by Matthew Cobb

This is a picture of a male vinegar fly, Drosophila melanogaster, which both Jerry and I have studied for the whole of our lives (in fact I’ve spent much of mine studying fly maggots). This was the insect that was chosen by Morgan in 1908 to study evolution – he didn’t hold with the new-fangled ‘genetics’ that had just been named. Morgan wanted to get his flies to mutate by subjecting them to all sorts of environmental stresses, but instead he discovered a white eyed fly that just popped up in the stocks.

Over the next few years, Morgan and his students – principally Sturtevant, Muller and Bridges – laid down the basis of genetics, showing that genes are on chromosomes, and constructing intricate chromosome maps showing the precise location of different genes, for which Morgan won the Nobel Prize in 1933. Muller went on to show that mutations could be induced by X-rays, for which he won the Nobel Prize in 1946.

Drosophila kind of went out of fashion in the second half of the 20th century, as molecular genetics swept the board – for over three decades, this was an approach that was limited to bacteria and viruses. However, in the 21st century ‘the fly’ has undergone a bit of a renaissance, as all sorts of techniques have become available for identifying and manipulating genes. Most satisfying for Jerry and I, many of our colleagues have realised that other Drosophila are available. There are dozens of Drosophila species, each with a different evolutionary history, and therefore different genes, anatomy and behaviour.

There’s a fantastic set of fly pictures available at this site, run by two French researchers, Benjamin Prud’homme and Nicolas Gompel of the CNRS in Marseille. What is striking in looking at these images is quite how varied these flies are, and above all the realisation that although we may know a great deal about D. melanogaster, we know very little about why it is the way it is. Its natural history remains obscure.

In a way, the fly was turned into a piece of laboratory equipment by Morgan and his colleagues. Now we are turning it back into a proper organism. Here are three questions we do not know the answers to, some of which are being studied by the Prud’homme/Gompel lab:

– Why do males of some species have ‘sex combs’ (those little black dots on the front legs), while others do not?

– Why do some species have patterned wings while others do not? (Here are just three species: D. melanogaster, D. biarmipes and D. guttifera (note that D. guttifera does not have sex combs)

– And finally, why does the closely-related African genus Zaprionus have these funky go-faster stripes?

Science isn’t primarily about knowing stuff. It’s about finding out new stuff. Uncovering the answers to these questions will be part of 21st century biology, and while they might seem quite unimportant to most readers, the answers will undoubtedly tell us something important about how species evolve and adapt to their environment, and how new characters arise.

If any of you are unsure as to how big (or rather small) these insects are, this will give you an idea:

All photos except the final one (c) Prud’homme and Gompel. The final photo is from here.

Reader Sylvain Duford, a Canadian living in Panama, and yet another photographer who visits here, sent me this note and two photos of a kitten he rescued. It was so cute I couldn’t resist putting it up. Plus, it’s a life saved:

 We have a stray cat near my office that had a new litter recently, she then moved them away but left this one kitten behind for some unknown reason. After a couple of days we realized this kitten was abandoned and getting weak. We took him home and nursed him back to health, he’s now 3 weeks old and healthy.

We called him Little Bear because of his ferocious appetite and assertive personality.

This was a timely rescue for Sylvain, too, as he reports he’d recently lost his beloved cat Cleopatra.  Here’s Little Bear:

There it is; all the objections to New Atheism distilled into a single quotation. It conflates an attack on one’s false or questionable beliefs with an attack on one’s person.

This comes from a new article in the Torygraph by journalist and historian Dr. Tim Stanley, whose newspaper bio says he’s recently published a biography of Pat Buchanan (!) and whose faith is described by Wikipedia:

In October 2012 Stanley stated he was “raised a good Baptist boy”. He is a convert to Roman Catholicism. Previously, he considered himself to be an Anglican, beginning around “one glorious summer” in 2002, and was baptized as an Anglican in Little St. Mary’s, Cambridge in New Year 2003. He later aligned himself with the Church of England’s Anglo-Catholic wing before becoming a Roman Catholic.

So naturally Stanley might be a little techy when his faith is insulted. In fact, in yesterday’s paper he produced an entire column about it: “If we’re cracking down on Twitter abuse, can we include Richard Dawkins and the atheist trolls?”

It can be summed up in the four words of his main complaint, “words can hurt, too”.

Well, yes they can, but they can hurt in two ways: they can make fun of things that you can’t change or are irrelevant to your innate human dignity, like your ethnicity, weight, or appearance. Or they can make fun of ideas that you can change, and, while not affecting your inherent value as a human being, can nevertheless be harmful and wrong. One of those categories is, of course, religious belief.  Stanley is peeved that Dawkins goes after his belief:

So this gives me an opportunity to flag up a particular kind of abuse that’s annoyed me for a long time: aggressive online atheism. Don’t get me wrong: this is in no way comparable to the terrible sexual abuse that has recently gained headlines. But it’s still amazing how people feel that they can casually mock the spiritual and emotional convictions of others – including Tweeting directly at believers that God doesn’t exist and they’re either liars or idiots for saying so. One man who does this with gay abandon is Richard Dawkins. Apparently Prof Dawkins is a genius who writes beautifully about chromosomes and cave men. Well, bully for him. But he’s a bully, nonetheless. A recent Tweet that caused a stir: “Don’t ask God to cure cancer & world poverty. He’s too busy finding you a parking space & fixing the weather for your barbecue.” Hilarious. Or on Islam: “Mehdi Hasan admits to believing Muhamed flew to heaven on a winged horse. And New Statesman sees fit to print him as a serious journalist.” Of course, that’s the same New Statesman that invited Dick Dawkins to edit it for a week – so, yeah, its taste is questionable.

“Bully”? Really? Is it bullying to make fun of someone’s belief? As for the two Tweets, as far as I know Dawkins apologized for the one about Hasan (though I didn’t see it as a flagrant case of bullying, and the first one, about God curing cancer, was simply funny. Perhaps Stanley doesn’t understand that the attitudes Dawkins was mocking here are largely American: we pray for the dumbest things, like victories in football games. Surely sarcasm is not out of line for stuff like that.

And, while we’re at it, everyone knows that Richard doesn’t like being called “Dick Dawkins,” so what is that but a gratuitous insult?

Now Stanley doesn’t go so far to call for Dawkins’s tweets to be banned. But he does decry Richard’s Twitter attacks on religion:

When you insult my faith you go right to the heart of what makes me me. When you’re trying to convince me in 140 characters of sub-GCSE philosophical abuse that God doesn’t exist, you’re trying to take away the faith that gets me up in the morning, gets me through the day and helps me sleep at night. You’re ridiculing a God without whom I suspect I might not even be alive, and a God that I prayed to when my mother was going through cancer therapy. You’re knocking a Church that provides me with compassion and friendship without asking for anything in return – perhaps the greatest, most wonderful discovery of my adult life. You see, people don’t generally believe in God for reasons of convenience or intellectual laziness. It’s usually fulfilling a deep need – filling a soul with love that might otherwise be quite empty and alone. In short, when you try to destroy someone’s faith you’re not being a brilliant logician. You’re being a jerk.

Well, too fricking bad! If what makes you you is a belief in delusions, like your redemption through the execution of a Palestinian carpenter, or the notion that a cracker and wine literally—literally—become the body and blood of that carpenter, then you’re fair game for criticism. And plenty of people think the core of their being rests on belief in the Genesis story of creation and a young earth, the idea of psychic phenomena, or their imagined abduction by aliens. Are we to coddle them as well?

None of these ideas deserve dignity. And the same Church that provides Stanley with compassion and friendship also marginalizes women, prohibits abortion, divorce, and gay behavior, terrorizes children with thoughts of hell, sanctions and protects child rape, and deliberately spreads AIDS in Africa by denying its adherents birth control. Are we to remain silent on these, too? What world is Stanley living in?

Presumably Stanley wouldn’t object if someone writes a tw–t that criticizes his conservative politics.  And many people’s political beliefs also “go to the heart of what makes me me.”  So why are politics fair game and religion not? I have yet to understand this distinction; perhaps some readers can explain it to me. For many folks, politics is as pervasive a worldview as religion is for others.

Finally, yes, people have some deep needs that are fulfilled by faith. But those deep needs reflect an intellectual laziness as well—the laziness to not examine whether you have good reasons for what you believe, the laziness to figure out why Roman Catholicism is, say, a better “worldview” than that of Islam. And, most distressing, the laziness to accept the Church’s succor without decrying its retrograde ideology. Really, who does more harm: Richard Dawkins or the Catholic Church?

Stanley’s misguided piece reminds me of Peter Boghossian’s terrific talk at TAM 2013 on “Authenticity“, which was notable for proposing a mantra that we should all keep in mind;:

“Ideas do not deserve dignity; people deserve dignity.”

What Stanley is trying to do is shut down discourse on religion by conflating “ideas” and “people.” You can’t do that, for good people can have bad ideas.

h/t: Ant