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.
Iranian intellectuals and secularists must be shaking their heads in dismay at this news. A group of state-run media outlets in Iran have grouped together and raised an additional US$600,000.00 to renew the fatwa, originally declared in 1989, on the life of Salman Rushdie for the crime of writing a book that you can guarantee most have never even seen, let alone read.
The fatwa although in 1998 then president Mohammad Khatami declared the fatwa over, however The Guardian reports
“Imam Khomeini’s fatwa is a religious decree and it will never lose its power or fade out,” Iran’s deputy culture minister Seyed Abbas Salehi.
In the intervening years, four people who worked on translations of the novel The Satanic Verses were attacked, three of them fatally, by murderous zealots rushing to fulfil this cowardly commandment.
There’s a list of fresh new cowardly zealots on the FARS News Agency who contributed funds to the fatwa reward over here.
There is very little left to say, other than I mourn for the many people in Iran who surely do not want this, and I hope that Mr Rushdie will be safe. Instead take a look at what Muslims who have read the book have written about it. Much saner and far more interesting.
Click on the arrow to watch it work. According to Greg Mayer’s favourite source, Wikipedia, this illusion was discovered by the American psychologist Joseph Jastrow (1863-1944) in 1889, when he was only 26 (some sources say 1891; the date of publication was 1892…). Jastrow’s explanation was follows. I think in fact it describes rather than explains the illusion:
“The lower figure seems distinctly the larger, because its long side is brought into contrast with the shorter side of the other figure. … In judging areas we cannot avoid taking into account the lengths of the lines by which the areas are limited, and a contrast in the lengths of these is carried over to the comparision oft the areas. We judge relatively even when we most desire to judge absolutely.”
You can apparently get the original paper, free, from JSTOR (just accept their unonerous terms and conditions). In it, Jastrow describes a series of illusions, most of which had already been discovered, and provides explanations/descriptions of them. The ‘Jastrow illusion’ illustrated above was a development of this illusion, in which the lower parallelogram looks smaller than the upper (they are, of course, the same size):
Jastrow appears to have been quite the skeptic, spending a lot of his time both studying and debunking various forms of occultism and woo. Another section of the article in which Jastrow described these illusions is devoted to ‘a study of involuntary movements’ – slight movements of the hand that occurred while subjects were focusing on another task, such as looking at different colours, with the hand involuntarily following the movements of the eyes. This is quite dramatic in the case of someone counting the oscillation of a pendulum, as shown by this figure (the arrow denotes time – recording began at A and ended at Z and covered 80 seconds:
Although Jastrow does not say so, this provides a nice explanation for how Ouija boards can work, even if everyone is absolutely honest and not trying to move the glass (or whatever) in any direction. Unconscious effects will produce slight movements.
Jastrow’s article is quite a find for me, as another part deals with my professional area of study, which is the sense of smell. Although I primarily study maggots, I’m becoming increasingly interested in cases of anosmia (people who have lost their sense of smell, or who never had one) and of phantosmia (where you can smell things that aren’t there). Phantosmia in particular is intriguing, as it is a form of olfactory illusion. For many people it is very distressing (smelling faeces everywhere, for example), but has a primarily physical origin (to do with damage/malfunction of a subset of our 4 million or so smell cells). I have met phantosmics (that is the word) who could smell things they could not describe and had never smelt before; I had a slight insight into this over Xmas, when I had a nasty case of sinusitis and ended up smelling what I can only describe as weird smoke all the time. It wasn’t unpleasant, but it was weird. It went after a while.
Jastrow describes the case of ‘Mr. E’ a 21 year-old man who was apparently a congenital anosmic (his mother had a similar defect, although she once remembered smelling things). They carried out various tests on Mr E, who appears to have been completely anosmic, although he could respond to stimulation of the trigeminal nerve by very high concentrations of ammonia and similar substances. Above all, Jastrow looked at Mr E’s sense of taste and found that although he was unable to distinguish some tastes (eg tea and coffee), this was entirely because his sense of smell was affected. Jastrow’s conclusion was perceptive and entirely accurate:
‘The results conclusively show that a great many of the mouth-sensations, which we ordinarily speak of as tastes, are really due to smell.’
Joseph Jastrow, from Wikipedia
In other work, Jastrow studied the dreams of the blind, and interviewed many blind people about their dreams, including the amazing Helen Keller. Born in Poland, his family emigrated to Philadelphia when he was only 3 years old, and he spent most of his career at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I can’t find any reference to a biography of him, which is a shame as he sounds very interesting. My copy of Edward G Boring’s History of Psychology is at home, so I can’t check him out in there. If any reader knows any more, please chip in below.
Jastrow appears to have invented the famous rabbit-duck illusion. At the end of 2014 The New Yorker published this excellent cartoon by Paul Noth. I wonder if Noth knew how much Jastrow would probably have liked it?
As someone who hails from the land of Not-America, I was vaguely baffled when I heard that Trump was running for President of the USA. I had heard of him before, of course, as he had cropped up from time to time in Time Magazine in the 80s and 90s, and in one of the indistinguishable Home Alone movies. I couldn’t imagine what had moved him to get into politics, as his most notable features seemed to be dubious skills at managing hotels, casinos and marriages to blonde women. I also reckoned that the media, particularly the liberal media, were going to boost his campaign constantly with their indefatigable coverage of everything he did or said that they could find to be scathing or outraged about.
I certainly wouldn’t claim that their outrage is without merit, but I am still unable to accurately point at what he actually does stand for. It seems to me that he will say anything that he thinks his audience wants to hear. Moreover, he doesn’t care about the consequences of anything he says; he has after all lived a life where consequences happen to other people. What his actual policies or actions would be were he to actually succeed in being elected is anybody’s guess. He’s certainly not nearly as conservative as he likes to play, which is the point of yesterday’s Doonesbury strip by Trudeau.
Original here: http://doonesbury.washingtonpost.com/strip/archive/2016/2/21
If Trump has done anything this election cycle, it is expose the underbelly of the state of politics: money is everything. As worrying as it is that as a result certain corporations pretty much own certain politicians; it is also terrifying that money can catapult someone who appears to be accountable to no-one this close to the finish-line .
Dan Graur, who is Professor of Biology and Biochemistry at the University of Houston, describes himself on Tw*tter as “A Very Angry Evolutionary Biologist, a Very Angry Liberal, and an Even Angrier Art Lover”. His Tumblr says he ‘has a very low threshold for hooey, hype, hypocrisy, postmodernism, bad statistics, ignorance of population genetics and evolutionary biology masquerading as -omics, and hatred of any kind.’
Anyway, yesterday he tw**eted a link to a document containing what he called ‘All of evolutionary biology in 12 paragraphs, 237 words and 1,318 characters’. Here they are for your delectation. I’ve made some comments at the end – feel free to chip in (you too, Dan!).
1.Evolutionary biology is ruled by handful of logical principles, each of which has repeatedly withstood rigorous empirical and observational testing.
2. The rules of evolutionary biology apply to all levels of resolution, be it DNA or morphology.
3. New methods merely allow more rapid collection or better analysis of data; they do not affect the evolutionary principles.
4. The only mandatory attribute of the evolutionary processes is a change in allele frequencies.
5. All novelty in evolution starts as a single mutation arising in a single individual at a single time point.
6. Mutations create equivalence more often than improvement, and functionlessness more often than functionality.
7. The fate of mutations that do not affect fitness is determined by random genetic drift; that of mutations that do affect fitness by the combination of selection and random genetic drift.
8. Evolution occurs at the population level; individuals do not evolve. An individual can only make an evolutionary contribution by producing offspring or dying childless.
9. The efficacy of selection depends on the effective population size, an historical construct that is different from the census population size, which is a snapshot of the present.
10. Evolution cannot create something out of nothing; there is no true novelty in evolution.
11. Evolution does not give rise to “intelligently designed” perfection. From an engineering point of view, most products of evolution work in a manner that is suboptimal.
12. Homo sapiens does not occupy a privileged position in the grand evolutionary scheme.
I think the main thing that’s not quite right about this is 5, “All novelty in evolution starts as a single mutation arising in a single individual at a single time point”. While this is essentially true, it misses out two of the most significant novelties in the history of life, which were not created by mutation, but instead by instances of predation that went wrong and instead produced symbiosis, with one kind of cell living inside another.
The first such event took place around 2 billion years ago, somewhere in the ocean. Prior to that moment, all life had consisted of small organisms called prokaryotes which had no cell nucleus or mitochondria (these are the tiny cellular structures that help provide you and me and giraffes and mushrooms with energy). Everything changed when one unicellular life-form, known as an achaebacterium, tried to eat another, called a eubacterium. On this one occasion the eubacterium survived inside its would-be predator and became trapped, losing many of its genes to its host and eventually turning into a molecular powerhouse – the mitochondrion – that produced energy from chemical reactions and was used by the new eukaryotic cell. These new eukaryotic life-forms were a weird hybrid, composed of two different organisms. They were our ancestors.
A second, similar, event occurred around a billion years ago, when a eukaryotic cell, complete with mitochondria, engulfed a eubacterium that had long ago evolved the trick of acquiring energy from sunlight, through photosynthesis. Predation went wrong again, and another form of symbiosis eventually appeared. This gave rise to algae and eventually plants, in which small organelles called chloroplasts, the descendants of the intended eubacterial victim, turn light into energy for the benefit of the eukaryotic host.
What happened after these events took place was entirely down to natural selection, following the kind of processes that Dan describes above. But the source of the novelty – and pace his point 10 above, these were truly novel organisms – was not mutation, but an incredibly unlikely pair of events.
It is striking that these two acts of predation gone wrong were able to open up the potential of life in ways that genetic mutation + natural selection have not been able to do in 3.5 billion years of evolution. Life on Earth without mitochondria – prokaryotic life – is limited to the microscopic because of the physical limits imposed on the transport of matter, energy and information from the environment into the inside of the organism. In the absence of an additional, powerful energy source, prokaryotic life cannot carry out those operations beyond certain tiny physical dimensions. The co-option of the energy-producing mitochondria first enabled eukaryotic cells to grow large, and then, eventually, to become multicellular. Mutation and natural selection were not able to do this. Similarly, no eukaryotic organism has on its own mastered the trick of evolving photosynthesis; the only way the ancestors of plants were able to do this was through symbiosis with photosynthetic bacteria.
Other people have pointed this out on Tw*tter; Dan’s response was to redefine ‘mutation’ in point 5 as ‘any heritable change’. Which is fine, but would have been clearer had he said so from the outset
Mutation is any heritable change. Recombination for example. If mutualism is heritable, then it's a mutation. @MostlyMicrobes@mbeisen
What do you think of Dan’s list? Is it useful, either for students, for the lay person, or for clarifying differences within evolutionary biology? Could it give rise to testable hypotheses?
Last year, John Brockman, my literary agent as well as the agent for many other popular-science writers, put together his annual book of answers to one Edge question. The 2015 book was This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress. My short contribution was “Free Will”, and since everyone knows why I think that notion should quietly lie down and expire, I won’t go into it. Rather, I wanted to show how it prompted an irate email from someone whose name I have expunged out of mercy:
Dear Sir:
I’ve read what you wrote in This Idea Must Die.
Maybe you should look at Taylor Branch’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book on the civil rights movement, “At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-1968.” King publicly asked America’s clergymen to come to Selma to help him, and hundreds of them poured in. He would have accepted science professors too, of course, He needed all the help he could get. But no science professors showed up. They didn’t care. There was a contest here to see who cares about morality, religion or science, and religion won in a landslide.
Branch is a personal friend of Bill Clinton. I doubt that he is biased in favor of religion.
In the 1980s, the same story. Lots of clergymen condemned Reagan’s mass murder in Central America, but when did the Nobel Prize winning scientists sign a petition condemning it? Never. They didn’t care. If they had done that, maybe the American people would’ve woken up a little bit, but they didn’t care. Sagan could’ve written a book called “Reagan Is Committing Mass Murder” but he never bothered. Instead he wrote about comets and “Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors,” a completely worthless book.
Read any biography of Richard Feynman. You will see he never showed the slightest interest in politics, or in improving the world. He lived for pleasure.
Sincerely,
[Name redacted to protect the clueless]
As far as I can determine, this letter has nothing to do with free will. Rather, it’s an indictment of scientists for being unconcerned with social progress. The problem is that it compares scientists with clergymen, but what about every other profession? Just counting academics, what about economists, art historians, or medical school professors? For that matter, what about plumbers, dentists, engineers, merchants, or baseball players? Clearly the clergy would be overrepresented in matters like the civil rights movement, for Dr. King was one of them. But the workers for racial equality weren’t all clergymen: what about the thousands of students who marched for civil rights—some of them dying? I was one of them (no, I didn’t die!), and I have the lapel buttons to prove it.
As for Feynman, well, he wasn’t totally silent on matters of social import. He cared deeply about education, wrote textbooks, and we shouldn’t forget his presence on the Challenger panel—he zeroed in on the O-rings (as had the engineers who were overruled) as the cause of the disaster.
As for scientists not interested in improving the world, the writer is simply an idiot about that. Many scientists go into their professions to improve the world, or to understand it in ways that could lead to a better world. I’m not saying that all of us are deeply invested in improving society, but I’ll also claim that, as a group, scientists have done a tremendous amount for humanity, and I’m counting here the material and physical well being of humanity, not the bonus of giving us an inspiring understanding of nature.
Reader Tracy Hurley sent a nice batch of photos; her captions are indented below.
I’m a long-time reader, and I want to help fill your tank with some nature photos.
I signed up for a nature tour at the Seal Beach National Wildlife Refuge, which is a salt marsh habitat on the grounds of the Naval Weapons Station in Seal Beach, CA. This is a monthly tour, and a reservation requires a background check. We were told we could not photograph anything naval-base related, only nature. Fine by me!
A gigantic salt marsh ecosystem used to exist on the coast of southern California, but it has been paved over and fragmented so that only a tiny bit remains. 965 acres of salt marsh is in the Seal Beach National Wildlife refuge. We visited during a low tide, so these photos show the grasses and pickleweed and mudflats in plain view. They are submerged twice a day by high tides.
We saw a lot of Belding’s Savannah Sparrows (Passerculus sandwichensis). These birds have a narrow range and require the pickleweed-dense salt marsh for nesting (and other pursuits). The bird in this photo is in a patch of pickleweed.
Here’s a Marbled Godwit (Limosa fedoa) poking around the mudflats.
This light-footed Ridgway’s Rail (Railus obsoletus) was the most cooperative of subjects! The Refuge is providing habitat and rehabilitation to this endangered species. The problem for the Rails at the refuge is that during high tides, their nests float upward with the rising water. Under normal circumstances this is fine, because the nests would still remain trapped in the long strands of cordgrass–the cordgrass holds the nests in place so they don’t float out to sea when the tide goes back out. However, this particular salt marsh no longer gets fed enough fresh water to allow cordgrass to grow tall enough. Thus, the nests tend to float away. In the contraption in this photo you can see one of the hundred-plus nesting platforms installed at the refuge. These platforms float on the rising water, but the vertical bars keep them from drifting away when the tide goes out. The tent over the top protects the birds from predators.
Good morning, welcome to another week. Mondays shouldn’t be allowed.
Technically, there is no evidence for the concept of Blue Mondays (so Ben Goldacre tells us) but I’ll hate them if I want to.
Jerry has arrived safely and will check in with us when he can.
Over in Poland, Hili is observing social niceties like a civilised cat should.
A: What are you doing?
Hili: I’m washing my paws before dinner.
In Polish:
Ja: Co robisz?
Hili: Myję łapki przed obiadem.
And as a bonus, here’s our favorite fearless and earless Gus, no doubt dreaming of Important Cat Stuff.
and lastly reader Ken sent this picture in,
A bit of fun with ‘Spot the…..’ and our favorite squirrel. You can
see the setup my wife has provided for the wildlife in our
neighborhood as well.
Squirrels are a little more industrious than felids. Who knew?
