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.
“Full gator” boots, i.e., those whose vamps and shafts are both made of gator, are extremely expensive if you buy them new. It will set you back several thousand simoleons if they’re made by a good outfit. But I get mine on eBay for a tiny fraction of that, and they’re often new or almost so. Like cars, the minute you take a boot out of the store, its value depreciates enormously.
This is a great pair: full American alligator boots in black by Rodney Ammons of El Paso.
Here is Agnieszka, a lawyer who is a friend of Andrzej and Malgorzata.
Hili: It’s good that these girls like you.
A: Why?
Hili: I’m getting benefits.
In Polish:
Hili: Dobrze, że te dziewczyny was lubią.
Ja: Dlaczego?
Hili: Bo ja na tym korzystam.
You’ll be glad to hear that I don’t have the stomach to post more than about two more “worst songs.” This dreadful specimen from 1971, “Brand New Key” by Melanie, is rife with not only face-palming lyrics, but also sexual innuendo. It is a testament to Americans’ bad taste that this song sold 3 million copies and became a gold record. Not only that, but it reached #1 in the U.S., Canada, and Australia. What were we thinking?
Melanie, whose real name was Melanie Anne Safka-Schekeryk (born 1947), had two other hits, “Lay Down” (tolerable) and “What Have They Done to My Song Ma” (intolerable).
Wikipedia describes its genesis, which is more or less what you’d expect. It was inspired by a meal from McDonald’s:
In an interview with classic rock music journalist Ray Shasho on July 22, 2013, Melanie describes the inspiration behind “Brand New Key” … “I was fasting with a twenty seven day fast on water. I broke the fast and went back to my life living in New Jersey and we were going to a flea market around six in the morning. On the way back …and I had just broken the fast, from the flea market, we passed a McDonalds and the aroma hit me, and I had been a vegetarian before the fast. So we pulled into the McDonalds and I got the whole works … the burger, the shake and the fries … and no sooner after I finished that last bite of my burger …that song was in my head. The aroma brought back memories of roller skating and learning to ride a bike and the vision of my dad holding the back fender of the tire. And me saying to my dad …“You’re holding, you’re holding, you’re holding, right? Then I’d look back and he wasn’t holding and I’d fall. So that whole thing came back to me and came out in this song.”
It should have stayed in her.
And there’s this:
For a time, at the beginning of her career, Melanie was a follower of Meher Baba and this influenced some of her songs (such as “Love to Lose Again” and “Candles in the Rain”). Over time she became disenchanted with other followers and then disassociated herself from Meher Baba. In 2006 she underwent a life-altering experience with Mata Amritanandamayi or Amma (Mother) as she is also known, or as the “hugging saint” from India, which inspired Melanie to write “Motherhood Of Love”, one of her more recent songs.
She’s got a brand new guru, too.
Many people who feed wild birds have troubles with squirrels stealing bird food. My problem is the opposite: I’m feeding squirrels and their food has suddenly attracted birds, probably because winter’s coming on and food is scarcer. The other day I found these house sparrows nomming my squirrel food (there was a gorgeous male cardinal, too, but I didn’t have my camera). This species, Passer domesticus, was named by Linnaeus, and was of course introduced to the U.S., having been released in New York in 1852.
They are pretty, though, aren’t they? They are the tabby cats of birds.
Now, of course, I must feed these guys as well, so I have bought bird food. Between that, the sunflower seeds, peanuts, squirrel food, and now acorns (collected from nearby oaks), I have quite a collection of animal fudz.
I love the French translation of “Wild Bird Seed Mix” on the bag: “Mélange de Grains Pour Oiseaux Sauvages“. It’s much cooler to think of bird seed as a melange of grains for savage oiseaux.
Now all the animals have quite a buffet on my lab windowsill (water dish to right):
I hope raptors don’t find this place and start picking off birds and squirrels.
Someone made a petulant comment a while back asking why I bother feeding animals who will only convert that food into more squirrels and birds, swelling the population and exacerbating the problem. My answer is that the animals are hungry and suffer from lack of food. Would you withhold food from the children of impoverished nations because there are too many people there anyway?
Sally Quinn of the Washington Post will be interviewing Richard Dawkins live on Book TV; the subject is his new autobiography. The information about viewing times, which are streamed at special times (but not live) is given below, but you have to go here to see the show (click the “click here to watch online now” line). Note that the Monday shows can be seen at a decent hour in the UK
Here are the times (U.S. Eastern Standard time) that the show will be aired:
Gratuitious information: I used to play in Sally Quinn’s house when we were both kids (she’s 8 years older than I). She was the daughter of General William “Buffalo Bill” Quinn, who was stationed in Athens, Greece at the same time as my father. It was at her house that I first heard “Rock Around the Clock” by Bill Haley, which must have been 1956. That’s generally regarded as the first rock and roll song, and I remember hearing her playing it up in her room while I was at the bottom of the stairs. Quinn, who married Post editor Ben Bradlee, is now the editor of the paper’s “religion” section.
It’s been known for a while that ants evolved from a wasplike ancestor, but the relationships among living wasps and ants have been unclear. An new online paper in Current Biology by Brian Johnson et al. (the senior author is my old friend Phil Ward at UC Davis), using a huge amount of sequence data, seems to have resolved the situation pretty definitively. The group they studied were the “aculeate” Hymenoptera, which includes all the “stinging” Hymenoptera.
Earlier workers suggested that ants evolved from ectoparasitic wasps that laid their egg on other insects, and whose larvae then hatched on the host or in its nest. These wasps were obviously not “eusocial” (i.e., having reproductive queens with a nonreproductive female worker caste), leaving open the question of what factors prompted the evolution of that marvel of behavior, eusociality (mostly found in insects but also in naked mole rats and a few other species). What factors could prompt the evolution of a sterile worker caste? That was a question that puzzled Darwin in The Origin.
The new phylogeny, based on 308 to 5,214 genes, is strongly supported and is given below. It shows that the sister group of ants are the speciform wasps and bees (“Apoidea”), which is something nobody suspected. That group includes the familiar mud-dauber wasps, which you might have seen making their cylindrical nests on your house.
That novel finding gives one clue to the origin of eusociality in ants, for the Apoidea is a group characterized by two things: like ants, they build nests to contain their eggs, and they provision those nests by bringing prey back to feed the offspring. The outgroups, scoliid wasps and their relatives, as well as the tiphioids and some pompiloids , retain their ectoparasitic habits, and none of them are eusocial. (Eusociality is indicated by asterisks in the diagram below.):
The offspring in such nests, of course, contain the genes of their mothers, and all of these species (including every group in the diagram above) are haplodiploid: the males are haploid, with a single set of chromosomes, while females have two sets. The reproductive queen produces males from unfertilized eggs, and females from fertilized ones. It’s been hypothesized that this situation also favors the evolution of eusociality, as sterile workers share 3/4 of their genes with the sisters they help rear, which might give an evolutionary leg up to becoming sterile—using your efforts not to produce your own offspring, but to make more copies of your genes by helping your mother rear your sisters.
Now haplodiploidy is not sufficient to promote the evolution of eusociality, as most of the non-eusocial species above are also haplodiploid. And termites, which are not haplodiploid (both males and females have two sets of chromosomes), are also eusocial, with a reproductive queen and sterile workers. But previous work that I’ve discussed elsewhere suggests that haplodiploidy is nevertheless a factor important in promoting eusociality.
Rather, it may be the combination of haplodiploidy and the construction of a defensible and provisioned nest, which allows you to keep your offspring around to help you, that was pivotal in promoting the evolution of the eusocial lifestyle. This paper, at least, supports that two-factor hypothesis, and that’s why it’s important.
Edward O. Wilson and his colleagues have suggested that haploidiploidy and the “kin selection” it can cause was irrelevant in the evolution of eusociality, and the “nest” hypothesis was the important factor, along with selection among groups. The Johnson et al. paper doesn’t speak to that hypothesis, except to support the idea that defensible, provisioned nests are important.
Rather, Wilson’s idea of group selection, and of the irrelevance of kin selection, seems unlikely for other reasons. Those include previous work showing that eusociality evolved only in hymenopteran groups whose females mated only once (that causes increased relatedness in offspring, promoting kin selection), as well as the general unlikelihood of (and failure to demonstrate) group selection in any species. Finally, although the Nowak et al. paper in Nature claimed that, in their models, kin selection did not promote eusociality, they showed no such thing, for their models did not vary the level of relatedness among individuals.
You can read my posts earlier posts on the “group selection/eusociality” controversy here.
Carl Zimmer had a piece on this work in last Tuesday’s New York Times.
_____________
Johnson, B. R., M. L. Borowiec, J. C. Chiu, E. K. Lee, J. Atallah, and P. S. Ward. 2013. Phylogenomics resolves evolutionary relationships among ants, bees, and wasps. Current Biology, online, in press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2013.08.050
We will have mostly amusement and persiflage today, as it’s the weekend and I’m working hard. With luck I can put up a science post in a bit.
In the meantime, I know you’re all on tenterhooks after reader Sheila B reported yesterday that she’d adopted a stray kitten. Well, an eight-month-old “kitten”—and pregnant, too! I of course demanded photos and a story, and she kindly obliged. Sheila’s report:
The finding:
I was lying in bed on Monday morning listening to the rain hammering on the window, as only Texas rain can do, thinking “What is that noise?” Get up, get umbrella, hope none of the neighbors see me in my nightgown, look around the front of the house. Can hear meowing, but can’t see anything. Go back in the house, out the back, meowing much louder and little face pops out from the gap between the fence and the shed. Enticed her out and under the porch. Fortunately it was warm outside so her only apparent discomfort was that she was hungry. We spent the next few days calling neighbors and checking websites for lost cats and buying cat food and litter. No-one seemed to be missing a cat and by the time we’d purchased a scratching post, we realized she was staying with us. Indeed, she has shown no inclination to leave! We took her to the vet to see whether she was chipped (she’s not), and to get her checked over. Apart from fleas, which the vet treated, she was otherwise in good health. And in the family way!
She is very friendly, very talkative, very playful (anything that moves is fair game) and we named her Zinnia. I say “we” because she has wormed her way into my husband’s affections, even though she stalks the fringed weights hanging from his prized Japanese scrolls.
Of course I will now request pictures of the kittens when they arrive.
I give in: elebenty gazillion readers sent me this hilarious video of cats stealing d*gs’ beds, which, of course, was exactly what I encountered in Poland. The dog Emma regularly slept on the hard floor while Hili-Cat, refusing her own nice bed, appropriated Emma’s. Although this video features d*gs, it does so in an unflattering light, and so it will be part of today’s Caturday felids. This may in fact be the one item I’ve been sent most frequently by readers in the history of this website. I conclude that most readers like to see cats triumphant.
The d*gs are impotent, powerless. They clearly perceive the cats as superior animals.
Several readers also sent me this interesting piece from Popular Science, “See the world through the eyes of a cat.” It uses “science” to depict how cats see the world. I’m not convinced.
Artist Nickolay Lamm, who has previously brought us visualizations of urban heat islands and sea level rise projections, took a look at the world through kitty eyes for his latest project. Lamm consulted with ophthalmologists at the University of Pennsylvania’s veterinary school and a few other animal eye specialists to create these visualizations comparing how cats see with how humans do. How we see things is represented on top; how a cat standing next to us would see the same scene appears below.
If a moggie found its way to Times Square, in New York City, this is what it would supposedly see:
How did they do this?
Some of the cat-eye facts he took into account: The blurry edges of the pictures represent peripheral vision. Humans have a 20 degree range of peripheral vision on each side. Cats can see 30 degrees on each side. Their visual field overall is just bigger—they see 200 degrees compared to our 180 degrees.
Cat vision isn’t so great at a distance. What we can see sharply from 100 feet away, they need to see at 20 feet. From what researchers can tell, cats can see blue and yellow colors, but not red, orange or brown, which is why all the images look a little washed out. Your kitty sees in Instagram, it seems. Not so good for looking at far-away, lush landscapes.
Well, the problem here is that they’re simulating vision based on the morphology of cat’s eyes, and perhaps some experiments on peripheral vision. You can probably detect the problem with this already.
Here’s that New York cat in Grand Central Station, also in New York:
The problem is that we have no idea how the cat’s brain processes the visual input, and about that we have no idea. The cat could, for instance, see even worse than this, or might compensate for the problems by seeing better than the pictures suggest.
A cat in the mountains would supposedly see this:
What about at night? We all know that cats are far better than we at seeing in the dark. Here’s a simulation of cats’ night vision.
Cats can see some six to eight times better than us in the dark, partially because they have more rods, a type of photoreceptor in the retina. Their elliptical pupils can open very wide in dim light, but contract to a tiny slit to protect the sensetive retina from bright light. And like other animals that evolved to hunt at night, cats have a tapetum lucidum, a reflective layer of tissue that bounces light that hits the back of the eye out through the retina again for a second chance to be absorbed by the rods. It’s also what gives them those terrifying glowing eyes in pictures.
Well, maybe, but again we don’t know how the brain of a cat would interpret the input. The bottom doesn’t look all that better than the top. Maybe it’s accurate, but perhaps cats can, like a camera, somehow compensate even more by increasing the “exposure” it perceives.
At any rate, at least this tells us something about peripheral vision and perhaps about the colors cats perceive. The problem of how the brain processes information in another species—what it really “sees”—is a problem of qualia, and one that, for the present, is unknown. Someday we might be able to download a cat’s brain onto a computer and get that kind of information, but of course you’d have to find a way to give that computer noms, and eventually we’d find computers taking over our beds.
I wish they’d have mentioned the brain problem, but, after all, it’s “popular science.”
