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.
We all know about creationists lying for Jesus. In fact, we saw an example of that last night when Eben Alexander, debating the existence of an afterlife against Sean Carroll and Steve Novella, deliberately misrepresented a quote of Carl Sagan by taking it out of context.
What we don’t expect is that pro-evolution people would use the same tactic to promote their agenda. Yet they do if their evolution is mixed with religion, as it is in the case of Peter Hess, the “Director of Religious Community Outreach” for the National Center for Science Education (NCSE). That organization, which has done great stuff by keeping creationism out of the schools, is nevertheless committed to undiluted accommodationism, repeatedly telling religionists that their faith is compatible with evolution. That, in fact, is Hess’s job (he’s a Catholic, I believe). In that way they push theology as well as evolution, for such accommodationism effectively tells people what form of religious belief is considered “proper”. (Hint: it’s the form that accepts evolution.)
And Hess, perhaps because of his religiosity, isn’t above doing a little quote-mining to defend that accommodationism. In a new article on the NCSE blog “Science League of America” (an unfortunate title for that site, I think), Hess has accused atheists of arguing that religious people can’t do good science.
Hess’s piece is called “An astronomer for God: William R. Stoeger (1943-2014),” and it’s a paean to a cosmologist and theologian (a Jesuit) who tried to put a religious interpretation on science. Hess plainly admired Stoeger, though I’d argue that praising this kind of accommodationism on the NCSE website is unseemly, as it’s osculating the rump of superstition. Nevertheless, I’ll let Hess have his moment of admiration, which includes these encomiums:
Bill Stoeger was both a brilliant and careful astronomer and an astute partner in dialogue about issues at the interface between religion and science. It was his lifelong conviction that
“God is speaking to us not only through Scripture, but also through the beauties, the wonder, the intricacies, and the harmonies of creation, and so what we discover, either about the way our brain works, and how it coordinates our behavior, or what we discover about the biology of the cell, or the chemistry of DNA, or the working of cosmology or physics, all those things are going to tell us, at least a little bit, about how God acts in the world.” [The quote is apparently from a Catholic biologist who knew Stoeger]
Father Bill, we bid you fond farewell and Godspeed, in remembrance of and thanksgiving for your contributions to our understanding of so many facets of life in the universe.
That curled the toes of my shoes a bit, but what really upset me—and reader John Harshman—was this statement from Hess (my emphasis):
Biblical fundamentalists and their opponents on the extreme opposite end of the spectrum of belief often share one significant assumption: in order to contribute to modern science you have to be an atheist. That is, you cannot at the same time believe in a personal God and accept the scientific explanations of Big Bang cosmology, of the age of our solar system, and of the evolution of biodiversity on Earth.
Well, I’m not sure whether many Biblical fundamentalists feel that only atheists can contribute to modern science, but I know for damn sure that few atheists, or atheist scientists such as myself, feel that way. Although I think scientists who are religious are engaged in a form of subconscious cognitive dissonance, I’ve never said that religious belief automatically prevents somebody from doing good science. There were many believers, even in my own field (Ronald Fisher and Theodosius Dobzhansky, to name two) who made immense contributions to evolutionary biology. And although I vehemently object to Francis Collins’s touting scientific evidence for God (i.e., “The Moral Law”), I’ve said repeatedly that Collins was a good scientist and that I had no scientific objections to his heading the National Institutes of Health.
But Harshman wanted to know which atheists, exactly, held the views that Hess claimed, and, in the comments on Hess’s post, pressed him relentlessly:
My comment at the end represents Hess’s answer, responding to Harshman, to “which atheists think that religious people can’t do science?: For Hess had put up a response (now altered) that had two names, “Vic Stenger and Jerry Coyne”.
I never said anything of the kind. Hess’s misrepresentation really ticked me off, so I left my own comment after his post.
I waited patiently for Hess’s apology, and instead of tendering one, he simply modified his list of atheist miscreants by striking out my name (I don’t have a screenshot of the earlier version that lumped Stenger and I, but here’s his “apology”):
Well, that’s hardly an apology, and I’d expect a real one from a believer like Hess. After all, wouldn’t Jesus do that? But perhaps we’re learning that accommodationists can be just as devious and manipulative as fundamentalists. (I don’t think I’ve ever distorted a quote.)
So, Dr. Hess, I’m still waiting for you to retract your words, and not simply by striking out my name from your “J’accuse” list.
In the meantime, Hess is hoist with his own petard. After accusing fundamentalists and atheists of behaving the same bad way, he goes ahead and behaves exactly like a fundamentalist creationist.
From engadget we learn that NASA has now given us real-time video of Earth from the International Space Station:
NASA has switched on the High Definition Earth Viewing (HDEV) experiment, an internet stream that shows the station’s view of our planet in real time; you can check it out below. Developed and run in part by high school students, it includes both multiple 720p camera feeds and the ISS crew’s radio chatter.
The footage isn’t always riveting — HDEV will occasionally lose contact, and there isn’t much to see when the station is on the dark side of the world. Even so, it should still serve a noble purpose. It’s testing both the quality of Earth-facing cameras as well as their ability to survive high doses of radiation while in orbit. Once the experiment goes offline in October 2015, NASA will use the results to decide what cameras it uses on future missions. Don’t be surprised if awe-inspiring views become a staple of spaceflight in the near future.
Lord, when will these people stop promising that you can change your genes by changing your mind? This week’s “World” edition of PuffHo engages in its usual hyping of Deepak Chopra and Rudy Tanzi in a piece called “Deepak Chopra on how to modify your own genes.” It’s pure quackery, implying that we can permanently alter our genes by altering our thoughts and lifestyle. Imagine: having peaceful children just by practicing meditation yourself! If you can think your way out of clinical depression, maybe—even if depression runs in families—it will reduce your children’s chance of becoming depressed!
I consider this article a severe and harmful distortion of science. Its author, Kathleen Miles, is a senior editor of PuffHo World without any apparent biological training. And it shows: she swallows the tasteless pablum dished out by Tanzi and Chopra without a grimace, or a word of criticism. Let’s deconstruct this ludicrous article, which, mercifully, is short. (It also has two videos.)
Physician and best-selling author Deepak Chopra has an empowering message: You can actually modify your own genes through your actions and behaviors.
“We are literally metabolizing something as ephemeral as experience or even meaning,” Chopra said in an interview this week at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills, California. “If somebody says to me, ‘I love you,’ and I’m in love with them, I suddenly feel great, and I make things like oxytocin and dopamine, serotonin, opiates. And if someone says to me, ‘I love you,’ and I’m really thinking they’re manipulating me, I don’t make the same thing. I make cortisol and adrenaline.”
Throughout the piece one sees the conflation of two things: changes in gene expression versus changes in the structure of the genes themselves. Certainly when your body has a physiological reaction, or there’s neuronal activity, genes are involved, either having made the hormones or neurotransmitters that are expressed, or becoming activated to make more of them. Genes are also involved in rewiring your brain in light of your experience. But this is all differential activation of genes that remain themselves structurally unchanged. Their sequences don’t change: they’re just turned on and off.
This has been known for years, but Tanzi and Chopra deliberately (or so I think) confuse gene expression (as in the second paragraph above) with gene structure, as in the paragraphs below:
If certain experiences happen enough times, they can affect how genes are expressed and packaged without altering DNA, said Harvard Medical School professor Rudy Tanzi. This phenomenon, called epigenetics, is gaining increasing popularity among scientists.
“Every experience will cause chemical changes in your body and in your brain, and those chemical changes will then cause genetic changes,” said Tanzi, who recently co-authored the book Super Brain with Chopra. “If those genetic changes occur often enough and with persistence, that can lead to modification of those genes such that they react the same way in the future because they’ve been trained.”
Though not a typical outcome, there have been reports of such modifications being passed onto subsequent generations, in what’s known as transgenerational epigenetic evolution.
Now epigenetics is not the differential expression of unchanged genes, but the structural alteration of genes (which itself can change their expression) by modification of their DNA sequence—usually by attaching methyl groups (one carbon and three hydrogen atoms) onto specific DNA bases. Epigenetic modification of genes has also been known for a while, can affect their expression, and can be adaptive, as when male and female genes are differently methylated, and expressed, in the egg that results from fertilization. But all the adaptive changes in methylation we know of are themselves coded in the DNA; that is, the DNA has a sequence that tells other parts of the DNA to become epigenetically modified in an adaptive way.
This is not what people like Tanzi and Chopra mean by “epigenetics,” though. They mean that the changes in DNA come not from the DNA code itself, but from the environment, and then become inherited. Indeed, such “Lamarckian” changes in DNA modification can occur from the environment, and be inherited—but not for more than a few generations. It is not a stable form of inheritance, and hence can’t play a role in evolution, or (as the duo repeatedly implies) in changing the genes of your children. Such modifications have never, to my knowledge, been the basis of a biological adaptation, because they disappear within a few generations. All evolutionary adaptations that I know of have, when investigated finely, proved to rest on changes in the sequence of DNA bases. None of them have been shown to rest on environmentally-induced epigenetic modification of the DNA.
But Tanzi and Chopra use the few unstable examples found in the lab to construct an airy edifice of self-help. Here’s what they say:
For example, Tanzi said, a study published in December in the journal Nature Neuroscience reported that mice inherit smell memories from their fathers — even when the offspring have never met their father or experienced the smell themselves. The study also found that the third generation of mice was born with the same smell memory.
“If you had told me that five years ago, I would’ve said it’s science fiction,” Tanzi said, referring to transgenerational epigenetic evolution. “When you talk about this stuff, the conservative evolutionary biologists, the Darwinians, will come out and attack you.”
I suspect that by “conservative evolutionary biologists,” Tanzi (who’s threatened me with action for libel) means me, and perhaps Dawkins and others who have called Tanzi and Chopra out for their exaggerations. After all, we’re the annoying fleas on the body of quackery, demanding evidence for their claims. The problem with the mouse example is that , like all epigenetic modifications it hasn’t been shown to be stable for more than two generations.
And here’s the telling admission by Tanzi (my emphasis):
While scientists have found evidence for epigenetic changes that are passed down in mice and water fleas, Tanzi noted that there is only circumstantial evidence for the phenomenon occurring in humans.
Still, he emphasized that the connection between our actions and our genes is clear.
“The brain is not static. It’s dynamic. It’s changing all the time,” Tanzi said. “And you’re in charge of how it changes.”
So—no evidence in humans. Nevertheless, the Quack Train has left the station, and nothing will induce these two to provide proper caveats about the research, for they’re selling books and CD’s about how we can change our genes by changing our behavior. I don’t mind these people speculating about what might happen in humans in the absence of any evidence, but I consider it unethical to use those unfounded speculations to sell stuff to a gullible public.
Note, in the above, Tanzi’s argument that the brain is “dynamic” and “changing all the time.” Well of course it does: it changes every time we receive sensory information, have a thought, or feel an emotion. So what? That says absolutely nothing about modifying our genes. And it’s a bit misleading to say “you’re in charge of how it changes.” As a determinist, I don’t think we are (what does Tanzi mean by “you,” anyway?). Even if you’re not a determinist, you must admit that changes in your brain often have nothing to do with your volition. If you’re permanently traumatized by some horrible event, or your memories are altered by external events, that occurs without your conscious will.
To see how far these guys take this stuff, here are two videos from the PuffHo piece, described as follows:
Deepak Chopra, physician and best-selling author, and Rudy Tanzi, Harvard Medical School professor, spoke with Kathleen Miles, senior editor of The WorldPost, at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills, California on April 28, 2014.
They’re short, so listen up. There’s more quackery here than in a duck colony!
Note Chopra’s statement: “There is no experience of any kind that doesn’t get metabolized into gene regulation and neuroplasticity.” Metabolized? What does he mean? If he means that experiences affect the expression of genes we already have, then fine. And if he means that our brains get “rewired” from experiences, that’s true, too. But then Tanzi chimes in at 1:45 and says that these chemical changes in the brain cause genetic changes that can be passed on. That’s simply distorting the truth; we have no idea that that can happen in our species (or stably in any species), and considerable evidence against it.
Here’s the second video, in which Tanzi again implies that stuff like getting yourself un-depressed might change your children’s propensity to be depressed. To be fair, he does admit here that the data are a bit thin in humans (i.e., nonexistent), but then goes on to discuss the temporary epigenetic modifications seen in other species.
At about 2:30 Tanzi disses criticism by “conservative evolutionary biologists” who “don’t do really do experiments but do a lot of lecturing” I deeply resent that, for I’ve spent my career doing experiments (should I threaten Tanzi with a lawsuit?) and mapping genetic differences between species. He then says that biology is “self-organizing”: more jargon that, at bottom, means nothing.
My three conclusions.
1. Chopra is up to his old tricks by trying to build a reputation and a fortune on unproven science (as well as obfuscation existing science). I maintain my view that he’s a complete quack, and resent him for distorting good science to mislead people and swell his coffers.
2. His partner in this endeavor, Tanzi, will ultimately seriously damage his reputation (he’s a professor at Harvard) by not only associating with the quack Chopra, but by pushing the idea of epigenetic modification of our brains without supporting evidence. But he’ll cry all the way to the bank. Were I Tanzi’s colleague, I’d urge him to get as far away from Chopra as possible.
Now it’s possible that these guys could be right to some extent—that is, there may be a few permanently inherited modifications of our genes induced by epigenetic alterations stemming from the environment. But I’d bet a lot of money that we don’t find, say, five of them that are adaptive within the next decade.
3. This is science journalism at its very worst. Miles has not taken the slightest effort to vet Tanzi and Chopra’s claims by consulting other scientists. She is gullible and just wants to sell a big story. PuffHo should be ashamed of itself for publishing stuff like this, but, as we know, that rag has no shame. Their job is to sell website clicks, and if they have to push quackery to do it, so be it. Frankly, this is far worse than sideboob!
More quackery from Twitter, with Deepakity trying to get us “atheist Darwinists” to pay attention:
A student in one of my classes asked why, in many species of animals, if one sex is brightly colored and the other is not, or one sex does mating displays and the other does not, that sex is male. I answered, but won’t repeat the answer here; readers should learn the explanation for what is, in effect, one of the “laws” of biology. (Unlike physics, though, this law isn’t unbreakable, as we see from the gaudy female seahorse.) But here’s a nice case that adheres to the “law”:
Reader Bruce Lyon sent a series of photographs (and a 7-second video) of an amazing bird, the Montezuma Oropendola (Psarocolius montezuma), a denizen of the neotropical rainforests of the Caribbean coast, ranging from southern Mexico to Panama. Like other oropendolas, it builds a hanging woven nest. That, and the fact that these birds nest in colonies, presumably helps deter predators, but that’s just a guess on my part.
Wikipedia describes the male call, given during its display, as “unforgettable,” and I’ve managed to find a 1.20-minute recording of it here. As the Sound Recordings Blog notes:
The song of the male Montezuma Oropendola is one of the most unforgettable sounds of the Central American rainforests. Named in honour of the 16th Century Aztec ruler, Montezuma II, this New World bird weaves his song into an elaborate courtship ritual that can be heard throughout the day during the breeding season. With his claws wrapped tightly around a branch, the male will swing forward, displaying his bright yellow tail feathers and performing his distinctive, gurgling song. The aim of this behaviour is to maintain mating privileges with the females in the colony; If the display is not up to scratch however, females will choose to mate with a superior performer.
Bruce’s descriptions are indented below, and the photographs and video are his. He concentrated on the gaudy male and its sexual display.
Montezuma Oropendolas had a nesting colony very close to one of the cabins I stayed in during my recent Costa Rica travels. Oropendolas are the largest blackbirds—they are related to the more familiar red-winged blackbirds and orioles—and they also have the distinction of being among the most size dimorphic birds in the world. Males are more than double the weight of females.
Oropendolas are regular visitors to bird fruit tables at ecolodges throughout Costa Rica so lots of tourists get to enjoy these fabulous birds up close and personal. Below: An oropendola perched near a platter of bananas put out for the birds near our cabin.
The oropendolas colony was in a small gumbo limbo tree (Bursera) growing in a pasture:
The nests are hanging woven bags, similar to those of their cousins the orioles. The nests are huge; these ones were about four feet long. A male hanging on a nest:
The extreme size dimorphism [JAC: I couldn’t find a picture to show the size difference] is likely a consequence of the mating system. Mike Webster (Cornell University) studied this species for his doctoral work and showed that they have a harem defense mating system more like that of mammals than most birds. He found a clear dominance hierarchy in males and the alpha male alone displayed in the nest tree when there were lots of receptive females. This extreme mating skew likely favors the evolution of large males that can rise to alpha status.
Similar to Webster’s observations, at the colony I watched there was only ever one male displaying in the nest tree, but other males displayed from nearby trees. Oropendola displays are wonderful things—both visually and acoustically. The male bows over until completely upside down, while giving an unforgettable bubbling and gurgling call that is a very evocative sound that says ‘tropics’. The male then rights himself from his upside down position with leg power alone.
Here’s Bruce’s very short video of the male display:
Male launching into his display:
Next, the wings flash out:
Almost at the bottom:
Perfectly executed half somersault:
The male typically did his display perched on a branch but a few times he flew to a nest and displayed while clutching the nest:
Sean Carroll and Steve Novella on the “no afterlife” side, Eben (I’ve been to heaven”) Alexander and Raymond Moody on the “there’s Heaven” side. See it livestreamed here, and now: it’s already 15 minutes in.
You try writing about Alvin Plantinga and Aquinas and their ilk for four hours and see how you feel! This is what I’d like to do tomorrow, except professors don’t have bosses to call:
Well, element 117, which has the titular name of “ununseptium”, was actually discovered by a team of Russians and Americans four years ago, and has been submitted for recognition as an “official element,” but its creation was just replicated by a group in Darmstadt, Germany, and that should speed its acceptance. The new discovery and its implications are described in a piece by Clara Moscowitz in Scientific American.
It’s amazing what physicists go through to make this stuff, but it had a fortuitious outcome:
To create 117, with the temporary periodic table placeholder name ununseptium, the researchers smashed calcium nuclei (with 20 protons apiece) into a target of berkelium (97 protons per atom). The experiment was so difficult in part because berkelium itself is tough to come by. “We had to team up with the only place on the planet where berkelium can be produced and isolated in significant quantities,” Düllmann says. That place is the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, which has a nuclear reactor that can create the rare element with a half-life of 330 days. It took the facility about two years to build up a large enough stock of berkelium for the experiment; when about 13 milligrams had accumulated, Oak Ridge scientists shipped it off to Germany for the next stage of the project. At GSI, researchers accelerated calcium ions to 10 percent light-speed and sent them colliding into the berkelium. If a calcium and berkelium nucleus collided head-on, occasionally the two nuclei would stick together, fusing to form a new element with a combined total of 117 protons. “We get about one atom per week,” Düllmann says.
One atom per week! It’s a triumph of our species that we can get one atom per week and then get enough of that stuff to identify it!
Now, as is usual for these trans-uranium elements, its half-life is very short: 0.05 seconds, but it’s identified by looking for the elements it forms upon decay: in this case (after several decays), lawrencium 266. That’s a new form of lawrencium (Lr, characterized by its 103 protons), for up to now the most common form of Lr was the 262 isotope, with 159 protons and half-life of 3.6 hours. Lawrencium-266, in contrast, has 163 protons and a half life of 11 hours. This has been seen as a confirmation of physicist’s predictions:
“Perhaps we are at the shore of the island of stability,” [Christoph] Düllmann says. [Düllmann led the German collaboration.] No one knows for sure where this island lies, or even if it exists at all. Theory suggests that the next magic numbers beyond those known are around 108, 110 or 114 protons, and 184 neutrons. These configurations, according to calculations, could lead to special properties that allow atoms to survive much longer than similar species. “All existing data for elements 116, 117 and 118 do confirm that lifetimes increase as one goes closer to the neutron number 184, says theorist Witold Nazarewicz of Oak Ridge, who was not involved in the study. “This is encouraging.”
Well, I can’t say I understand the “island of stability” business at all (click the words in bold for more info), but perhaps one of our physics readers can explain that theory—if it’s not too arcane for general consumption.
Reporting from mid-book, Professor Ceiling Cat, Chicago.
