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.
Another week gone already! Which seat can we take? And, in Dobrzyn, Cyrus and Hili are warily forging a two-state solution:
Hili: We still have some outstanding issues to discuss but there is a chance for peace.
Cyrus: But may I lick your fur now?
Hili: Mamy jeszcze kilka spraw do omówienia, ale jest nadzieja na pokój.
Cyrus: A mógłbym cię już teraz polizać?
2-1 Brazil, at last!
and. . . 3-1 Brazil final. At least two good goals for the green and yellows, and I’m on my way to winning several bets.
Oy, the World Cup is playing hob with my work. If I don’t put the livestream behind me on my laptop, and turn the sound way down, I’ll never get anything done. Brazil is tied 1-1 with Croatia at half-time.
Let’s talk about pie instead.
I have often extolled the virtues of pie as one of the great glories of American cuisine. No other nation produces pies that resemble those of the United States. Yes, the French have their tartes, some of which are delightful, but give me two thick, flaky and buttery crusts enclosing a sea of blueberries or sour cherries, or a real pecan pie, filled with nuts instead of just a niggardly layer floating on top. Or one of my favorites, the hard-to-find sour cream/raisin pie. Pie is the perfect dessert, even more perfect because it also makes a terrific breakfast. And no other nation has anything like it (don’t waste space in the comments touting your pallid alternatives).
And if you’re a pie fan, and live in or around Lawrence, Kansas, you’re in luck. Reader Marc alerted me to the impending opening (in July) of the Lady Bird Diner at 721 Massachusetts St, Lawrence, Kansas 66044. The establishement will, so they say, specialize in classic diner fare. And on their Facebook page is one of the most elegiac and mouthwatering odes to pie I’ve ever seen. It’s apparently written by either the owner or a cook, but the love of pies evinced below bodes well for the place. I know there must be some reader in the area, so please visit the diner next month and report back.
In the meantime, here’s their paean to the pie:
Someone recently asked me, Why Pie? Why not diversify into a more elaborate bakery production? The truth is that I could bake 250 cookies in the time it takes me to make one single apple pie. By the time I’ve made the dough, chilled it, rolled it, rested it, peeled and sliced the apples, filled, baked and cooled the pie, I’ve invested about six hours into eight pieces of pie.
So why bother? Pie is never going to be as pretty as its more postured peers Cake or Tart. When roused from its nap on the cooling rack, a piece of pie will likely slump, undignified and oozing its filling while its once perfect crust slips out of alignment in rebellion at having been manhandled by a spatula. Pie is testy, its dough cantankerous (sometimes downright mean) in the hands of anyone who overlooks either the precise chemistry or the matronly patience to yield a pastry neither too flaky nor too firm. “Touch me,” says the dough, “but not too much, and not there, now back away, don’t even look at me!”
And the fillings! Of a million combinations of fruit and custards, each has its own fussy notion about what kind of thickener it wants and at what ratio. Too much and it looks like your pie is wearing too-small pantyhose. Too little and it’s in a muumuu. I’ve spent many years trying to refine my pies’ wardrobes so that they each have their own perfectly fitted Ann Taylor pantsuit. There are good days and bad…
But even on a bad day, even when I’ve plated a piece of pie that I’m not particularly proud of (and a few that I’ve been downright embarrassed of), I can always count on people to taste the effort. I can’t even take credit for what they’re tasting. I’m only one of many pie bakers in their life, perhaps beginning with their own mothers and grandmothers, who spent more time than is reasonable in the kitchen making something that was going to be consumed in under three minutes. Those mamas and grandmas, they could have made instant pudding, and sometimes they did, but those times you’d hear them early in the morning, padding around the kitchen delicately on their tiptoes… and you’d hear the light click-clack of the sifter and then the chunk-chunk of the rolling pin on the counter… soon there would be the smell of warm butter and cinnamon… and then the most perfectly imperfect dessert would emerge from the oven, bubbling fruit through vented pastry, custard cooling and waiting to be topped with cream. It’s the tremendous effort involved in creating something so ordinary that makes pie my favorite dessert to make and to eat.
And so the answer to the question: Why Pie? is: Because Pie.
Now that is food writing! If this person is as good with pie as with words, the Ladybird can’t open too soon.
To whet your appetite, here’s some photos I posted at the local South Side Pie Challenge in November of last year:
Pecan!
Apple!
Turtle (carmel, nut, and chocolate)!
Hungry yet? And remember, folks. . .
by Matthew Cobb
I saw this article by the excellent Ian Sample on The Guardian website last night, and was simply appalled. A group of US and Japanese scientists, led by Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the School of Veterinary Medicine at University of Wisconsin-Madison decided to try and recreate the Spanish Flu virus which killed millions of people after WW1. The abstract of their paper, ‘Circulating Avian Influenza Viruses Closely Related to the 1918 Virus Have Pandemic Potential’, published in Cell Host & Microbe, starts off well:
Wild birds harbor a large gene pool of influenza A viruses that have the potential to cause influenza pandemics. Foreseeing and understanding this potential is important for effective surveillance. Our phylogenetic and geographic analyses revealed the global prevalence of avian influenza virus genes whose proteins differ only a few amino acids from the 1918 pandemic influenza virus, suggesting that 1918- like pandemic viruses may emerge in the future.
In other words, as everyone knows, we are in danger of another flu pandemic that could kill millions of people. The abstract continues:
To assess this risk, we generated and characterized a virus composed of avian influenza viral segments with high homology to the 1918 virus. This virus exhibited pathogenicity in mice and ferrets higher than that in an authentic avian influenza virus.
Yes, that’s right. To see whether a virus with characteristics like the 1918 virus would be dangerous, they created it! And you know what? It was dangerous.
The Discussion of the article concludes with a justification of their study:
To prepare for such a scenario [a new pandemic – MC], it is important to understand the molecular mechanisms of pathogenicity and transmissibility of avian influenza viruses. Such information provides support for pandemic preparedness activities (vaccines and antivirals are effective control measures), demonstrates the value of continued surveillance of avian influenza viruses, and emphasizes the need for evaluation and integration of improved risk assessment measures.
I am really not convinced by this, and I am amazed that the paper includes not a word about the apparent ethical/biosecurity issues. People have been arguing about whether to destroy the last remaining samples of smallpox, but we know how to cure that, and it is nowhere near as infectious as the 1918 flu virus. This seems to me to be a colossal and dangerous mistake. Nothing that I have read in the paper convinces me that the insight they have gained is worth the risk of the damn thing getting out.
Lord May, former President of the Royal Society, is quoted in The Guardian article:
“The work they are doing is absolutely crazy. The whole thing is exceedingly dangerous. Yes, there is a danger, but it’s not arising form the viruses out there in the animals, it’s arising from the labs of grossly ambitious people.”
Marc Lipsitch, professor of epidemiology at Harvard School of Public Health, said:
“I am worried that this signals a growing trend to make transmissible novel viruses willy-nilly, without strong public health rationale. This is a risky activity, even in the safest labs. Scientists should not take such risks without strong evidence that the work could save lives, which this paper does not provide,” he added.
Kawaoka defended his work from criticism, referring to some of his previous work:
“There were discussions on the usefulness of stockpiling H5N1 [bird flu] vaccines until our H5N1 papers were published. Similarly, this paper strongly supports stockpiling anti-influenza drugs. If this is not a ‘lifesaving benefit’, what is?” he said.
NIH, who funded the research, said this:
Carole Heilman, director of microbiology and infectious diseases at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (Niaid) in the US, said: “This study was conducted as part of a research project on understanding the molecular mechanisms of virulence of the 1918 influenza virus. NIH peer review determined that the research was scientifically meritorious. It was also determined that the information gained had the potential to help public health agencies in their assessment of circulating and newly emerging strains. In addition, NIH determined that all the research was being done under appropriate biosafety conditions and with appropriate risk mitigation measures.”
I’m afraid I’m with Simon Wain-Hobson, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Pari:
“It’s madness, folly. It shows profound lack of respect for the collective decision-making process we’ve always shown in fighting infections. If society, the intelligent layperson, understood what was going on, they would say ‘What the F are you doing?'”
What do readers think? Am I over-reacting? I’d be especially interested in anyone with insight into this field – is this information of any conceivable use in the fight against the next flu pandemic? Best of all would be if the authors, or anyone else involved in the reviewing the paper or the original research application, chipped in below the line to convince me and, I suspect, many readers, that this is not some colossal, hubristic mistake.
You can download the article for free, it appears, here.
Today’s Google Doodle is a short animation of the World Cup, beginning with a bouncing ball. Click on the screenshot below to see it:
Here’s creationist Derek Isaacs, someone I’ve not heard of, promulgating his inanities on an episode of “Creation Today.” Isaacs says that, after studying the writings of “purveyors of evolutionary biology” like Darwin, Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and E.O. Wilson (since when was Hitchens a “purveyor of evolutionary biology?), he discovered himself “in a very dark place”—a place where rape was basically okay because, after all, evolution tells men they have to propagate their genes.
As The Raw Story reports:
“You have to start asking questions: Well, if evolution is true, and it’s just all about the male propagating their DNA, we had to ask hard questions, like, well, is rape wrong?” Isaacs said, as one of his hosts gasps.
Isaacs is the author of “Dragons or Dinosaurs?” – which argues that ancient myths about dragons were based on human interactions with dinosaurs — and the founder of theWatchman 33 end times blog.
He said marriage would be “anathema” in an evolutionary worldview because it would limit sexual relations to one man and one woman for life.
“According to the evolutionary worldview, [if] that male is strong enough and he had wonderful genes, he should propagate his DNA as much as possible so that the species can progress,” Isaacs said. “So it redefines everything about our society.”
I won’t bother to rebut the view that whatever behaviors instilled in our genes (and it’s dubious that rape is one of them) must be okay in modern society. After all, how much credibility can somebody have who describes evolution as merely ” random chaotic force”?
But Isaacs’ dilemma instantiates a broader issue: the widespread view that if evolution were true, there would be no reason to behave morally. After all, if we’re simply evolved beasts, there’s nothing wrong with behaving like beasts. This, perhaps, is the psychological reason behind most of America’s opposition to evolution. Michael Ruse once said something like this: people don’t stay up at night worrying whether birds evolved from dinosaurs; they stay up worrying about morality.
The response to Isaacs’ idiocy is, of course, is that humans certainly evolved, but we also evolved in a way that made possible a form of non-genetic evolution: the propagation of culture. And our culture has “evolved” to the point where we recognize that what evolved genetically—behaviors that helped spread the genes of our ancestors—is not necessarily desirable in modern societies. Our ancestors were probably deeply xenophobic, too, but that’s simply not good behavior in today’s interconnected world. As Paul Bloom has noted, babies do start out rather xenophobic, being nice only to those whom they recognize, and that cooperation and beneficence must be instilled later through learning.
At any rate, Isaacs is full of it, but you should realize that his attitudes are surprisingly common.
You can see the long version of this program here.
It’s been a long time since I’ve discussed any essays of Andrew Brown, the Guardian‘s resident faitheist and purveyor of laughable nonsense, but his latest piece, “Our horror at the mass baby grave in Ireland shows an instinctive religiosity,” is worth singling out for its pandering to religion. One wonders, given Brown’s self-declared atheism in the face of his constant osculation of the rump of faith, why the man simply doesn’t declare himself religious and hie himself to a church.
A guest post by Grania Spingies on Tuesday described the discovery of a mass grave of babies and young children at a workhouse in Tuam in County Galway, Ireland. The estimate of dead children is around 800, and most of them surely died from malnutrition or disease due to the horrific conditions in Catholic-run homes for unwed mothers. And a lot of those deaths must be laid at the doorstep of the Church, for although there was infant mortality in the surrounding areas, it was far higher in homes for unwed mothers, where children were poorly fed and medical care deemed too expensive. It is only because of religious strictures on “illegitimate” babies and their mothers that the homes existed at all.
Everyone is naturally appalled, but Andrew Brown takes advantage of the situation to show two things. First, that although this is a horrific event, it’s not as bad as we think. Second, our horror at the dumping of these babies (said to have been in a septic tank) shows that, at bottom, we’re all religious.
Here’s his minimalization of religion’s role in the deaths, so subtle that you can read right through it:
Twenty babies dropped in a cesspit as corpses is a horrifying figure. Even one would be dreadful. And of course the whole story fits wonderfully into the larger stories of Irish nuns as heartless and cruel, which many undoubtedly were. But what’s interesting to a student of religion is why the desecration of dead bodies should be so very much more shocking than the deaths of living babies.
“Wonderfully” is the key word here. It’s as if people were waiting to pin this one on the nuns who ran the home, and on the Church who employed the nuns, and doubtless gave them their task. Brown here simply dismisses people’s outrage at the C hurch. And why are those deaths less “interesting” to a student of religion than our shock at the bodies being tossed into a pit? Brown is an expert at simply ignoring the perfidies of faith, or, in this case, the role of the Catholic church. What is really interesting is that these homes were even operating in a civilized society. Catholicism is a big part of the answer.
Another minimalization:
Corless has established that about 20 children a year died in the home for the years of its operation, which could hold around 200 mothers at a time. That would make an infant mortality rate that is shocking by modern civilised standards though actually no worse than that of the whole of Ireland in 1910. But outside the Tuam home, it had dropped from 11% in 1910 to 3.7% by the end of the 50s. This progress does not seem to have reached into the home. That is rightly horrifying.
The Home operated between 1925 and 1961. What does 1910 have to do with it?
Instead, he bangs on about how strange it is that the desecration of the bodies is more distressing than how those babies died. Brown thinks he’s found some profound moral truth:
But it still doesn’t horrify us in the same way as the thought of dead babies tossed into a cesspit does. Two explanations occur as possible. They may not be mutually exclusive: that’s to say that they might be different ways of describing the same phenomenon.
The first is that we have an innate sense of the sacredness of dead bodies. That seems to be a factual and true claim. Certainly, the burial of the dead is one of the things that distinguishes humans from our ancestors, and one of the things that is held by archaeologists to distinguish skeletons of people like us from those of people who have not quite got to full humanity. That’s why we think Neanderthals were humans, for instance.
The second is that we feel an instinctive sympathy for the figure of a woman holding a dead baby in a way that we don’t when the baby is merely ill or suffering. That’s a cruel thing to say, but again, I think it is actually true. Either way, we have here a fact about human nature that is terribly difficult to justify rationally. It takes a very cold heart to say that a dead baby is not worth our grief because it has passed beyond suffering.
Has it crossed Brown’s mind that maybe people are more horrified at the deaths themselves than at the bodies being dumped in a mass grave—perhaps a septic pit? Or that the denigration of these children’s humanity that caused their deaths is of a piece with the dumping of those bodies? According to Brown, we’d be equally horrified if the children were well taken care of and died at the “normal” rate, but their bodies were simply dumped after death. I deny that. We’d still be horrified that they treated the bodies that way, but what really angers people is simply that these homes existed, that unwed mothers were forced into them against their will, forced to give up their children, and that the children living there were treated so poorly that their death rate was phenomenally high. Oh, and that the Church seems to ignore the problem.
Once again we hear the word “sacredness” to characterize this reaction—the same deliberate co-option of religious terminology that Roger Scruton used to argue that atheists lacked humanity. No, I don’t think bodies are “sacred,” and, in fact, I don’t care much what happens to mine when I’m gone. But bodies do have a non-religious value, for they give us something tangible to help us remember the dead and what their deaths mean. The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Virginia is a popular place to visit, not because those unidentified soldiers are “sacred,” but because their presence stands for the sacrifice of many soldiers, and for the families who never learned the fate of their soldier sons. My father’s grave is nearby—he was a veteran—and I visit it not because I see his body as “sacred,” but because it helps me remember my old man, and to try to fit his life into the fabric of my own. Yes, some people may regard bodies as “sacred” in the religious sense—that they won’t go to Heaven unless they have a proper burial—but I doubt that this is behind the Tuam issue.
But the worst part of Brown’s dreadful piece is the last two sentences, in which he simply claims that our horror at what happened at Tuam shows how religious we really are:
This story will undoubtedly be used to attack religion. But what it actually shows is how very deeply religious instincts operate within us.
Can a man get more stupid, or opportunistic, than that? Does Brown have no inkling that atheists and nonbelievers can also be shocked at such a travesty? And does he fail to see that it is “deeply religious instincts” that led to those deaths in the first place?
_________
UPDATE: I forgot that Brown is afflicted with a chronic case of Maru’s Syndrome: when he sees a box, he cannot help but enter. Here’s his response to a reader who tw**ted the piece above:
Several readers contributed pictures for today’s show and tell.
Reader Sarah Crews took this photo of an American kestrel (Falco sparverius) with prey in the Blue Mountains of Jamaica last November:
. . . and a desert iguana ((Dipsosaurus dorsalis)
Reader Ed Kroc gives us an epic battle between Gull versus Crow:
A glaucous-winged gull (Larus glaucescens) battling a northwestern crow (Corvus caurinus). This gull has a nest with her partner on the pictured rooftop, across the street from my apartment, while the crow has his/her own nest in a tree right next door. Occasionally, the crow gets a little irritated if one of the gulls wanders too close to this tree. This usually results in a few minutes of the crow dive-bombing the offending gull. Usually the gull just ducks and snaps its beak, but this time she got a bit aggressive herself, displaying her wings in full and lunging at the buzzing crow.
Finally, reader Scott sent a picture of bats taken during his honeymoon in Aruba (note the dedication to biology!):
The bats were observed on a tour of the island, and the picture with the dive bombing is my favorite. I think they are Southern Long-nosed Bat (Leptonycteris curasoae). The caves are along the shores of Aruba in Arikok National Park, and gets scheduled tours regularly. I think the park limits the number of caves the public has access to and the “picture time” each tour gets to reduce disturbances.
