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.
“Good Night” is the final song by the Beatles on their 1968 album The Beatles (also known as The White Album). It is sung by Ringo Starr, the only Beatle to appear on the song. The music is provided by an orchestra arranged and conducted by George Martin.
John Lennon originally wrote the song as a lullaby for his 5-year-old son Julian.
George Martin’s arrangement is excessively lush, and intentionally so. Lennon is said to have wanted the song to sound “real cheesy”, like a Gordon Jenkins-esque Old Hollywood production number. The musicians play the following instruments: twelve violins, three violas, three cellos, one harp, three flutes, one clarinet, one horn, one vibraphone, and one string bass. The Mike Sammes Singers also took part in the recording, providing backing vocals.
Starr became the third member of the group (after Paul McCartney and George Harrison) to record a song credited to the group without the other members performing (Lennon was the fourth with “Julia”). The song ends with Starr whispering the words: “Good night… Good night, everybody… Everybody, everywhere… Good night.”
The later Beatles were immensely enriched by having Martin as their producer.
Reader Kent called my attention to a new piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education called “Dodging the God Squad.” It’s by someone using the name “Madalyn Dawkins” (clearly a nod to Richard), who won’t identify herself because she is a faculty member in the humanities at a western U.S. research university, and is married to a senior college administrator. Why would that make her hide behind a pseudonym? Because she’s an atheist. And if she came “out,” her husband could get in serious trouble:
While top administrators wield a considerable amount of power on their campuses, they are also vulnerable (like their counterparts in the world of politics) to people and forces that can undermine their positions and potentially jeopardize their careers.
My spouse has had a succession of administrative posts over the last few decades, and my experience is that in academe there is a kind of God Squad that monitors and polices administrators’ beliefs and attitudes toward religion. The real danger for campus officials who reveal themselves as agnostic or atheist is retaliation from powerful donors, board members, alumni, or other administrators in the institutional hierarchy.
“Dawkins” recounts several incidents in which college administrators who let their atheism slip suffered because of it, The indented material are her quotes:
A friend who was a long-serving university president ran afoul of an influential donor when he made the mistake of mentioning in a local speech that he had long ago stopped believing in any god. The donor was so outraged by his revelation that she canceled all future payments on a multiyear, multimillion-dollar gift. That same donor encouraged others to stop all future gifts while the president was in office. As a result of her actions, the university lost a substantial amount in canceled payments and anticipated gifts.
One chancellor had to fight for his job when a powerful board member mounted a campaign against him, lobbying his fellow trustees to vote for the chancellor’s ouster. An avowed evangelical Christian, the board member was outraged when the chancellor told a small group at a cocktail reception that he likened religion to superstition, and questioned whether intellectuals could truly practice a faith.Fortunately for the chancellor, the offended trustee could not marshal sufficient support to fire the wayward administrator, but the board member continued to be obstructionist throughout the chancellor’s tenure, consistently voting against his initiatives.
Sometimes the offense and the retaliation are more subtle. I know of a dean who, in casual conversations, implied that he was an agnostic and was skeptical of organized religion. The provost happened to be present at one of those conversations, and suddenly her demeanor toward the dean changed. He found it increasingly difficult to schedule meetings with the provost, he was inexplicably passed up for an end-of-term raise, and he received a mediocre annual performance review. The dean ended up leaving for an appointment at another university.
I’m actually surprised that this kind of discrimination would occur in the western U.S., unless it’s in states like Idaho, Montana, or Nevada. And, of course, this is, among First World countries, a uniquely American form of discrimination. I can’t imagine it happening in, say, Denmark, France, or Germany, where nobody gives a rat’s patootie if you’re an atheist. And it’s asymmetrical: if you talk about your religion a bit, you’re not going to suffer at all.
At any rate, “Dawkins” gives some tips for atheist administrators who want to keep their jobs, which include hiding your beliefs and, if someone asks you about them, saying, “I’m sorry, but religion is a very personal topic, and so I never discuss it in public.” But her advice to “Keep your religious (or nonreligious) beliefs to yourself” is not really apposite because, as I said, if you say a few things about your religion, that’s pretty much okay so long as you’re not an atheist. You can’t, of course, constantly ask your co-workers if they’ve heard the good news about Ceiling Cat.
Having been in liberal and godless schools all my life (I did go to college in the South, but wasn’t a vociferous nonbeliever then), I’ve never suffered a bit from being an atheist and professing it openly. That’s because 95% of my biology colleagues are also atheists. But I’ve heard horror stories from other biologists who teach in the South.
I’d be interested in hearing from heathen readers who have suffered, professionally or otherwise, for publicly avowing atheism.
nb: I’m getting ready go to to Poland, which involves writing two talks (Warsaw and Cracow residents, be warned) as well as doing a book, so posting this week will be largely devoid of deep thought.
I’ve finally sat down and made a list of my favorite Beatles songs that I’ve not yet put up, and there are 19 in all. That was far more than I envisioned posting, but going through their music I found it impossible to distill the best into a week of songs. So, for better or worse, you’ll have endure one a day for nearly three more weeks.
Although I’m a big fan of the early Beatles, which is when I fell in love with them (I actually lived in Germany when they became big there, before they were popular elsewhere), I’ve found that nearly all of my favorites come from the Rubber Soul album or after. I suppose that’s when they became purely sui generis, with a style of music that, although influenced by earlier blues and rock, also had an element that was completely new.
This song, “I Want to Tell You,” is one of the two types of love songs the Beatles wrote: the soft ballads (“Yesterday,” “In My Life”, “If I Fell”) and the harder-driving amorous songs (“Got to Get You Into My Life,” “Any Time at All”). This one fits in the second category, and appeared on “Revolver” (1966). For reasons I don’t understand, it’s not on Rolling Stone‘s list of the 100 best Beatles songs. It’s dissonant but beautiful, and nobody had written anything like it before.
The song came out when I was in high school and the psychedelic era was just reaching the East Coast. Imbued with drugs, romanticism, and the sense that I was a more complex person than I really was (psychedelics will do that), I thought the lyrics really spoke to me. Ah, but I was so much older then; I’m younger than that now.
“I Want to Tell You” is in the key of A major. It is driven by bass fours and a catchy, persistent piano discord: a short, distinctive guitar melody opens and closes the song and recurs between verses. Harrison’s voice is supported by John Lennon and Paul McCartney in close harmony.
Like “Eight Days a Week”, the song begins with a fade-in. The vocals open (on “When I get near you” with a harmonious E-A-B-C#-E melody note progression against an A chord, but dissonance soon arises with a II7 (B7) chord pointedly mirroring the lyrics on “drag me down”. The dissonance is immediately further enhanced by the rare use of an E7♭9 chord (at 0.46-0.53 secs). This chord has been termed “one of the most legendary in the entire Beatles catalogue”. When interviewed about the “weird, jarring chord at the end of every line that mirrors the disturbed feeling of the song”, Harrison replied: “That’s an E7th with an F on top played on the piano. I’m really proud of that as I literally invented that chord. The song was about the frustration we all feel about trying to communicate certain things with just words. I realised that the chords I knew at the time just didn’t capture that feeling. I came up with this dissonant chord that really echoed that sense of frustration. John later borrowed it on I Want You (She’s So Heavy) [at] “It’s driving me mad.” Everett emphasises McCartney’s “finger-tapping impatience” on the piano (at 0.25-0.32) which is countered by the lyric “I don’t mind… I could wait forever. I’ve got time.” During the song’s ending fadeout (a reprise of the song’s guitar intro featuring a prominent group vocal harmony), McCartney makes notable use of melisma while chanting ‘I’ve got time’, revealing the song’s subtle Indian influence. Everett considers that the closing on “maybe you’ll understand” pointedly involves a descent to a “perfect authentic cadence.” Neil Innes of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band (and later The Rutles) said the Bonzos’ first studio experience was at Abbey Road Studios while The Beatles were recording “I Want to Tell You”. Innes said he took a break in one of the studio’s hallways and heard The Beatles playing back the song, blasting it at full volume. Innes recounted that he was in a state of immense awe over the song’s beauty, and sheepishly returned to the Bonzo session, where they were recording the 1920s Vaudeville song “My Brother Makes the Noises for the Talkies”.
This is one of the more palpable dangers of faith: disease spread by a refusal to accept modern medicine, itself based on the assumption that God will heal you. Except he doesn’t.
According to several sources, including the Dallas News, there’s a measles outbreak in Tarrant County, Texas, spread by one infectious case and a bunch of kids whose church frowns on vaccination. Frm the Dallas News:
The toll has grown to 20 cases since last Thursday, when Tarrant’s health department reported the first two.
Fifteen of the measles cases are in Tarrant, including four confirmed Wednesday.
“We are on high alert as we’ve seen case counts can cross county lines overnight,” said Carrie Williams, a spokeswoman for the Texas Department of State Health Services.
All 20 measles cases so far have been traced to the 1,500-member Eagle Mountain International Church in northeast Tarrant County, health officials said.
The outbreak appears to be occurring within a group of families that has chosen not to get vaccinated, officials said.
“This will spread fast among pockets of unvaccinated people,” Williams said.
Of the 15 cases in Tarrant County, 11 of the infected people were not immunized against the measles.
In Texas, that’s rare. Almost 98 percent of students are vaccinated against the measles when they enter kindergarten, a state requirement for public and private schools, according to the state health department.
About 1 percent of students obtain “conscientious exemptions” for all vaccinations.
In this outbreak, all the infected children in Tarrant County were being home-schooled, said Al Roy, a spokesman for the health department.
The measles outbreak originated from a man who traveled to Indonesia on a mission trip where he was exposed to the infectious disease.
Upon his return, he visited the Eagle Mountain church, which is about 50 miles northwest of Dallas. The church’s risk manager, Robert Hayes, said the man, who was not a member of the church, shook hands and gave hugs to many others.
Dr. Karen Smith, who runs her own medical practice and the Eagle Mountain church clinic, said she has treated most of the measles cases — five adults and the rest children — since the outbreak began.
She said many members follow alternative medicine and choose not to immunize their children.
This is one reason that there should be no conscientious exemptions for vaccinations. Unlike the burqa case, this is a no-brainer. For matters of public health, and to eradicate disease completely, every child must be vaccination. No religious belief can or should contravene that.
The measles vaccine, which has been available since 1963, typically is administered to children at 12 months of age and again before they go to kindergarten.
The two-shot regimen is believed to confer full immunity to the disease.
Although measles isn’t often fatal in the U.S. (the fatality rate is 0.3%), it can cause miscarriages in pregnant women, and has an appreciable death rate in other countries. The World Heath Organization gives these facts:
Measles is one of the leading causes of death among young children even though a safe and cost-effective vaccine is available.
In 2011, there were 158 000 measles deaths globally – about 430 deaths every day or 18 deaths every hour.
More than 95% of measles deaths occur in low-income countries with weak health infrastructures.
Measles vaccination resulted in a 71% drop in measles deaths between 2000 and 2011 worldwide.
In 2011, about 84% of the world’s children received one dose of measles vaccine by their first birthday through routine health services – up from 72% in 2000.
As I’ve said before, one death from such religious dogma is a horrible thing, but there have been many, particularly in Muslim countries whose residents are suspicious of vaccination as some kind of Western plot. Wikipedia notes this about vaccination , measles, polio, and religion:
In the early 2000s Islamic religious leaders in northern Nigeria advised their followers not to have their children vaccinated with oral polio vaccine. The boycott caused cases of polio to arise not only in Nigeria but also in neighboring countries. The followers were also wary of other vaccinations, and Nigeria reported over 20,000 measles cases and nearly 600 deaths from measles from January through March 2005. In 2006 Nigeria accounted for over half of all new polio cases worldwide. Outbreaks continued thereafter; for example, at least 200 children died in a late-2007 measles outbreak in Borno State.
The Eagle Mountain Church is a megachurch in the empire run by pastor Kenneth Copeland, whose daughter, Teri Copeland Pearsons, is the pastor who helps promulgate anti-vax attitudes. The Dallas Observer reports:
Pearsons is the eldest daughter of megapastor Kenneth Copeland, and her church is one of the cornerstones of Kenneth Copeland Ministries, his sprawling evangelical empire. He’s far from the most vocal proponent of the discredited theory that the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine causes autism, but, between his advocacy of faith healing and his promotion of the vaccine-autism link on his online talk show, he’s not exactly urging his flock to get their recommended shots.
That left his daughter doing some nifty theological footwork in last week’s sermon as she struggled to explain how believers should trust their health to both God and medical professionals.
“There are a lot of people that think the Bible — we talk about walking by faith — it leaves out things such as, I don’t know, people just get strange. But when you read the Old Testament, you find that it is full of precautionary measures, and it is full of the law.Why did the Jewish people, why did they not die out during the plague? Because the Bible told them how to be clean, told them how to disinfect, told them there was something contagious. And the interesting thing of it, it wasn’t a medical doctor per se who took care of those things, it was the priesthood. It was the ministers, it was those who knew how to take the promises of God as well as the commandments of God to take care of things like disinfection and so forth….
Many of the things that we have in medical practice now actually are things you can trace back into scripture. It’s when we find out what’s in the scripture that we have wisdom.”
She concludes by announcing that the church was hosting a pair of free vaccination clinics and urging everyone to show up, advice that probably would have been more helpful two months ago.
I’m not sure where the Bible says, “Wash your hands after defecating or tending the sick.” Can someone enlighten me? For God, in his omniscience, surely could have passed on that wisdom if he either wrote or inspired the Bible. How many lives it would have saved!
Just to show how lunacy propagates among generations, here’s a video (one that I’ve shown before) with Kenneth Copeland and the Pentecostal minister Kenneth Hagin (died 2003) inspiring a congragation to behave like complete lunatics. I’m sure foreign readers will be puzzled at this video, though American readers will take the religious insanity in stride.
Here’s another installment of the moggies sent by readers, along with some description. We will do this again in the future, so starting taking GOOD pictures of your cat to send in the future. And be creative!
Reader Beth sends a picture (captioned in LOLcat style) of her longhaired female, who is named (seriously) Hillary Rotten Kitten. She looks the part, too:
Hillary also features as a walk-on in some strips of the world-famous Snowball the Dancing Cockatoo, produced by yet another reader. (And the bird itself is owned by a third reader.)
Here is Hillary crashing a strip that also features a lizard and a cockroach:
Another recently departed kitteh, which makes me sad to post, as this beloved moggie, owned by readers Carolyn and Michael, died on August 2:
This is our not so little Lil Man aka Squeezie Pig (he squeaked when you squeezed him which we did a lot.) We just had to say goodbye this past Friday to this sweet boy…the most loving cuddly puss face ever.
Finally, reader Cameron Way sends our first video of a reader’s cat. It shows the behavior described below by Cameron:
This is our cat Spot. When I get home from a bike ride, I give him my stinky bike clothes. He seems to love them. If you try to pet him while he’s rubbing on the clothes, you may get bitten or scratched. He gets in a trance or something.
Today’s Beatles “song” is actually a medley of seven short songs amalgamated on the second side of Abbey Road (1969). The medley ranks as #23 on Rolling Stones’ list of The 100 greatest Beatles songs. It’s curious that, to me at least, none of these stand out as a top-notch Beatles song, but together they do—almost like the Beatles themselves as a group compared to their post-group solo achievements.
You Never Give Me Your Money
Sun King
Mean Mr. Mustard
Polythene Pam
She Came in Through the Bathroom Window
Golden Slumbers
Carry That Weight
The End
The last line of “The End”: “And in the end, the love you take—is equal to the love you make” is one of my favorite Beatles lines, and quite profound in its own way. The other great and profound line by a Beatle, but produced by Lennon on his own, is this one from “Beautiful Boy” (1980): “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”
I learned a lot from the Rolling Stone description:
“I wanted to get John and Paul to think more seriously about their music,” [George Martin] said. “Paul was all for experimenting like that.” McCartney, in fact, led the first session for that extended section of the album — on May 6th, 1969, for “You Never Give Me Your Money,” his deceptively sunny indictment of the business nightmares at Apple Corps.
Lennon was a lot less interested in the medley, although he contributed some of its most eccentric parts, like the sneering “Mean Mr. Mustard” and the quick, funky put-down “Polythene Pam.” He subsequently dismissed the concept as “junk” in Rolling Stone, saying that “none of the songs had anything to do with each other, no thread at all, only the fact that we stuck them together.”
He was right in one sense. The 16-minute sequence — veering from “Money” and the luxuriant sigh of Lennon’s “Sun King” to McCartney’s heavy-soul shard “She Came in Through the Bathroom Window” and the sweet lullaby “Golden Slumbers,” and closing with McCartney’s famous prescription in “The End” (“The love you take/Is equal to the love you make”) — has no narrative connection. But the Abbey Road medley is the matured Beatles at their best: playful, gentle, acerbic, haunting and bonded by the music. Their harmonies are ravishing and complex; the guitars are confident and cutting. “We were holding it together,” McCartney said proudly. “Even though this undercurrent was going on” — a reference to the pressures and differences that had been pulling them apart since the White Album — “we still had a strong respect for each other even at the very worst points.”
The Beatles recorded the sections of the medley at various times, out of order, during the July and August 1969 sessions for Abbey Road. “Mean Mr. Mustard” dated back to early 1968. The lingering hysteria of Beatlemania cropped up in “She Came in Through the Bathroom Window,” which was inspired by an overeager fan. But the emotional heart of the suite was the financial woes that were consuming the Beatles’ energy and were on the verge of bankrupting them. Lennon was instrumental in the hiring of Allen Klein, the business manager of the Rolling Stones, to straighten out the books and the chaos at Apple Corps; McCartney wanted the band to hire Lee and John Eastman, his future father- and brother-in-law. McCartney admitted that “You Never Give Me Your Money” was “me directly lambasting Allen Klein’s attitude to us — all promises, and it never works out.”
. . .The swapping of guitar solos in “The End” was a band brainstorm. Harrison thought a guitar break would make a good climax. Lennon suggested he, Harrison and McCartney all trade licks. McCartney said he’d go first. Coming after Starr’s first and only drum solo on a Beatles record, the scorching round-robin breaks — with Harrison in the middle and Lennon at the end — were cut live in one take, a last blast of natural brotherhood from a band only months from splitting.
“I didn’t know at the time that it was the last Beatles record that we would make,” Harrison said of Abbey Road. “But it felt as if we were reaching the end of the line.”
“Out of the ashes of all that madness,” said Starr, “that last section is one of the finest pieces we put together.”
Biologist and photographer Piotr Naskrecki continues to produce great posts on his travels in Africa. You can see them at his website The Smaller Majority, and this week he’s posted on the Empusidae, a small family (28 species) of mantids. He say that they fall into two morphological classes:
Two main body types are common – they are either thin and stick-like or, while still being rather spindly, the body is covered with large lobes and flaps, making them excellent mimics of dried, shriveled leaves.
He has photos of both types. This one, of the thin variety, looks like some bizarre space alien dreamed up in Hollywood (all photos reproduced by permission, and please don’t reproduce ’em without asking Piotr):
The stick-like variety, such as the genera Empusa, Hemiempusa, and Idolomorpha, are usually found in grassy vegetation, where they hunt small insects, such as planthoppers and grasshopper nymphs. Earlier this year I ran across a gorgeous male specimen of Idolomorpha dentifrons on the Cheringoma Plateau of Gorongosa, but had troubles photographing it in a way that would properly convey its incredibly elongate morphology. In the end I took a series of vertical photos of its head and front legs that I stitched together in PS, and here is the result. Male empusids are unusual in having pectinate antennae, the kind usually seen in silk moths and other insects with well-developed pheromonal communication, where the female emits sex pheromones and males follow the faint scent trail. Not surprisingly, such behavior was recently demonstrated to be present in empusids (Gemeno et al. 2005. J. Ins. Behav. 18: 389-403).
The captions are Piotr’s:
Male empusid (I. dentifrons) cleaning his pectinate antennae.A portrait of a male empusid Idolomorpha dentifrons from Gorongosa National Park, Mozambique. This photo is a composite of four vertical frames.
In fact, this reminds me of some alien in a science-fiction movie, but I can’t remember the film. Does anybody know it?
And the other type:
The leaf-like morphology can be seen in the Devil’s mantis (Idolomantis diabolica), arguably one of the most striking and beautiful praying mantids in the world. The body of immature individuals resembles a dry, withered leaf, except for the brighter colors on the underside of the raptorial front legs. Adults turn pale green and white, and the pattern on their front legs becomes brightly red, resembling vivid petals of a flower. There is a reason for this – Devil’s mantids are specialized hunters of pollinators, such as bees and butterflies, and presumably this bright coloration fools some insects into coming dangerously too close.
Nymphs of the Devil’s mantis (Idolomantis diabolica) resemble dry, shriveled leaves, which allows them to blend among the vegetation where they hunt flying insects. Interestingly, this species is not interested in slower insects and those that walk or crawl on the vegetation – the prey must be flying really fast to elicit this predator’s response. (This species has recently become popular in the pet trade, and this photo shows a captive individual.)
Here we go again: someone arguing that DARWIN WAS RONG (well, he was, on several issues) and also that DARWIN’S INTELLECTUAL DESCENDANTS ARE RONG TOO. But this time it’s not a creationist but a card-carrying biologist, and a famous one, too.
Matthew Cobb ruined my morning by sending me a video of the renowned physiologist Denis Noble (born 1936 and a professor at Oxford until 2004), whose name is followed by a veritable alphabet soup of honors (CBE, FRS, FRCP). His contributions to physiology are apparently multifarious, though I confess I don’t know much about Noble or what he did. Nevertheless, in his dotage he’s taken to writing and talking about how modern evolutionary biology (“neo-Darwinism” or “the Modern Synthesis”) is wrong, and that I know something about. And Noble, as you’ll see in the video, is wrong; in fact, I’d use the physics adage and say “he’s not even wrong.”
Noble’s motivation, apparently, is to put physiology back at the High Table of Evolution, as Steve Gould wanted to do with paleontology. That is, Noble argues that the current paradigm of evolutionary biology doesn’t leave much of a niche for physiology. He’s butthurt about that! And so he constructs a case that not only is the Modern Synthesis wrong, because all its tenets have been disproven, but that his own “Nobleian Synthesis” leaves a central place for physiology. What a mitzvah!
The views in the video below were also given Noble’s paper published in Experimental Physiology this year (reference at bottom, free download). I read that paper and intended to write about it, but its misguided arguments and willful ignorance angered me so much that I moved on to other things. Now, with Noble’s video staring me in the face, repeating his stupid arguments against neo-Darwinism, I must respond. I can do no other.
If you’d rather read his views instead of spending 38 minutes watching this video, read his paper. If you’re an audiovisual type of person, watch this video, described on YouTube this way:
A major revolution is occurring in evolutionary biology. In this video the President of the International Union of Physiological Sciences, Professor Denis Noble, explains what is happening and why it is set to change the nature of biology and of the importance of physiology to that change. The lecture was given to a general audience at a major international Congress held in Suzhou China.
Here are Noble’s contentions and why they’re wrong:
1. Mutations are not random. This is a central tenet of evolutionary biology, which Noble says has now been disproven. It hasn’t. He argues that there are mutational hotspots in the genome, and that mutation rates can change in response to the condition of the organism or its environment.
That is true, but says nothing about the randomness of mutations. What we mean by “random” is that mutations occur regardless of whether they would be good for the organism. That is, the chances of an adaptive mutation occurring is not increased if the environment changes in a way that would favor that mutation. The word “random” does not, to evolutionists, mean that every gene has the same chance of mutating, nor that mutation rates can’t be affected by other things. What it means is that mutation is not somehow adjusted so that good mutations crop up just when they would be advantageous. My friend Paul Sniegowski, a professor at Penn, uses the term “indifferent” instead of “random,” and I think that’s a better way to describe the neo-Darwinian view of mutations.
And there are no experiments—none—showing that mutations are not indifferent, and plenty showing they are. In other words, Noble’s characterization of neo-Darwinism’s error is simply misguided.
2. Acquired characteristics can be inherited. In support of this neo-Lamarckian view, Noble trots out the tired old horse of epigenetics, arguing that environmentally-induced changes in DNA can be transmitted for several generations, presumably by differential methylation of the DNA. And that is also true.
But what is not true is that a. these changes are frequent, b. epigenetic changes, when they occur, are always induced by the environment, and c. epigenetic changes produced solely by the environment are the basis of adaptive evolution. There are four types of evidence for these contentions.
First, when we map adaptations in organisms, they invariably turn out to be changes in the DNA (either the structural or regulatory bits) and are not purely epigenetic, that is, are not based on methylation of DNA that is itself not coded in the genome.
Second, as I just noted, adaptive methylation, such as “parental imprinting”, in which the father or mother contributes differently methylated DNAs that do different things in the zygotes and offspring, is based on instructions in the DNA itself. That is, the DNA carries instructions that say something like, “If you’re a male, methylate this bit of DNA in your sperm.” That is not environmentally-induced or Lamarckian change of the DNA. It’s based on simple, garden-variety evolution of genes themselves.
Third, I know of not a single adaptation in organisms that is based on such environmentally-induced and non-genetic change. Geneticists now know the genetic basis of dozens of adaptive traits that differ between populations and species. All of them reside in the DNA. If non-genetic adaptive change was common, we would have found it.
Finally, it would be odd if pure epigenetic changes were the basis of adaptations, because such changes are not inherited stably. For an adaptation to become fixed in a population or species, it must be inherited with near-perfect fidelity. And that is not the case for all environmentally-induced modificatons of DNA. They eventually go away.
Because of the supposed environmental acquisition of inherited traits, Noble claims in his talk that the Central Dogma of genetics (genes produce DNA produce organisms) is flat wrong. But he fails to show a convincing case of long-term evolution induced by an environmental modification of the genetic material. I’ve written extensively on the problems with the “epigenetically-driven” paradigm of evolution, and you can find posts on this site simply by searching for “epigenetic.”
3. The gene-centered view of evolution is wrong. Noble clearly has a beef about his colleague Richard Dawkins, and spends a lot of time in his talk arguing against both the notion of “selfish genes” and the idea that the gene is the true unit of selection rather than, say, the cell.
Here Noble is deeply confused. He decries the gene-centered view of evolution because, he says, “well, cells replicate too, and the cell carries the DNA, so the DNA can’t itself be the unit of reproduction.” That’s just dumb. Cells are transitory, and DNA is not. A cell is not passed on from one generation of individuals to the next, but the DNA molecule, which is in some sense immortal, is. This point is made clearly in Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene.
Noble also claims that all biologists now recognize that selection is “multilevel” rather than just at the level of the gene. But he doesn’t explain what he’s talking about. Clearly, multilevel selection is logically possible, but we don’t know of many cases. In the case of the most famous form of “higher level” selection—group selection—I can’t think of a single convincing case in nature where a trait has plausibly evolved through that process.
What bothers me is that this kind of palaver sounds superficially convincing to those who don’t know a lot about evolution, and that may include the biologists in Noble’s audience.
4. Evolution is not a gradual gene-by-gene process but is macromutational. Here Noble cites examples of entire blocks of genes being moved around, or acquired from other species, in a leap. This, he says, invalidates the neo-Darwinian view of gradual evolutionary changes in genes.
And he’s right that those kinds of large changes sometimes happen. We now know, for example, that adaptations can originate with a big part of a gene “jumping” in an organisms to fuse with another gene, producing a hybrid gene that has beneficial consequences to the individual. Something similar occurs when organisms absorb genes from different species, as bacteria often do. Those changes can also occur in eukaryotes, like rotifers, that can take up DNA from, say, fungi, and the absorbed genes can be beneficial.
But that doesn’t show that the modern synthesis is wrong, for those big jumps or horizontally-transmitted changes in DNA must still obey the rules of population genetics. They are equivalent to mutations, but they’re just BIG mutations. The Modern Synthesis has expanded a bit to take account of these new genetic findings, which only recently became possible. But their discovery hardly invalidates the Synthesis.
Noble claims in this lecture that these kinds of changes overturn the view of evolution as a “branching bush” because genes can leap between distant twigs. He’s wrong. These kinds of changes are rare except in bacteria. If they were common, the reconstruction of evolutionary trees through systematics would be impossible. Different genes would show different patterns, and we’d never be able to use multiple-gene analysis to reconstruct the ancestry of a group of organisms. We wouldn’t be able to find out, for example, that our closest living relative is the chimpanzee. But the fact that multiple genes do show similar phylogenies, especially between species that are not extremely close relatives, is proof that Noble is wrong.
5. Scientists have not been able to create new species in the lab or greenhouse, and we haven’t seen speciation occurring in nature. This is what really burns my onions, because Noble is flat wrong here, and the study of speciation is my specialty. I’m not even sure why Noble makes this argument, which resembles a creationist argument. We haven’t seen new species arise before our eyes, ergo Jesus!
If species arise through evolution, as they must—and surely Noble admits this—then we should be able to see them forming in nature, even though their formation usually takes a long time: thousands or millions of years. That is, we should be able to see incipient cases of speciation: populations that are in all stages of evolving reproductive barriers against other populations. And indeed we do: this has been documented since the time of Ernst Mayr and Theodosius Dobzhansky in the 1930s and 1940s. Further, we have been able to produce new species in the laboratory through a mechanism of speciation important in plants: polyploidy (the appearance of a new species when either a pure species doubles its genome on its own or does so after hybridizing with a different species). Polyploidy is responsible for about 5-10% of new plant species, and we can make new polyploid species in the laboratory. We’ve known this for over a half century, and Noble should know that, too. It’s garden-variety evolutionary knowledge. But Noble doesn’t seem to have learned it.
Further, we can make “diploid hybrid species” in the lab by hybridizing two species and letting their mixed and somewhat incompatible DNA sort itself out over several generations. What you can get is a non-polyploid hybrid species that is reproductively isolated from both parental species—that is, a new lab-produced species. Loren Rieseberg has done this in sunflowers, and we’re beginning to find such cases occurring in nature.
Noble, then, is talking out of his hat when he argues that we haven’t been able to produce new species. But even if we hadn’t, that doesn’t mean that we can’t see speciation occurring in nature. As I said, it’s usually a gradual process, and if we can see all possible steps in nature, and show that the more distantly related populations show more reproductive isolation (as I did in a pair of papers with Allen Orr), then one has strong evidence that reproductive isolation increases gradually in nature as populations become geographically isolated for longer and longer periods. This is the same way we have figured out how stars evolve. We rarely see a single star changing, but we can trace the process of stellar evolution by seeing all stages occurring in different stars in our galaxy.
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I’m writing this post in a bit of anger, as Noble’s attacks on the modern synthesis are both poorly informed and clearly motivated by his ambition to make physiology a central part of evolutionary biology. Although he’s an FRS and famous, he wants more: he wants his field to be central to evolution. But such misguided hubris is not the way science is supposed to be done. And physiology is already important in evolutionary biology. It’s the reason why we look at the effects of a gene substitution, for example, not as a simple one-gene-produces-one-trait issue, but as a the gene’s overall effect on reproductive output through its effects ramifying through the complexities of development. Noble says that evolutionists are guilty of this “one-gene-one-trait” error, but he’s just wrong: I don’t know a single person in my field who holds this simplistic view.
None of the arguments that Noble makes are new: they’re virtual tropes among those people, like James Shapiro and Lynn Margulis, who embarked, at the end of their careers, on a misguided crusade to topple the modern theory of evolution.
However famous Noble may be in physiology, he’s a blundering tyro when it comes to evolutionary biology. He might try discussing his ideas with other evolutionists and listening to their responses. He obviously hasn’t done that, and yet travels the world trading on his expertise in physiology to show that the edifice of modern evolutionary biology is rotten. And he writes papers to that effect, including the dreadful piece referenced below.
But what’s really rotten is Noble’s knowledge of the field and his claim that virtually every assumption of neo-Darwinian evolution is wrong. In fact, his arguments are so rotten that they stink like old herring.
