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.
This new 9-minute video, for which embedding has been disabled, shows magician Penn Jillette relating engaging and affectionate stories about fellow atheists, beginning with Hitchens, when Jillette (a teetotaler) tried to prevent Hitch from bringing booze into Jillette’s house. He then gives tidbits about Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Lawrence Krauss, and mentions an upcoming bit that Penn and Teller will do in Vegas combining “physics, astrophysics, particle physics, and atheist propaganda.”
It looks as if Jillette was answering a post-lecture question about his interactions with famous New Atheists.
I know a lot of people are turned off by Jillette’s libertarianism or the fact that he comes on strong, but I kind of like the guy—even though I’ve never met him. And, as the video shows, he’s a good raconteur.
Almost exactly a year ago, I reported in twoposts here at WEIT on a paper in Science by Maureen O’Leary and colleagues on the radiation of placental mammals. Placentals are one of three major groups of living mammals, the others being the marsupials (dominant in Australia, plus a fair number in South and Central America, and a few in North America) and the monotremes (the egg-laying playtpus and spiny anteaters: a handful of Australasian species). Placentals are by far the most species rich and abundant of the mammals, including the cats, dogs, cattle, deer, and us that are the dominant land animals of our world today.
What O’Leary et al. argued for was a view of placental evolution called the “Explosive Model” (see figure below). In fact, they argued for an ‘extra-explosivey’ model, since they thought the common ancestor of the modern placental orders of mammals arose after the extinction of the dinosaurs (i.e. in the Paleogene, not the Cretaceous); in the figure below by Ken Rose, the ‘explosive’ evolution begins at the very end of the Cretaceous).
Models of placental mammal radiation (Rose, 2006); the thicker lines represent extant orders of placental mammals..
The O’Leary et al. study was widely misinterpreted by the press, which said they had discovered the common ancestor of mammals, a beast called Protoungulatum. This interpretation is completely wrong, and not what O’Leary et al. claimed. My earlierposts emphasized correcting this misinterpretation.
I also noted that O’Leary et al. used the fossil record in a quite literal way to infer dates of lineage splitting. But fossils only provide a minimum date of separation of lineages, and there may be a considerable unrecorded history predating the earliest known fossil. A new paper in Biology Letters (open access), a Royal Society publication, takes O’Leary and colleagues to task on precisely this issue.
Mario dos Reis and colleagues use various approaches to calibrate the molecular clock of placental divergence and accounting for the imperfections of the fossil record. Under all three methods they use (a, b, and c in the figure below), the divergence of the modern orders begins in the Cretaceous, their estimates ranging from 72 to 107 mya (the former, though, not very far from O’Leary et al’s 65 mya). O’Leary’s view is shown in panel d of the figure.
dos Reis et al. 2014, Figure 1. a, b, and c are the estimates they contemplate; d is the view of O’Leary et al.
So, who’s right here? The first thing I would note is that although the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary has great psychological weight (and is when a lot of things went extinct, including the dinosaurs), Rose’s depiction of the “Explosive” model had divergence beginning in the Late Cretaceous, and 72 to 107 mya is still Late Cretaceous (or very close to it). So while dos Reis et al. strongly object to O’Leary’s methodology, the results of the two papers are not very different: O’Leary has the most recent explosion, dos Reis has a somewhat earlier explosion, and both bracket the time of divergence depicted by Rose. dos Reis’s timing does have biogeographic implications differing from O’Leary’s, since an extra 25 million years allows for greater influence of plate tectonic events on mammalian distribution.
The second thing to note is that a defender of O’Leary’s might make the empirical retort that we have a fair number of Late Cretaceous mammal fossils, and none of them are clearly progenitors of the modern placental orders. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, unless, of course, you’ve looked where the evidence should be, and that’s what an O’Leary defender could argue.
And a third issue is that dos Reis et al. rely heavily on Bayesian statistics to make their inferences. It would be a very long and dry argument to explore this here, but suffice it to say that I find Bayesian statistics, in most cases, to be logically unjustified, and thus I’m not entirely sanguine about dos Reis’s inferences. It’s a fairly arcane issue in the logic of scientific inference, so I’ll just point in the references below to two sources (Royall and Sober) that I have found helpful.
[I]sn’t using the literal fossil record a pretty crude way of determining ages of taxon splits, since such ages are always minimum ages? And shouldn’t the richer information available in molecular sequence data that is time-calibrated by securely known fossil dates be used? Well, the critics will answer “yes” to both questions, and will also point out that the fossil record is imperfect, so to say we don’t have any fossils dated to the Cretaceous is different from saying no such animals existed then. O’Leary et al. might reply that all molecular dating requires geological calibration, so that the fossil data is primary, not the molecular extrapolation; and that we have lots of Cretaceous mammal fossils, and none of them are obviously the varied precursors of the Cenozoic placental radiation.
And concluded by asking
Who’s right? I don’t know. But that’s what the upcoming arguments will be about.
Indeed, dos Reis et al. have made a sharp statement in this ongoing argument.
dos Reis, M., P.C.J. Donoghue, and Z. Yang. 2014. Neither phylogenomic nor palaeontological data support a Palaeogene origin of placental mammals. Biology Letters 10. pdf
O’Leary, M.A., et al. 2013. The placental mammal ancestor and the post-K-Pg radiation of placentals. Science 339:662-667. (abstract)
Rose, K.D. 2006. The Beginning of the Age of Mammals. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore. (Google Books)
Royall, R. 1997. Statistical Evidence: A Likelihood Paradigm. Chapman & Hall, London. (Google Books)
Sober, E. 2002. Bayesianism — its scope and limits. in R. Swinburne, ed., Bayes’ Theorem, Proceedings of the British Academy 113:21-38. pdf
We all know the Catholic strictures about masturbation, and how you can suffer eternally for unconfessed onanism. What I didn’t realize is that the Mormons also regard “self abuse,” depicted in the video below as an implied consequence of watching online pornography, as something with dire consequences.
This video, narrated by Kim B. Clark, president of Brigham Young University (the world’s most famous Mormon college), depicts a college student watching internet porn as the equivalent of a soldier wounded in battle. And those who know and ignore his “addiction” are compared to soldiers who ignore that wounded comrade. The film urges those in the know to report the onanistic miscreant to their bishop or another authority figure.
As the film ends, the self-abuser, who has clearly been subject to that intervention, is now depicted as having a healthy attitude toward the opposite sex, while the tattle-tale looks on.
It’s just like religion to take a normal sexual outlet and make people see it as the equivalent of a grievous wound. Why do Mormons care about this?
This video was apparently removed (by Mormons?) after it was publicized and ridiculed, but Dusty Smith put up a mirror video, and then made his own video mocking it (WARNING: Smith’s video uses pretty raw language, but it’s also passionate and pretty funny)
Professor Ceiling Cat is more disposed now. Reader “P” sent this photo (and a link to its source on Facebook) with this comment:
This is doing the rounds: obviously one in a European Robin (Erithacus rubecula) , the other, I think, a Blue Tit (Cyanistes caeruleus ) …
I doubt that it has been photoshopped – robins are violent territorial birds ( despite mistaking gardeners for wild boar foraging for food – that is probably the reason why, at least in the UK, they are pretty tame – I have had one perch on my hand) and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it mugged the Blue Tit …
As a bird lover but not a bird expert, I expect readers to weigh on on the ID, the possibility of photoshopping, and whether this encounter seems realistic.
On a more peaceful note, here’s “Sunset with swans” by reader Stephen Barnard (click to enlarge):
One of nature’s grand spectacles is the annual migration of monarch butterflies (Danaus plexippus), in which the insects travel from the U.S. and southern Canada down through the Great Plains to a small bit of forest in the mountains of Mexico, where they gather in a spectacular mass display comprising millions of breeding individuals. What is even more amazing is that the entire migration up and back doesn’t involve individuals of a single generation, but individuals from several successive generations (there is more than one generation per year). That means that the butterflies have some kind of internal, hard-wired drive to head south, generation after generation, eventually homing on the same small patch of Mexican woodland. Nobody has any idea how they do this.
That patch used to include 45 acres, but has been reduced through deforestation to about 1.6 acres. That, combined with bad weather over the last two years and the replacement of essential milkweed plants (the insects’ food) with agricultural plantings in the U.S., has severely reduced the populations of monarchs converging in Mexico. I’m not sure why the Mexican government hasn’t stopped this deforestation, as the gathering of monarchs is not only amazing to our eyes, but essential to the continuation of many monarch populations. (For a longer discussion, see this article in the New York Times from Jan. 29.)
At any rate, reader Joe Dickinson sent in some pictures he took of another gathering place in the annual monarch migration, a spot near Santa Cruz, California. His notes:
Here are some non-avian wildlife shots. A local paper recently reported that the famous muiti-generation migration of monarch butterflies is under serious threat due to environmental factors at both ends, so I went down yesterday to check one of the groves in Santa Cruz that is a southern terminus. I did have the feeling a couple of weeks ago that numbers were down relative to two or three years ago (1st photo), but they looked pretty good yesterday. One interesting puzzle: I would think this complex migration has fairly deep evolutionary roots, but most roosting sites in the area are now in (introduced) eucalyptus groves.
This popped into my Tw*tter feed. Not sure of its original provenance, but it works. Or rather, it worked on me.
There’s a long thread on this at museumofhoaxes.com, from 2005. It isn’t a *hoax*, though effects can be variable. It’s been an e-mail, a Facebook page, in some versions it’s ‘from an orthopedic surgeon’ (so it MUST be true of course). There are Youtube videos of people doing it (go look yourself; it isn’t that interesting!), it’s even been picked up by arch-loon David Icke (no I am NOT linking to that lizard). I’m sure many of you have tried this over the years, but I’ve led such a sheltered life I never came across it until today.
Why does it work? According to one 2010 commenter “My God created our bodies and you know our bodies are excellent!!!”, so that’s obviously true. More likely, it proves that we are quadrupeds, and that the movement of our limbs is neurally linked. It seems to me that it’s basically the same effect as one that is well-known by runners: if you want your legs to go faster, pump your arms, although that generally works contra-laterally (ie you pump your left arm, your right arm goes forward). I just tried it with moving my right foot and then doing the gesture with my *left* hand and it didn’t seem to work. (You can tell I have a shedload of marking to do and am engaged in pathetic work avoidance behaviours…).
Those of you who aren’t watching the Superb Owl (I don’t get American ‘football’), chip in below with whether it worked for you, and other examples of weird and wonderful behaviours. Or discuss the flow of this particular ‘meme’ around the internet.
Good God, is it possible? I just got this bulletin from CNN:
Oscar-winning actor Philip Seymour Hoffman has been found dead of an apparent drug overdose in his Manhattan apartment, law enforcement sources said Sunday.
Hoffman received the Academy Award for best actor in the film “Capote.”
He was 46.
His death, but not the cause, was verified by the New York Times. The New York Post, however, reports that his body was found with a needle in his arm. Hoffman had been in rehab, and had earlier admitted to “substance abuse.”
He was nominated for three Academy Awards, and won the “best actor” award for his fantastic performance in “Capote”, which you must see if you haven’t. I recently saw him in “The Master”—also a great performance. I wish he’d stuck to something like marijuana: it’s too much talent gone too early for a lousy reason.
