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’m on the road it’s easier for me to post readers’ photographs from emails than from my folder (which I’ll bring to Poland nonetheless), so by all means send me your good photograph on Friday or thereafter. Today we feature our most stalwart stalwart, Stephen Barnard from Idaho.
Stephen originally identified this as a “Female Black-chinned Hummingbird (Archilochus alexandri) in various poses,” but he now says this:
Social media is trending toward female Calliope Hummingbird (Selasphorus calliope), and I tend to agree, mostly because of the short tail compared to the Broad-tailed. The Internet is a marvelous thing. The females and juveniles of these species are very hard to tell apart. The mature breeding males are super obvious. [JAC: I’ve put a photo of a male below.]
Here’s a photo of a male Calliope Hummingbird in its mating display, when it fans out its chin feathers (photo from Trek Nature):
This bull moose (Alces alces) got Deets’s [the border collie’s] attention this morning. I like the backlighting on the velvet antlers.
I don’t know what to do with this guy. Answering him will, as I’ve learned, only provoke more emails. I have a series of three:
September 18, 2013
Dear Dr. Coyne:
My name is [REDACTED], a college student currently. I was once an irreligious person when I was a boy; however, I have experienced a vast conversion in my life which permanently changed my character from a carnally-minded selfish, rebellious child unto a spiritually-minded being who strives to do what is right in God’s standards, which do not change.
I have learned for myself that atheism is not true. My inquiries for you are these: Do you believe that I’m idiotic, deranged, or stupid in anyway? If so, do you believe we’re better than our ancestors?
Yours truly, [REDACTED] — “Behold, I am a disciple of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. I have been called of him to declare his word among his people, that they might have everlasting life.” – 3 Nephi 5:13
Experience has taught me that any response to this kind of email invariably triggers more emails in which the believer demands a “conversation.” Although I was tempted to answer his penultimate question, I refrained. A year later he tried again:
December 25, 2014 (Christmas Day!):
Dr. Coyne,
If you’re unwilling to answer, you could at least tell that to me. You’re probably a busy man, but it doesn’t take long to do that.
My faith remains strong. Merry Christmas, and God bless.
-[REDACTED]
Again I didn’t respond. Another email came today, nearly 7 months later. I think the fellow is getting testy.
Only two more days before I head to Poland to see my adopted parents and also to get my Hili and cherry pie fix. It’s got to be cooler there than here!
It’s July 26, which means it’s the Day of National Significance in Barbados. Also on this day, the very first reported women’s cricket match took place–in 1745! Exactly two hundred years later, Winston Churchill was removed from power in a general election. Ingrates! Finally, there’s this intriguing Wikipedia note from July 26, 2007: “Shambo, a black cow in Wales that had been adopted by the local Hindu community, is slaughtered due to a bovine tuberculosis infection, causing widespread controversy.”
Notables born on July 26 include Carl Jung (1875), Aldous Huxley (1894), Stanley Kubrik (1928), Mick Jagger (1943), Helen Mirren (1945 ♥), Dorothy Hamill (1956), Kevin Spacey (1949), and Sandra Bullock (1964♥♥). Those who died on this day include William Jennings Bryan (1925, right after the Scopes Trial), Eva Peron (1952), Diane Arbus (1971), and Merce Cunningham (2009). Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili has learned that Hiroko, the Japanese woman who embroidered Hili’s image on my shirt, has sent me some cat snacks to bring to the Furry Princess (they are unusual—liquid snacks in tubes!). Hili, who’s never had a Japanese cat’s snack, is very excited:
A: Jerry wrote that he is coming with a Japanese treat for you.
Hili: Japanese?!!!
In Polish:
Ja: Jerry pisał, że przywiezie ci japońskie jedzenie.
Hili: Japońskie?!!!
And out in Winnipeg, they’ve removed the railings from Gus’s deck, so he has a better view of what’s going on in the yard:
This moron not only tried to hit a raccoon with a broom, but then faced the wrath of a mother whose babies were obviously in the bin. DO NOT DO THIS! LET THE ANIMAL BE!
The Syrian who blew himself up in southern Germany, wounding 15 people, had pledged allegiance to Islamic State on a video found on his mobile phone, the Bavarian interior minister said on Monday.
“A provisional translation by an interpreter shows that he expressly announces, in the name of Allah, and testifying his allegiance to (Islamic State leader) Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi … an act of revenge against the Germans because they’re getting in the way of Islam,” Joachim Herrmann told a news conference.
“I think that after this video there’s no doubt that the attack was a terrorist attack with an Islamist background.”
Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack, according to Amaq, a news agency that supports Islamic State.
The attack, outside a music festival in Ansbach, a town of 40,000 people southwest of Nuremberg that has a U.S. Army base, was the fourth act of violence by men of Middle Eastern or Asian origin against German civilians in a week.
The man, whose name wasn’t given, is apparently a refugee who arrived in Germany from Syria two years ago, had repeated run-ins with the cops, and was reportedly facing deportation to Bulgaria.
Ray Comfort’s last movie, “Evolution vs God” (you can see the whole 38-minute movie here), was execrable: Comfort ran around asking people whether they ever saw evolution in “real time,” and if they didn’t he said, “Aha, evolution doesn’t work!”. The trick, of course, that these people, who weren’t scientists, had to give some “observable” evidence, and stuff like fossils or the evolution of insecticide resistance were ruled out tout court. He wanted observations of changes “between kinds”, with “kinds” not defined, as it never is. (See my critique here.)
Now the old goddy has a new film, “The Atheist Delusion”, that opens on Friday. Here’s the trailer:
Over at The Friendly Atheist, Hemant conducted an email interview with Comfort about the movie, which isn’t that enlightening because Comfort refuses to say what that “irrefutable evidence” is that makes atheists squirm and question their nonbelief. The only time they even discuss it is this:
FA: Conservative columnist Matt Barber wrote of this film that, “you managed, in about an hour, to make the case, beyond any reasonable doubt, for the Creator God.” How is it possible that you did that when so many Christian apologists before you have failed?
RC: I wouldn’t say that they failed. They perhaps just didn’t frame it using the Socratic Method. But the question I ask in the movie isn’t a magic bullet. I hope this doesn’t sound offensive, but it only works with those who are both humble and open to reason. I’m sure the movie will be thoroughly trashed by most in the atheist community, but I believe those who want to know the truth will hit it head-on.
I’m curious what this magic bullet really is, but I ain’t gonna pay good money to see the movie. Comfort does note that the movie will be free on YouTube at the end of September. I suspect we’ll all just wait for it. However, one commenter at Hemant’s site says this:
. . . as seen in this meme Ray claims he has one “scientific” question that will destroy atheism. That question is about the existence of DNA. Just marketing hype for his Christian followers. They are the true target of his videos and books. He makes his money from them.
One note: Comfort admits that he was “very embarrassed” by the infamous banana video in which Comfort touts the (domesticated) banana as evidence for God’s handiwork. (He called the banana “the atheist’s nightmare!)
One of the classic stories of biology, taught to virtually every student, is the fact that what we call “lichens” are actually a combination of two very distantly related species: a species of alga and a species of fungus. (Sometimes the “alga” is really a species of cyanobacteria, formerly called “blue green algae” but not really algae.) It is offered as the paradigm of a true symbiosis, in which two species living together each provide something for the other. In the case of lichens, the alga provides the products of photosynthesis as nutrients, while the fungus provides structure, protection, nutrients, and moisture. They’ve coevolved to the extent that while the algal partner can sometimes be found living freely on its own, the fungus is never found on its own. Finally, most (but not all) of the fungal partners in a lichen are ascomycetes (“sac fungi”)—a phylum in the fungal kingdom.
Lichens vary tremendously in their growth form depending on the partners; here are three examples taken from the Wikipedia article:
Well, this classic story has just been revised in a new online paper in Science by Toby Spribille et al. (reference below; free download). Spribille and his colleagues note that although this partnership has been described for decades, attempts to reconstruct a lichen in the lab by combining the fungal and algal partner always failed: researchers could simply not obtain the characteristic structure seen in nature. Their new paper gives an astounding result that may explain this failure: there’s a third partner in this symbiosis, and it’s yet another fungus—a yeast, which is a “basiodiomycete”, a different phylum that includes mushrooms and puffballs.
I’ll be brief. Spribille et al. discovered the new partner when studying two lichens that looked very different (one produced an acid that made it yellow), but turned out to have the same algal and fungal partners. They were, in effect, the same species of lichen (though of course species delineation is tricky in this group). Why were they so different? They decided to study gene expression in the two forms using genes identified in ascomycetes and algae. No differences were found. But when they expanded their search to other types of fungi, they found that some basidiomycete genes were expressed in one form but not the other, even though no basidiomycetes were supposed to be there.
They then determined that other lichens also had a third basidiomycete partner, but one that differed among lichen “species”. Although only 42 of the 56 sampled lichen genera had related basidiomycetes (indicating that the partnership may not be required in all lichens), they conclude that “basidiomycete fungi are ubiquitous and global associates of the world’s most speciose radiation of macrolichens.”
Finally, they visualized the cells, which was hard to do because they’re sparse and embedded in the lichen cortex (its skin). They finally managed to visualize the yeast cells, at first detected only by their gene transcripts, by “FISH” (fluorescent in situ hybridization) analysis: making RNA transcripts of the yeasts that hybridized to fluorescent molecules. And then they could see this:
Figure from paper. (A) B. fremontii, with (B) few FISH-hybridized live yeast cells at the level of the cortex. (C) B. tortuosa, with (D) abundant FISH-hybridized cortical yeast cells (scale bars, 20 μm).
The previous failure to detect the presence of another fungal partner may explain why scientists haven’t been able to synthesize lichens from their components: they were leaving out the third partner.
And why wasn’t this partner detected before? The authors suggest that the genes in the new partner simply weren’t detected in the usual gene-sequencing procedures, which can be biased toward detecting genes present in greater numbers.
This shows that long-established stories can be drastically revised by new findings, and that the classic tale of this symbiosis may have to be revised a bit. It remains to be seen whether this new, third partner is actually required for the lichen to form, and, if so, if it really partakes in a symbiosis as well, giving stuff to its two partners and getting back from them. It could even be parasitic or neutral, or have a symbiosis with one of the two other partners and a different relationship with the other. To add the classic ending to scientific papers, “Much work remains to be done.”
