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.
Ah, opprobrium has been mercifully scarce lately, although it makes this post a lot less interesting. In fact, there’s been only one thing to show over the past couple of weeks (beyond those comments that have gone straight to spam): an attempted but futile comment by reader “Janye Best” on my post about the acceleration and power of the chameleon’s tongue (spelling is reproduced without correction):
Dude you know so little about biologly in an applicable relevant sense, as opposed to reading this blog for any information I usually ask my 14 year old what’s in her earth science book. Please blog about things that can actually contribute to the advancement of biology. Oh and please, you’re an atheist. Talk about that.
Well, I don’t write about “earth science”; my speciality is evolutionary biologly. And, looking at the chameleon-tongue post, I’m simply unable to find what exercised this reader. Perhaps he (I’m assuming here a male) was simply hyped up from overconsumption of Doritos and Mountain Dew in his parents’ basement.
Damon Linker, author and senior correspondent at The Week, is also a Catholic, which, it would seem, makes him less than objective as a reviewer of Christopher Hitchens’s new book of essays, And Yet . . . .
Linker has also criticized New Atheists on several occasions, chastising us for not being sufficiently lugubrious (you know the argument: like Camus, we need to be totally devastated at our realization that there’s no God); I’ve discussed Linker’s ridiculous argument on this site.
Nevertheless, except for a blip or two, Linker does a creditable job of assessing Hitchens’s book in today’s New York Times. (He also reviews Roger Scruton’s Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands, but you can read that bit for yourself.) As it happens, I finished Hitchens’s book yesterday. It’s a short book, and I’d read many of the essays before, but I found it a satisfying conclusion to his oeuvre. The selection is eclectic, and not all the pieces are brilliant, but Hitchens’s eloquence, diversity of interests, and enormous erudition made me wish once again that he were still alive. (You can see the table of contents here). What would Hitch have made of the Republican candidates, of the terrorist attacks, of Hillary Clinton? It would have been fantastic to see how he covered the U.S. Presidential election. Linker, it turns out, wonders exactly same thing:
In the four years since Christopher Hitchens’s untimely death at age 62 from complications brought on by esophageal cancer, I’ve often found myself wondering what he would say about this or that event in the news. What I wouldn’t give to read him on Hillary Clinton’s email imbroglio, the rise of ISIS or, best of all, the darkly demotic presidential campaign of Donald Trump.
Indeed.
In general, Linker proffers substantial but qualified praise for the man, as seen in this bit of the review:
Objectivity has nothing to do with it. Hitchens — fair-minded on Hillary? Levelheaded on Islamic terrorism? Impartial on a demagogic bully? You’ve got to be kidding. What I miss is this man, with this unique sensibility, these foibles and blind spots, this particular mix of literary and cultural references, moral obsessions and undeniable brilliance as a prose stylist.
“And Yet . . .” is the closest any of us are likely to come to a resurrection of the man. There is, alas, no Trump in this collection of four dozen articles, book reviews and opinion columns, most of them written for The Atlantic, Vanity Fair and Slate during the final seven years of Hitchens’s life. But there is so much else: dazzling, vintage Hitch on Che Guevara, George Orwell (twice), Clive James, Edmund Wilson (who “came as close as anybody has to making the labor of criticism into an art”), Arthur Schlesinger Jr., V.S. Naipaul, Barack (“Cool Cat”) Obama, Rosa Luxemburg, Joan Didion, Charles Dickens and G.K. Chesterton.
I would add to this panoply Hitchens’s essay on Paul Scott’s four novels, The Raj Quartet, which I consider the greatest unrecognized literary work in English since World War II. However, Hitchens did appreciate its greatness (the sequel, Staying On, won a Booker Prize), and I urge readers, if they have time, to absorb all five books. They contain some of the best English writing ever, and the story, about the British departure from India in the Forties, is mesmerizing.
Back to the review. In the first paragraph above, Linker mistakes passionate and considered criticism with prejudice. Hitchens, after all, gives reasons why he didn’t like either of the Clintons, and, for Linker, to be “levelheaded” on Islamic terrorism apparently means some sort of understanding attitude—or even blaming it on Western colonialism. There’s only one levelheaded stand to take on Islamic terrorism: to despise it and combat it, and that’s what Hitchens did. To imply that he was not “objective” is to imply that he didn’t consider other viewpoints, and I reject that. If Hitchens did anything, he read and considered opinions contrary to his. You may not agree with his conclusions, but give him this: his dislike of the Clintons wasn’t simply post facto rationalization of a predetermined stand—the kind of attitude people take toward religion.
Linker offers more criticism:
If Hitchens flourished when he brought his literary sensibility to bear on the kaleidoscopic spectacle of American life, his greatest weakness as a critic and analyst was his tendency at times to take his instinctual hatred of illegitimate authority to absurd lengths. This led him to elevate a seemingly arbitrary list of villains — Henry Kissinger, Mother Teresa, Bill Clinton, Saddam Hussein and God — to the status of History’s Greatest Monsters. Thankfully, these personal moral fixations, and the reckless judgment calls they sometimes inspired, make relatively few appearances in this volume. (Yes, I’m talking about his foolish, and never withdrawn, enthusiasm for the disastrous Iraq war, but also the unalloyed, incurious contempt for religion that filled every page of his best-selling “God Is Not Great.”) “And Yet . . .” really does give us Hitchens at his best.
Again, I reject the notion that Hitchens’s hatred was “instinctual” rather than reasoned. Read his books on Kissinger, Mother Teresa, or the Clintons, and see if there is a dearth of reasons for his opprobrium. As for the Iraq war, yes, many of us—including me—think he was mistaken, but it was a reasoned mistake based on his hatred of tyranny and his love of the Kurds. And yet so many people completely dismiss Hitchens simply because of his stand on the Iraq war. What is wrong with us these days that we cannot assess someone’s views one by one, but simply use a single erroneous or disputed opinion to dismiss someone entirely?
Finally, Hitchens’s contempt for religion was not “incurious.” In fact, he apparently knew a lot more about religion than Linker—who repeatedly makes dumb criticisms of atheism—knows about nonbelief. God is Not Great is a reasoned polemic, to be sure, but it’s not incurious. And, as we’ve seen from Linker’s previous writings, he may not be incurious but he’s sometimes ignorant, as when he claimed that human altruism, because it can’t be explained by science (it can), is evidence for God.
Linker’s favorite piece in the book is “On the limits of self-improvement,” Hitchens’s three essays in Vanity Fair about his “makeover,” involving visits to spas, waxing of his “back, crack, and sack”, exercise, attempts to stop smoking, and dental veneers. It’s a hilarious series, which, fortunately, you can read free online (Part I, Part II, and Part III). And it once again reminded me that besides being a great essayist and polemicist, Hitchens had a fantastic sense of humor. Here’s an excerpt from Part I of the series where he assesses his physical condition:
The fanglike teeth are what is sometimes called “British”: sturdy, if unevenly spaced, and have turned an alarming shade of yellow and brown, attributable perhaps to strong coffee as well as to nicotine, Pinot Noir, and other potations.
Proceeding south and passing over an almost vanished neck that cannot bear the strain of a fastened top button or the constriction of a tie, we come to a thickly furred chest that, together with a layer of flab, allows the subject to face winter conditions with an almost ursine insouciance. The upper part of this chest, however, has slid deplorably down to the mezzanine floor, and it is our opinion that without his extraordinary genital endowment the subject would have a hard time finding the damn thing, let alone glimpsing it from above.
Matters are hardly improved on the lower slopes, which feature a somewhat grotesque combination of plump thighs and skinny shins, the arduous descent culminating in feet which are at once much too short and a good deal too chunky. This combination, of ratlike claws and pachydermatous-size insteps, causes the subject to be very cautious about where, and indeed when, he takes off his shoes. There have been unconfirmed reports of popular protest whenever and wherever he does this. Nor do his hands, at the same time very small and very puffy, give any support to the view that the human species does not have a common ancestor with the less advanced species of ape. The nails on the hands are gnawed, and the nails on the feet are claw-like and beginning to curl in a Howard Hughes fashion (perhaps because the subject displays such a marked reluctance to involve himself in any activity that may involve bending).
Viewed from the front when clothed, the subject resembles a burst horsehair sofa cushion or (in the opinion of one of us) a condom hastily stuffed with an old sock. The side perspective is that of an avocado pear and, on certain mornings, an avocado pear that retains nothing of nutritious value but its tinge of alligator green. . .
I love the sly reference to his “extraordinary genital endowment” and his appearance as a “burst horsehair sofa cushion.” And who but Hitchens could use the phrase “ursine insouciance” to describe his hairy chest?
A photo from the Vanity Fair essay:
Christopher Hitchens takes an unauthorized smoking break in a “Moor Mud Mask” at the Four Seasons Biltmore Resort, in Santa Barbara. Photographs by Art Streiber.
Ah, Hitch, you died at just the wrong time. He loved his “gaspers” so much (he even smoked in the shower) that they finally did him in—and right before the U.S. and the world went mad. What living journalist can give us the sardonic and uncompromising take he would have had on terrorism, Charlie Hebdo, and the follies of the U.S. political season?
Instead of presenting our own readers’ photographs, I wanted today to highlight a post by naturalist/evolutionist/photographer Piotr Naskrecki from his wonderful website The Smaller Majority. I doubt that Piotr reads my site, so he probably doesn’t qualify as a “reader,” but I do know him and have permission to reproduce his photos. That’s good enough for me, for today’s post, in which I shamelessly steal his photos and descriptions, will stun you with yet another achievement of natural selection.
In fact, the species at hand, the ghost mantis Phyloocrania paradoxa, is a fantastic example of crypsis (camouflage). The resemblance of this species to a leaf is simply amazing—involving shape, color, and behavior. As Wikipedia notes:
Phyllocrania paradoxa is camouflaged so as to appear as dead, dried-up leaf material.It has an elongated head, a flattened, extended prothorax (together referred to as its “elaborate headdress and shoulder shields” by one enthusiast), and leaf-like protrusions from its limbs. The mantis also has a forewing that looks like a desiccated leaf, and the “creases” in the wings are actually shadings of pigment.
Wikipedia says that the genus Phyloocrania contains three species, but Naskrecki says that they’ve all been “synonymized” (lumped into a single species). The confusion comes because there’s tremendous polymorphism (variation among individuals) in both shape and color, so dividing individuals up into species, particularly for populations living in different places, is tricky at best. And the reason for this variation, which I’ll discuss in a second, is unclear.
The best photos and description can be seen at Piotr’s new post, “Ghost hunting.” First, a photo (all captions are by Piotr, and photos are copyrighted). Look at this thing! Can you even tell front from back?
A female ghost mantis (Phyllocrania paradoxa) – these insects are such superb mimics of dry vegetation that it is often difficult to tell which part belongs to the plant and which to the insect.
After first learning about this remarkable creature, Piotr went to Zimbabwe, with the mantis high on his bucket list. He had trouble finding one but finally succeeded:
The ghost mantis was one of my most desired quarries and I started looking for it the moment I landed. Alas, a month on and with no trace of the animal, it was beginning to feel as if I were really hunting a ghost. I had spent countless hours sifting through the leaf litter, scanning bushes and trees, sweeping my net through all kinds of vegetation – nothing.
One day I stood on the platform of a railway station, waiting for a train to take me to Bulawayo. It was late October, the peak of the dry season, and shriveled leaves were falling from trees onto my head in a rare, merciful breeze. One, fairly large and twisted brown leaf landed on my shoulder. I tried to brush it off but it just sat there, trembling in the wind. I flicked it again. It landed lower on my sleeve. And then the leaf started to climb up my arm. I looked, still not believing. Could it be? No, this is just a piece of withered plant. But it was, finally, a ghost mantis.
They come in a variety of colors, with the color changing at each molt. Here are two different-colored specimens (note the differences in shape as well):
No two individuals of ghost mantids are alike, which prevents their principal predators, birds and primates, from learning how to tell them apart from real leaves.
It took Naskrecki 25 years before he saw another one of these, this time in Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park, where he’s been spending a lot of time. He notes that ghost mantids are widely available to collectors:
Thanks to their otherworldly appearance ghost mantids have long been the favorite of amateur insect collectors and, since they can be easily bred in captivity, they have recently become very popular in the pet trade. Now all you need to do to see a live ghost mantis is to pay a few bucks online and one will be delivered to your door. But for an animal so widely kept, shockingly little is known about its biology and behavior in its natural habitat.
The polymorphism for color, which appears to rest on changes at each molt, immediately raised a question for Matthew and me. If the color makes the mantid cryptic on leaves, and the color must match the leaves, how does the mantid know what color it is? It must have a way of matching its color to its background, so it has to know what color it is. Can it see itself, or does it have some endogenous way, not involving self-inspection, to “know” what color it is and choose an appropriate background? Or does it even go to the appropriate background? (After all, perhaps you can be a brown mantid on a green tree and still enjoy some protection from predators.)
It is probably to the mantis’s advantage to change color with molts. That way, as Naskrecki suggests in the photo caption above, the predator has a harder time learning to pick you out from the environment, as it has to learn various colors. (This form of selection, in which the rarer types are favored because it’s harder for the predator to learn their color or pattern, is called “negative frequency-dependent selection”.) Or perhaps not—if the predator hunts by shape alone.
And why is shape so variable? (There’s an example of this in the third photograph below.) Such variation among individuals in morphology is remarkable in insects; I know of no other species in which individuals differ from each other so strikingly. That, too, could be an adaptation: a developmental program that is sufficiently plastic to allow the cuticles of different individuals to develop in different ways. (I find this less likely than variation in color.) But there’s a constraint: they still must always resemble leaves. How much variation is there among individuals? And do individuals change their “ornamentation” with each molt?
I’ve raised many questions here, but none have answers. The question of whether an individual can choose a matching background should be easily answerable in the lab: just put individuals in cages where they have a choice of vegetation. So far as I know, that hasn’t been done, but even a hobbyist could do that, and get a scientific paper!
An alternative hypothesis: if an individual molts on a certain vegetation, perhaps its developmental program will channel its color into that of the background vegetation. If the mantis tends to stay put on that vegetation, it need not be forced to “choose” a background that matches its color. I’ve described an example of such developmental polymorphism in an earlier post on the moth caterpillar Nemoria arizonaria, so it’s possible that this also occurs with the mantid. But that presumes that mantids stay put. And we don’t know whether they do.
Finally, if they’re so bloody cryptic, how does a male find a female when it’s mating time? Piotr suggests that they use pheromones. That’s a reasonable hypothesis, but again, we just don’t know. There’s a lot of interesting work to be done on this species!
Here’s a female ghost mantis with a newly-laid ootheca (egg case): the white structure behind it:
There’s more information (and more photographs) at Piotr’s site, so go over and have a look (be sure to see the photo of a mantis molting). We’ll end with two more of Piotr’s lovely photos:
A silhouette of the first ghost mantis (Phyllocrania paradoxa) recorded from Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique.
This photo shows the variation in both color and morphology.
Now you surely want to see some videos, and, because this species is commercially available, there are many on YouTube. I’ll show three.
As Piotr says, this species is an “ambush predator”: individuals wait until some hapless insect walks or flies within range, and then quickly strike. Here’s a video of a captive mantis taking down a waxworm (at 45 sec. in; note the speed of the strike and how the mantis holds its front legs up by its head):
Here’s a brown female being handled:
And here’s a green morph:
Note that Naskrecki also has a photo-and-science book with the same name as his website, a book that got great reviews as well as a rare starred review from Publishers Weekly. It was published in 2007 by Harvard University Press, and would make a nice present for lovers of nature photography and biology.
Finally, I’d love to have one of these mantids (I won’t, though, as it’s a bit of trouble and I travel a lot), and since they’re bred in captivity that doesn’t endanger the wild populations. There are many places to buy them (one is here), but be sure you learn how to take care of them properly (go here).
There was heavy snow yesterday in Chicago, but it was mercifully brief and not much has accumulated. However, it’s cold, and the high temperatures will be well below freezing for the next four days— by noon today it will be only 14°F (-10°C). I won’t present “this day in history” this morning, as Matthew is eager to report that a handsome tuxedo cat wandered onto the Goodison pitch during an FA Cup match between Everton and Dagenham & Redbridge, interrupting play before the goalkeeper shooed it off the field (story here, video here). How do cats, squirrels, and the like even get into a soccer stadium? Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the Queen has suggested an alteration of the Listy protocol, but I think she has ulterior motives:
Hili: The editorial meetings should always take place in the kitchen.
A: Why do you think so?
Hili: The best atmosphere is here.
In Polish:
Hili: Zebrania redakcyjne powinny zawsze być w kuchni.
Ja: Dlaczego tak sądzisz?
Hili: Tu jest najlepsza atmosfera.
And in Wroclawek, Leon seems a bit jealous that Elzbieta is lavishing affection on a strange cat:
Leon: May I pet him as well with my claw?
Finally, Anne-Marie Cournoyer has sent us a pious squirrel with a caption:
“Our Father, who art in heaven,
Give us our daily nuts…”
As Pascal once said: If God does not exist, one will lose nothing by believing in him, while if he does exist, one will lose everything by not believing.
The first thing God should do, though, is clean off his nose. . .
This video shows a brilliant idea: calm a cat down at the vet’s by using a clip to make it think it’s being carried. It apparently activates the cat’s “go-limp” reflex—a holdover from its kittenhood—without hurting it.
Try this with your cat (don’t hurt it!) and let me know if it works.
The Telegraph gives some new data from a Pew survey on how people in various countries feel about religion. The one graph shown depicts the percentage of people from 40 countries who say that religion is “very important in their lives.” Here it is:
The good news is that countries like the UK and Australia are getting more and more like Scandinavia in their levels of nonbelief. As the Torygraph says, “Only 21% of people in the UK said religion was very important in their lives. The only countries which care about religion less are Russia, China, South Korea, France, Japan and China.” (Note that they didn’t survey Scandinavian countries.)
What I also see in that graph is a negative relationship between religiosity and societal well-being, with the least religious countries being, in general, First World nations or ones that are better off, while the most religious nations are poor countries in Asia, the Middle East, or sub-Saharan Africa. This is part of a general negative relationship between the “success” of a society and its religiosity, one quantified by Greg Paul in a paper in 2009. The relationship isn’t perfect, of course, as countries like Vietnam, Russia, and China show a historical legacy of non-religiosity based on a Communist past.
Nevertheless, here’s Paul’s relationship among 17 First World nations between the religiosity of a nation and its societal well being (measured on a “successful societies scale” ranging from 0 [absymal failure as a society] to 10 [highly successful society]. The names of the countries (with the large letters used on the graph) are given below:
The “U” stands for the U.S., which has a has a high religiosity and yet low success as a society. That’s because the U.S. ranks low on some of the indicators of “success”: free medical care, child mortality, homicide rates, abortions, proportion of people incarcerated, and so on. And if you were to add countries in the Middle East and Africa to this graph, the negative relationship would be even more striking. Being highly religious and low in societal success, those nations would fall in the lower right of the graph.
The possible explanations for this relationship are several. More religious societies could simply be ones that don’t impel their members to make them “successful” using the measures Paul incorporates. Alternatively, societies that are less successful for other reasons might promote religiosity in their members, as religious people might turn to God when they can’t depend on their neighbors and government (the “Karl Marx” explanation). Or both of these could apply. Or there could be unmeasured covariates that really explain the relationship.
A lot of data, though, supports the “Marx” explanation: people become more religious, or stay that way, when their living conditions are poor or they perceive themselves as disadvantaged. This is supported by a wealth of sociological data that I’ve mentioned in earlier posts, but I’ll add one fact that suggests the direction of the causation. Income inequality—a huge aspect of how well people think they’re doing—fluctuates over time in the U.S. And religiosity fluctuates with it, but a year behind! That is, when income inequality (as measured by the GINI index goes up), religiosity goes up a year later. Ditto when income inequality falls. This suggests that people become more religious when they perceive that their well-being is dropping, and vice versa.
At any rate, many sociologists agree with this interpretation. But of course, Christians don’t, as they’d like to see piety as the result of recognizing the “truths” there is a god and a heaven, and not simply as a reaction to a bad situation.
So, when the site Christian Today looked at the data above, they saw something completely different. In a piece called “Why are people in rich countries less religious?”, author Andy Walton gets pretty close to the Marxist interpretation, but somehow manages to completely recast it (my emphasis):
While richer countries have more access to material goods, which make people feel more satisfied, it appears that people find more ‘meaning’ in religious faith.
In an Atlantic article looking at some psychological research on this phenomenon, the author said, “The researchers found that this factor of religiosity mediated the relationship between a country’s wealth and the perceived meaning in its citizen’s lives… it was the presence of religion that largely accounted for the gap between money and meaning.”
In other words, there may be something psychologically significant about a belief in the transcendent which offers more meaning to people than wealth – in spite of the good things wealth can provide.
What Walton is doing here is making a virtue of necessity: people in poor societies, he says, find religion rather than goods as their source of meaning. That may well be true, but the important question is this: given access to any society they want, would these impoverished people still choose their poor but religious societies rather than the richer and more atheistic ones? Given the flow of immigrants from the former lands to the latter, I think the answer is clear. People aren’t valuing religion over goods because that reflects their innate preferences; they’re doing it because it’s the only thing they can do! They want that material well being!
Walton ends his piece with a slap at atheism:
So, what can we learn from these figures overall? I suspect there’s a different lesson depending on where we sit on the faith spectrum.
We are one of the richest countries in the world, yet English children are some of the unhappiest in the world. Atheist progressives should realise that a society which doesn’t as a whole take religion very seriously isn’t necessarily a better society.
Yes, but in general it’s a better society. As always, societies that don’t take religion very seriously tend to be the most successful societies. And as for the relationship between religiosity and happiness, take a gander at the 25 “happiest” countries in the world and, below them, the 25 “unhappiest” countries, all from a survey of 156 countries (data from the 2013 World Happiness Report, free online). First note that, contra Walton, Britain is #22 out of 156, so it’s not doing too badly. (h/t to reader “infiniteimprobability” for pointing me to the updated data.)
I haven’t run the stats on these, but I’ll bet that happiness is negatively correlated with religiosity.
