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.
Now here’s an interesting idea. “Visualization artist” R. J. Andrews culled through the biographies of famous people and put together a graphic depiction of their daily routines, published at Twisted Sifter as “The daily routines of famous artists and scholars.” Number 5 on the list of twelve is our hero, Charles Darwin. First, the key to how the activities were coded:
Now, how did Darwin spend his day? Here it is:
Seven hours of sleep (same as me!), and lots of rest. In fact, it looks as if he put in about four hours of genuine work per day, and then spent two hours awake in bed (besides his seven hours’ sleep) “solving problems.”
One could conclude from this that Darwin was a sluggard, but in fact we know that’s not true. For, while having his walks, reading his mail, and reading books, Darwin was constantly pondering his Big Theory. Add to that the fact that most of the time he wasn’t well, with bouts of depression, vomiting, and general malaise. It’s amazing that besides The Origin, he wrote 11 other books.
But compared to Freud, Darwin really was a sluggard. Look at how Sigmund spent his days: a minimum of ten hours, or even 12+ if you stretch it. Pity that so much of his work yielded nothing.
Go look at the other artists and poets, the most diligent of which seems to have been Beethoven, putting in a solid 8 hours a day of composing. That sounds tough!
One thing I’ve concluded from perusing all those graphs is that I’m working too hard and not achieving enough!
As if it weren’t enough that Alain de Botton tells atheists that we need atheist church-equivalents, and how to set them up, he’s apparently now doing the same in the art business, at least according to the Guardian. Their new piece, “Art as therapy review—de Botton as door-stepping self help evangelist,” by Adrian Searle, bascially takes de Botton apart like a house of cards.
I visited the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam a few years ago, and had a great time seeing what few Rembrandts were on display (it was being renovated). Now, however, the museum has reopened, but there’s a skunk in the woodpile: a Mephitis mephitis named de Botton. For some unaccountable reason the Rijksmuseum has agreed to allow de Botton (below) to put up giant Post-It™ style notes next to the paintings, telling the viewer how he/she is supposed to react to the paintings.
de Botton at the Rijksmuseum. Photo by Vincent Mentzel
Read for yourself:
A flashing neon sign hangs over the grand entrance to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Art Is Therapy, it reads, mirroring the cover of Alain de Botton’s recent book Art as Therapy, written with the philosopher and art historian John Armstrong.
The Rijksmuseum reopened last year after major reorganisation and restoration, to almost universal acclaim. It had more than 3 million visitors in 2013. They thought they had a museum; what they have is a crammed-to-the-gills tourist attraction. It’s the Tate Modern effect.
Perhaps troubled that 3 million visitors was not quite enough, Rijksmuseum director Wim Pijbes invited De Botton and Armstrong to make an “intervention”. The authors have filled the place with loud, intrusive labels – giant Post-it notes that often dwarf the exhibits – along with a number of thematic displays.
Photograph: Olivier Middendorp
And oy, what the notes say!
“You suffer from fragility, guilt, a split personality, self disgust,” reads a note next to Jan Steen’s 1660s genre painting The Feast of Saint Nicholas. “You are probably a bit like this picture,” the label goes on. “There are sides of you that are a little debauched.” The labels tell us what’s wrong with us, and how the artworks and artefacts they accompany can cure our ills.
In front of Rembrandt’s Night Watch, the crowning glory of the collection, another big yellow label tells us what it believes we are thinking: “I can’t bear busy places – I wish this room were emptier.” De Botton sees the Night Watch as an image of communality, which I suppose it is. There’s not much fellow-feeling in the audience around it, and I guess that’s the point, too.
Can you believe that?
Here’s another one, completely superfluous. Perhaps it went next to a Mondrian.
More from Searle’s piece:
Next to Vermeer’s Woman Reading a Letter and his quiet Delft street scene, beside teapots and Chinese gods, alongside an Yves Saint Laurent dress and aRietveld chair, the labels proliferate. De Botton is trying to mend what he sees as a disconnection between art and life, between past and present. This is an unexceptional ambition. Artists and designers do it all the time. Why do we need De Botton? In a display of 19thcentury daguerrotypes, under the curatorial theme of memory, we are told we are in “one of the saddest rooms in the museum. You might want to cry.” Why? All the people in the pictures are dead. They generally are in photographs this old.
Banality and bathos are the stock-in-trade here. De Botton’s curatorial rubrics – as well as memory, there’s fortune, money, politics and sex – are anodyne, his insights and descriptions shallow and obvious. De Botton insists that art can tell us how to live: “It should heal us: it isn’t an intellectual exercise, an abstract aesthetic arena or a distraction for a Sunday afternoon.” His petulant tone is wearing. I also dislike the self-improvement shtick. In front of an athletic bit of statuary, a label inquires why, if we can accept going to the gym to improve our bodies, we don’t visit the museum “to work on our character”.
. . . De Botton’s evangelising and his huckster’s sincerity make him the least congenial gallery guide imaginable. He has no eye, and no ear for language. With their smarmy sermons and symptomology of human failings, their aphorisms about art leading us to better parts of ourselves, De Botton’s texts feel like being doorstepped. But art contains concentrated doses of the virtues! You could coerce any art at all into his cause of mental hygiene and spiritual wellbeing. De Botton reduces art to its discernible content. He doesn’t make us want to look at all.
But tell us how you really feel, Mr. Searle! All I can say is that I’m very glad he had the temerity to call this bovine guano exactly what it is.
de Botton has an obdurate streak of both pedantry and self-styled superiority that we’ve learned about from his interaction with the community of nonbelievers. Do we really need someone telling us how we’re supposed to feel in an art gallery? And who has the right to tell us how we’re supposed to feel? The good thing about art is that each person brings his or her baggage and history to each work of art, imbuing it with different meanings. Imagine what would happen if de Botton went next door and got his sticky fingers on the Van Gogh Museum!
What baffles me is why this man has any reputation at all. I suppose it’s because Brits, like Americans (and now presumably the Dutch) like self-helpy stuff, too. And apparently de Botton runs a “School of Life” in London whose purpose is to teach students the way to lead a meaningful life.
In short, he appears to be Britain’s answer to Deepak Chopra, without the quantum stuff and merchandise. I’ll take my art straight, thank you.
Professor Ceiling Cat has arranged a demonstration of what would happen were de Botton to get hold of literature in the same way. We’d likely see stickers in bookstores like this:
Well if this doesn’t beat all! There are flowers that mimic insects, and insects that mimic flowers, and even plants that mimic stones (Lithops) to hide them from predators, but this is the first time I’ve heard of a plant mimicking another plant. Not only that, but the mimic, a vine, can modify its leaves to resemble those of at least eight other trees on which it climbs.
The article describing this, in press in Current Biology (full reference and link to abstract below; the paper is behind a paywall though judicious inquiry might yield a copy), shows that the neotropical vine, Boquila trifoliata from South America, can not only mimic at least eight different species of tree, but—and this is truly amazing—a single plant can mimic the leaves of several different trees if it happens to entwine around more than one of them. In other words, each plant has the genetic ability to somehow sense which tree it’s on, and modify its leaf shape to resemble the leaves of its “host.” Now that’s what I call plasticity!
Below is a screenshot of figure 1 from the paper showing the vine’s leaves (arrows) next to the plant on which it climbs or is near. I’ve added the caption for those with more serious botanical interests. Note how closely the vine leaves resemble the tree leaves. The plasticity involves changes in shape, size, and color.
The other amazing thing is that the vine doesn’t actually have to touch or climb the tree whose leaves it mimics; it only has to be near it. That means that the vine has to somehow sense what tree is nearby. That rules out explanations for the mimicry involving physical contact. But more on that below.
Figure 1. Leaf Mimicry in the Climbing Plant Boquila trifoliolata Pictures of the twining vine B. trifoliolata co-occurring with woody species in the temperate rainforest of southern Chile, where leaf mimicry in terms of size, color, and/or shape is evident. White arrows point to the vine (V) and to the host tree (T). Leaf length of the tree species is shown in parentheses [13]; this may help to estimate leaf size variation in the vine. (A) Myrceugenia planipes (3.5–8 cm). (B) Rhaphithamnus spinosus (1–2 cm). (C) Eucryphia cordifolia (5–7 cm). Notably smaller leaves of B. trifoliolata appear to the left of the focus leaf. (D) Mitraria coccinea (a woody vine; 1.5–3.5 cm). Both here and in (F), the serrated leaf margin of the model cannot be mimicked, but the vine shows one or two indents. (E) Aextoxicon punctatum (5–9 cm). (F) Aristotelia chilensis (3–8 cm). (G) Rhaphithamnus spinosus (1–2 cm). (H) Luma apiculata (1–2.5 cm). The inset shows more clearly how B. trifoliolata has a spiny tip, like the supporting treelet and unlike all the other pictures (and the botanical description) of this vine. See also Figure S1 for pictures showing different leaves of the same individual of B. trifoliolata mimicking different host trees.Two questions arise immediately:
1. What’s the advantage to the vine of being able to modify its leaves to match those of its host tree? The first thing that comes to mind is protection from leaf-eating insects. This could occur in either of two ways, though the authors don’t mention these alternatives.
The first advantage comes if the leaves of its host are somehow toxic to herbivores, who then learn to avoid them. In this case the mimicking vine would be a Batesian mimic, an edible species that takes advantage of a learned avoidance response by the herbivore. (The herbivore could use visual cues, which must be the case here because of the visual resemblance of leaves, as well as other olfactory or other chemical cues, which weren’t investigated in this case. Could the vines show “chemical mimicry” as well?
The other hypothesis is simply that by mingling your leaves with those of an edible, and resembling them, the chance of you being nommed by a herbivore is lessened: most likely the herbivore will go first for the more numerous leaves of the tree, so the vine gets protection by being outnumbered.
The authors, as I said, don’t distinguish between these theories, but they did preliminary experiments to show that the mimicry does seem to confer protection against herbivores. They did this by looking at how often the vine’s leaves were munched it was attached to a tree whose leaves it mimicked, compared to vines that were either naked on the ground or entwined around a tree that was leafless. After showing that the rate of herbivory on vines climbing leafy trees was similar to that of the trees themselves, they also showed that the rate of herbivory of vines on the ground or naked trees was significantly higher.
Now that doesn’t show that the mimicy itself confers protection—only that being on a leafy tree confers protection. The authors still need to show that making your leaves resemble those of the specific tree confers greater protection than if your leaves are mismatched. That could be done fairly easily, I think, through transplant studies.
2. How the hell does the vine know how to grow its leaves to mimic the nearest tree? This is the real stunner, for each vine apparently “knows” how to change into the best of at least 8 possible leaf shapes; that is, the vine carries genetic information to sense the leave morphology of the nearest tree, and also the genetic information to transform its leaves into that particular shape. The evolutionary scenario for how this could happen boggles the mind, for it involves cues and switches between at least eight discrete morphologies. And the mechanistic basis is unknown. How do the vines sense what tree is near?
The authors offer two hypotheses, one much better than the other.
a. Volatile compounds emitted by the tree are sensed by the vine, which uses that signal to change the shape of its leaves appropriately. This is feasible becasue such volatiles are known in some plants, and are used to deter herbivores or affect the grown of nearby plants of the same species.
b. The second hypothesis is far more speculative (and to my mind, unlikely). Here it is in the authors’ words:
“An alternative hypothesis, but perhaps less plausible, would consider horizontal gene transfer between plants, a phenomenon that is increasingly being reported. These cases include both single and multiple transfer events per species, which are hypothesized to be mediated by a vector or result from plant-plant parasitism or natural grafts. The plasticity in leaf mimicry in B. trifoliolata could involve horizontal gene transfer on an ecological timescale and might be mediated by airborne microorganisms. The latter speculation is based on the fact that mimicry is observed with respect to the foliage to which the vine is nearest, irrespective of whether this foliage belongs to the host tree that the vine has climbed. Further research on leaf mimicry by B. trifoliolata might lead to the identification of the host tree volatiles or vector-mediated gene transfers that trigger differential gene expression in this singular climbing plant.”
I think this far less likely, because I find it implausible that the very genes carried by some kind of vector microorganism would include those involved in leaf shape, and would insert in the appropriate place in the vine genome and be expressed properly. Were I the investigators, I’d concentrate on the first hypothesis.
Clearly there’s a lot more work to be done on this system. But it’s really a fantastic one. Who would have thought that a vine could act like a chameleon, able to change its leaf shape to match the surroundings, to match at least eight different model hosts, and to match more than one host on a single vine? This is the kind of stuff that gave rise to the adage in my field, “Evolution is cleverer than you are.”
Cat cafes (an idea I claim credit for, since I thought of such a thing when I was a postdoc in Davis), are popping up all over. What more relaxing thing can you imagine than enjoying a coffee and pastry with a cat in your lap, purring away? I visited a cat cafe in Vienna, and had a great time, and now I hear that one has opened up in London.
Laws make it difficult to open such places in America, but a temporary one (apparently designed to place homeless cats) has opened in New York City—on the Bowery in Manhattan. CNN reports that it is a joint venture of PurinaOne and the North Shore Animal League, and aims to adopt out 16 cats. It opened Thursday and, sadly, will close tomorrow. I wish it were permanent. If any readers want to visit and report, the address is 168 Bowery.
As cat people sipped cappuccinos with cat faces drawn in the foam and flicked furry, feathered balls attached to sticks by string at feline guests, Roberts said the café featured a “Cat Chat” speaker series with discussions led by a cat behaviorist, a veterinarian and other cat experts.
Nearby, Valerie the cat had been camped out on Casey Schimon for about an hour, when someone came over to say Valerie had been adopted.
“I’m so excited for her, because she is seriously the most precious thing, and somebody is going to be very happy,” an only slightly sad looking Schimon said.
. . . Cat coffee houses started in Asia, have gained popularity in Europe, and there are talks of opening a few in such places as California, Oregon and Canada. Bu for now, organizers say the Cat Café in New York is the first feline coffee spot in North America.
“I just want to look at cats. I really like them. I go to school here, so I’m far from my cats. I just wanted to get my fill,” said Melissa Torres, who waited nearly two hours to get in the café, “You hear about them in Japan, and I always thought I would have to go to Japan to go to a cat café.
Really, do we need more of these or what? You get a cat to stroke while you sip your joe, and the cats get adopted. What’s not to like?
Here’s a video of the cafe contributed by reader dano1843; be sure to look for the cattucinno:
D*g cafes would, of course, be a bust.
***
For our second feature, reader Steve alerted me to Gizmag, where I found a newly invented “CA Table”, created by Chinese designer Ruan Hao. Here, in Hao’s own words, is his rationale:
People who live with cats always have these kind of experiences.
1. Putting away the cat from your laptop is like a sentimental ritual of temporary farewell.
2. A proper sized hole could be so irresistible to cats. Their curiosity would be greatly satisfied through repetitively exploring the unknown path behind the hole.
The design of CATable was a fusion of those experiences, as well a locus where the interaction occurs. It is a table for us, and a paradise for cats.
So here’s the table:
The piece says that although the table is lovely, it won’t achieve its aim. I think I agree:
Does [Hao] not understand? Buy a cat an expensive toy, and it will take great delight in playing with the box, and show nothing but contempt for the toy itself. Build a cat a thousand-dollar gorgeous table full of hidey holes, and you’ll do nothing but reaffirm Muffy’s deep affection for the window sill and the warm laptop keyboard.
If you’re a well-heeled cat owner, you might try it out. All I can offer is a free autographed copy of WEIT if you buy one of these and sent me a photo of your cat in it. (Like that’s gonna work!)
For more cat accountrements, see the list of Gizmag‘s top ten cat gadgets, including cameras for cats to wear, litter boxes, cat castles, massage centers, and playhouses like this one:
Hili is all srs bzns today! The person attempting (and failing) to interest Hili is Henryk Rubenstein, an old friend of Malgorzata and Andrzej who helps wit the technical side of Listy from Sweden.
Hili: We were supposed to talk about technical matters today.
A.: But now we are out for a walk.
Hili: And this is your idea of admiring the orchard in bloom?
In Polish:
Hili: Mieliście rozmawiać o sprawach technicznych. Ja: Ale teraz jesteśmy na spacerze. Hili: I to jest wasz sposób podziwiania kwitnącego sadu?
This video of goats playing on some sheet metal was posted by francophone Max Murs a couple of months back, and has already been seen by over 8 million viewers. Sorry we were late to the party:
Max writes (I translate):
On Sunday, at dinner time, my little family discovered a new game – this sheet metal. I filmed my goats balancing – their names will remain a secret out of respect for their privacy 🙂 . In the evening, I sent a copy of the video to a friend, and everything took off from there, really quickly. I don’t think they really know what’s going on – they carry on chewing as though nothing had happened… Who is enjoying themselves the most? I’m not sure.
UPDATE 2: Reader Miranda, notes, in the comments below, that you can hear my expatiation on zonkeys broadcast again at this link; the second Newshour broadcast will start at 4 pm EST (US) and 9 pm London time. My short zonkey segment begins about 24 minutes after the hour. [Click on the episode entitled “Observers seized in Ukraine”; Jerry’s segment begins at 19:41 GCM.]
___________
UPDATE: The only information I have is that this will be on the BBC World Service “Newshour” starting at 2000 hours and again at 2100 hours, and my piece is about 15 minutes in.
_______
I’ve just been given a preliminary interview by the BBC on the zonkey, of all things—the zebra/donkey hybrid I wrote about this morning. Based on this (they always check you out to see how you come across), the Beeb decided to interview me live on ZONKEYS on the BBC (radio) News Hour today at 3:15 p.m. EST, 2:15 Chicago time, and 8:15 UK time (that will be repeated in the UK at 9:15). I’m told that you can also hear the News Hour broadcast on some National Public Radio Stations in the US.
This is right up my alley, actually, since it’s about speciation and hybrids, and I had a grand old time teaching the BBC interviewer about the nature of biological species and the meaning of reproductive isolation. Now I’ll try to do that for the British public.
If for some reason you want to hear me talk about the enigmatic zonky, warm up your radios in about 40 minutes.
Don’t expect intellectual fireworks today; if you knew what’s on my plate, you’d be grateful just for pictures of cats.
To finish off the week, here are three of my favorite Joni Mitchell songs, all from the “For the Roses” album, and all, to my mind, underappreciated compared to her other songs. They’re all cuts from the album, for I couldn’t find any suitable live versions.
You hardly ever hear this one, but “Electricity” is a great song, fantastically inventive:
I know very little about “Blonde in the Bleachers,” but I suspect it was written about Stephen Stills, who happens to be playing the piano on this track (I’m not 100% sure of that, but , the style of playing is Stills’s, and he’s given instrumental credit for “rock and roll band” on that track, which may well mean that he’s playing every instrument, something he’s perfectly capable of doing (as on this track).*
“Woman of Heart and Mind” is simply a gorgeous song, and her voice on this one gives me the shivers:
And, if you have 90 minutes to spare, here’s a documentary about Mitchell’s life, “Woman of Heart and Mind,” made in 2003:
