despoblado notebook, here.

See a drawing of the cliffs from a later illustrated edition of voyage of the Beagle, here.

16711811_1428736470532909_5779822276754197414_n
 

 

 

 

 

 

h/t: Matthew Cobb, David Bressan

Moths that may mimic spiders

February 12, 2017 • 1:30 pm

Since it’s Darwin Day, I’ve featured only evolution-related issues, and let’s finish with some amazing pictures by photographer and entomologist Gil Wizen, taken from his eponymous website (with permission; note that he also has a Twitter page and a Facebook page).  (N.b.: the photos are used with permission and cannot be reproduced further.)

In a post called “Petrophilia“, Wizen shows a moth in that genus, trapped in Belize, with some weird markings on its hindwings (captions are from Wizen):

petrophila-sp1
Petrophila sp. in typical resting posture, partially exposing the hindwings.

Why are they there?  We’re not sure, but one clue is how the moth rests:

Many moths rest with their hindwings concealed by the forewings, however these moths, belonging to genus Petrophila, had a unique body posture at rest, exposing only the dotted part of their hindwings. This pattern looked very familiar to me, but I could not pinpoint from where exactly. Then a few nights later one of these moths decided to rest pointing sideways with its head rather than upwards like most moths. And it finally hit me: this moth has an image of a jumping spider on its wings looking straight at you. The mimicry is so convincing that the moth wings even have hair-like scales where supposedly the spider’s head is.

petrophila-sp2

Here’s the moth and its putative “model” (remember, this is a case of Batesian mimicry, in which a palatable mimic apes an unpleasant or dangerous model). Wizen is careful to hedge his explanation:

What I mean to say is that the color pattern on the wings of Petrophila species reminds me of a salticid spider, and perhaps it works the same for other animals as well. There is also a behavioral display that makes the mimicry even more deceiving: the moth moves its wings to mimic the movements of a jumping spider. In search for a second opinion, I turned to someone who breathes and sleeps jumping spiders. Thomas Shahan, who fortunately was around for BugShot, confirmed my suspicion and even came up with an ID for a possible model spider: a female Thiodina sp. And so we went on to find a jumping spider that looked like the one shown on the moths’ wings. In any case, to my untrained eyes it seems that this pattern is common in several moth genera, and in other insects as well.

You can see another moth with a similar pattern at his site, as well as a caddisfly with a salticid-like pattern.

petrophila-sp4-950x447

 

 

Darwin’s kids drew all over the manuscript of “The Origin” and his other works

February 12, 2017 • 12:15 pm

Before we begin, let’s all recall the title of Darwin’s greatest work, in full: it was called On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, and it was published on November 24, 1859. (Remember the kerfuffle when Richard Dawkins was excoriated for not remembering it in full? Well, it’s a long title, and I doubt many evolutionists could recite it accurately. And it doesn’t matter.)

Well, it turns out that almost all of the original manuscript of what I’ll call “The Origin” is gone, but 45 pages remain—a few of which bear drawings by his children. The Darwin kids also drew all over his notes and his manuscript for his barnacle monograph and his orchid book.  They also drew all over his writing paper.  These pages have been digitized courtesy of the American Museum of Natural History and the Cambridge University Library as part of the Darwin Manuscripts Project.

Note that in her post on these drawings at Brainpickings, Maria Popova got it badly wrong, titling her collection of drawings “The charming doodles Darwin’s children left all over the manuscript of ‘On the Origin of Species’“, adding this:

There is no more endearing a testament to how this balance skews — to both the exuberant happiness that children bring and the benign misery of the innocent waywardness — than the doodles Darwin’s children left on the back-leaves and in the margins of his Origin of Species manuscript draft. . .

Nope. In fact, the vast bulk of what she reproduces came from other manuscripts, notes, and blank paper—something Popova doesn’t mention. She really should have exercised due diligence.

At  the AMNH website you’ll learn how little of the original manuscripts remain; Darwin saved his letters religiously, but book manuscripts weren’t considered sacrosanct. The manuscript of The Origin was probably largely destroyed after it was set in type by publisher John Murray:

Darwin’s young children sometimes painted pictures and wrote stories on the back of draft manuscripts for Darwin’s books & notes. These drawings & stories were precious to the Darwin family. So it was thanks to the fortunate meeting of the children’s play with their father’s science that these extremely rare manuscripts of the Origin of Species (4 pages), Origin Portfolios type notes (2 notes), Cirripedia (9 pages), Orchids (1 page) were preserved. Otherwise, these items, precious to scholars, would have most likely been destroyed. Moreover, the four Origin pages are part of the only 45 Origin pages (plus 9 insert slips) that are extant–out of the original c. 600 page draft. The 9 surviving Cirripedia pages (8 fragments and 1 full page) are the sole survivors of that massive work. However, most often the children simply used their father’s writing paper–without his writing–to produce their pictures and their tales. We present here the totality of 111 images, which includes 94 images produced by the children and 17 images with drafts or notes in Darwin’s handwriting.

Here are three drawings from manuscript pages of The Origin. This one is “aubergine and carrot cavalry” by Francis Darwin (initialed FD).

screen-shot-2017-02-12-at-11-36-34-am

Birds and butterfly, probably by Francis Darwin, drawn on back of Origin ms. page:

screen-shot-2017-02-12-at-11-37-35-am

Down House (the family home), watercolor by Francis Darwin in an Origin ms page. Is that a dog or a cat in the window?

screen-shot-2017-02-12-at-11-43-16-am

Soldiers with turbans on old Darwin notes; artist not identified:

screen-shot-2017-02-12-at-11-45-06-am

Horse and carriage, on Darwin’s barnacle monograph; artist not identified: screen-shot-2017-02-12-at-11-46-56-am

The horse “Bright,” artist not identified, drawing not on Darwin ms.:

screen-shot-2017-02-12-at-11-50-46-am

And, presciently, a fish with legs; artist unidentified, not on Darwin ms.:

screen-shot-2017-02-12-at-11-53-18-am

And here is a rarity: one of the 45 surviving manuscript pages of The Origin (see them all here, along with other information relating to publication). You may remember his famous discussion about how the eye could evolve from a light-sensitive pigment spot:

screen-shot-2017-02-12-at-11-57-47-am

 

Translation:
 screen-shot-2017-02-12-at-11-58-08-am

 

 

Damn! I didn’t win Censor of the Year again

February 12, 2017 • 11:00 am

Three years ago the “Center for Science and Culture”(CSC) of the creationist no-think tank Discovery Institute (DI) named me “Censor of the Year,” an award they now confer every Darwin Day, but which started with me. And I was so happy to get it!

The reason for my award? I helped stop the teaching of Intelligent Design (ID) at Ball State University (BSU) in Indiana, in courses taught by Eric Hedin. Hedin was pushing Christianity and a religious view of life in a science course at a public university, something that the courts have declared unkosher. Somehow the press got on it, and the President of BSU (who has since left) declared that ID would not be taught at her university. In view of that, Hedin, an assistant professor of astronomy and physics (he’s since got tenure) had to go back to teaching real science. My activities apparently constituted censorship, and so I got the prize.  To quote the DI:

Coyne was pivotal in stampeding Ball State University president Jo Ann Gora to issue a campus-wide gag order on teaching about intelligent design in science classrooms. This involved intimidating and silencing a young Ball State physicist, Eric Hedin. That’s censorship. But something that really stands out about Coyne’s effort is the power differential between himself and his victim.

. . . So we have the powerful, prestigious and above all safe Jerry Coyne, swooping in from the next state to rile up Hedin’s employers, Ball State’s administration. Why? Because Hedin included a bibliography in an interdisciplinary class that listed some books that were favorable to intelligent design (and others that were critical of it).

Coyne was not only successful in shutting down Hedin, and getting intelligent design shut down on the campus as a whole. He was also a bully, exploiting the difference in power to tyrannize and dominate a vulnerable younger scholar.

Oy! All I did was point out the unconstitutional teaching of a religiously-based doctrine to the school and the public; Ball State University did the rest. But I’ll accept the opprobrium in return for such an honor!

censor-of-the-year-6-1

I’ve not-so-secretly hoped that I’d get it again, as a double win would be unprecedented: a Linus-Pauling-like achievement. Sadly, it wasn’t to be. In 2015 the prize went to Neil deGrasse Tyson, but not for any obvious censorship. He just hosted a television series. The DI notes:

Neil deGrasse Tyson, of course, stands out this year for his command of the aptly named Ship of the Imagination, which he piloted through 13 episodes of the revived Carl Sagan science series, Cosmos. As we documented here at ENV and in a book, The Unofficial Guide to Cosmos: Fact and Fiction in Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Landmark Science Series, Cosmos represented a highly imaginative rewrite of the history of science. It was designed to convey an impression that faith was always an obstacle to scientific discovery, that all legitimate scientific controversies are in the past, that skeptics of scientific orthodoxy today are fools or worse.

Censorship can involve implied or explicit threats — that’s Jerry Coyne’s style, not Dr. Tyson’s. The charming, avuncular, facile Neil Tyson is effective, far more so than other nominees this year, because he is so very likable. As a censor, he works with an airbrush. Clearly produced with an audience of impressionable young people in mind, and no doubt on its way to becoming a staple in school science classrooms, Cosmos tells a seductive story that leaves out complications and controversies around science, and casts materialism as the obvious inference from the scientific data.

. . . Tyson broadcast his photoshopped narrative of science to millions. That alone wins him our nod as 2015 Censor of the Year.

Apparently teaching evolution, and not mentioning discredited and erroneous “alternative” theories, constitutes censorship. In that case David Attenborough should be a prime candidate!

What about last year? Hold onto your horses, for the 2016 award went to the Commission on the General Conference of the United Methodist Church. Why? Because they barred the DI from a conference they held:

This choice, however, calls for a necessary clarification. It is unclear who on the Commission participated in deciding to exclude Discovery Institute from the church’s upcoming General Conference, and thereby censor discussion of intelligent design. When we inquired, we were told only that the “leadership” of the Commission made the decision. The UMC — with its motto of “Open Hearts, Open Minds, Open Doors” — refuses to disclose who made up this shadowy “leadership” group. So the best we can do is bestow COTY on the Commission.

. . . Why was the UMC Commission the obvious winner? After all, at least in the initial move to bar us, they did not set out to hurt or intimidate any particular scholar or scientist (as past COTY winner Jerry Coyne did) or to mislead the general public (as did Neil deGrasse Tyson). Instead, the Commission stands out by exemplifying what appears to be the culpable ignorance, confusion, and shiftiness of leaders who ought to know better — who should welcome insights revealing the design of life! — but who prefer to clap their hands over their ears. Who knows what these folks really had in mind, but an excessive, fawning concern about what prestige academia thinks of you, combined with intellectual laziness in researching the matter for oneself, are together the typical reasons that clergy go astray on this issue.

The DI really needs to learn what censorship is. There is no “right” for the Discovery Institute to promulgate its nonsense in schools, or even in churches. If a church takes an enlightened stand about science, as the United Methodist Church apparently did, then it’s not “censoring” ID. If there were credible evidence for ID, which its flacks keep promising to provide, then we can talk.  Until then, this is surely the first time that I’ve received an award that a religious body also got.

What about this year? Well, today’s winner is. . . . .

. . . . The Natural History Museum in Stuttgart—our first foreign winner! As Evolution News & Views reports, the Museum harbored one Günter Bechly, former curator of amber and fossil insects. Bechly found himself no longer able to accept the corpus of modern evolutionary theory, and was sympathetic to Intelligent Design. He came out publicly as an ID sympathizer, and the Museum didn’t like that. They cut back his duties, and apparently told him his future at the Museum was in doubt. He quit. As Evolution News and Views reports:

This is how the “consensus” for Darwinian evolution is maintained. Oh, not only or primarily through outright censorship. Vanity is the single most effective tool that ensures uniformity of opinion. Men are monsters of vanity — males especially, but women too. The pressure to be on the prestige side of any significant disagreement is intense, a fact often unacknowledged unless you are pretty honest with yourself. This holds across science, the media, education, politics, religion, and other fields.

Dr. Bechly was among the contingent of ID-friendly scientists present at the Royal Society meeting (“New Trends in Evolutionary Biology“) in London last November. Another scientist on hand, we noted, a senior figure with views on Darwin overlapping with ours but allergic to ID itself, was visibly skittish about even being seen talking with us. So it goes.

Bechly has now become a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute’s CSC.  Was he censored? I don’t see how, given that he was promulgating erroneous and misleading science as a representative of a big museum. It’s as if someone started promulgating the Biblical Flood theory at the Smithsonian Institution, and is equivalent to Eric Hedin teaching Intelligent Design to his students at Ball State. There is no “right” to promulgate discredited ideas as part of your job as a scientist at a public institution.

At the end of this year’s award piece, author David Klinghoffer did what the DI has always done: told us that the debunking of Darwinism is right around the corner.

Someday, a tipping point will come. Numerous closets will open in a swell of confessions: “I’ve doubted the straight Darwin story for years.” “I’ve long suspected that design or teleology of some kind must have played a role in evolution, but I would never admit it till now.” And at that time we’ll stop giving out Censor of the Year awards. But that day has not yet arrived.

They said this would happen over a decade ago, but it didn’t. I’m sorry to say that, I think, Klinghoffer will go to his Maker (disassociated molecules) before a teleological view of life permeates evolutionary biology.