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.
It snowed till late evening here last night, though we don’t have the ten inches originally predicted. There is enough, though, to cause cancellation of flights at O’Hare and Midway. And enough for students at my University to make a cool snowman (snowperson?). The mohawk hairdo is made from coffee stirrers purloined from the dining hall. I love the leafy necklace:
And here’s a mystery: footprints in ice. Can you explain this? Remember, it snowed twice in the past two days, with nearly a day’s break between.
It’s December 12, 2016—two weeks till Boxing Day. And it’s both National Cocoa Day (appropriate given the amount of snow and the cold temperatures here) and also National Ambrosia Day, a fruit salad made with a variety of things that don’t meld well (Wikipedia gives the most common ingredients as fresh or sweetened pineapple, mandarin oranges or fresh orange sections, miniature marshmallows, and coconut. I’m not too fond of it, but I’d eat it if it were the only dessert on tap. It’s also Kanji Day in Japan, an unusual holiday in which the Japanese vote on a written character that best represents the events of the year. I’m not sure how it works, for this year’s character is already on Wikipedia as having been chosen. Perhaps the character is first chosen by the Japanese Kanji Proficiency Society, and then there’s simply a yes or no vote. Japanese-knowledgable readers, please weigh in.
Here’s this year’s kanji:
And the explanation:
High number of gold medals won at the 2016 Rio Olympics, the shift to minus interest (“interest rate” is “kinri” in Japanese), Trump’s U.S. presidential election victory, and Piko Taro, singer of ‘PPAP’, who’s known for wearing a gold-colored animal print outfit.
On this day in 1911, Delhi replaced Calcutta as the capital city of India. A good thing, too, as Delhi is much nicer (I’ve been to both places). In 1935, Himmler started the Lebensbornproject, a scheme to increase the production of more Aryan types. Exactly 6 years later, Hitler announced his plan to exterminate the Jews, though I’m dubious of that Wikipedia entry since I know of no formal document or announcement of that, beyond Hitler’s intimations in Mein Kampf. On December 12, 1963, Kenya became independent of the UK, and, in 2000, the infamous Bush v. Gore decision came down from the Supreme Court, effectively declaring GW the President.
Notables born on this day include John Jay (1745), Gustave Flaubert (1821), Edvard Munch (1863), Edward G. Robinson (1893), Frank Sinatra (1915), Ted Kennedy (1925), Buford Pusser (1937; I just wanted to write his name), Dickey Betts (1943, and, amazingly, still alive), and Jennifer Connelly (1970 ♥). Those who died on this day include Robert Browning (1889), Tallulah Bankhead (1968), and Joseph Heller (1999).
Here’s a very early Sinatra song: “Night and Day,” one of my favorites. The writer was Cole Porter.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is still pondering the meaning of meaning (something philosophers do all the time, and get paid for it!). Her staff has just purchased a new camera, too, so we can expect some nice new pictures in the next week:
Hili: There are moments when I wonder.
A: Frankly speaking, me too.
In Polish:
Hili: Są momenty kiedy się zastanawiam.
Ja: Szczerze mówiąc, ja też.
It’s cold and snowy out in Winnipeg, and Gus spends his time watching the world on his Katzenbaum, as well as nomming his new box. He’s started doing that again, and has shredded nearly one whole side:
Yep, you’re right: all of them. The women named in the December 8 piece include a hijabi fashion blogger, a journalist who appeared (clothed) in Playboy, a fencer, a hip-hop group, and the Miss Minnesota contestant who wore both a hijab and a burkini. It’s not so much the achievements of Muslim women that are celebrated here—and there’s nothing wrong with that—but the headscarf. Hijabs are mentioned repeatedly: here are two excerpts.
From the introduction:
Muslim Americans continue to face rising intolerance and Islamophobia as a result, in part, of aggressive attacks on their community by politicians and conservative media. They were assaulted, ridiculed and at times even murdered for their religious identification ― and hijab-wearing Muslim women often bore the brunt of this bigotry.
Check the link to the “even murdered for their religious identification” link in the Guardian, which says this about the murder of two men wearing Muslim garb:
The motive for the shooting was not immediately known and no evidence has been uncovered so far that the two men were targeted because of their faith.
“There’s nothing in the preliminary investigation to indicate that they were targeted because of their faith,” said deputy inspector Henry Sautner of the New York police department.
That’s the exact opposite of what the HuffPo article claims about the link. And then there’s this:
Well-known Muslim beauty blogger Nura Afia made history in November by becoming CoverGirl’s first ambassador who wears a hijab. With her CoverGirl contract, Afia will appear in commercials as well as a giant billboard in New York’s Times Square alongside celebrity representatives like Sofia Vergara and Katy Perry.
“I feel proud to be part of a movement that is showing the hijab in a positive light for once. The more of us who can wear them as representatives of these big household names on TV or billboards the better,” Afia told The New York Times.
Now that’s making America great!
What is really the positive light here is not the woman herself who is achieving, but that the achiever wears a hijab. And can this garment, reflecting a religious dictate that women must hide themselves to avoid arousing the uncontrollable lusts of men, really be seen in a positive light? It’s a symbol not only of a largely oppressive faith (one based, like all faiths, on fiction), but of the misogyny of that faith itself. Do we need to show the yarmulke in a positive light given the higher per capita rate of anti-Semitic than anti-Islamic acts?
Read for yourself (screenshot links to the article):
I can’t brain today, which is lucky because there’s nothing substantive to write about—and I have other work to do. So enjoy these photographs from Robert Clark’s new photo book: Evolution: A Visual Record. I’ve selected a few photographs from a longer selection in the December 8 Washington Post. The notes at flush left are mine but are informed by the Post‘s captions. All photos are by Clark himself.
Below is a gynandromorph (half male, half female) of the Palawan Birdwing butterfly (Trogonoptera trojana): guess which half is male. What probably happened here is that one sex chromosome in a male embryo was lost at the two-cell stage, so that the left half remained ZZ in sex-chromosome constitution, while the right half was ZO. (In birds and butterflies, unlike mammals and flies, males have two identical sex chromosomes, ZZ, and females have unlike sex chromosomes ZW. If you’re ZZ and lose a Z, you’re ZO, probably a female—and very probably sterile.) [Note added in proof: actually, this speculation isn’t correct; as reader Arnaud Martin pointed out in a comment on this site, Lepidopteran gynandromorphs are produced in a genetically different way. But the stuff about flies below is correct.]
This beautiful specimen is certainly sterile, with its body split right up the middle. Notice the longer antennae of the male as well as its shorter hindwing. It’s a direct way of comparing the traits that are sexually dimorphic, but in a single individual.
I sometimes found flies just like this, though the gynandromorphs were caused by a loss of the X chromosome in females, causing one half (or bits) of the body to be XX (female) and the other half to be XO (phenotypically male). Sometimes the loss of the X occurs later in development, so that only a portion of the body is male.
My undergraduate student Ryan Oyama and I used genetic tricks to make lots of these gynandromorphs (with the male parts identified by bearing a yellow body-color mutation), trying to find out where in the body the male cuticular hydrocarbons, which act as sex pheromones, were made. (Males and females have different pheromones.) I found that it was only when the abdomen was male did the gynandromorph produce male pheromones, so that area, I concluded, was where the hydrocarbons were made. (Each gynandromorph, carefully scored for where and how much was male vs female, was then assessed for its hydrocarbons using gas chromatography.) This location was later confirmed by others who directly found the hydrocarbon-producing cells—right under the surface of the abdomen.
Here’s the table from my PNAS paper with Ryan clearly showing that the abdomen must be male for the fly to have male pheromone, and female to have the female pheromone (female pheromone is 7, 11-HD or 7,11-heptacosadiene, male is 7-T, or 7-tricosene). The “H”, “T” and “A” in the first three columns refer, respectively, to the sex identification (F for female, M for male) of the gynandromorphs (“mosaics”) we produced. n is the sample size.
I was just reminded that Matthew had a post–a really good one–on this site about Lepidopteran gynandromorphs as well as gynandromorphs affecting behavior in Drosophila. The first comment on that post, by Arnaud Martin, corrects both Matthew and me in our speculations about the source of the gynandromorphism.
The orchid, from Madagascar, was described by a French botanist in 1798, but came to be named “Darwin’s Orchid” because Darwin speculated that the flower, which had a long nectar spur—27–43 cm, or 10.6–16.9 in—must have been pollinated by a moth that could stick its very long proboscis all the way into the spur. (By so doing, the moth pollinated the orchid by pressing its head against the opening of the flower. Flowers produce nectar as a way to get their genes into the next generation through pollination.) Here’s the orchid (photo by B. J. Ramsay):
Darwin’s idea was ridiculed by some of his colleagues, but then the moth was discovered in 1903. Darwin, as usual, was right, though he didn’t live to see his vindication—at least about the moth.
Here’s how Wikipedia describes the pollination:
The fertilization of A. sesquipedale has been observed to proceed as follows. The moth approaches the flower to ascertain by scent whether or not it is the correct orchid species. Then the moth backs up over a foot and unrolls its proboscis, then flies forward, inserting it into a cleft in the rostellum which leads to the spur while gripping the labellum. After the moth has finished drinking the nectar, which usually takes about 6 seconds, it instinctively raises its head while removing its proboscis from the spur, and in doing so causes the viscidium to adhere to its proboscis usually about 4 to 9 mm (0.16 to 0.35 in) from its base.[22]Attached to the viscidium via the caudicle is the pollinia. Upon removing its proboscis from the flower, the pollinarium stalk will be straight and parallel with the moth’s proboscis. Then after leaving the orchid the caudicle will eventually dry out, causing its angle relative to the moth’s proboscis to change by 90° so that it is at the correct angle to attach to the stigma of the next orchid the moth visits. The moth then repeats this process at another A. sesquipedale orchid and simultaneously fertilizes it. Once the flower has been fertilized, it quickly stops producing its powerful scent.
I believe it was my friend Phil DeVries who first actually photographed the pollination event, which takes place at night (video at link).
I’ll add two more photos because Matthew, who called the Post piece to my attention, said they were his favorite pictures of the lot. I’ve used the Post‘s own captions here.
Not so long ago, it was a controversial theory, but now it’s widely accepted: Birds aren’t just dinosaur-like; they are in fact living dinosaurs. That’s true of everything from sparrows to eagles to Darwin’s finches — but it’s rarely more obvious than when looking at a southern cassowary (Casuarius casuarius), the flightless bird native to Australia and New Guinea that at 5 feet tall and over 100 pounds is one of the largest and heaviest birds on Earth. (Robert Clark/Courtesy of Phaidon)
And this is amazing, though there are much older hominin footprints (the Laetoli footprints, which date back 3.7 million years and were probably made by Australopithecus afarensis). Both show humans walking bipedally, and the A. afarensis footprints are direct confirmation of what was surmised only from anatomy.
“The combination of good sedimentary conditions and the fact that animals, including hominids, like to be near a source of water,” the great paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey said, helps explain why the remains of human ancestors — and many other creatures — are so often found near the shores of lakes. These beautiful human footprints, about 120,000 years old, were discovered south of Lake Natron, Tanzania. (Robert Clark/Courtesy of Phaidon)
Here’s Clark’s book, which is much cheaper at both Amazon and Target. It would make a great Christmas present for your evolution-loving friends or relatives.
I seem to have lost this batch of photos, but fortunately reader Loren Russell re-sent them the other day. His notes:
The pix were taken on a trip from Corvallis to LA along Cal 1. This is the rookery at Piedras Blancas, just south of the Sur Coast. A wonderous case of back from near extinction, the Northern Elephant Seal [Mirounga angustirostris] was reduced to (?a few dozen?) by whalers in the early 20th century. This particular rookery dates only to 1990 and is estimated to have reached 15,000 Famously, one several-ton male was aggressively blocking traffic on Route 1 for several weeks a couple of years ago.
Here’s their range. Dark blue represents breeding colonies and light blue the occurrence of non-breeding individuals:
And, a picture from Wikipedia showing the extreme sexual dimorphism in size: males can weigh between 1500 and 2300 kg ((3,300–5,100 lb; over two tons! That’s more than a Volkswagen Beetle), while the smaller females can weigh between 400 to 900 kg (880 to 1,980 lb). The males have harems and battle for access females; this huge male is mating with a female who has a pup. (Males can easily crush the pups if they roll on them.)
Here’s a video of battles for females between Northern Elephant Seals; such battles can result in death:
The weather people report that it snowed about six inches here last night, and it’s started again. We didn’t get that much in Hyde Park, being next to Lake Michigan, but it’s still enough to beautify the campus.
Before. This is the arch that connects my building with the Anatomy Building (home of Neil Shubin and others). Incoming students are told that the three gargoyles ascending the arch represent the first three years of college (freshman, sophomore, junior), while the gargoyle at the summit are successfully graduating seniors. This was taken when the sky began getting overcast yesterday afternoon.
