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.
Here’s a bit of music to start the week. Here’s the finest folk rock singer/songwriter of our time (I will brook no dissent), performing at the height of her powers: at the BBC on September 30, 1970. She was 26.
Joni plays piano, guitar, and dulcimer. Unlike many acoustic concerts, where it’s simply a display of proficiency on acoustic instruments and a chance to see the artist, an acoustic concert by Joni Mitchell was a complete, emotionally satisfying experience, needing no other accompaniment.
The highlights for me here: “My Old Man” (8:32, written about Graham Nash), “Real Good for Free” (11:43), a stunning version of “California” (18:17), and “Both Sides Now” (25:49).
If you want a bit more, there’s a lovely piano version of “Woodstock”, from the same concert, but not on the video above
Oh, and if you want to see her first incarnation, as Joni Anderson of Saskatoon (1965), go here and start at 1:36. And you can read about her greatest album here.
It baffles me why the good citizens of the UK permit children to be educated in government supported “faith schools.” Why do they even exist? What good do they do, except to inculcate fairly tales in children and prevent them from intermingling with those of other backgrounds—something that is desirable in a democracy. Even the U.S. doesn’t have them, though in some cases state governments support religious education through a voucher system.
The dangers of these schools don’t just reside in the Islamic ones, which was what you probably thought I was getting at. That is a problem, but there are problems in schools of other faiths—probably of every faith. The latest comes from a Jewish girls’ school in Hackney (an area of London), Yesodey Hatorah Secondary School, in which every student is a girl from an Orthodox Jewish home.
And, as many of you know, Orthodox Judaism is not friendly to evolution. Most are creationists, and I’ve met several Orthodox Jews who, after accepting evolution, were expelled from their family and shunned by their friends. They became atheists, and are deeply wounded.
According to the National Secular Society, Yesodey Hatorah has been redacting evolution questions on the GCSE (General Certificate of Secondary Education) exams, tests given to every student in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland, and whose scores determine one’s eligibility for higher education. After being caught simply eliminating the questions from the GCSE exam, Yesodey Hatorah’s principal, Rabbi Avraham Pinter, expressed no contrition, but said this:
“if we can’t redact [questions], then we won’t redact them.” However, the Rabbi went on to state that “our children will be aware of which questions they should be answering and which ones they shouldn’t be.” Pinter also said that evolution was not compatible with the school’s strict, Orthodox ethos. It is now clear that rather than redacting questions as they had in the past, the school is advising students not to address the questions.
This, of course, lowers the students’ scores, as they get no credit for evolution questions. But it’s apparently more important to keep the faith than learn the truth.
And it’s not just evolution where students are shortchanged. The school also refuses to teach required courses in human reproduction, for that, too, violates Orthodox strictures. Questions on human reproduction, like those on evolution, were being “redacted” from the exams by the teachers. This violates national standards for education, and keeps the kids in the faith-based cocoon where their parents want them.
One would think, since the school has admitted violating government standards, and seems committed to continuing these violations, they’d be called out or punished by the government.
One would be wrong.
OFSTED, the UK governmental organization for Standards in Education, Children’s Services, and Skills, rated Yesodey Hatorah school for 2014. The rating? “GOOD”! Here it is:
Against this backdrop, it was surprising that the school’s inspection in September, which was published in October, not only found the school to be ‘good’, but does not mention evolution, creationism or sex and relationships education at all.
The BHA has made inquiries, so far with no response:
BHA Faith Schools Campaigner Richy Thompson commented, ‘Every young person is entitled to a broad and balanced education, including understanding evolution’s central role in biology and that it is the only evidence-based view of how life came to be. The Government has made it clear that if a school teaches creationism as scientifically valid, then that, in its view, would be unbalanced. Equally, all the best evidence shows that full and comprehensive sex and relationships education leads to the best outcomes for young people in terms of sexual health and wellbeing.
‘How can it be right that a school, never mind about a state school, can deny pupils a broad and balanced education in these important areas, and yet still be deemed by Ofsted to be ‘good’? We have asked Ofsted how this happened and why these issues are not mentioned in its report, and are currently awaiting a reply.’
I’ll be curious to see how Ofsted justifies its “good” rating. In the meantime, you heathens and science-friendly UKers should be raising holy hell about this, and, above all, trying to end the practice of having government faith schools. Now I’m sure that since the schools are firmly embedded in the UK system, this won’t be easy, but there is simply no justification for an enlightened democracy to support religious education. When it does, you get stuff like this happening.
The usual array of curmudgeons and loons have weighed in this week, and here’s a small selection of comments from those who will never post here again.
by Greg Mayer Qapla’!! Philae has landed! The European Space Agency’s Philae lander has successfully landed on Comet P67, …
That’s ok..we feel sorry for you for being a self righteous ignorant pompous ass. Maybe take a religions or philosophy class so you can somewhat seem like you know what you are talking about. Way to paint humanity with one broad stroke. Or maybe you should spend some non judgemental empathetic time with the “others” that you feel such contempt and pity for. The world is made up of a variety of experience..everyone holds unreasonable ideas..even you! I feel sorry for you with such animosity towards other people that are not “like you”. Embrace diversity..you are doing no service to the atheists with views like this. At least many religions believe in compassion and
LOVE. EVEN FOR OTHERS NOT LIKE THEM!!
Except for Muslims, Christians, Jews, Hindus, and so on and so on. . . . .
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Reader Ted Christopher of Rochester New York (easily found by Googling) signed a rant-y comment on the post “The New York Times profiles James Randi“. Sadly, he got off on the wrong foot with the second word, and went downhill from there:
Jerry Coyle [COYLE???] and others including the Amazing Randi,
I don’t buy Randi’s skepticism, the larger realm of skepticism, and of course the encompassing scientism. In the library yesterday I noted a book by Rupert Sheldrake on inexplicable behaviors by pets entitled “Dogs That Know When the Owners are Coming Home” and then in the back it had his interaction with Randi. Randi had in some official capacity rebutted some of Sheldrake’s findings (and presumably in mocking fashion) and Sheldrake wanted to know the details. After some pushing Randi acknowledged he had little if any basis for his counter claims. Sheldrake simply characterized this as “lying”.
Getting off on the presumptions of science is easy and of course the intellectually pretentious thing to do.
It is not hard to rock the materialist boat. I plunge in here with a couple of basic points and then return with an ESP example and the superficiality of Randi’s test. A short list of what materialism is facing:
1. In the behavioral realm, prodigal and transgender phenomena contradict the evolved materialist model. If you haven’t you can wade into something like A. Solomon’s (overly-long) “Far From the Tree” and read some parental descriptions of their kids. Having young children declare that they are the opposite sex (and live accordingly) is a big challenge to materialism. Having young children inexplicably hit the pavement running (perhaps sprinting) along some adult intellectual path is another. D. Treffert’s “Islands of Genius” covers a lot of this ‘knowing things [and demonstrating motivations] they never learned’ territory.
2. An apparent answer to mysteries like the above is with genome. I would argue that never made sense – certainly with some of the very unusual innate behaviors – but now that we are several years deep into the Missing Heritability problem you would think that some would be questioning genetic presumptions. Here is the latest on the search for the origins of the variations in our intelligence,
blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/2014/10/14/quest-for-intelligence-genes-churns-out-more-dubious-results/
Note J. Horgan is to be commended for his unusual critique but he still ends up superficial here. It isn’t sloppy genetics work by behavioral geneticist, it is once again that the limited set of individual-differentiating DNA is coming up short. Where are the skeptics (and scientists) on the DNA deficit? And by the way, the transgender phenomena shows up discordant amongst some monozygotic twins.
On paranormal “debunking”, unless the many para-reports involved some remarkable combination of dishonesty and stupidity (as presumed by skeptics) there is something mysterious going on. This arrogant dismissal of basic mysteries contributes to the public’s lack of support for science (although applied science is another matter). Such events appear to be rare enough that one could certainly argue about their significance, but their existence is another matter. The following was found at the beginning of the Chapter 2 in the late P. Mattheissen’s book “Nine-Headed Dragon River”:
>> [i]n mid-November of 1971, [my wife] Deborah and I attended a weekend sesshin [meditational period] at the New York Zendo. For two months Deborah had been suffering from pains that seemed to resist all diagnosis, and she decided to limit herself to the Sunday sittings. On Saturday evening, meeting me at the door of our apartment, she stood there, smiling, in a new brown dress, but it was not the strange, transparent beauty in her face that took my breath away. I had been in zazen [meditation] since daybreak, and my mind was clear, and I saw Death gazing out at me from those wide, dark eyes. There was no mistaking it, and the certainty was so immediate and shocking that I could not greet her. In what she took as observance of sesshin silence, I pushed past quietly into the bathroom, to collect myself in order that I might speak <>
The rest of the chapter follows thru and entails more unusual activity. The context here happens to be Buddhist mediation where traditionally such happenings are viewed as possible but not important. None of such insights apparently happen on command (like a lot of significant things) and thus the irrelevance of Randi’s test.
Ted Christopher
Rochester, NY
I’ve found that any comment that heaps approbation on Sheldrake is likely to be fraught with lunacy. This is no exception. It makes the ludicrous statement that transgendered humans disprove “materialism,” that problems in pinning down “intelligence genes” supports something called the “missing heritability problem” (one of Christopher’s pet theories if you choose to dig into his internet presence), and, finally, that Mattheissen’s numinous experience with the “death eyes” of his wife says something about the reality of non-material phenomena. You can’t get more garbled than this. Oh, what sad diversity our species contains!
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Finally, Gary Austin had a comment on “Jesuit college teaches atheism,” which he mistakenly tried to post on the picture page.
Oh, an atheist, a proud spaghetti monster bumper sticker man. Do you have the guts to answer this? Were your school teachers atheist? I’m confused; explain to me how the reproductive system evolved so I can be a proud atheist. Oh, and don’t say A-Sexual reproduction because first of all: that would have to evolve as well. And then it only works with one cell, once you get to two cells it no longer works. Also, like Darwin himself asked, how do you evolve an eyeball? No fossil record for that. Think about it. Blind organism wouldn’t even know what sight is, so why would they try to evolve it? ????? I have many more questions, once you successfully answer those. You PROUD ANT-SPAGHETTI MONSTER ATHEIST you. Questions such as heart valves, how do you evolve something that you never could have lived without in the FIRST PLACE????
Also the FLOWER. It never could have existed without the BEE, so did the FLOWER evolve the BEE??? Oh, maybe the BEE evolved the FLOWER? WELL??? I’m waiting for the EDUCATED M.I.T. Atheist to explain. I think you Atheist boys are just spoiled children that took it to heart when your communist elementary school teacher said: “The conscience is just something that the Christian man dreamed up to keep the Atheist man down.” Hence the SOLE Atheist commandment: “Thou shall not get CAUGHT.” Good way to raise children folks. Yes, raise them like animals. You folks remind me of trashy spoiled children, having trashy spoiled children. Even if there was no God and you could explain one of the questions I posed, why is teaching a child: “Thou shall not kill, thou shall not steal, turn the other cheek” so bad?
There is no answering someone as mixed up as this. You don’t need guts to answer the comment, you need lots of time and the ability to somehow think that such a person is open to reason. It reminds me of the Insane Clown Posse: “Fucking heart valves—how do they evolve?“
In fact, this rant is one of the funniest comments ever attempted on this website. The person who wrote it is so willfully ignorant that there is nothing to do but giggle. What else can you do when you’re accused, as an atheist, of having problems with the idea of teaching your kids not to kill or steal?
Not much, really, though there are some interesting but preliminary findings.
Many readers sent me a link to a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Michael J. Montague et al. (reference at bottom, free download, too many authors to list!), and I found it interesting but not definitive. That’s not the authors’ fault, for there’s only so much you can say about the evolution of Felis silvestris catus from sequencing its genome and comparing it to genomes of other mammals. And, of course, cats have been domesticated for only around 10,000 years, so there hasn’t been much time for evolution, especially because artificial selection practiced on cats has been less intense than that practiced on dogs. Cats, after all, are still semi-feral, not much removed from their wild ancestor, the Middle Eastern subspecies of the European wildcat (F. s. lybica). And they keep escaping and mating with their wild ancestors, unlike dogs.
I’ll try to be brief. The authors sequenced the entire genome of a single female Abyssinian cat named “Cinnamon.” After arduous effort, I found a picture of the actual Cinnamon. Here she is, from the IFL Science page:
photo credit: Cinnamon / Kristina Narfstrom, University of Missouri-Columbia via National Human Genome Research Institute
Cinnamon’s genome contained 19,493 genes that are predicted to code for proteins, not much different from the 20,000 protein-coding genes estimated to constitute the human genome. Cats, in other words, have about as many genes as we do. That’s no surprise as lots of animals that we see as “simple,” like fruit flies, also have numbers of genes similar to that of humans.
The authors were most concerned with which genes in the domestic cat lineage—as well as in the felid lineage (about 36 species) and the carnivore lineage—had evolved by natural or artificial selection. Geneticists determine this by looking at those genes that appear to evolve faster than the “normal” turnover of gene sequences by nonselective processes such as genetic drift. Those genes that show a higher proportion of “coding differences” (DNA sequence differences that change the sequence of their protein product) compared to “noncoding differences” (those changes in the DNA sequence that don’t affect the protein that a gene produces, and there are many such changes), are presumed to have evolved by selection. The authors thus compared the “selected” genes in domestic cats to those of other felids, and then to those of other carnivores, and even further, to those of non-carnivorous mammals, by comparing DNA sequences of cats to tigers, to dogs (carnivores), and to humans and cows (noncarnivores).
The rather complicated diagram below shows the evolution of genes in house cats compared to other felids and carnivores (dogs), and to felids in general compared to dogs. The numbers in the boxes at the node (826 and 779) represent the number of reconstruced “olfactory receptor genes” (those involved in smelling different odors) in the ancestral carnivore and felid, respectively. They don’t differ much, although there’s been a slight decrease in felids.
The pie charts show the V1R genes (“vomeronasal genes,” used to detect chemical scents, probably of conspecifics) and “Or genes” (olfactory receptor genes, used to detect odors in general.) The numbers on each branch reflect the gain of Or genes since the common ancestor (in green) and loss of Or genes (red). “Pseudogenes” are genes that have become nonfunctional.
As you can see:
Since the divergence from the common ancestor with other carnivores, felids have lost more of their Or genes, reflecting, perhaps, a lesser reliance on detecting prey and the environment with scent as opposed to vision and hearing.
Felids, however, have retained more of their V1R genes, perhaps reflecting the need to detect conspecifics for both mating and avoidance, as cats (except lions) are nonsocial and must learn each other’s territories (through scent-marking).The authors suppose that the relative gain in V1R genes and loss of Or genes in felids reflects their greater reliance “on pheromones for sociochemical communication.” You may have seen your cat use its vomeronasal organ when sniffing the dried urine or scent of other cats: it opens its mouth and appears to go into a trance as it absorbs and analyzes scents through the organ, located in the roof of its mouth. This is called the “flehmen response” by animal behaviorists. Other animals do it to, but especially felids.
Here’s a cat showing the flehmen response, opening its mouth to let odors enter the vomeronasal organ:
The figure also shows the genes that look as if they’ve been subject to positive selection (in the case of dogs and house cats, that could be artificial selection) in that lineage. Here are a few other genes of interest:
Cats have lost the ability to synthesize many fatty acids compared to other carnivores or mammals. The authors suggest that this is because cats get plenty of fats from their carnivorous diets. Further, felids show some signs of having genetic changes that render them immune to the heart disease that other mammals (like us) get from eating too much fat. If we could put those genes in humans, we’d be far less prone to heart disease (though we may begin urinating against the walls!)
Compared to both wild cats and non-felid carnivores, domestic cats show an accelerated evolution of genes involved in the nervous system: in particular, genes involved in “stimulus-reward learning” and, say the authors, perhaps in tameness.
There are other conclusions as well, such as identification of the genes that cause the “white mitten” pattern of Birman and related Ragdoll cats, as shown below (it’s supposedly due to the combination of two recessive genes).
A Birman with mittens
In general, though, the conclusions are necessarily speculative (after all, they’re based on patterns of gene change rather than actual analyses of gene function). We can say that cats haven’t evolved that much since their domestication, which is what we expect given its recency and the fact that, unlike domestic dogs, cats are still largely feral. In addition, cats roam a lot, and it’s almost certain that some of them have mated with European wildcats (after all, they’re the same species), producing offspring that introduce wild genes back into domesticated cats. That, too, would have slowed down the rate that cats diverge from their wild ancestors.
What we do know is that, compared to other carnivores, felids are more resistant to a high fat diet, show more genetic change allowing them to detect odors of conspecifics compared to odors of prey and the environment, and compared to other felids, domestic cats show neurological changes that make them more amenable to living with humans.
As for the color and pattern differences among breeds of domestic cats, we already know a lot about that from crossing experiments (see here, and here, for instance), though the genes involved in those differences have yet to be identified and sequenced in the genome.
I haven’t read the relevant papers (I have neither the time nor the interest), but if conservatives have bigger amygdalas (amygdalae?), is there evidence that their politics, and their “innate” fearfulness, is a consequence rather than a cause of conservativism? Even if it’s “genetic” (as M**ney claims), well, political affiliation also is inherited, but through culture rather than DNA, and even if it’s really genetic, it could still be some other trait that causes the amygdala to enlarge as a consequence of political affiliation.
Finally, Mooney argues that this is an evolutionary adaptation. If so, then why the variation? If fearfulness was adaptive, or is still adaptive, why do we have so many liberals today? Mooney says this about Republicans:
And thus are we drawn to the only context in which we can make any sense of any of this — the understanding that we human primates evolved. As such, these rapid-fire responses to aversive stimuli are something we share with other animals — a core part of our life-saving biological wiring.
But then are liberals somehow maladapted? There’s surely more to it than this, but, as I said, I haven’t read the papers.
Fortunately, the Photo Tank is refilling thanks to readers, so we’re set for a while. (But keep the GOOD pix coming in!)
Today we have what the Brits call a “bumper edition,” thanks to reader/photographer John Pears:
In response to your reserves of photographs running low, I thought I’d share a few photos taken of the birds that visit my garden. I never tire of watching them squabble over feeders. None of the birds featured are rare but some are seldom visitors to gardens.
Starting with the finches – included are common chaffinch (Fringilla coelebs), European greenfinch (Carduelis chloris) and the striking European goldfinch (Carduelis carduelis). The larger greenfinch is the dominant feeder but tends to prefer the black sunflower, whereas the goldfinch prefer nyjer seed over which they squabble between themselves. I do occasionally see Bullfinch (Pyrrhula pyrrhula) in my garden but haven’t managed to photograph one yet.
Next are the tits including Blue (Cyanistes caeruleus), Great (Parus major), Coal (Periparus ater) and Long tailed (Aegithalos caudatus). Blue, Great and Coal will eat most things that are on offer whereas the long tailed tits which forage in large groups rarely visits the feeders.
The common European robin (Erithacus rubecula) forages on the floor and takes its turn on the feeders and occasionally the great spotted woodpecker (Dendrocopos major) will visit.
Although the smaller species tend not to be on its radar, the Eurasian sparrowhawk (Accipiter nisus) will occasionally visit the table, not with a House Sparrow (Passer domesticus), as its name might suggest, but typically with a blackbird (Turdus merula). However, only one of them is feeding!
All the spilled feed attracts a few mice which have become quite adept at joining the birds on the feeders!
