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.
Jerry noted in February that friend-of-the-site Neil Shubin will be presenting a three-part series on PBS this month based on his bestselling Your Inner Fish. The series began this past Wednesday; I was unable to see the whole episode (because at the same time I was writing an exam I had to give the next morning!), but it seems to have gotten off to a good start, and I saw appearances in one or more of the clips not only by Neil, but by my friends and colleagues Steve Gatesy, Ted Daeschler, and the late Farish Jenkins (all of whom were involved in the discovery of Tiktaalik).
Neil Shubin holding a cast of Tiktaalik.
The program has a well done website, where you can watch full episodes, as well as many other videos, and find other great resources. There is a parallel website hosted by Biointeractive.org, an arm of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which also has many resources. The two sites seem to be only partially overlapping, so it’s worth visiting both.
The second episode will be aired in most areas next Wednesday, April 16, and the third episode the week after (April 23), but show times and dates may vary locally. There are also several re-broadcasts, and episodes become available on the website after broadcast. A DVD version will be released later this spring.
[Jerry asked me to write something about this article forwarded by reader Steve as he is pretty much tied up today and tomorrow. I would normally approach the subject of US politics cautiously, not being an American myself; but “evolution made my daughter cry” is one of the most plaintive battle cries I have ever heard. – Grania Spingies]
My theory, which is mine, is that some people get into politics because they see themselves like this:
Minnesota Republican Aaron Miller who is now running for Congress is reported as saying:
There’s a war on our values by the government, we should decide what is taught in our schools, not Washington, D.C.
By “we” I think we are meant to understand people who think like he does, specifically people who deny science.
He repeated his story about his daughter returning home from school in tears because evolution was being taught in her class. He said the teacher admitted to not believing in the scientific theory to his daughter but told her that the government forced him to teach the lesson.
I’m running for Congress because of my children,” Miller explained at a Rochester Tea Party Patriots forum in February. “I have two daughters, 14 and 9, and I’m concerned that I’m about ready to offer a country to my girls that is not better off than my parents offered me. (emphasis mine)
Well, he’s got that bit right. If you deny your children a fair chance at an education that tries to teach basic scientific literacy, then yes, they do inherit a country that is worse off than the one he grew up in.
Here’s a podcast of an Intelligence Squared event that took place on November 11, 2011 at the Royal Festival Hall in London: “Stephen Fry and friends on the life, loves, and hates of Christopher Hitchens.” Moderated by Fry, the event includes discussion by Richard Dawkins, Sean Penn, Christopher Buckley, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, and Salman Rushdie.
As the notes say,
Hitchens himself watched the event live online from his bedside in Texas. Novelist Ian McEwan who was at his side sent Fry a text which read “The Rolls Royce mind is still purring”.
The event took place on 11th November 2011, shortly before Hitchens died on 15th December.
The exhibition is unusually compelling, given its directness and simplicity. In one sense, pterosaurs are quite familiar: Any image of the dinosaur age shows them ruling the skies. But as you work your way through this exhibition, they become confoundingly strange. Walking on wings! A fourth finger for flying! Crests larger than heads!
His review also considers how it is we come to know about the pterosaurs (‘pterosaur epistemology’), the serendipity of fossilization and discovery, and how small clues can be used to build up a more complete picture of the creature, noting, for example how a small mass of ejected bones (a gastric pellet), which might be overlooked, reveals what pterosaurs ate.
It reminds us of what exists before hypotheses accumulate, and what the paleontologist must accomplish, combining meticulous examination with speculative reconstruction. The pellet presents just a slightly more extreme version of how many pterosaur fossils are found. Some are seen here: jumbles of flattened bones and random filaments, gastric pellets spat out of some geological maw. …
Out of accidents, order takes shape; we see this to be as true of the paleontologist’s enterprise as it is of evolutionary change. The effect is to make us wonder which is more marvelous: the creatures themselves, or the ways they have been recreated?
The accompanying website is chock full of images, videos and information– go have a look. Here’s a nice summary video.
Some aspects of the reconstructions are speculative– we don’t really know what colors their crests were (although we do have evidence for the color of some Mesozoic reptiles). And, surprisingly to me, there is almost nothing about the “hairs”– called “pycnofibers”– that have been described in a number of pterosaurs. I’ve always thought the suggestion of pterosaurs being haired was very exciting, and, if true, a nice example of convergence, and evidence that pterosaurs were warm-blooded. The only mention I can find on the AMNH site concerns Jeholopterus, a small pterosaur with pycnofibers, seen in the following gif:
Jeholopterus, a “haired” pterosaur (AMNH).
Pterosaurs are, of course, reptiles (and not dinosaurs!), and one of the three groups of tetrapods to have evolved true flight (as opposed to gliding, which has evolved many more times). Pterosaurs’ air foil is membranous skin, stretched along an enormously elongated 4th finger; bats, too, have a membranous wing, but it is supported by fingers 2 through 5; birds have a wing of feathers, which project not from elongated finger bones, but from a shortened and fused set of hand/finger bones. These structures are nicely illustrated in the following figure from Steve Gatesy and Kevin Middleton:
Pterosaur (A), bird (B), and bat (C) wings. Gatesy & Middleton, 2007.
Powered flight is thus an excellent example of convergent evolution— the origin of similar structures as adaptations to similar conditions of existence. The wings, because they evolved independently, are said to be analogous (i.e. not derived from a common ancestor possessing wings), as is evident from the different nature of the air foil, and the different modifications of the bones involved in the wings of the three groups– the similarities are superficila nad functional. It also nicely shows the hierarchical nature of homology. The front limbs of bats, birds, and pterosaurs are homologous as limbs (i.e. derived from a common ancestor possessing front limbs), but not as wings. The common structures (humerus, radius, ulna, etc.) are homologous at the level of tetrapods, but the modifications of these structures as wings are separate evolutionary events.
The exhibit is temporary, and will be up through January 4, 2015. Be sure to put it on your list of things to see while in New York; it’s on mine!
Gatesy, S.M. and K.M. Middleton. 2007 Skeletal adaptations for flight. pp. 269-283 in Hall, B.K., ed., Fins into Limbs: Evolution, Development, and Transformation. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
This is the story of how a professor was so intent on convincing the public of his findings that he put on the most bizarre and salacious public display conceivable, completely oblivious to what he was doing. I’d heard of this before, but today’s “Seriously Science” column at Discover Magazine recounts a lecture given in 1983 by Professor Giles Brindley, a British physiologist born in 1926 and still with us, undoubtedly still shamed by what he did in 1983.
“In 1983, at the Urodynamics Society meeting in Las Vegas, Professor G.S. Brindley first announced to the world his experiments on self-injection with papaverine to induce a penile erection.
. . . The Professor wanted to make his case in the most convincing style possible. He indicated that, in his view, no normal person would find the experience of giving a lecture to a large audience to be erotically stimulating or erection-inducing. He had, he said, therefore injected himself with papaverine in his hotel room before coming to give the lecture, and deliberately wore loose clothes (hence the track-suit) to make it possible to exhibit the results. He stepped around the podium, and pulled his loose pants tight up around his genitalia in an attempt to demonstrate his erection.
At this point, I, and I believe everyone else in the room, was agog. I could scarcely believe what was occurring on stage. But Prof. Brindley was not satisfied. He looked down sceptically at his pants and shook his head with dismay. ‘Unfortunately, this doesn’t display the results clearly enough’. He then summarily dropped his trousers and shorts, revealing a long, thin, clearly erect penis. There was not a sound in the room. Everyone had stopped breathing.
But the mere public showing of his erection from the podium was not sufficient. He paused, and seemed to ponder his next move. The sense of drama in the room was palpable. He then said, with gravity, ‘I’d like to give some of the audience the opportunity to confirm the degree of tumescence’. With his pants at his knees, he waddled down the stairs, approaching (to their horror) the urologists and their partners in the front row. As he approached them, erection waggling before him, four or five of the women in the front rows threw their arms up in the air, seemingly in unison, and screamed loudly. The scientific merits of the presentation had been overwhelmed, for them, by the novel and unusual mode of demonstrating the results.
The screams seemed to shock Professor Brindley, who rapidly pulled up his trousers, returned to the podium, and terminated the lecture. The crowd dispersed in a state of flabbergasted disarray. I imagine that the urologists who attended with their partners had a lot of explaining to do. The rest is history. Prof Brindley’s single-author paper reporting these results was published about 6 months later.”
What a great story! The image of a professor waddling up the aisle, hobbled by his trousers with erect penis waggling proudly in the faces of the audience, is stupendous. But as a scientist, I can almost understand how, suffused with pride about his accomplishment, he was determined to show his results in the most compelling way possible, completely oblivious to the effect of his “display” on the audience. There was no intent to be salacious, but merely to convince others. Brindley was simply bursting with pride.
But imagine having to live with this the rest of your life!
What is it: silly season for the First Amendment? Apparently, for according to WWLTV in New Orleans, the Louisiana legislature is considering another totally unconstitutional bill:
BATON ROUGE, La. — Lawmakers are moving ahead with a proposal to name the Bible as Louisiana’s official state book, despite concerns the bill would land the Legislature in court. A House municipal committee advanced the bill Thursday with an 8-5 vote, sending it to the full House for debate. Rep. Thomas Carmody, R-Shreveport, said he sponsored the proposal after a constituent made the request. But Carmody insisted the bill wasn’t designed to be a state-endorsement of Christianity or a specific religion. “It’s not to the exclusion of anyone else’s sacred literature,” he told the House committee. Again, later he said, “This is not about establishing an official religion of the state of Louisiana.”
Who is he kidding? Everyone knows that this bill is palpably unconstitutional, making a Judeo-Christian text into an official state emblem. Curiously, four of the eight voting for the bill were Democrats. As usual, the sponsors pretend this doesn’t have anything to do with Christianity:
Rep. Barbara Norton, D-Shreveport, said she didn’t feel qualified to “vote on anything that’s related to the Bible,” so she voted against it. Rep. Ebony Woodruff, D-Harvey, said adopting the Bible as the state’s official book could be offensive to people who live in the state and who aren’t Christian. “You’re OK with offending some of the citizens of this state?” she asked. “It’s not meant to be offensive,” Carmody replied. “There’s no requirement that they would have to follow this particular text.”
This guy is either one neuron shy of a synapse, or, more likely, he’s simply dissimulating. This stupid bill offends everyone who follows the U.S. Constitution, a group that apparently doesn’t include Carmody or many citizens of Louisiana. If they’re going to choose a version of the Bible (Carmody suggested a specific version, perhaps the King James translation), he could at least have used this one.
One of my hosts in Davis is Luke Mahler, a postdoctoral fellow soon to take up a job elsewhere (he hasn’t decided between two schools). Thanks to him and my old friend Michael Turelli, my visit has been pleasant, well run, and, most important, replete with good noms (pictures later).
There used to be burrowing owls in a field near my office in the Genetics Department, but they’ve been moved in the intervening 30 years, apparently by putting them in a field containing holes lined with PVC pipe.
I hope to see these great creatures (which are not threatened over most of their range, but are endangered in California and precarious in much of the US) before I leave. Luke, however, sent me some photos he took of the local Athene cunicularia, endemic to western North America and much of South America.
Luke’s notes:
Here are a few shots of those burrowing owls. the ‘in flight’ shot was mostly luck. The reason it’s cropped so closely is that it was at the very left edge of the frame from a much wider shot. but it was in focus and it (barely) wasn’t clipped, so it counts!!
These long-legged owls usually live in other animals’ burrows, but they do have the ability to excavate their own. I have no idea how they do it.
My talks in Davis are over now, and went well, I think. It was bittersweet to me that yesterday I gave what was almost certainly the last pure research talk of my career, but at least it was at Davis before many of my old friends. I have one more day of one-on-one meetings with scientists, and then tomorrow I’ll be free in Davis for Picnic Day, a renowned and annual campus celebration that includes something I love: the dachshund races. The sight of a pack of wiener d*gs racing at top speed down a track, tiny legs a blur, and, finally, bashing into hay bales, is hilarious:
There are many other demonstrations and events. When I was here as a postdoc in the early 80s, they used to display a “vegetarian cat” in a cage: a sad-looking tabby whose diet included no meat, as well as a fistulated cow whose innards you could inspect through a hole. I suspect those exhibits are long gone.
But on to Hili, who wouldn’t appreciate such shenanigans:
