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.
In 2009, shortly after WEIT came out, I was asked by the BBC to write a letter to Charles Darwin and read it on the air. The letter was supposed to convey my sentiments to the old chap and bring him up to date on what had happened to evolutionary biology since he became food for his beloved earthworms. That letter later appeared on the Oxford University Press blog, which has given The New Republic permission to reprint it today.
Happy 200th birthday! I hope you are as well as can expected for someone who has been dead for nearly 130 years. I suppose that your final book, the one about earthworms, has a special significance for you these days. Are the worms of Westminster Abbey superior to the ones you studied so carefully in the grounds of your home at Downe in Kent? They’ve certainly mulched some distinguished people over the years!
Yes, it’s South Carolina, and yes, it’s a Republican. That spells death for evolution on Darwin Day. As the Charleston Journal and Courier reports, the South Carolina Education Oversight Committee has removed from the state science standards, at the behest of REPUBLICAN state senator Mike Fair, any mention of natural selection as a fact. His approach, one the benighted Committee apparently approves, is to “teach both sides and let the kids sort it out.” That, of course, is a tactic of creationists who can’t get their views taught any other way. As the paper notes:
“Natural selection is a direct reference to Darwinism,” Fair said after the meeting. “And the implication of Darwinism. is that it is start to finish.”
Fair argued South Carolina’s students are learning the philosophy of natural selection but teachers are not calling it such. He said the best way for students to learn is for the schools to teach the controversy.
“To teach that natural selection is the answer to origins is wrong,” Fair said. “I don’t have a problem with teaching theories. I don’t think it should be taught as fact.”
Ultimately, the committee approved all measures except that clause, which now gets sent back to the committee level for review. State Superintendent of Education Mick Zais said after the meeting he was not surprised by the debate that took place.
“This has been going on here in South Carolina for a long a time,” Zais said. “We ought to teach both sides and let students draw their own conclusions.”
Indeed. And while they’re at it, why not teach homeopathy and spiritual healing in health class, and astrology and ESP in psychology class. Let the students draw their own conclusions.
Curiously, one of the people fighting this bill is Robert Dillon from the College of Charleston, the same man who reproved me rudely in public for saying that science and religion are incompatible after a debate he had set up on that very topic (my emphasis below):
Meanwhile, a debate taken up by an advocacy group against the use of the word “critically” when it comes to the standards of natural selection and climate change was largely ignored. College of Charleston biology professor Robert Dillon said in a previous interview the use of “critically” on two pages of the entire packet means more than it appears.
“They’re trying to make evolution appear controversial, they’re trying to make it somehow different,” said Dillon previously. “Well, it is controversial, but the controversy is political or religious, it’s not scientific. It’s this richly symbolic situation.”
I approve Dillon’s battle, but he really should recognize now that the controversy is religious (played out, of course through politics), and that means that, for many of his fellow South Carolinians, evolution and religion are indeed at odds!
Mike Fair, bent on purging the truth from science class
In this two-minute excerpt from his debate with Ken Ham, Bill Nye channels Carl Sagan and talks about the excitement of discovery. It’s quite eloquent, though I suspect it’s been edited from a number of his remarks. And I could do without the grandiose music.
Regardless, I think Nye should be saying stuff like this in lectures and not debates. Perhaps he will.
As it’s Darwin Day, I’ll try to devote all of the posts to evolution, though I’m sure a cat will slip in here and there.
Here is a 4.5-minute clip of creationists talking about their beliefs in the recent HBO film, “Questioning Darwin,” a show that the readers didn’t much like, and not because it contained creationists like these. You can get a glimpse, in this video, of some of the psychological reasons why people reject evolution, which they hold as equivalent to atheism. Note that at least two people make the frightening statement that no matter what the evidence against creationism may be, they’d still embrace the Genesis view. For those people there is no harmony between science and faith. BioLogos, why have you failed us?
Here’s an appropriate post for Darwin Day: a new discovery of some very old fossils.
You remember the Burgess Shale fauna, right? The whole story, although it’s since been revised, is given in Steve Gould’s excellent book Wonderful Life (1989). Discovered by Charles Wolcott in the Canadian Rockies in 1909, the site’s shale-preserved fossils were largely neglected until students Simon Conway Morris and Derek Briggs analyzed them decades later. They’re from the Cambrian, a bit more than 500 million years ago.
The first analysis suggested that they belonged to many groups (perhaps phyla) no longer living, suggesting that there had been a luxuriant explosion of life that was subsequently pruned away by extinction. The assemblage also contained a fossil chordate, Pikaia gracilens, perhaps a relative of our ancestors, although it wasn’t a vertebrate:
Pikaia gracilens, about 1.5 inches (3.8 cm) long. It may have been closely related to the ancestor of all chordates, or even vertebrates.
The diversity of weird, un-placeable fossils led to the message of Gould’s book: had the “tape of life” been rewound, and had extinction not removed most of the Burgess Shale fauna, life today might have descended from those creatures and would be very different from what we see on Earth today. Gould’s message was one of contingency: evolution is unpredictable because of the vagaries of the environment. (Of course, while I see evolution as unpredictable by humans, I see it largely as deterministic, since environmental perturbations must themselves obey the laws of physics. Evolution is only non-deterministic insofar as mutations might be the result of completely indeterministic processes involving quantum-level events.)
At any rate, a closer examination of the fauna by Briggs and Conway Morris showed that most of the anomalous beasts were actually members of extant groups, like arthropods, annelids, and sponges, so the fauna really wasn’t as much of an outlier as Gould suggested. That somewhat overturned his idea that the types of life on Earth today were purely the result of contingencies.
Nevertheless, there are still animals in the original Burgess fauna that defy identification; one of them is the bizarre Opabinia regalis, which looks like a shrimp with a vacuum-cleaner hose attached to its head. Here’s a specimen from the nice Smithsonian site on the Burgess shale (first link in this post):
Opabinia. As the Smithsonian site notes, “Wielding a long flexible proboscis tipped with grasping spines, its reconstructed image was greeted with laughter as a pretty good joke when first presented at a scientific meeting in 1972.”
Another weird one was the six-foot predator Anomalocaris canadensis (the genus name means “abnormal shrimp”) a large predator that may be closely related to ancient arthropods. Here’s a reconstruction and a fossil of its two forelimbs:
Later comparable fauna, also remarkably well preserved, were found in the Chengjiang biota of Yunnan, China, a series of Cambrian shale fossils about 525 million years old. They’re notable for containing what may be the first known jawless fish (“agnath,” a group that comprised the ancestral vertebrates), Myllokunmingia. Here’s a fossil of that species and then a reconstruction (it’s somewhat speculative; we don’t know whether it had eyes). Myllokunmingia was about 1.1 inches (2.8 cm) long:
Which brings me to the point of this post: a new paper in Nature Communicationsby Jean-Bernard Caron et al. It describes a site 50 km from the Burgess Shale site (and not too far from where I’m speaking in Kamloops this spring), that, like the original Walcott site, contains a remarkable array of wonderfully-preserved invertebrate (and one chordate) species, 22% of which are new to science. It also contains many fossils known from the Chengjiana fauna, showing that some species had a broad distribution.
The specimens haven’t yet been worked up and many aren’t yet identified as to group, but some are known as identical species from other places. When the new ones are identified, however, we may see some severe revision of the early history of life.
The paper is not much more than a description of the site (called “Marble Canyon”) and a brief description of the fauna, with some pictures, so I’ll show both. A nice article in the Globe and Mail (be sure to watch the one-minute video showing the beautiful location) gives some of these photos; my captions are lifted that article:
The fossil bed was discovered in 2012, in a section of Kootenay National Park in British Columbia that cannot be accessed by trails. Although the team is not sharing the site’s precise location – to protect it from pillaging by would-be fossil hunters – Dr. Caron said it was near a scenic feature called Marble Canyon.
“It’s on the side of a mountain like any other mountain,” said Alex Kolesch, a manager with Parks Canada. “To be able to discern what’s there, you would really need to know what you’re looking for.”
The team first stumbled upon the site while looking for exposed sections of rock similar to that found in the Burgess Shale. One evening, they came to a place where it seemed that fossils were littering the ground. Upon closer inspection, they realized it was no fluke, but the eroding edge of a significant deposit that previous expeditions had missed. Within days, there were pulling out high-quality specimens of ancient marine life in stunning numbers.
First the site and some excavations:
A view of the quarry site and Diego Balseiro.Paleontologists have discovered a vast and ancient fossil bed in Kootenay National Park which they say could equal or surpass the famous Burgess Shale deposit just 42 kilometres away. The new find is half a billion years old, similar in age to its famous counterpart,but it contains many new and previously undocumented life forms. (Jean-Bernard Caron)
The animals. If you think you know your groups, guess which phyla these belong to. The paper, which unfortunately is not free, gives some answers. For example, the third photo below shows a new species of arthropod:
Naraoia, another of the specimens discovered at the Kootenay site. All the specimens found at the site lived on the ocean bottom and were later covered with a muddy silt, which gradually became a fine-grained rock.Molaria, another of the specimens discovered at the Kootenay site. Dr. Caron’s teams also found fossil types that had previously only been seen in Asia, along with others never encountered by scientists anywhere.New arthropod ROM 62976, discovered at the Marble New Burgess Shale Fossil Site in Kootenay National Park Canyon site. (Jean-Bernard Caron/ROM)Polychaete, one of the specimens discovered at the Kootenay site. The fossils are remarkable for the degree of preserved detail.Leanchoilid, one of the specimens unearthed at the Kootenay site. The new find dates back to the Cambrian Period, some 505 million years ago. (Jean-Bernard Caron/ROM)
Here are two pictures from the Nature Communications paper. The first shows another chordate, Metaspriggina, which has remarkable preservation of the internal organs, including the heart and liver, and, especially, the eyes (“ey” in figure), so we know that eyes had already evolved by this time. The scale bar is 5 mm long (0.2 inches):
And here is something I didn’t know about, a “bivalved arthropod,” apparently with some kind of bivalve-like shell. This one is new to science and not yet named; the scale line is 10 mm (0.4 inches), so you can see that these specimens are small:
The fossils include the first preserved neural tissue from any specimen of this period, but its meaning awaits further analysis.
Happy Darwin Day: one of your ancestors might be in the pictures above!
It’s Darwin Day—the 205th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin (and, of course, of Abraham Lincoln, who was born on the exact same day). Hili is celebrating in her own way:
Hili: Do you know what kind of bird that is in that tree?
A: No, it’s too far away.
Hili: What would Darwin do?
A: Shoot it and have a good look at it.
Hili: Then would he eat it?
A: No, he would stuff it and send it to London.
Hili: What a silly thing to do.
in Polish:
Hili: Czy wiesz co to za ptaszek siedzi tam na gałęzi?
Ja: Nie, jest za daleko.
Hili: A co by Darwin zrobił?
Ja: Pewnie by go zastrzelił i porządnie obejrzał.
Hili: I zjadł by go potem?
Ja: Nie, wypchał by go i wysłał do Wielkiej Brytanii.
Hili: To głupie.
Well, my “Cat Angels”—the secret celebrity panel of helpers and judges—have collated all the entries of the Cat Confessions contest, in which readers were asked to provide a photograph of their moggie as well as a TRUE written confession of that moggie’s misdeeds, along the lines of what was done to people during China’s Cultural Revolution.
And the results vastly exceeded my expectations. We have 34 entries, and all of them are funny. Rather then put them all on one post, which would take forever to load, I have placed them as a widget on the left sidebar (label: “Cat confession contest: all entries”), which you can click to see every entry, or you can simply click here to go directly to that page. Take some time to read them all; believe me—it’s worth it. You will LOL.
The quality of the entries is a testimony to both the ingenuity of the readers and the malefaction of their cats.
What will happen next is that the Cat Angels and I will pick five finalists and display them on one page where readers can leave comments (you can, by the way, leave comments on the big page above as well). After a short while, we will pick the winner, who will receive an autographed copy of WEIT with a cat hand-drawn by Professor Ceiling Cat to the winner’s specifications. We will not take a vote, as some cats have figured a way to game the system, but we will look at readers’ comments before deciding.
Alex Honnold, whom I’ve featured on this site before, is probably the best rock climber on Earth, and here’s a slo-mo video showing part of his recent free solo climb of a huge wall in Mexico. The YouTube notes say this:
On January 15th, 2014, Alex Honnold made the first free solo ascent of El Sendero Luminoso (5.12d), a 15 pitch big wall near Monterrey, Mexico. This is footage from pitch 7 (5.12a), filmed by Cedar Wright, Renan Ozturk, and SkySight RC for Camp 4 Collective. The full film is coming soon to The North Face’s YouTube Channel.
I simply can’t imagine doing this without safety equipment. You have to have immense confidence in your ability to overcome any obstacle on that wall, and if you screw up, you’re dead.
