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.
This picture of Chicago was tweeted from the International Space Station by Commander Chris Hadfield. (Tweets from space!). It shows Chicago from space orbit (click to enlarge), and was taken yesterday. Hadfield’s note:
Chicago on a clear winter’s day, ice on the shore, busy O’Hare airport visible from orbit.
O’Hare is obvious, about halfway up from the center on a line bisecting the photo vertically. I’ve added a red arrow to show you where I am (I think!).
h/t: Matthew Cobb
by Matthew Cobb
I have a student who is writing a dissertation about the evolution of opsins – molecules that respond to light, which we use to see with. These molecules apparently have their origins deep in evolutionary time, long before there were animals, perhaps going back to 3.5 billion years, shortly after the appearance of life. While I was reading a draft, I wondered why organisms that use electromagnetic radiation for clocks and seeing (like us) and those that use it for getting energy (like plants, algae and cyanobacteria) all use pretty much the same part of the electromagnetic spectrum – the ‘visual’ spectrum. No organism can detect X-rays or radio waves (which are at opposite ends of the EM spectrum). Why not?
Unlike Jerry, I use Twitter, so I asked my tweeps why no organism can detect radio waves. Many of the answers fell into these three groups:
• What advantage would there be? Not much radio hitting the Earth.
• What emits radio waves that you would want to detect?
• Radio wavelength too long to provide differentiation at a cellular level?
The clearest answers came from two physicsts, @TommyOgden (a PhD student at Durham University), and from my friend and colleague @Tim_O_Brien, who is the Associate Director of Jodrell Bank radio telescope at the University of Manchester. Here’s my interpretation of what they tweeted. If they (or more likely, I) have made a mistake, chip in below.
Organisms use electromagnetic (EM) radiation to shift molecular energy levels, either for growth (photosynthesis) or in sensation (moving protons through cell membranes). Radio is too low-energy and has too long a wavelength to be able to move electrons from one energy state to another. At the other end of the spectrum, X-rays would be able to do this (they can excite the inner electrons), but there are not very many of them. Visible light is both highly energetic and is mainly what the sun produces.
So the simple answer seems to be – as you might expect – that life has been tinkering, making do with what it can find. The surface of the planet is covered with lots of this energy source, which is uniquely able to move electrons about, leading to the production of sugars in plants and sensory responses in animals (and other organisms).
Later on in evolution, other aspects of visible light – its directionality and its absorbability (?) by pigments led to the evolution of eyes, as areas of tissue shielded the detector from stimulation from all but a certain direction. If you were detecting X-rays, you’d have to ingest a lot of lead to be able to detect directionality.
One final point struck me, about quite how energy-poor radio waves are. Carl Sagan apparently said that all the radio waves detected by all the radio telescopes in the world were less than the energy released by a single snowflake touching the ground. Tim O’Brien was asked on the Jodcast (a podcast produced by Jodrell Bank) whether this was true. If you listen here at around 10:00, you can hear Tim work out the answer with some simple but occasionally mind-boggling sums.
If you don’t have the time, the summary of his answer is that the big dish of the Lovell telescope, detects 10-5 joules per year from Cygnus-A, one of the brightest radio-sources in the sky (800 million light years away). In comparison, a 50 watt light bulb produces 50 joules/second) Meanwhile, his guestimate of the potential energy released by a snowflake hitting the ground is 2x 10-6 joules. This is about five times less than the energy from Cygnus-A detected by Jodrell Bank in a year. So if any organism did have a reason to detect radio waves, it would have to be absolutely massive (much, much bigger than the Lovell telescope) to get any decent amount of energy out of it.
You can find an interesting discussion from a couple of years back of the evolution of transceivers, including references to various science fiction stories where people or animals could detect radio waves, here.
The bottom line of this story is probably the age-old evolutionary one of ‘if they could, they would; they don’t so they can’t’. On the other hand, at least I have a bit more of an idea of why – it’s all to do with physics, man.
h/t Tim O’Brien, Tommy Ogden and a Twitter cast of thousands (OK, six).
Peter Hitchens can’t leave well enough alone, and so has sent yet another reply to my critiques (here and here) of his views on evolution (he doesn’t accept it, and is sympathetic to intelligent-design creationism [“ID”]). This is the last time I’ll put his responses above the fold; from now on they’ll go in the comments. But since I did criticize his views in a post, I will not prevent him from responding however he wants.
Here’s Hitchens’s latest salvo:
Funny , isn’t it? First, I am even in some way condemned for actually replying to a personal attack on me, posted in a public forum and advertised on Twitter with the suggestion that I am a ‘moron’. Wouldn’t it be more reprehensible to ignore it? I’m a journalist and a debater. It’s what I do.
You can’t win, with such people. Everything you do is automatically wrong, unless you are of their faith.
You’d never guess from the bilious railing and lecturing above that what I say, repeatedly, is that ‘I am quite prepared to accept that the theory of evolution by natural selection may be true’. In other words, to my opponents I say gently and generously ‘Yes, you might be right’.
This isn’t enough for the devotees, who would never under any circumstances say the same to me. As is the case with all fanatical creeds, these cultists cannot stand even the slightest doubt (being so burdened with their own doubts) and demand actual professions of belief. By the way, which theory of evolution am I supposed to believe in absolutely? Gould’s? Or Dawkins’s? The existence of this choice, and of the disagreements between these two, seems to me to give every reasonable person room for a little doubt.
If the ID theory, which I regard as an interesting sceptical current, has made the open declarations of religious purpose of which it is accused above, could someone please give me the references and quotations? My understanding is that it has taken great care not to do so.
I do smile at the heaps of praise for my late brother’s supposed scientific knowledge. Neither he nor I ever counted the sciences as our most successful subjects at school or since,to put it mildly. But (like me) he instantly understood the significance of evolutionary theory for theism.
Scientists did indeed uncover the Piltdown fake, but not for some time. They wanted, passionately, to believe it to be true. Had they not wanted to believe it, they would have seen the fake far more quickly. That is the point of the story.
As for my own faith, I acknowledge it as such. I make no claim to *know* its truth. I don’t attack other people for not holding it, though I will defend it against attack, and against intolerant attempts to suppress it and drive it from public discourse.
Mr Coyne can say what he likes – now – about what he meant when he said that God ‘took’ the ‘wrong’ Hitchens. I bet he privately regrets making this crass and contemptible remark, and will be more careful with such language in future.
I repeat my strictures about the Christopher Hitchens Fan Club. I know perfectly well (better than almost anyone living) that these people have no real connection with my late brother. The fact that they behave as they do is proof enough of that.
My responses will be as brief as possible:
1. My tone: Hitchens is still peeved that I made fun of him. I don’t regret that, for mockery was, I think, appropriate in a situation where an intelligent, well-educated man with a huge public platform says absolutely stupid things about evolution. I don’t take back what I said, nor do I retract my statement that if we could have only one Hitchens in this world, I would choose Christopher. That’s simply a truth, though it may sound unkind. Again, I have no wish to see Peter exit this mortal coil, yet he’s still banging on about how I want him dead.
Let me add that I also leveled substantial criticism at P. Hitchens’s views on evolution, and he still has not responded to any of those save for his brief statement about Piltdown Man above.
2. Piltdown Man. As I’ve said before, Piltdown Man was initially accepted as a real hominin fossil, possibly our ancestor, but soon after its discovery it was suspected to be a hoax—an amalgam of different bones, some of them from other primates (orangutan and chimp). Greg Mayer posted here about Piltdown Man last December, and noted that most paleontologists had concluded by 1916—four years after its discovery— that it was a fake “fossil”. By the 1950s it had been thoroughly debunked. All of the debunking was done by scientists. So much for Mr. Hitchens’s claim that scientists took forever to uncover the hoax because they “passionately wanted it to be true”!
Obviously, the “passionate will to believe” of scientists wasn’t strong enough to overcome their passionate will to find the truth. It’s odd that Hitchens offers up this story as a caution for science, as it’s far more of a caution for his faith (Anglican) than for science.
Let me rephrase his critique, then: “Hitchens wants, passionately, to believe that his religion is true, and that Jesus Christ is our savior. Had he not wanted to believe it, he would have seen the delusional nature of this view. That is the point of this story—and the sad nature of faith.”
3. Hitchens’s lack of intellectual curiosity and open-mindedness about evolution. As the video below shows, Peter Hitchens is espousing exactly the same views on evolution and intelligent design (ID) as he did in 2008. (This is from a debate between Christopher and Peter Hitchens on April 3, 2008.) The video is over two hours long, so just go to the relevant part, which is between 1:29:45 and 1:36:45.
As Peter Hitchens notes in his response to a rather incoherent question about ID, he views it as an “interesting skeptical current” that has been brutally suppressed by British bookstores and publishers. He then mutters about how the Scopes Trial was misrepresented in the movie “Inherit the Wind” (true, but so what?), and decries the “intolerance and rage” of the Darwinists about ID, which, curiously, leads him to believe that ID proponents “might have a point.” His brother Christopher then takes him apart.
Peter’s views on ID are exactly what they were five years ago—a long interval during which he’s had time to examine the “evidence.” Surely “intolerance and rage” of evolutionists about faith-based incursion into science education aren’t sufficient for P. Hitchens to remain sympathetic to ID, are they? As a good journalist, shouldn’t he have looked at the evidence in the interim?. But over those five years, ID arguments have not changed, have gained no more credibility, and the promised “ID research program” has produced—nothing. Surely in 2013 Peter Hitchens could give us a more informed assessment. But he doesn’t: he obviously has read nothing and knows nothing about evolutionary biology, and likes ID simply because it supports his faith.
(The debate, by the way, is worth watching in its entirety. We can once again relive Christopher’s powerful intellect and rhetorical skills, and perhaps get an inkling of why his brother engages in so much post-mortem criticism of the “Christopher Hitchens Fan Club.”)
Peter Hitchens also claims that he is “quite prepared to accept that the theory of evolution by natural selection may be true.” But he was saying that five years ago. I guess that Peter is still in the state of “preparing to accept it.” Well, Mr. P. Hitchens, you’ve had time in the intervening five years to look at the evidence. When will you stop preparing to accept evolution and simply either accept it or reject it?
As for what we mean by “modern theory of evolution,” I’ll lay it out:
Those are the parts of modern evolutionary theory that are widely agreed on. Gould and Company disagreed with #5 alone, but their claims that “punctuated equilibrium” is a non-“Darwinian” process, and that macroevolution is not an extrapolation of microevolution, have been soundly refuted. What remains of punctuated equilibrium is the claim of pattern rather than process: that species evolve at uneven rates, with lineages often remaining largely unchanged in morphology. That may well be true, but the reason for that is not that some new, paradigm-busting evolutionary process is involved in macroevolution. Just because Gould and Dawkins disagreed on the evolutionary causes responsible for a “jerky” fossil record in some groups does not mean that one must doubt the fundamental claims of modern evolutionary theory. Did we discard all of quantum mechanics because there’s a disagreement on how to interpret its meaning?
So, Mr. Hitchens, if you want to weigh whether or not to “accept” evolution, I suggest you ponder the five points above—something you apparently haven’t done in the last five years.
Oh, and British publishers and booksellers did not suppress ID. If you look on Amazon.com.uk, you’ll see that the ID book Darwin’s Black Box has been on sale at Amazon UK since 1996, and another well known ID book, Icons of Evolution has been on sale at Amazon UK since 2001. I haven’t looked at other ID books, like Phillip Johnson’s Darwin on Trial, but I suspect they were also available in the UK from nearly the beginning. To the extent that British bookstores didn’t carry as many ID books as evolution books, it was probably because of lack of interest and scientific merit, not censorship!
4. The religious nature of intelligent design. This is obvious to anyone who examines the evidence objectively and dispassionately. ID proponents, of course, cannot “openly” declare that it’s religious, as that would defeat their cause of getting it taught in the public schools. (Such teaching is forbidden in the U.S. because the courts—obviously more observant than Peter Hitchens—have descried ID as a religiously-based movement, not as secular science.)
Hitchens asks for references for the religious nature of ID and the “designer” saying that “If the ID theory, which I regard as an interesting sceptical current, has made the open declarations of religious purpose of which it is accused above, could someone please give me the references and quotations? I will answer that. After this, I never want to hear him argue that ID isn’t a religiously-based theory, and that the designer isn’t the Abrahamic God.
What is the evidence that ID is religiously based? There’s plenty. For starters, ID advocates admit it when speaking to a religious audience. I quote from an email by Jason Rosenhouse, an expert on ID and creationism and author of Among the Creationists: Dispatches from the Anti-Evolutionist Front Lines:
The usual dodge the ID folks use is to argue that while a Christian would naturally be sympathetic to ID, the fact remains that the science of ID (in their view) only gets you some sort of intelligent designer. Could be a really powerful alien, for all the science can tell you. They generally don’t deny that most of the major ID proponents do, in fact, believe that the designer is the Christian God, but they claim instead that this conclusion goes beyond what the science can say. That’s what they say in public, anyway. When they are speaking to religious audiences they happily burnish ID as a powerful apologetic weapon.
Here’s but one example from Wikipedia about William Dembski, perhaps ID’s most famous spokesman:
Dembski has also spoken of his motivation for supporting intelligent design in a series of Sunday lectures in the Fellowship Baptist Church in Waco, Texas, the last of which took place on Sunday, March 7, 2004. Answering a question, Dembski said it was to enable Yahweh to receive credit for creation.
Dembski has also made this famous statement:(from Wikiquotes):
The mechanical philosophy was ever blind to this fact. Intelligent design, on the other hand, readily embraces the sacramental nature of physical reality. Indeed, intelligent design is just the Logos theology of John’s Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory. (From: Signs of intelligence: understanding intelligent design. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Brazos Press. 2001).
Phillip Johnson, generally seen as the father of ID, has made it manifestly clear in his writings that ID is an apologetic weapon. The “Wedge Document”, prepared by the Discovery Institute (an ID-creationist “think tank” in Seattle), makes the religious motivation clear (the link in this sentence goes to the document). Note in particular this sentence from the document’s “Five Year Strategic Plan Summary”:
Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions.
Any question about who the “designer” is now, Mr. P. Hitchens?
The wedge strategy is a political and social action plan authored by the Discovery Institute, the hub of the intelligent design movement. The strategy was put forth in a Discovery Institute manifesto known as the Wedge Document,[1] which describes a broad social, political, and academic agenda whose ultimate goal is to defeat materialism, naturalism, evolution, and “reverse the stifling materialist world view and replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions.”[2] The strategy also aims to affirm God’s reality.[3] Its goal is to change American culture by shaping public policy to reflect conservative Christian, namely evangelical Protestant, values.[4] The wedge metaphor is attributed to Phillip E. Johnson and depicts a metal wedge splitting a log to represent an aggressive public relations program to create an opening for the supernatural in the public’s understanding of science.[5]
Need more evidence for the religious nature of ID, Mr. Hitchens? How about this statement from another ID bigwig and Discovery Institute member Jon Wells, an adherent of the Unification Church, explaining why he got his Ph.D. in biology? This is from my review (Nature, 2001) of his ID book Icons of Evolution.
In 1976, Jonathan Wells a student in Moon’s seminary, answered his leader’s call. Wells writes, “Father’s [Moon’s] words, my studies, and my prayers convinced me that I should devote my life to destroying Darwinism, just as many of my fellow Unificationists had already devoted their lives to destroying Marxism. When Father chose me to enter a PhD program in 1978, I welcomed the opportunity to prepare myself for battle.” The University of California supplied Wells with his weapon, a PhD in biology and, with Icons of Evolution, Wells has fired the latest salvo in the eternal religious assault on Charles Darwin.
Want still more? Here’s an excerpt from the cross examination of ID advocate Michael Behe at the Dover trial on Oct. 18, 2005 (pp. 99-103, I’ve filled in the identities of the discussants):
LAWYER: “ . . . Thus, in my judgment it is implausible that the designer is “a natural entity.” You don’t absolutely rule it out, but you’re not taking it very seriously, are you?
BEHE: Well, I’ve said that quite a number of times. I think I said that at the beginning of my testimony yesterday, that I think in fact from — from other perspectives, that the designer is in fact God. But if you turn back to page 699, there is a section entitled, “Is it possible that the designer is a natural entity?” And I won t quote from it, but I come to the conclusion there that sure it’s possible that it is, but I do not — I myself do not find it plausible.
. . . LAWYER: Now, you’ve said in your testimony today and yesterday you personally believe the designer is God.
BEHE: Yes.
LAWYER: And in this article in fact you say for purposes of the discussion I’m going to assume the supernatural entity is God, right?
BEHE: Yes.
Then, posted at the site of the National Center for Science Education,we find the famous “Cdesign propnentsists” episode, when Barbara Forrest discovered that the ID textbook Of Pandas and People was simply a thinly-revised version of an earlier creationist textbook. The garbled two words above represented an unsuccessful attempt to replace the word “creationists” with “intelligent design proponents.”
Finally, Mr. P. Hitchens, if you aren’t convinced by all this, read Nick Matzke’s essay in the anthology edited by Michael Ruse and Rob Pennock, But is it Science? The Philosophical Question in the Creation/Science Controversy. There Matzke shows quite clearly that intelligent design was simply a legal strategy devised to replace young-earth creationism after the latter suffered various legal setbacks in the 1980s. If you have any remaining doubts about the religious nature of ID, that should dispel them—assuming, of course, that you have an open mind.
5. “The Christopher Hitchens Fan Club.” P. Hitchens argues that his fans have “no real connection” with Christopher Hitchens, and that is why we (yes, I’m a fan) behave as we do. I’m not sure how our behavior comes from our lack of “real connection” (I suppose P. Hitchens means sharing actual DNA, which he does), but I would argue otherwise. I claim that those of us who share many of Christopher’s views have a more real connection with him than you do. For ours is an intellectual connection—the only kind of connection that Christopher saw as meaningful. It is we, not you, who share his dislike of religion, his love of science and evolution, and his willingness to follow the path of rationality wherever it leads. Yes, Peter Hitchens, you may have his genes, but you don’t have his eloquence, knowledge of science, or inability to shake yourself free from the shackles of superstition. And, unlike your brother, you are intellectually dishonest.
h/t: Jason Rosenhouse, Grania Spingies
by Greg Mayer
At the end of last year, the Field Museum in Chicago announced that it was considering draconian budgetary cuts to, and even more ominous institutional restructuring of, its scientific departments. Jerry and I wrote about this here at the time, decrying the Field administration’s plans.
In January, Science published a news article on the situation. A number of us had been discussing various actions to protest the planned cuts, through petitions (change.org here), resolutions, critical commentary, and letter writing. In response to the Science piece, Jon Losos, Johannes Foufopoulos, Neil Shubin, Doug Futuyma, Ben Campbell, Scott Edwards, Jerry, and I wrote a letter to Science supporting scientific research at the Field Museum. The letter was published in today’s issue. The opening snippet:
The headline, which was written by Science, is appropriate: it refers to a famous line by the English scientist James Smithson, founding benefactor of the Smithsonian Institution, that we quote in our letter. Smithson wrote that his institution would be devoted to the “increase and diffusion of knowledge“. While many (especially newer) science museums can contribute to the diffusion of knowledge, only great natural history museums like the Field, with its priceless treasure of collections and and staff of outstanding scientists can contribute so much to the increase of knowledge. It is this mission that the Field administration threatens to give up, but must not dare, for shame, to abandon.
There’s another letter supporting science the Field Museum in the same issued, by Sophie Warny of Louisiana State University, arguing for the importance of natural history museums for practical applications.
Public outcry has worked before in saving some of the research departments at the Smithsonian. If you have not yet done so, you can sign the petition linked above, or write to the Field’s President, Dr. Richard Lariviere (rlariviere@fieldmuseum.org ) or Board Chair John Rowe (postal address for both is The Field Museum, 1400 S. Lake Shore Drive, Chicago, IL 60605-2496).
_____________________________________________________________
Mayer, G.C., J.A. Coyne, J.B. Losos, J. Foufopoulos, N. Shubin, D.J. Futuyma, B.C. Campbell and S.V. Edwards. 2013. Museums’ role: increasing knowledge. Science 339:1148-1149. (pdf; if link doesn’t work for you, email me and I can send you a pdf)
There are few ways to enter the consciousness of another species, much less another human, but at least we can see if some animals process visual information the way we do. I am speaking in particular of visual illusions, like the “rotating snake” illusion that obviously has deceived this felid:
Of course there’s no control (does this cat scratch at any image?), but I suspect it sees the snakes rotating, just as we do when we look at this:
If you let your gaze wander over it, it moves, but if you fix your gaze on one section, it stops. It’s quite an illusion.
You can print it out from above or here (the site also has information about the illusion). I would of course be immensely pleased if some readers would test their cat and report back about whether it seems to perceive movement.
h/t: SGM. Alejandro
When my friend Andrew Berry, who teaches at Harvard, told me this story two days ago, I realized that it would be a great post for Wallace Year. (This is the centenary of the death of the great naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, aka The Man Who Also Thought of Natural Selection.) I begged Andrew, an excellent writer with several books under his belt (including a very nice one on Wallace), to write up this tale for my website, and he kindly complied. And so, here is . . .
The most poignant episode in all of the history of science
by Andrew Berry
On July 12th 1852 in Belem, Brazil, Alfred Russel Wallace boarded a freighter, the Helen, bound for England. His great Amazon adventure was finally, he thought, at an end. The four years in the field that had transformed him from a biological neophyte into a serious scientific naturalist had done their work, and it was time now for Wallace to return to Britain to try to establish himself as part of the Victorian scientific elite.
The adventure had really begun in 1841 when, in Leicester, Wallace, 18 years old and with an untutored interest in plant life, met Henry Walter Bates (of future Batesian mimicry fame). Like Wallace, Bates was largely self-taught, but he had developed a sophisticated interest in beetles, and soon Wallace too was obsessing about beetles.
But it was not just beetles: Wallace and Bates were interested in the pressing scientific topics of the day, including the “Species Question,” as evolution was termed at that time—where and how had species arisen. If they were to do serious science, and to become anything more than enthusiastic amateurs, Wallace and Bates realized that they would have to set their sights beyond the delights of British beetles. They would have to travel to explore biological diversity in its tropical citadel.
May 1848, then, saw the pair arriving in Brazil, planning between them to explore the Amazon basin, all the time collecting specimens. They would bankroll the whole enterprise by selling duplicate specimens through their London-based agent. Just how naive they were can be gauged from how they chose their destination. They were swayed by an account of the Amazon published in 1847 by an American entomologist, W H Edwards. Edwards, presumably with an eye to book sales, peddled a bizarrely romanticized view of tropical forests. For example, he observed that the canopy was inhabited by squirrels that “scamper in ecstasy from limb to limb, unable to contain themselves for joyousness.”
One can hardly question the choice made by Wallace and Bates: who would not want to head off to view those ecstatic, joyous Amazonian squirrels? Needless to say, the reality of tropical forests on arrival forced them to recalibrate. Having thus rapidly been disabused of their Edwards-generated expectations of a zoo-like density of animals—Wallace wrote that the “productions of the South American forests are much scarcer than they are represented to be by travellers”—Wallace and Bates split up, with Bates heading up the main branch of the Amazon and Wallace up the Rio Negro.
The Amazon forest. This image comes from H W Bates’ account of his journey, The Naturalist on the River Amazons.
Over the next four years, Wallace led an extraordinary, lonely, itinerant life. He was largely on his own, dependent on the hospitality and assistance of local people, remaining throughout, as he put it, an “industrious and persevering traveller.” His younger brother came out from England to help, but died of yellow fever on the way home. (Wallace, still up country, did not find out about this for many months. He had heard that his brother had contracted yellow fever in Belem, but the news that he had died took a long time to make its way to the interior).
Wallace himself nearly died on several occasions. He traveled in to areas previously unvisited by Europeans, all the time amassing an extraordinary biological collection and taking copious notes on everything he encountered. He collected anthropological materials as well as biological ones and was at pains to learn the rudiments of a number of local languages. When finally it came time to head back down river, home, he discovered on arrival at Manaus, half way across the continent, that many of the specimens that he had sent off back to England had been impounded by the authorities. No matter, the material would travel with him, making his final arrival in London all the more triumphant. As he headed down the Rio Negro, Wallace added living animals to his collection. This menagerie would surely be his passport to the scientific big time when he got home: imagine walking in to an early Victorian scientific meeting with a toucan on your arm! These animals were professionally important to Wallace but they were also pets. He cared for them, fed them, nurtured them, on that long slow journey by boat across the continent.
Now aboard the Helen, more than three weeks into the voyage and more or less in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, the captain calmly roused his sole passenger (Wallace was sharing the captain’s cabin), “I’m afraid the ship’s on fire.” Poorly stowed flammable cargo was apparently responsible. The crew made forlorn attempts to control the fire before the order came to abandon ship. The Helen, a tropical tinder box, was going up in what Wallace later called a “most magnificent conflagration.”
In the smoky cabin, Wallace had time to grab one small trunk of drawings and notes as the life boats were launched. Clinker-hulled and parched after a life time spent upside down on the Helen’s deck, the boats immediately started to take on water, so bailing and caulking became an immediate priority. In his haste to join the bailing party, and still weak from his various tropical ailments, Wallace slid down a rope in to one of the boats, badly rope-burning his hands in the process. Baling salt water with raw, flayed hands proved unpleasant. Now that everyone was safely aboard the life boats, what to do? The captain decreed that they should stay close to the burning wreck as their best hope of rescue lay in other shipping coming to investigate. No ships came. As they circled the wreck, Wallace could only watch as those animals—his pets—struggled, and failed, to survive. Sprung from their cages by the fire, some, Wallace recalled, made it to the bowsprit, the last part of the boat not on fire. There, confronted with the daunting prospect of an endless ocean, they turned round and plunged back in to the flames.
Save for those few notes and sketches, the entirety of those four brutally tough years of Wallace’s life had literally gone up in smoke. His brother’s death had been in vain. All those fever-wracked bouts of disease had been in vain. Wallace recalled being too numb initially to take in the scale of his loss. It was during the long days that followed that he had a chance to process things:
“When the danger appeared past I began to feel the greatness of my loss. With what pleasure had I looked upon every rare and curious insect I had added to my collection! How many times, when almost overcome by the ague, had I crawled into the forest and been rewarded by some unknown and beautiful species! How many places, which no European foot but my own had trodden, would have been recalled to my memory by the rare birds and insects they had furnished to my collection! How many weary days and weeks had I passed, upheld only by the fond hope of bringing home many new and beautiful forms from these wild regions … which would prove that I had not wasted the advantage I had enjoyed, and would give me occupation and amusement for many years to come! And now … I had not one specimen to illustrate the unknown lands I had trod, or to call back the recollection of the wild scenes I had beheld! But such regrets were vain … and I tried to occupy myself with the state of things which actually existed.”
Rescue was slow in coming. Wallace and the crew of the Helen spent ten days at sea in the open boats before being picked up. Wallace, in his account of one of the nights, redefines notions of both stiff upper lip and positive thinking: “During the night I saw several meteors, and in fact could not be in a better position for observing them, than lying on my back in a small boat in the middle of the Atlantic.”
Wallace finally made it back to England after a total of 80 days at sea (his uneventful voyage out with Bates had taken 29). Not surprisingly, he was ocean-travel averse: “Fifty times since I left Para [Belem] have I vowed, if I once reached England, never to trust myself more on the ocean.”
But, having lost virtually everything and still determined to make his name as a naturalist-scientist, Wallace would have to do just that. A mere sixteen months after his return to England, then, he was once more at sea, en route to Singapore from where he would launch his second set of extraordinary exploratory journeys. The Amazon was his scientific apprenticeship; his eight-year journey through South East Asia was, for Wallace, “the central and controlling incident of my life.” While in Indonesia, Wallace heard that Bates and his collections had finally made it back to England from the Amazon: “Allow me to congratulate you on your safe arrival home with all your treasures; a good fortune which I trust this time is reserved for me.”
In 1862, after those eight momentous years in the field, exploring everything between Peninsula Malaysia and Western New Guinea, good fortune did indeed this time visit Wallace. His was a painless journey home, and he returned, appropriately enough, to acclaim as the co-discoverer, with Mr Darwin, of the theory evolution by natural selection.
One of the species that Wallace was especially interested in collecting while in the Amazon, the umbrella bird. Also from The Naturalist on the River Amazons
Yesterday I put up the video of an absolutely dreadful anti-scientific talk by woomeister Rupert Sheldrake, a talk that he gave it for TEDx Whitechapel. After I kvetched about it here, I sent an email complaint to Emily McManus, an editor at TED.com (her TED biography notes that she’s an atheist!), adding a link to my post on Sheldrake’s video. Last night Ms. McManus sent me this obliging email:
Hi Jerry,
Thanks for writing in, and for the link to your thoughtful blog post. I wanted to let you know we’ve been looking at this talk all day today, and my team is both analyzing it for content and pulling together a list of the specific issues with it. It’s good practice for us to prepare a comprehensive list like this — we learn a lot from engaging.
We will concurrently open a public discussion of the talk on our TED forum tonight. I’ll send you that discussion link when it’s up.
While TED does not vet speakers for independent TEDx events, we do hold the TEDx licensee to the standards outlined in Lara’s and my letter, and take it seriously when viewers suggest the guidelines have not been met. We also take seriously the act of removing a TEDx talk from the archive; this is why we’re thoughtful and deliberate in our analysis.
I appreciate your thoughtful blog post and comments. Please know that you have been heard.
Best,
Emily McManus
Editor, TED.com
And, sure enough, she wrote me this morning noting that they had started a comment site for Sheldrake’s talk. If you go there, you can leave a comment with your reaction to what you saw. I’ve already commented, and I urge readers to express their opinions about what Sheldrake said, or about the scientific quality of TED and TEDx talks. This is your chance to make a difference, and to promote quality science and good science communication. Leave any comments at the link above (note: you have to register, but it’s dead easy and you can opt out of TED emails).
There are only a few comments now, none of them (except mine) criticizing the talk, and some tout Sheldrake as a great scientist, e.g.:
Who is in charge of the Transportation Security Administration? Obsessed with security theater rather than real security, they’ve just made a decision to allow small knives and sporting goods like golf clubs and small baseball bats to fly with passengers in the cabin. As CNN reports:
On Tuesday, TSA Administrator John Pistole announced that small pocketknives and an array of sporting equipment — which were banned from aircraft cabins in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks — will be allowed in U.S. planes beginning April 25.
Pocketknives will be allowed if the blade is no longer than 2.36 inches (6 centimeters), which is shorter than the 4-inch blades that were allowed at the time of the 2001 attacks. And they must adhere to other rules: the blade can be no more than 1/2 inch at its widest point, it cannot have a locking or fixed blade and cannot have a molded grip. Box cutters and razor blades are still not allowed inside the passenger cabin.
The TSA also will allow travelers to bring billiard cues, ski poles, hockey and lacrosse sticks and a maximum of two golf clubs into aircraft cabins as carry-on baggage. It will allow novelty and toy bats if they measure less than 24 inches and plastic bats if they weigh less than 24 ounces.
Air marshals and flight attendents have rightly objected:
FLEOA President Jon Adler said the dangers extend beyond air marshals. “Pistole’s decision is putting my guys at greater risk,” Adler said. “It’s not just the (Federal Air Marshal Service), it’s all of my guys,” he said, noting that law enforcement officers are allowed to carry weapons during commercial flights.
A union representing 90,000 flight attendants called the measure “a poor and short-sighted decision by the TSA.”
“Continued prohibition of these items is an integral layer in making our aviation system secure and must remain in place,” the Coalition of Flight Attendant Unions said in a statement.
I’m not sure about the miniature baseball bats, but I don’t see why knives can’t be checked. Do you really need a knife in your possession on a plane? Remember that the 9/11 hijackers began their attacks by cutting the throats of flight attendants. They’re not sure what kind of knives they used (they could have been box-cutters), but a knife with a 2.4-inch blade is pretty good at cutting jugular veins.
If the TSA wants to do something, why not get rid of that idiotic rule to take your shoes off before screening?
It’s time for somebody with brains to be put in charge of the TSA. And while they’re at it, why don’t they replace those officious, authoritarian, and extremely rude TSA screeners? They seem to get people who revel in newfound authority, ordering passengers around like we’re children.