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.
Yay for The New Republic, which has just purchased and posted a slightly rewritten version of yesterday’s piece on the discovery of a pre-Biblical cuneiform account of an animal-filled Ark. The TNR piece is called “A newly deciphered Babylonian tablet details plans for ‘Noah’s Ark,’” and can be found here.
I should be elated that a pro-atheism piece was published last week in a major newspaper. The author was Cindy Hoedel, the paper was The Kansas City Star—as I recall, that’s the paper where Ernest Hemingway got his start—and her piece was called “Let 2014 be the year we start accepting atheists.” Well, that’s great. But I’m going to kvetch a bit about it, maybe because I’m cranky today and also, after lunch, must make my way downtown through the frigid weather to get my fangs cleaned at the dentist. It’ll be frostbite for sure.
I guess I’m the opposite of those atheists who criticize New Atheists for being too strident: my beef is usually that people are too accommodating to faith, and not strident enough. To each his own, but as a secular Jew and a scientist I have no choice but to kvetch. And I’ll kvetch about both the ideas and the prose.
First, the good things about Hoedel’s piece:
1. It’s pro-atheist. She declares herself an unrepentant nonbeliever in a major paper and ends by saying “it’s time that atheists are accorded the same respect as Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and Christians.” (I just thought of another beef, though. We should get more respect than the religious because we’ve rejected superstition and embraced rationality. Why should someone be afforded any respect simply because they’re religious?)
2. She properly calls out Oprah Winfrey who, interviewing atheist Diana Nyad after her swim from Cuba to Florida, told the swimmer that because she (Nyad) was “spiritual”, she didn’t count as an atheist. Hoedel shows clearly why that’s offensive:
Winfrey challenged Nyad’s self-proclaimed atheism after Nyad described having feelings of wonder and awe, saying: “Well, I don’t call you an atheist then. I think if you believe in the awe and the wonder and the mystery, that that is what God is. … It’s not a bearded guy in the sky.”
It’s hard to imagine Winfrey remarking to a guest who proclaimed herself gay, “Well, I don’t call you gay then.” That would be rude. But to tell an atheist she isn’t an atheist is OK somehow.
I suppose those points, particularly the first, outweigh the things I don’t like about the article. But I’ll mention them anyway.
1. It’s written poorly. Here’s the beginning, which is discursive and self-indulgent:
I don’t make resolutions, but January always inspires me. There’s something about the bright cold sunshine and the bare trees that reveals things that are hidden in spring, summer and fall.
Also, after the holiday hullabaloo subsides but before the ground yields to a spade, there is an enforced downtime, as a friend describes it, that fosters reflection on societal currents and how I fit in.
As I was hiking recently at Chase State Fishing Lake outside Cottonwood Falls, Kan., marveling at the grandeur of the rugged hills and thousands of geese sunning themselves on an ice-sheeted lake, I thought that in the same way that 2013 saw a tidal shift in attitudes toward gays in America, 2014 portends a wave of acceptance for one of the few remaining groups people feel justified in disrespecting: atheists.
Once at a cocktail party I told someone who asked about my faith that I was a Judeo-Presbyterian-Mennonite-atheist. I love the Jewish emphasis on learning and philanthropy, the live-and-let-live message of the Presbyterian services I occasionally attended as a child and the pacifism and service of Mennonites, but ultimately I think all religions are human inventions. Nothing wrong with that: Humans have created wonderful things. Look at Michaelangelo’s “David” and our Constitution.
I think religion expresses a human striving to live a virtuous, meaningful life. But you can lead a virtuous, meaningful life without religion.
First, “Michelangelo” is misspelled. Where are the editors?
Well, I repeat Steven Weinberg’s quote: “With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.” And yes, it is wrong for religions to be human inventions, because they pretend that they’re not. Further, the “human” part of religion is often expressed as a retrograde morality that is used to enforce prejudice, divisiveness, and social control. If you think religion is a human invention, then everyone who disagrees is simply wrong. Further, religion expresses a lot more than “human striving to live a virtuous, meaningful life”, for “virtuous and meaningful lives” are construed in many faiths as lives that repress women and gays, as the desire to control the sex lives and reproduction of others, and as the need to not only brainwash children, but terrify them with thoughts of hell. There’s no mention of any of that in Hoedel’s piece.
3. Hoedel likes atheist churches!
A new church for the Godless called Sunday Assembly has been attracting crowds in 14 U.S. cities, including Dallas, Chicago and Nashville, but not Kansas City. They offer fellowship, social interaction and networking without the religious component. Scientific talks and pop songs replace Scripture and hymns. Their motto is “Live better, help often, wonder more.” What’s wrong with that?
Again we have the trope “what’s wrong with that?” Well, nothing, really, except that I find the idea of such churches repulsive. But of course if it helps others remain firm in their disbelief, more power to them. I just can’t see adopting the trappings of those institutions that we reject, and I don’t see that there’s really a human need for “atheist churches.” The godless Scandinavians get along just fine without them. You won’t find a Swede going to a big building on Sunday to sing Abba songs with his mates. (The thought of “Dancing Queen” as a hymn ties my kishkes in knots.)
4. Hoedel doesn’t like to make waves:
I appreciate [Jeffrey Tayler’s] logic — if it is OK to say you believe in God, it should be OK for me to say I don’t. But some of his suggestions sound confrontational; for example, opting out when invited to join hands and say grace before a meal. I think that’s just silly. I will keep on saying grace with friends and family who enjoy that, and we’ll skip it when they eat at my place.
What? They’re praying! And if you’re an atheist, they should be okay with you just politely refraining to join in, which is, by the way, not confrontational. Why on earth would we pretend to pray when we don’t believe it? Now I’m not going to jump all over an atheist who pretends to pray to avoid offending her host, but I do decry those who say that it’s impolite to not join in. I used to bow my head at grace, and do all that other stuff, but I won’t do it any more. Of course, this is a judgment call, for in other ways I do avoid offending the faithful. I will, for example, take off my shoes at a mosque or Hindu temple, which is the only way to visit one without causing a ruckus. To each their own. But it’s not “confrontational” to refuse to join in prayer.
Not so. Just as gay marriage is not a threat to straight marriage, atheism is not a threat to religion.
From primatologist Frans de Waal’s public Facebook page, via reader Malcolm:
You might not have known that Carl Sagan’s famous television series, “Cosmos: a Personal Voyage” (13 episodes, first aired in 1980) was, at least according to Wikipedia, “the most widely watched series in the history of American public television until The Civil War (1990). As of 2009, it was still the most widely watched PBS series in the world. It won an Emmy and a Peabody Award and has since been broadcast in more than 60 countries and seen by over 500 million people.”
Those are big shoes to fill, but Neil deGrasse Tyson is going to try. I’m sure you do know that Tyson is presenting a successor to Sagan’s show, called “Cosmos: A Space-Time Odyssey.” It airs beginning March 9 on both the Fox network and the National Geographic channel. The driving force in getting the series made, and its producer, is Ann Druyan, who was married to Sagan and collaborated with him. In the Wikipedia article on the new show, Tyson expatiates on its purpose:
“The task for the next generation of Cosmos is a little bit different because I don’t need to teach you textbook science. There’s a lot of textbook science in the original Cosmos, but that’s not what you remember most. What most people who remember the original series remember most is the effort to present science in a way that has meaning to you that can influence your conduct as a citizen of the nation and of the world–especially of the world.” Tyson states that the new series will contain both new material and updated versions of topics in the original series, but primarily, will service the “needs of today’s population.” “We want to make a program that is not simply a sequel to the first, but issues forth from the times in which we are making it, so that it matters to those who is this emergent 21st century audience.” Tyson considered that recent successes of science-oriented shows like The Big Bang Theory, and CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and films like Gravity, that “science has become mainstream” and expects Cosmos “will land on hugely fertile ground.”
Well, “textbooks science” sounds a bit pejorative to me, and the evocation of shows like CSI and Gravity don’t inspire me with a lot of hope, but I trust Tyson will come through. Remember, though, that the young people who will be watching the new series haven’t seen the old one, and probably don’t know the “textbook science” (do they know what a black hole is? Or dark matter?). I just hope it won’t be all gimmicky and grandiose with a lot of shouting about the wonder of it all.
Sadly, those fear are reinforced by what purports to be the official trailer (from Comic Con), shown below. I hope it was just made just for the Con, because otherwise it’s grandiose, dire, and smacks of that dreadful movie “Tree of Life”:
Still, I’m hoping the show will be a hit: Ceiling Cat knows that we need more good science on television; and I hope my fears of an overweening “gee-whiziness” are unwarranted. I also know that many of you have an interest in astronomy and cosmology and will be watching the show, so do report in when you see it (my t.v. watching is limited to the evening news and “60 Minutes”).
But on to Tyson, science, and religion. You may remember that I’ve criticized Tyson before for backing away from any statements about religion, even when they come up, and for criticizing New Atheism. My theory was that he wanted to be popular, and you don’t get that way in the U.S. by dissing religion. And there’s some point to that: Tyson does, after all, want people to watch his science series. It’s his big chance to become a science media superstar like Sagan.
Happily, Tyson has redeemed himself on the science-versus-religion issue in a recent interview with Bill Moyers. In that 26-minute segment, below, Tyson pulls no punches about the incompatibility of science and faith, and adamantly opposes having any religiously-inspired pseudoscience taught in the classroom.
The science-and-religion part, in which Tyson initiates by saying that he doesn’t think the two areas are “reconcilable,” begins at about 16:30. I think you’ll like it: I did.
Tyson’s interview with Moyers was in several parts, and you can see part 1, which deals mostly with science and the nature of the new “Cosmos” show, here. Part 3 will be aired this Friday.
h/t: Dale
The title above is also the title of a strip from The Oatmeal, which, curiously, ends with the same sort of nihilism evinced in yesterday’s SMBC strip. But this one is much funnier, though it’s too long to reproduce here. So go to the link and start the day with a chortle. (I started mine with a frozen face: the weather is wicked cold here and I don’t have anything to protect my visage.)
I’ll put up a few panels so you get the drift.
It ends with a flowchart you can follow to determine whether you suck at your religion. (That won’t, I suppose, be relevant to most readers here.)
h/t: Merilee
Crypsis fail!
Andrzej: What are you doing on that old rug?
Hili: I am trying out some camouflage ideas. It worked! I’m invisible!
(Photo: Sarah)
In Polish:
Ja: Co ty wyczyniasz na tym starym dywanie?
Hili: Sprawdzam nowe możliwości kamuflażu. Widzisz, nie widać mnie.
Zach Weinersmith must be reading about free will, because there’s a cartoon about it in his latest SMBC (Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal).
Sadly, it gets some stuff confused, including the pyramid’s contention that whatever one does (the determined “decision”) makes no difference. It does. The strip ignores the determinism inherent in the issue (I’m no cartoonist, but the decision about the laptop has already been made by the finders innards), and the last panel, which is supposed to be the kicker, doesn’t seem very funny. In fact, although several readers have sent me different cartoons about free will (and I appreciate them), I’ve never found one very funny.
Or maybe I’m just too wrapped up in this issue to see the humor!
h/t: Mark
by Matthew Cobb
One of the big problems that worried Darwin in his theory of evolution by natural selection was what he called ‘the example of neuter insects’ – social insects such as ants, wasps and bees—groups in which most of the members of a colony are female, and yet do not reproduce and are sterile. As Darwin wrote in On the Origin of Species:
Darwin’s answer was that selection operated at the level of ‘the family’ – sterile workers shared characters with those individuals who were reproducing, and thus those characters could be ‘seen’ by natural selection.
We now interpret worker sterility in terms of genes shared by highly related groups of insects, which in the case of Hymenoptera (bees, wasps and ants) show a bizarre form of sex determination called haplodiploidy, whereby males are haploid, produced from unfertilised eggs, while females are diploid, produced by mating.
This means that if a queen has mated with only a single male, her offspring (the workers) are more closely related to each other (sharing 75% of their gene copies) than they would be to their own offspring (50%). In other words, it is in the genetic interest of the workers to be sterile and rear their sisters rather than mate themselves – they will pass on more copies of their genes to the next generation this way!
Life is (of course) more complicated than this – many queens mate with more than one male, so those ideal relatedness levels aren’t always seen. Furthermore, while haplodiploidy encourages the evolution of sociality, it isn’t necessary. Many Hymenoptera are not social, despite being haplodiploid, while some of the most successful social insects – termites – have XY sex determination like you and me.
However, for the last few decades the basic view of those studying sociality has been that it’s in the workers’ genetic interest to be sterile – they are passing more of their genes on to the next generation this way. They haven’t been ‘sterilised’ by the queen, they are ‘choosing’ to be sterile (or at least, choosing not to mated, for in some species workers can produce males from unfertilised eggs).
This would mean that for a worker to turn off her ovaries, she would need two bits of information – she is surrounded by closely-related individuals (that is, there is a colony-specific signal) and that there is a reproductive individual present who is churning out eggs (that is, there is a fertility signal provided by the queen or reproductive).
There were two reasons why we came to this view. Firstly, in 1993 there was an excellent article by Laurent Keller and Peter Nonacs which looked at what we would expect if the queen was controlling the workers, or if she was merely signalling her fertility and thereby enabling the workers to ‘decide’ to turn their ovaries off. Keller & Nonacs pointed out that if the workers were being forced into sterility, then there would be an ‘arms race’ and in some groups we would expect to see that workers had started mating. So you might expect, for example, to see some species of solitary ants. There is no such evidence, so on the basis of a tight argument, most people accepted that there was no evidence for queen ‘control’. That doesn’t mean to say it doesn’t exist, merely that there is no evidence of this.
The second reason is that there was a mass of evidence showing that chemical signals are involved in affecting the growth of worker ovaries. If you removed the reproductive individual from the colony, in some species worker ovaries would soon start to grow. Furthermore, the chemical signature of the reproductive is correlated with her ovarian function – these ‘queen pheromones’ are in fact a chemical signal indicating her fertility. Further, similar effects were seen in solitary insects, like flies, providing an insight into how the sensory systems of social insects could have evolved, on the basis of the pre-existing sensory systems of solitary insects.
As Michel Chapuisat puts it:
The hypothesis that queen pheromones evolved from a preexisting communication system in solitary ancestors has interesting implications for the evolution of eusociality. In the early stage of sociality, daughters may respond to maternal fertility signals by helping the mother if she is highly fertile, and reproducing if she is not. By allowing this conditional response, a preexisting pheromonal communication of fertility may have facilitated the transition to eusociality.
In the latest issue of Science there is a stunning proof of this suggestion (Chapuisat’s article is commenting on this), but frustratingly it is partly framed – and is certainly being reported – in the wrong way.
To summarise an awful lot of very impressive work, the scientists looked at three very distantly related species – a wasp, a bumblebee and an ant, in each of which sociality evolved independently (in other words, their most recent common ancestor was a solitary insect).
They looked at the chemicals on the cuticles of the various castes within these species (queens, workers, males), and identified a set of compounds that appeared to be common to the queens in these species. They then removed the queen from colonies of these insects, and introduced synthetic versions of the compounds, and observed what happened to the workers’ ovaries. If the ovaries remained regressed, then this would indicate that the compound was perceived as indicating the presence of a queen.
Amazingly, they found that some of these compounds were indeed common to these three groups (note the effect is clearer in the wasp and the ant – which are more closely related – than it is in the bee):
The legend says: “The results demonstrate that long-chain cuticular hydrocarbons act as a conserved class of sterility-inducing queen pheromones in three independently evolved social insect lineages, represented by the wasp V. vulgaris (A), the bumblebee B. terrestris (B), and the ant C. iberica (C). Treatment of queenless worker groups with the linear alkanes n-C27 and n-C29 and the methyl alkane 3-MeC29caused a two- to sevenfold reduction in the odds of workers having fully developed ovaries in the common wasp and the Iberian ant (bar charts, red bars) relative to a pentane-treated control (left, stacked bar charts)”
So this suggests that there may be common chemical signals relating to ovarian function that are used in all these species. The authors then looked at a large number of other studies and plotted the putative fertility signals onto a phylogenetic tree, with fascinating results:
The legend says: “Fig. 2 The evolutionary history of queen and fertility signals across major clades of social hymenopteran insects. Each alternately shaded clade indicates an independent origin of eusociality. The pie charts show the likelihoods of different compound classes being used as queen or fertility signals (…). Saturated hydrocarbons (linear and methyl-branched alkanes) receive very high support for being used as conserved queen or fertility signals across several independent origins of eusociality.”
The authors conclude with this great summary of a marvellous piece of work:
“our ancestral state reconstruction shows that saturated hydrocarbons were most likely used as fertility cues in the common solitary ancestor of all ants, bees, and wasps, which lived ~145 million years ago”.
Note that they aren’t suggesting that exactly the same molecules are used today – “saturated hydrocarbons” is a pretty broad class of substances, and insect physiology keeps on popping up with the same molecules (they’re all related to fatty acid biosynthesis), so this is an entirely legitimate suggestion.
So what’s my beef? The data are fantastic and change the way we think about the evolution of queen signals, suggesting the same signals may exist in different lineages. The problem comes with the way the findings are being presented. Here are two screenshots from the Science magazine website. See if you can spot the problem.
Both these presentations – especially the second one – suggest that the authors have proved that queens control their ‘underlings’. My guess is that this view will be repeated in the media over the next few days. In fact, the study does nothing of the sort – it doesn’t show how these chemicals exert their effect. If anything, as the authors argue, and emphasised by Chapuisat, it supports the view that these are fertility signals, not methods of ‘control’ used by the queens ‘to prevent worker reproduction’. The idea of ‘underlings’ being ‘controlled’ might seem sexy to some; to anyone who knows, it’s just plain wrong.
So where does this view come from? It’s not simply sub-editors at Science who don’t ‘get’ what is, I accept, quite a subtle point. I fear the authors have inadvertently contributed to the confusion.
The title of the paper is ‘Conserved class of queen pheromones stops social insect workers from reproducing’. To which I would answer, ‘well yes and no’. The ‘stops’ is very affirmative and suggests strongly this is a manipulation of the workers’ fertility by the queen. Elsewhere in the paper, they suggest ‘pheromones emitted by the queen are thought to play a key role in suppressing worker reproduction’, ‘we searched for sterility-inducing queen pheromones’, ‘the more volatile queen pheromone blend not only stops workers from reproducing’.
These minor terms create the impression that these compounds act against the interests of the workers. This might be the opinion of some of the authors, or they might have felt that this was a sexier way of presenting the findings, or it might just be sloppy writing. Whatever the case, it’s unfortunate as it lessens the impact of a fantastic piece of work.
Why do I care? Well apart from being punctilious/cranky, I have 150 final year students sitting a Chemical Communication in Animals exam on Monday, and I don’t want them to go off writing about this new study showing queen control!
A final intriguing point. About 15 years ago, Jean-François Ferveur and myself, together with two of his students, suggested that closely-related Drosophila species (the flies studied by Jerry) might use common sex pheromones, which are related to ovarian activity. Among the compounds we suggested could be involved were saturated hydrocarbons such as 2-methyl hexacosane, 7-heptacosene and n-heptacosane – chemicals with structures similar to those identified as common fertility signals in social insects by this study. The deep history of chemical communication in insects might go even further than anyone had suspected.
[UPDATE: I told you so. Here’s New Scientist’s coverage of the article. *Sigh*. “Minions”. They should know better, but maybe it’s me who should not expect so much from them… h/t @dunbarrover]
References (mostly $$$ I’m afraid, but the link will get you to the abstract):
Chapuisat (2014) Smells Like Queen Since the Cretaceous. Science 343:254-255