Temporarily laid low by a bug, I am limited to posting stuff like this. With luck, Professor Ceiling Cat will be in fine fettle tomorrow.
Meet Gizmo:
Bonus felid: Gizmo, a bad cat
April 6, 2013 • 4:38 pm
Mimicry: Two mantids, one cryptic and one aposematic
April 6, 2013 • 12:48 pm
“Aposematic coloration,” as I’ve mentioned before, is a form of self-advertisement in animals that are toxic, distasteful, or dangerous, and the bright colors—often orange, black, red, and yellow—tell the predator to leave the animal alone. (It’s also called “warning coloration”.)
The first brightly-colored mutants would seem to be disadvantageous, as the predator hasn’t yet learned to avoid them and, indeed a new, brightly-colored mutant could attract unwanted attention. There have been various hypothesis of how aposematic coloration gets off the ground. These involve kin selection (you die because of your bright coloration, but the predator learns to avoid your relatives, who carry copies of your genes), or, in other cases, individual selection (the predator learns without killing you). In truth, we’re not sure exactly how the evolution of such patterns begins.
You can see many examples of aposematic coloration in various animal species on this lovely page (not all the animals are aposematic).
The video below shows a bush cricket escaping an aposematic mantid, only to fall into the clutches of an “orchid mantis” that is cryptic (camouflaged). These babies sit on vegetation all day, looking like a flower (often among real orchids that they resemble) and waiting for a good prey item to fall into their clutches. The prety is often a pollinator that mistakes the mantis for an orchid). You won’t be able to spot this one until it strikes the bushcricket. (Warning: if you don’t want to see a cricket caught and devoured alive, don’t watch!)
This video is from the BBC series, “Wildlife on One” (you can watch many other videos from the series here).
If you do a Google image search of “orchid mantis,” you’ll find plenty, and they’re amazing. Here are just two:
Hymenopus cornatus, photo by pulsarr (found at deviantART):
I don’t know the species, but this is from 37signals.com:
And while we’re at it, watch a Brazilian mantid pwn a cat. The world’s most bravest mantis!
Why are there miracles for Africans but not Americans?
April 6, 2013 • 10:03 am
Inquiring minds want to know. All over Africa, the Lord performs miracles on a regular basis, including healing of the blind and lame—and even resurrections! But here in the U.S.? Not so much. In fact, beyond the quotidian Jesuses in tortillas and tree stumps, I haven’t heard of a good old-fashioned miracle in ages. No Fatimas, no sun spinning and dancing in the sky, no amputees with regrown limbs.
On the Christian Broadcasting Network, Pat Robertson explains why. It’s because Americans are too sophisticated, scientific, and secular. God does miracles only for the “simple and humble” people who live “overseas.” Watch and laugh:
The transcript of Robertson’s words below is taken from a short essay in The Atlantic by Heather Horn, “Why are there so few resurrected corpses in the United States?”
Cause people overseas didn’t go to Ivy League schools! [chuckles] Well, we’re so sophisticated. We think we’ve got everything figured out. We know about evolution, we know about Darwin, we know about all these things that say god isn’t real. We know about all this stuff and if we’ve been in many schools, the more advanced schools, we have been inundated with skepticism and secularism. And overseas they’re simple, humble, you tell them God loves them and they say “okay he loves me.” And you tell them God will do miracles and they say “okay, we believe you.” And that’s what God’s looking for. That’s why they have miracles.
What an incredibly pretentious and condescending piece of tripe! I’d belabor it but, really, attacking Pat Robertson no longer counts as serious criticism of religion. The man is simply addlepated, good for a few laughs but that’s about it. Does any religious person still take him seriously?
In fact, Robertson’s argument is the wrong way round. Presumably God should perform more miracles in the U.S. to convince all those sophisticated nonbelievers of His existence. But Robertson unwittingly gave the real answer to his question in his last three sentences. Credulity.
Heather Horn shows why Robertson’s data are in fact wrong:
I suspect United States is in fact ahead of the African nations in bringing the dead back to life. It’s hard to find a good estimate of how many bodies are resurrected in the U.S. each year, but let’s go with this vastly oversimplified figure: 92,000. 92,000 is the number of people the American Heart Association estimates are saved in the U.S. each year after their hearts or their lungs have stopped moving, i.e. by CPR. Or let’s go with a percentage: 45.3%. That’s the success rate in the bottom-quarter of American hospitals in a 2012 study in restoring circulation to a body whose heart has completely flatlined. 14.5% of the bodies treated managed leave the hospital. And that’s in the hospitals with the lowest performance. Wait till you see American rates for getting the lame to walk and the blind to see.
Horn reaches an accommodationist conclusion: faith and science should work hand in hand, and Robertson should give God some credit for those people revived by CPR, and for the curing of polio and leprosy. Horn doesn’t realize, though, that then he’d also have to give God credit for killing all the people in the Indonesian and Japanese tsunamis.
There are only 9 comments at the Atlantic site; here’s one:
Caturday felids: Cats and boxes
April 6, 2013 • 5:26 am
Professor Ceiling Cat is a bit under the weather today, so posting will be light. Feel free to discuss the pressing issues of the day among yourselves. But I’ve never yet missed a Caturday felid, so here are a few, all featuring boxes.
First on deck is a fairly recent Maru—in many boxes, of course.
And here is the famous Kagonekoshiro (“white basket cat”) and his mates in an instructional photograph:
Big cats like boxes, too!
No state religion for North Carolina
April 5, 2013 • 12:41 pm
According to ABC News, the North Carolina bill that would annul the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution—the amendment guaranteeing freedom of religion—is now dead in the water.
The legislation, House Joint Resolution 494, filed Monday by two GOP legislators and co-signed by 12 others, says the Supreme Court cannot block a state “from making laws respecting an establishment of religion.” But on Thursday, House Speaker Thom Tillis’ said the resolution was dead, according to WRAL.
The bill was initially filed in response to a lawsuit filed last month by the American Civil Liberties Union against the Rowan County Board of Commissioners, which, the ACLU said, opened 97 percent of its meetings in 2007 with explicitly Christian prayers. Filing the lawsuit on behalf of three residents, the ACLU wrote in a press release, “the commissioners, who deliver the prayers themselves, routinely call on Jesus Christ and refer to other sectarian beliefs during invocations.”
The legislation filed by Reps. Harry Warren and Carl Ford stated the “North Carolina General Assembly asserts that the Constitution of the United States of America does not prohibit states or their subsidiaries from making laws respecting an establishment of religion.”
Warren and Ford did not return several requests for comment, but Warren told The Salisbury Post he never really expected the bill to go too far.
“I didn’t expect it to go anywhere,” Warren told the newspaper, noting that the bill was referred to the committee for Rules, Calendar and Operations of the House. “Quite often bills go there and never come out.”
How cynical can you get? Proposing legislation that they know won’t pass? That’s just grandstanding for their constituents. That may garner them support from their religious constituents, but wastes the legislature’s time and the taxpayers’ money. Of course, as several commenters noted, the North Carolina bill already contravened both the Constitution’s other provisions and Supreme Court opinion> This was emphasized by a local law professor:
University of North Carolina constitutional law professor Michael Gerhardt said “people can believe what they want to believe.”
“They are entitled to believe it, they are entitled to think it, they are entitled to say it, but they aren’t entitled to act on it,” Gerhardt said. “However they are not entitled to reject applicable Supreme Court opinion.”
This is a brushfire, of course, and not the end of the fire, for many of the faithful in the South always want to impose Christianity on everyone, or at least expose them to its doctrine.
JREF’s Pigasus Awards
April 5, 2013 • 11:32 am
In this 7-minute video, James Randi announces the annual “Pigasus Awards,” which are described in detail, along with the requirements for winning, at the James Randi Educational Foundation. I won’t divulge the winners in print, except for the “Refusal to Face Reality” award won by the infamous Dr. Oz. Oz has now set a record, nabbing the “Quack of the Year” prize three times!
Since 1997, the JREF’s annual Pigasus Awards have been bestowed on the most deserving charlatans, swindlers, psychics, pseudo-scientists, and faith healers—and on their credulous promoters, too. The awards are named for both the mythical flying horse Pegasus of Greek mythology, and the highly improbable flying pig of popular cliché.
I’m really looking forward to meeting Randi at TAM this year.
via: Incredulous
Salamander pokes its ribs through its skin to defend itself
April 5, 2013 • 8:34 am
As the old saying goes, “Natural selection is smarter than you are,” and I continue to be amazed at the things it’s come up with. In fact, sometimes I think that biologists should invent a drinking game in which we imagine adaptations and then try to find out if they’ve actually evolved. (To ensure reality, you have to down one if you lose.) Here’s a bizarre adaptation that I heard about the other day but found hard to believe. I looked it up and, sure enough, it’s true.
There’s a species of salamander whose members actually defend themselves by poking their ribs through their skin to produce predator-deterring spines. It thus injures itself in the cause of survival.
This was reported three years ago on the BBC Earth News, and I tracked down the original report, a 2010 paper in the Journal of Zoology by Heiss et al. (reference below). The paper reports morphological and X-ray studies of the “Iberian ribbed newt,” Pleurodeles waltl, found in Spain, Portugal, and Morocco.
First, let’s see a male of the species (photo bu Javier Fuentes, taken from here); note the orange spots, which is where the ribs will poke through.
The authors examined five male and four females adult salamanders. To simulate a predator attack, the animals were repeatedly touched with a “cotton bud” (I think that’s a Q-Tip to Americans). Salamanders would then adopt a defensive posture involving either flattening or arching the body. Their ribs would then protrude, stretching the skin to make predator-deterring spines, and sometimes those ribs would actually pierce the skin (they went through the orange spots shown above). The beasts would also, like many salamanders, secrete a milky, viscous secretion on their neck, trunk (top and sides) and tail. Both behaviors are shown in the photos below:
Although the orange spots may highlight the presence of spines to the predators, they don’t contain any pores or openings through which the ribs can protrude. Dissection of salamanders killed (:-( ) while defending themselves show that the ribs do indeed poke through the skin, making holes in the body. X-rays and computed tomography show that the spines, which normally point backwards, can rotate forward as much as 50° forward to create the “spines”:
![Figure 2. Radiographs showing anterior rotation of ribs from before (a) to after (b) a mildly threatening stimulus of the same animal. (c, d) Schematic drawings of eight vertebrae (numbers 4–11) with corresponding ribs, pointing to the differences in rib angle relative to the sagittal body axis before (c) and after (d) stimulus. Both drawings are based on the above radiographs [(c) on (a); (d) on (b)].](http://whyevolutionistrue.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/salamander-2.gif)
One question is how salamanders that secrete a presumably toxic slime at the same time they make holes in their skin can avoid poisoning themselves. After all, the toxins could enter the body through the holes. Well, like other salamanders, these are almost certainly immune to their own toxins. And this immunity is likely an evolved one, for, as the authors note, when you inject even small amounts of skin secretions from one species into members of a different species, it is fatal, while injecting your own species’ toxin into yourself has no obvious effects.
Now we’re not sure that the ribby “spines” (or secretions) really do deter predators in this species, but secreted slime has been shown to be a powerful deterrent in other species. And the fact that the erection of ribs occurs only during a simulated predation event strongly suggests that it’s an antipredator device. Showing this definitively would be difficult, as you’d have to somehow have two identical salamanders, one of which doesn’t stick out the ribs when attacked.
h/t: S.
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Heiss, E., N. Natchev, D. Salaberger, M. Gumpenberger, A. Rabanser, and J. Weisgram. 2010. Hurt yourself to hurt your enemy: new insights on the function of the bizarre antipredator mechanism in the salamandrid Pleurodeles waltl. Journal of Zoology 280:156-162.
What did science and religion discover last year?
April 5, 2013 • 5:14 am
THE CLAIMS
“The question of truth is as central to [religion’s] concern as it is in science. Religious belief can guide one in life or strengthen one at the approach of death, but unless it is actually true it can do neither of these things and so would amount to no more than an illusionary exercise in comforting fantasy.” —John Polkinghorne
“On the contrary, religion is about the deepest of all realities. . . religion, to anyone who takes it seriously, is about what is Most Real.”—John Haught
“Both [science and theology] continue in the quest for truth. Both continue to make claims and argue for them. A kind of alliance of stubborn truth-seeking is formed here.” —Anna Case-Winters
“A religious tradition is indeed a way of life and not a set of abstract ideas. But a way of life presupposes beliefs about the nature of reality and cannot be sustained if those beliefs are no longer credible.”—Ian Barbour
“In this I am convinced that true Christianity is precisely the same as true science. Both are required to be totally open to whatever is authentically given in each situation. This is no mere coincidence. For it is Jesus Christ who definitively makes it clear that the universe is truly open to truly scientific investigation.”—David Jenkins
“Likewise, religion in almost all of its manifestations is more than just a collection of value judgments and moral directives. Religion often makes claims about ‘the way things are.’”—Karl Giberson and Francis Collins
“Science is not the only way of knowing. The spiritual worldview provides another way of finding truth.”—Francis Collins
“The topic is the claim on the part of many Christians that faith is a source of knowledge or information about the world in addition to reason.”—Alvin Plantinga
“On balance, theism is vastly more hospitable to science than naturalism, a much better home to it. Indeed, it is theism, not naturalism, that deserves to be called ‘the scientific worldview.’”—Plantinga again
“The ultimate test of faith must still, and always, be its truth; whether we can prove it or not, the reality of the perspectives it brings us, and the changes it puts us through, must depend in the end on it corresponding to an actual state of the universe.”—Francis Spufford
“But for this cure to work it appears that at least it must be true that God exists, that Jesus Christ is the son of God, that we are created in the image of God, that God is a creator, that God wants to forgive us, and that God loves us. Hence it seems as if Christianity, and not only science, has an epistemic goal, that is, it attempts to say something true about reality. If so, a religious practice like Christianity is meant to tell us something true about who God is, what God’s intentions are, what God has done, what God values, and how we fit in when it comes to these intentions, actions, and values.”—Mikael Stenmark
THE FACTS
The top 10 scientific discoveries and accomplishments of 2012 (from Wired Science).
- The Higgs Boson
- The Curiosity Rover lands on Mars
- Most human genetic variation is rare and the deleterious variants arose recently, during our expansion out of Africa
- The sequencing of fetal genomes using noninvasive procedures, from fetal DNA floating in the mother’s blood
- The teleportation of entangled quantum particles over a large distance: 50 miles
- The synthesis of XNA, a new polymer that can carry information and evolve via a form of selection
- A private company, SpaceX, launched and orbited its own spacecraft, and delivered it to the International Space Station
- Discovery of an Earth-size exoplanet orbiting a nearby star, Alpha Centauri B
- The reaching of Lake Vostok, an Antarctic lake, which required drilling through more than 2 miles of ice; this may lead to the discovery of unusual forms of life
- Government policy has started to end invasive research on chimpanzees in the U.S. (yay!)
and. . .
The top 10 religious discoveries of 2012
Well, maybe you can count the discovery of whom God wanted to be the new Pope.
“All knowledge that is not the real product of observation, or of consequences deduced from observation, is entirely groundless and illusory.”
—Jean-Baptiste Lamarck