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.
I like magic tricks, but I like even more knowing how they’re done, something that magicians are loath to reveal. Penn and Teller are an exception, and here they do a cool trick and then reprise it with transparent apparatus, exposing the ruse.
This takes good timing on the part of both magicians and substantial dexterity on the part of Teller. (I saw him at TAM, speaking just like a normal person!)
I’m starting to give up hope for Ball State University. I once thought that Professor Eric Hedin, with his Jesus-and-Intelligent-Design-pushing science course, complete with its “No Monkey Gods” brand of Christian apologetics, was an aberration, and that he’d be criticized by his colleagues. No dice. While BSU has convened a panel to investigate Hedin’s course, Ball State was busy hiring another creationist, Guillermo Gonzalez. And have we heard Ball State faculty and students standing up for good science education? Nope. What we get are a spate of BSU students and faculty writing semi-literate and pro-religion letters to the local newspapers, defending Hedin’s right to teach creationism to students in a public university. Along with that I’m accused of being a carpetbagging tyrant who wants to control science education and prevent “balanced” discussion (i.e., keep Jesus out of science).
I don’t in the least mind the invective, though its intensity has surprised me. What has surprised me is the antiintellectualism that’s rampant among Ball State faculty and students. It’s as if they want to be seen as a benighted group of academics unacquainted with science, with the meaning of academic freedom and, apparently, with the First Amendment.
Enter another BSU academic: Dr. George Wolfe, professor of saxophone. In today’s Muncie Star-Press, “Change needed for culture of the inquiring mind,” Wolfe pronounces that I’m not only “violating the integrity of academic culture” (how, exactly, did I do that?), but am also wasting my time going after creationists. What I should be doing, it seems, is going after Nazi eugenics, something that disappeared nearly seventy years ago!
Unfortunately, there has developed within secular humanist circles a small but vocal group of cynical atheists. These are people who are intolerant of those who question aspects of accepted science paradigms, or who belittle people who study the wisdom traditions of the great religions.
Wrong: we try to keep superstition out of science, for it has never added one iota to scientific wisdom or practice. And I don’t belittle people who study religious tradition, just those who believe in insupportable superstition and, above all, try to import it into the classroom.
Rather than dealing with the challenges presented by atypical researchers, cynical atheists respond with exaggerated accusations and generalized categorizations. They are quick to ridicule anyone who entertains the possibility that a power and a consciousness beyond the human mind’s comprehension may have initiated the unfolding expansion of the space-time continuum we call the universe.
No evidence for that celestial power and consciousness, Dr. Wolfe. I likewise ridicule those who entertain the possibility that a large Jurassic reptile lives in Loch Ness, or a primate-like creature roams the woods of Oregon.
Professor Jerry Coyne of the University of Chicago is a recent example of a professor who has violated the integrity of the academic culture. His assertion, for example, that Dr. Eric Hedin, who teaches a class on “The Boundaries of Science,” is a “nutty professor” who is “cramming Jesus” down students’ throats (see The Star Press, June 21 issue) is refuted by many students who have sat in Hedin’s class. One of my own students is appalled at the attack on Hedin, and insists that Dr. Hedin presented the science accurately and never once mentioned Jesus.
Other students disagree.
Rather than proselytize his atheism, professors such as Jerry Coyne should spend more time speaking out against the abuse of the theory of evolution, as occurred in the early 20th century when social Darwinism was used to justify European white supremacy, eugenics, and the extermination of Jews, gypsies and people with disabilities.
What the deuce is Wolfe banging on about here? Darwinism hasn’t been used in that way for decades—and the Nazis really relied not on Darwinism but simple artificial selection (which antedated Darwin by millennia) to justify the Holocaust. Creationism, on the other hand, is a going concern.
The overconfidence of scientists has come back to haunt researchers many times in the past. In the mid-20th century, behaviorism as promoted by Harvard professor B. F. Skinner — that conditioning comprised the “building blocks of behavior” and only observable behaviors were worth investigating — became the credo of psychological researchers. Yet today, many psychologists see Skinner’s views as extreme.
. . . Theories are important because they help explain phenomena and predict possible outcomes, but challenging accepted scientific views is what moves science forward. As educators, we should create an educational environment where students feel safe to discuss issues that are important to themselves and the academic disciplines, as Carson Bennett and I did in August of 2009.
Thank God Albert Einstein had the guts to question Isaac Newton.
Yes, but what has moved science forward is challenges from science—not from religion. Considering the supernatural has never moved science forward a millimeter, so why include creationism in the “educational environment”? As Laplace said, we simply don’t need that hypothesis. Here Wolfe embarrasses himself by mistaking challenges that science poses to itself with the non-challenges that the supernatural poses to science. He needs to get out of the studio more.
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As if that weren’t enough, BSU student Garett Cates contributes another letter, “Jerry Coyne’s agenda:”
GARETT CATES
After discovering from July 7’s article that Jerry Coyne from the University of Chicago is behind the investigation of Eric Hedin at Ball State, I researched Coyne to find out why he is so desperate to silence anyone who doesn’t bow down and kiss the sacred cow of evolution.
I watched a video of him speaking at an Atheist Alliance International convention (2009), which anyone can watch on YouTube, where Coyne sticks his middle finger in the air, saying, “That’s for creationists.” Toward the end of the video, he says, “The real way to increase the teaching and acceptance of evolution is to get rid of religion by building a more harmonious society.” Hmm. Does Coyne have an agenda? What does he mean by “harmonious” society? Lack of resistance to evolution? If he wants to get rid of religion, then evolution (macro) has to go, too.
I am a student at BSU, and I resent this academic tyrant suppressing academic freedom and free thought. I hope the administration will support academic freedom and its faculty. I encourage everyone to read 2 Peter 3 to understand what is happening in the world. “There shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts.” What is Coyne’s lust? To eliminate God. Coyne is not motivated by science but by sin. Even though Satan and those deceived by him may try, Jesus Christ cannot be removed from his own creation. It’s time for his followers to take a stand.
Ask yourself this: why would the Muncie Star-Press even consider publishing a letter that is but half a step removed from the delusional fulminations of snake-handlers? Is this letter of value to their readers?
Is this a typical product of BSU, one who thinks that academic freedom is furthered by bowing down before Jesus? If so, Ball State has its work cut out for it.
If you’re a Ball State student, faculty, or alum reading this, could you please clean up your house?
If evolution is true, one should be able to trace the origin of novel structures from their predecessors, with every step of this evolution being adaptive. If creationism were true, one would never or rarely be able to trace the evolutionary stages of such novelties. Well, we know that evolution is true (if you don’t accept that, go over to your own site, Answers in Genesis), but it’s exciting to see traits whose evolution wasn’t fully understood get this kind of clarification.
One of these traits is the sucker of the remora, and I’ve shamelessly stolen much of this post from Carl Zimmer’s explication over at the Loom, cleverly called “What good is half a sucker?”
Remoras, or suckerfishes (there are several species in the family Echeneidae), are known for a disk-shaped sucker on top of their heads, which they use to fasten themselves to larger sea creatures like sharks, tuna, manta rays, and sea turtles. (Fisherman also use this as a way to pull in sea turtles: they toss a remora on a rope into the water, wait for it to attach to the shell, and reel in the “bait” and the reptile.) In this interspecies association, the host is either unharmed or perhaps slightly slowed by the affixed remora) while the remora benefits by getting a free ride and some scraps from the host’s meals.
Here’s the weird head sucker, with the photo taken from a new paper by Ralph Britz and G. David Johnson in J. Morphology (well, actually December, 2012; only abstract is free online):
As Zimmer notes, this is a remarkable adaptation:
When you look closely at the remora’s suction disk, its remarkableness only grows. It looks like a spiked Venetian blind. Pairs of slat-like bones called lamellae form a series of rows running down the length of its head, and muscles running from the remora’s skull to those bones pivot them, creating spaces between the rows.
That negative pressure pulls the remora towards its host’s body. Each lamella also has a comb-like set of pins that help make its clamp even more secure. The whole structure is surrounding by a loose fleshy lip, ensuring that no water slips in, keeping the seal tight.
As a result, remoras can create a vacuum that’s not just strong enough to attach them to an animal, but to stay attached as water rushes past them. They can even hold tight as their hosts try to scrape them off on rocks. But a remora can instantly release itself when it’s time to eat, with just a flick of its muscles.
But where did this thing come from? Earlier biologists suggested that it evolved from the dorsal fin, and now this suggestion is pretty much confirmed by the studies of Britz and Johnson, who did detailed morphological and developmental studies of the sucker and found that several parts of it are “homologous” (that is, have the same genetic and developmental origin) as the dorsal fin of its relatives. Here’s what they say in their last paragraph:
The sucking disc of remoras is one of the most unusual skeletal formations among vertebrates. Even though highly derived in its adult anatomical structure, homology of its constituent parts can be established in a clear and straightforward way by studying the development of the disc. The earliest stages of disc formation allow for the unambiguous recognition of a one to one relationship between interneural spine, intercalary bone, and pectinated lamella, with the proximal-middle radial, distal radial and basally expanded fin spine of other acanthomorphs. Our study highlights again the unique power of ontogenetic investigations, as previously demonstrated in a series of papers that have resolved long-standing issues of homology (Britz and Johnson, 2002; Johnson and Britz, 2005; Hoffmann and Britz, 2006).
One can then hypothesize that an earlier ancestor had a dorsal fin that was could be used to snag a larger fish, and then, over time, this fin would become more sucker-like. Such an ancestor (or one of its relatives) could exist in the fossil record, although of course the patchiness of that record doesn’t guarantee we’d find it. But someone did: Matt Friedman and a group of colleagues, and their report, as Zimmer notes, has just been published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London (B). Friedman et al. studied three fossil remoras (about 30 million years old) in the genus Opisthomyzon, and found clear homology between elements of their early suckers and bones of the dorsal fin. The sucker had not yet moved all the way up to the head, and the bones were intermediate between the bones of a fossil relative without a sucker, and the modern remora with a full sucker on the head. Here are two pictures of one fossil showing the intermediate location and shape of the fossil sucker:
A close-up of the adhesion disk (area highlighted in white box above):
Zimmer draws out this scenario:
Friedman’s research now gives us a richer hypothesis for how the remora got its sucker. Some of the remora’s closest living relatives, like cobia, tag along with bigger fish to scavenge on their scraps. The ancestors of remoras may have lived a similar life.
It’s not rare for spiny rayed fishes to grow extra dorsal fin spines. In the ancestors of remoras, such an anatomical fluke may have allowed them to latch their dorsal fin into the skin of a host fish, if only briefly. Even if they could spend a little time hitch-hiking this way, they would save energy that they’d otherwise have to spend on swimming for themselves.
Gradually, the remora’s dorsal fin became better adapted to latching onto other animals. As it moved towards the remora’s head, for example, it reduced drag. And as the fin bones spread outward, they attached the remora more strongly.
Lest I steal too much of Carl’s post, I’ll let you go over to his piece to see the intermediate condition of the bones in this fossil remora, again supporting their origin from a dorsal fin.
So what we have here is a mystery, a hypothesis, a proposed solution based on morphology and embryology, and then verification of that hypothesis based on a fossil find. What better evidence for evolution could we have—though we hardly need one more pebble of evidence on top of the Everest that already exists!
And, my poem in honor of these discoveries:
There are suckers born quite frequently
In evolution’s battle;
Some evolve upon the heads of fish,
And others in Seattle.
h/t: Michael
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Britz, R., and G. D. Johnson. 2012. Ontogeny and homology of the skeletal elements that form the sucking disc of remoras (Teleostei, Echeneoidei, Echeneidae). J. Morphology 273:1353-1366.
Friedman, M., Z. Johanson, R. C. Harrington, T. J. Near, and M. R. Graham. 2013. An early fossil remora (Echinoidea) reveals the early fossil assembly of the adhesion disc. Proc. Roy. Soc. B, vol. 280 published 17 July 2013 doi: 10.1098/rspb.2013.1200.
Sunset on Friday, when it was sweltering: over 92°F. You can almost see the heat:
Last evening, when we finally got a break from the heat:
And one of my juvenile squirrels, momentarily scared off the windowsill by the arrival of an adult. These guys are real acrobats!
This is one of the more amazing ads I’ve seen. It previewed in the ESPN “Body Issue,” and is a Fiat 500 Abarth Cabrio. Made of living bodies.
A detail:
Here’s the real car:
The picture took five days to put together, involves no PhotoShopping, and is documented on the video below. (There’s more information in the New York Daily News.)
Most of you probably know that J. K. Rowling of Harry Potter fame (I can’t say I’m a fan) recently published a book under the pseudonym of Robert Galbraith: a detective novel called The Cuckoo’s Calling. Although the reviews were generally good (here’s one in the NY Times), the book barely sold: something on the order of only 500 copies were purchased in the U.S. since the book came out in April.
Then someone in a law firm who knew Galbraith’s real identity leaked her name and authorship to a friend, and the secret was out. The result, as the New York Times reports, was pandemonium: book sales skyrocketed and publishers are rushing to print hundreds of thousands of new copies:
. . . J. K. Rowling, easily one of the most bankable authors on the planet, admitted over the weekend to The Sunday Times of London that she — and not a male military veteran, as initial information from the publisher claimed — was the real author.
That has left the publisher and bookstores with an entirely different problem: getting copies of what has suddenly become the hottest book of the summer into the hands of Ms. Rowling’s impatient fans.
The publisher has also had to contend with the suspicion that Ms. Rowling’s camp was secretly responsible for leaking her identity. Speculation was rampant in the publishing world that the revelation was part of a big publicity ploy to help sell books — so much so that Ms. Rowling’s spokeswoman, Nicky Stonehill, was compelled to release a tightly worded statement denying it.
“We can confirm the story in The Sunday Times was correct, and it was not a leak or elaborate marketing campaign to boost sales,” she said in an e-mail on Tuesday. “We are not commenting any further.”
. . . Since then, Little, Brown & Company, her publisher, appears to have been scrambling to meet demand. Nicole Dewey, a spokeswoman for Little, Brown, said that on Monday the publisher began to print an additional 300,000 copies, a huge undertaking that takes several days. Ms. Dewey said the books are expected to start shipping some time this week. That isn’t soon enough for many bookstores, which are locked in a fierce competition with Amazon, and with the e-book, which, compared with hardcovers, is inexpensive and instantly available. (The hardcover list price of “The Cuckoo’s Calling” is $26; a Kindle or Nook edition is $9.99.)
Although another recent novel Rowling wrote under her own name, The Casual Vacancy, was not a critical success, I do believe her claim that this was a real, unintended leak,not a publicity stunt. I’m not sure why she’d use a pseudonym, unless to see how well her writing was judged by critics who didn’t know her name. Yet if that were the case, why wasn’t her earlier novel published pseudonymously? But at any rate, I have no reason to doubt that she and her spokeswoman are telling the truth.
But this does raise questions about sales versus merit, and the role of authorship. The book was judged good by the critics, but didn’t sell—until the author’s name was revealed. Clearly, intrinsic merit of a book isn’t perfectly correlated with how well it does. Well, that isn’t a surprise: history is full of good books that were initially rejected, or didn’t sell well, only to become classics or best sellers later. Recent examples are The End of Faith by Sam Harris (rejected by more than a dozen publishers) and, of course, Rowling herself, who survived many rejections of the first Harry Potter book. The Great Gatsby, now seen as a classic (and one of my favorite novels) also sold poorly, as did the early books of John Cheever.
But I still feel slightly puzzled—and, to be honest, a bit contemptuous—at the phenomenon of people buying books based solely on who wrote them. The book got good reviews, and so should have sold well initially. But it didn’t until the author was revealed as J. K. Rowling. Now people are buying it in droves, for no reason other than their knowledge of the real author. But that name is no guarantee of success, as judged by her earlier failed novel.
Perhaps I’m being uncharitable, but the novel is exactly as good as it is regardless of who writes it. But the power of a name trumps all. I have to add that I, too, am victim of the “name” phenomenon, though more for nonfiction than for fiction. I’d pretty much buy anything written by Sam Harris or (if he were still alive) Christopher Hitchens, not to mention Robert Caro, just because they always have something interesting to say, and Caro has never failed to produce a masterpiece.
So here’s a conundrum for you, one that I’ve asked some of my artistic friends. Imagine that Beethoven had never written his Fifth Symphony. But then, a few years ago, someone finds the score of that piece in a stack of old papers—written by someone other than Beethoven, say, one Gustav Biederstücker. What would happen?
Well, that symphony would be exactly as good as Beethoven’s Fifth, because it is Beethoven’s Fifth! It would, in theory, conjure up all the expressive romanticism of the original. It should be recognized as a lost masterpiece.
But it wouldn’t, because it was written by Biederstücker and not Beethoven. It would be ignored. Exactly the same thing would happen if some unknown nebbish wrote that symphony today. The critics would say “it is irrelevant because it was written out of the proper historical period.”
But does this make sense at all? People still flock to the concert halls to hear Beethoven’s Fifth, and get great satisfaction thereby, but the same people wouldn’t cross the street to hear the identical piece by Biederstücker. Why should that be?
Is the intrinsic (as opposed to the dollar) value of a work of art so dependent on who writes it, rather than on what it expresses? Apparently so. But to me that seems irrational.
As I’ve mentioned before, I am friends with Malgorzata Koraszewska and Andrzej Koraszewski, who run the highly popular Polish website Racjonalista, which has thousands of secular followers starved for a non-theist viewpoint in an overwhelmingly Catholic country.
Malgorzata translates many of this website’s articles into Polish, and so we have struck a deal: in return for the right to translate any of my pieces without asking, I get a daily “Hili Dialogue.” Hili is their young tabby cat, and every day Andrzej has a two-line dialogue with her, with Hili showing her characteristic haughtiness, inquisitiveness, and, above all, penchant for noms. The dialogue always includes an appropriate photo.
I thought I’d put up today’s Hili Dialogue since it’s one of the rare ones that mentions me.
Hili: I must ask Jerry, when people lost possibility to care for their hygiene without all those artificial tools.
Andrzej: Get thee to a nunnery, and let me clean my teeth.
(Note that Hili’s back paw is green. She recently injured it, and the color is from an antibiotic ointment.)
Since this is a question about human cultural evolution, I thought I’d answer it for Hili.
Dear Hili,
I could construe your question in either of two ways: when did humans first start using tools? Or when did humans first start using toothbrushes?
The first question is much easier to answer, since tools and their markings are preserved much more readily than are toothbrushes. There is questionable evidence of human tool use about 3.4 million years ago, about 2-3 million years after our ancestors had split from those of modern chimpanzees. This “evidence” consists of cut marks on and crushed segments of animal bones, and those bones are associated with the remains of Australopithecus afarensis in an Ethiopian site dated 3.4 mya. The authors of that study, published in Nature in 2010, suggested that the cut marks and crushed regions reflect the use of stone tools for butchering.
That work got a lot of attention because it pushed the earliest hominin tool use back 800,000 years, since, before that, the earliest unequivocal evidence for human use of tools was 2.6 million years ago. But other workers have suggested that that early evidence for tool use might be bogus, reflecting only the trampling of those 3.4-my-old bones by other animals (they supported this by looking at marks on bones trampled by modern animals). Kate Wong at Scientific American reports on the controversy.
As I mentioned, my dear cat, the earliest widely accepted use of human tools was 2.6 million years ago. As the Smithsonian notes:
The oldest stone tools, known as the Oldowan toolkit, consist of at least:
• hammerstones that show battering on their surfaces;
• stone cores that show a series of flake scars along one or more edges; and
• sharp stone flakes that were struck from the cores and offer useful cutting edges, along with lots of debris from the process of percussion flaking.
It’s not clear which of our ancestors (or relatives) used the Oldowan tools; suggestions have involved species of both Australopithecus or Homo (e.g., H. ergaster, H. habilis). They were first described in Tanzania but have been found in many other parts of Africa as well.
Here are some Oldowan tools from the anthropology collection of the University of California at Berkeley; you can order casts of them from this site (photos by Peter Bostrom):
Chopper cores (used for crushing or as a source of stone flakes for cutting):
Flake tools:
As you know, Hili, other animals besides humans use tools: these include crows, dolphins, elephants, and octopuses. But of course domestic cats like yourself are far too clever to have to fashion tools, for you simply get humans to do your tool-using for you. They can, for example, use can openers to release the contents of your beloved Whiskas—something that no nonhuman animal can do.
As for toothbrushes, that’s a harder question. As an article in HuffPo reveals, the earliest toothbrushes were probably just human fingers, a “tool” that would have left no trace. Apparently the Egyptians were using toothpowder made from ash, pumice, and eggshell about 7000 years ago, a concoction that would have been hard on the enamel! The ancient Babylonians cleaned their choppers with chewed-up twigs about 3500 B.C—something that I’ve also seen in modern India.
The advent of the real “toothbrush” appears to have been around 1700, with mass manufacture taking place less than a century later. These early toothbrushes used animal hair (not cat, I hope!); nylon bristles weren’t used until 1937.
I hope, Hili, that this satisfies your curiosity. And I hope you are keeping your teeth clean!
Love,
Professor Ceiling Cat
One of the things I like most about the British is their overwhelming love of animals and wildlife. There are tons of animal protection societies, and, if you want to see how seriously they take this stuff, see the fantastic article in the latest New Yorker about the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. That piece, “Operation Easter”, by Julian Rubenstein, is an engrossing read about the lengths to which the RSPB goes to catch and prosecute egg-collectors, a small but fanatical band of marauders who, to supplement their collections, remove eggs from the nests of endangered birds. I was glad to see that this article, which kept me up past my bedtime last night, is free online.
But I digress. I like to end the work week on an up note, one preferably involving animals. And reader “Gravelinspector” from the UK just gave me the chance by sending an email and some pictures. Upshot: mother hedgehog accidentally drowned, but baby is save. His email:
I’m sure your UK readers will have mentioned that the whole country is suffering a bit of a heatwave at the moment. Flooring the loft (american:attic?) is not recommended ; severely un-fun!
But more seriously, Dad had an unpleasant find in the garden pond at the weekend – a dead hedgehog. It probably fell into the pond while trying to get a drink. Very sad; have to re-design the pond with a crawl-out zone. But when burying the unfortunate, Dad also noticed a baby hedgehog crawling around the area.
Consultation with the local animal rescue got the diagnosis “two days old; viable” and so it’s off to the world of eye droppers of milk followed by dishes of cat food. No others were found in the garden, so if there were multiple hedehoglets … well that’s evolution in action.
Our only action on finding the hedgehoglet was to put a large flower pot over it with a brick on top to protect it from birds or cats while we contacted the rescue people; in the event that its Mum was still around, we didn’t want to leave undue scents.
A bundle of soft-spined cuteness to counteract your squirrel’s fluffiness.
Time to check those ponds to see if small animals can actually get out if they fall in! And make sure there’s a drinking water supply too!
Gravelinspector notes that the person fostering this baby is taking care of nine other baby hedgehogs!
Who doesn’t love these creatures? They’re cute, relatively tame, and the gardener’s helper. Pity that they’re vanishing from the UK.
