Food: Charleston

February 19, 2013 • 12:01 pm

Here are a few holiday snaps of the meals I had in Charleston, South Carolina—one of the loveliest cities I’ve had the privilege of visiting. I also have a bunch of pictures of the town itself, which I hope to put up later, but here’s what I ate.

Upon arrival, I immediately had a late lunch at Jestine’s Kitchen, an unprepossessing place that has superb fried chicken. It’s accompanied here with homemade pickles, collard greens, whipped sweet potatoes, the local paper and, of course, sweet tea.  The yardbird was great. I believe Anthony Bourdain featured this place in one of his recent restaurant shows. Click all photos to enlarge them.

Jestine's

I had a semi-fancy lunch the next day at Slightly North of Broad (Broad is a street in Charleston), a restaurant usually abbreviated S.N.O.B. But it’s not snobbish at all: it serves upscale Southern food in a pleasant, unstuffy atmosphere.

SNOB

The menu, heavy on local seafood and fancified southern food, and not too expensive:

SNOB menu

To start off with, since the day was warm: a locally-brewed “White Thai” wheat beer made with spices. Just the ticket.

SNOB white Thai beer

Steamed local clams in garlic and white wine, with fennel, tomatoes and toasted baguette. Yum!

SNOB clams

And the best dish of all: shrimp and grits, a Carolina favorite. The grits were creamy (I think they contained cream), a perfect foil for the many large shrimp, which were interspersed with pieces of homemade andouille sausage and country ham.  This is the Risotto of America, and was absolutely delicious, if filling!

SNOB shrimp grits

The next day, after a long walk around the city, I had a late lunch (I often eat one large meal per day while travelling) at Cru Café, another restaurant that does “modern” Southern food (they call it “gourmet comfort food”). Thank goodness that, in Charleston, “modern” or “gourmet” doesn’t equal “small portions.”

Because I booked the kitchen table (really a copper counter that overlooks the kitchen), but had to wait 25 minutes, they comped me a drink and an appetizer: delicious roasted corn flan with jalapeño peppers. Excellent.

Cru corn flan

And then the appetizer I ordered: duck salad with carmalized walnuts, arugala, and fried onion slivers on top.  A substantial appetizer that could also be ordered as a main dish. Note the sweet tea: the table wine of the South.

Cru Duck salad

The main course: homemade meat loaf, barbecue style, with mashed potatoes and homemade cole slaw with horseradish.  It was excellent as well, though a bit dry. You can imagine how full I was after consuming this and the two courses above. This was not a small dish.

Cru meat loaf

I wish I’d had room for dessert, as they were homemade as well, and looked great. Before the chef cut a slice of Orange Blossom Cake with coconut frosting, he made two squiggles of sauce on the plate, which, as a biologist, I had to photograph:

Cru dessert

Afterwards a quick walk through the touristy Charleston Market, once the place that house slaves went to buy groceries for their white owners. Now it’s a fancy mall selling geegaws (and some decent stuff, like local handwoven sweetgrass baskets).  There was some food on offer, too, like this (I didn’t try the famous okra chips):

Okra chips

And a panoply of hot sauces:

Hot sauce

I greatly enjoyed my three major meals in Charleston, as well as the BBQ dinner (with mustard sauce) that one of the seminar organizers at the College of Charleston got me to eat in my hotel before my debate (I can’t remember her name, but she was very gracious).  I know from reading about the city that it’s rapidly becoming a foodie paradise, and I wish I’d stayed longer to sample the fare. But I’m sure I’ll be back.

Later this week I’ll post some pictures of this beautiful city—a city voted the prime tourist destination in the world by the readers of Condé Nast Traveler Magazine last year. I can’t quite agree with that ranking (Paris is stiff competition for food and scenery, and beats Charleston hands down for art), but Charleston is up there with New Orleans and New York City as my favorite tourist destinations in the U.S. If you have a chance to go there, do so!

Pawprints 1: tracks of ancient cats

February 19, 2013 • 9:08 am

This week I’ve fortuitously come across three cases of domestic cats leaving their traces in ancient history. I’ll post one daily until Thursday.

Many of us have cats who walk across our computer keyboards and turn what we’re typing into gibberish. Well, nothing is new under the sun.

Here, originally from Eric Kwakkel’s Medieval Fragments website, is what happened to one cat-owning scribe in the fifteenth century (from Twitter, via Matthew Cobb):

Picture 1

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On morality and moral responsibility: a final response to Uncle Eric

February 19, 2013 • 7:17 am

I wasn’t going to prolong my interchange with Eric MacDonald about “ways of knowing,” as I think we’ve both made our disagreement clear (and let me emphasize again the affection and respect I have for the man), but I want to make a few points connected with Eric’s latest response to me at at Choice in Dying: “Is there a science of morality?”

As I interpret it, Eric sees that there are indeed “moral truths” that can be discerned through reason and empirical observation (but not through “science”), while I maintain that what we call “moral truths” aren’t really “truths” in any meaningful sense, but guidelines for behavior that either evolved or were socially constructed to meet certain ends.

Eric starts by taking apart a recent post at Rationally Speaking (presaging a book to be called The Moral Arc of Science) in which Michael Shermer defends the view that morality can be grounded through science. Here’s Eric’s take on Shermer’s claim that the conquest of polio is an objective moral good:

Now, no doubt much moral good went into the achievement of the result, but whether the result itself is a moral good we may question. It is a social good, certainly, and the outcome of much moral good by individuals. But the actual reduction of numbers of polio cases from 350,000 to 222 is not, by ordinary measures, what we think of as a moral good. It is a social good which is the outcome of a great deal of hard work and dedication by many people, many of whom were driven by moral considerations.

I would argue that, in the end, what we see as moral goods are really social goods, and we should jettison the notion of morality in favor of understanding what we really mean by saying an act is “moral.”

I further argue that we’ll find that, at bottom, morality consists of a series of behaviors designed to achieve certain social aims—or that evolved largely as a way to promote individual welfare through cooperation of individuals in small ancestral groups.  It’s likely that much of our “moral intuition” is based on evolution, and that evolution occurred in circumstances that no longer obtain. Ergo we must reexamine our “intuitive” morality. If we find that any of our evolved “moral” ideas are inimical to society—as, perhaps, is the xenophobic idea that we should treat members of our society better than members of foreign societies—we should get rid of them.

This does not mean that I think that morality is somehow objectively determined through reason and evidence. That’s because one first has to determine what one means by “social goods,” and that is often a matter of preference that can be immune to evidence.

Is abortion immoral? Try deciding that one objectively! But if we first construct the subjective dictum that “It is all right to abort a fetus before birth if that is the mother’s preference” (my own view of the situation), then we can say that abortion is moral. My view rests on the fact that fetuses are not sentient, and therefore have fewer “rights” (indeed, if they have any) than does the mother. But how can one argue objectively about what rights fetuses possess?  How can one argue that “if it’s inconvenient for a mother to have an unwanted child, it is not immoral to abort the fetus,” and maintain that this is an objective truth? Against that claim we have all the faithful (and others) who argue, immovably, that a fetus is a potential human being, and thereby has rights.  That is not subject to objective adjudication.

As I argued before, we should figure out why we think things are moral, and then adjust our “morality” to see if it meets the goals of having a code of behavior. Is it really bad to torture someone if there’s a 50% probability that that torture will save the lives of many others? That strikes many as innately immoral, but why? Getting us to think about such issues was, I believe, Sam Harris’s goal in writing The Moral Landscape. We shouldn’t automatically defer to our innate feelings of morality, but rather should delve deeper into the reasons things strike us as “moral” or “immoral”.

In the end, that exercise will, I think, result in deep-sixing the idea of morality in favor of, as one reader suggested, characterizing behaviors as “good or bad for society.” Maybe we think it’s bad to torture not because it’s inherently wrong, but because a society in which any torture is permitted would be dysfunctional. That’s something that can, in principle, be subject to empirical study.

And so I think there’s a lot of good in Sam’s neo-utilitarian approach, despite its many problems. (Two of these are deciding how to measure well being and how to adjudicate different forms of well being). What we call “morality” can be put on a scientific footing, but ultimately must rest on subjective judgments about the good and the right. Most of these judgments (indeed, perhaps the vast majority) will, I think, come down to “well being” or “social goods” when examined closely. But subjective judgments cannot produce “moral truths.”

Finally, Eric takes issue with my idea that we should dispense with the idea of moral responsibility:

I would be remiss here, however, if I did not also address one of Jerry’s central concerns, which he expresses in the following terms:

I am starting to think that we should dispense with the idea of “moral” and “immoral” acts for two reasons. The first is because morality is implicitly connected with free choice, that is, with “free will.” If one can’t choose one’s acts freely, that one can’t decide to be “moral” or “immoral.” Rather, as a consequentionalist, I’d replace “morality” with what it really means for most people, “the effects of an act on an individual or society.” Thus an “immoral act” might better be seen as “an act that reduces societal well being.”

In response to this what more can I say than that I disagree with the claim that we can give no sense either to freedom or to moral responsibility? This is a fundamental disagreement which is not susceptible to scientific proof, at least at present, in very much the same way that consciousness is unamenable to scientific explanation. Besides this, defining immorality in terms solely of a reduction to social well-being seems to me inadequate to what we normally mean when we speak of morality, which is as or more important in the context of individual relationships than it is on the scale of whole societies. Indeed, one of the besetting problems of utilitarianism is that it seems unable to deal with the more immediate concerns of individuals, and, indeed, in its classic form, would legitimate actions which most people rightly take to be immoral.

I stand by my claim that, in light of determinism of human behavior (which leads to my rejection of dualistic free will), we should reject the idea of “moral responsibility” and replace it with the simple notion of “responsibility.”

Consider this: a man who kills someone because of a brain tumor that causes aggression (viz., Charles Whitman), is deemed to be not morally responsible.  But someone who robs a gas station and kills the cashier is deemed morally responsible. But if neither person has a free choice about their behavior. If both behaviors are the ineluctable results of genes and environments, then why is one person seen as morally responsible and the other not?  It’s not that one person could have chosen to act differently while the other couldn’t.  Neither could have chosen to act differently. And if you can’t choose freely, if your behaviors are determined, then what sense does the notion of “moral responsibility” make?

Now you might say that we need the concept of moral responsibility as a sort of social glue. I don’t believe that, for I think the simple notion of “responsibility” will suffice. If you’re responsible for something bad, sanctions must be applied, no matter whether you had a real and free choice. Those sanctions are leveled for rehabilitation of the offender, protection of society, and to serve as an example to deter others. The notion of “morality” has nothing to add; indeed; it complicates matters by implying the false idea that offenders could have made a different choice. (I hasten to add that the sanctions applied to the victim of a brain tumor will differ from those applied to someone who kills because he came from a terrible environment and was abused as a child.)

Finally, I want to point out that Eric implicitly admits that there can be no objective standards of morality:

It may be true that moral philosophy does not reach assured conclusions in the way that science does; but it may, for all that, be the nature of the human condition that these things are undecidable in a strict sense, yet, at the same time, be such that the continuing discussion of morality is the way in which morality’s objectivity, as an aspect of our understanding of being human, is maintained. Absolute moral conclusions are probably, simply as absolute, immoral, because morality, given the nature of being human, cannot arrive at absolute principles that are valid for everyone. . .

Well, if absolute moral conclusions are impossible because there are no moral principles “that are valid for everyone,” then how can there be “moral truths”? After all, scientific truths, while always provisional, remain valid for everyone. Antibiotics work irrespective of your ethnicity, nationality, or religion.

Jonah Lehrer tries to rehabilitate himself by giving a $20,000 speech

February 18, 2013 • 11:42 am

 

UPDATE: As reader Derek notes in the comments below, the Knight Foundation has issued an apology for paying Lehrer any fee at all—much less $20,000.  Their apology includes this:

In retrospect, as a foundation that has long stood for quality journalism, paying a speaker’s fee was inappropriate. Controversial speakers should have platforms, but Knight Foundation should not have put itself into a position tantamount to rewarding people who have violated the basic tenets of journalism. We regret our mistake. . .

When asked, we released the amount of the speaker’s fee. The fee was not unusual for a well-known author to address a large conference. But it was simply not something Knight Foundation, given our values, should have paid. We continue to support journalism excellence in the digital age. And we do not want our foundation partners to think that journalism controversies are too hot for them to handle. Instead, we want to send the message that when things go wrong the best action is to admit the error and get back to work.

But of course Lehrer is still $20,000 richer.  In some states criminals aren’t allowed to profit from their crime by, say, writing a book about it. It seems that stricture doesn’t apply to journalism.

_________

I was never a fan of science writer Jonah Lehrer since he published a pretty dreadful piece on E. O. Wilson and his theory of group selection (discussed on this site) in the New Yorker. Subsequently, as most of you know, Lehrer was caught out fabricating quotes for a book; Lehrer resigned from the New Yorker and the book was withdrawn.

It wasn’t just the book, either; as Charles Seife reports in Slate, Lehrer’s journalistic misdeeds extended to his own blog, which contained not only plagiarisms from press releases but factual errors (uncorrected even after being pointed out) and other fabricated quotes. One example of the plagiarism is Lehrer’s lifting, in post on his own website from September 28, 2011, which, according to Seife, “closely parallels a blog post written by Christian Jarrett a few months prior.”

Lehrer:

Sixty kids were shown a boxy toy that played music when beads were placed on it. Half of the children saw a version of the toy in which the toy was only activated after four beads were exactingly placed, one at a time, on the top of the toy. This was the “unambiguous condition,” since it implied every bead is equally capable of activating the device. However, other children were randomly assigned to an “ambiguous condition,” in which only two of the four beads activated the toy. (The other two beads did nothing.) In both conditions, the researchers ended their demo with a question: “Wow, look at that. I wonder what makes the machine go?”

Next came the exploratory phase of the study. The children were given two pairs of new beads. One of the pairs was fixed together permanently. The other pair could be snapped apart. They had one minute to play.

Here’s where the ambiguity made all the difference. Children who’d seen that all beads activate the toy were far less likely to bother snapping apart the snappable bead pair. As a result, they were unable to figure out which beads activated the toy. (In fact, just one out of twenty children in that condition bothered performing the so-called “experiment”.) By contrast, nearly fifty percent of children in the ambiguous condition snapped apart the beads and attempted to learn which specific beads were capable of activating the toy. The uncertainty inspired their empiricism.

A second study was similar to the first, but this time the children were only given a single bead pair that was permanently fixed. This toy was trickier to activate, since it required that the kids place the pair of beads so that one bead was one top and one bead was dangling over the edge. Once again, children first presented with ambiguous evidence were five times more likely to perform this original “experiment” and thus activate the toy.

Jarrett:

Sixty 4- and 5-year-olds were shown a box-shaped toy that played music and lit up when beads were placed on it. Crucially, some of the children were shown that each of four beads, placed one at a time on the toy, activated it. This was the “unambiguous condition” that implied any old bead is capable of activating the toy. Other children were in an “ambiguous condition”: they were shown, by placing beads one at a time on the box, that two of the beads activated it, but two of them didn’t. In both conditions, the researchers said afterwards: “Wow, look at that. I wonder what makes the machine go?”, followed by: “Go ahead and play”.

Next came the key exploratory phase of the study. The children were given two pairs of new beads (different from those seen earlier). One pair was fixed together permanently. The other pair could be snapped apart. They had one minute to play.

Here’s the take-home finding: children who’d earlier seen that all beads activate the toy were far less likely to bother snapping apart the snappable bead pair to test which beads activated the toy and which didn’t. In fact just 1 out of 20 children in that condition bothered performing this “experiment”. By contrast, 19 out of 40 children in the ambiguous condition snapped apart the snappable bead pair and tested which specific beads were capable of activating the toy and which weren’t.

A second study was similar to the first, but this time the children were only given a single bead pair that was permanently fixed. This time, to identify precisely which beads activated the toy and which didn’t, the children had to come up with the entirely original idea of placing the pair on the toy in such a way that one bead made contact with its surface whilst the other bead hung over the edge. Again, children presented initially with ambiguous evidence (some beads activated the toy, some didn’t) were far more likely to perform this original “experiment” to isolate the beads with the activating effect …

Now, like Tiger Woods and Lance Armstrong, Lehrer has decided that the days of humiliation are over, and he’s trying to regain his former status as the science-journalist Wunderkind:

A piece in Forbes by Jeff Bercovici, “Jonah Lehrer thinks he can humblebrag his way back into journalism.”

Can you outsource integrity? Jonah Lehrer thinks so. In fact, that’s his plan for reviving his career as a big-idea science journalist.

At a seminar hosted by the Knight Foundation on Tuesday afternoon, the formerly high-flying author and speaker gave his first public accounting of the fabrication and plagiarism that led to his being dismissed from The New Yorker and disowned by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, publisher of his book “Imagine.”

In a speech and Q&A for which he was reportedly paid $20,000, Lehrer blamed his many deceptions, large and small, on “arrogance,” “a consistent asymmetry in the way I noticed error” and “carelessness matched with an ability to explain my carelessness away.”

Admitting that he’s trying to get himself back into science journalism, Lehrer presented his Grand Plan:

How, then, does he propose to bridge the rather large credibility gap he faces? By the methods of the technocrat, not the ethicist: “What I clearly need is a new set of rules, a stricter set of standard operating procedures,” he said. “If I’m lucky enough to write again, then whatever I write will be fully fact-checked and footnoted. Every conversation will be fully taped and transcribed.”

“That is how, one day, I’ll restore a measure of the trust I’ve lost,” he added.

Lehrer used several analogies to make his case. At one point, he likened himself to the FBI, which adopted new failsafes after a case involving fingerprint misidentification revealed systemic problems. He compared his new “standard operating procedures” — a phrase he must have used at least 10 times — to the “forcing functions” that software designers employ to guide users away from accidents.

The author of the Forbes piece, Jeff Bercovici, is rightly scornful of Lehrer’s plan, arguing that a real journalist strives to get it right, not to abide by a set of rules that prevents one from transgressing.

Lehrer’s speech—and shame on the Knight Foundation for paying him $20,000!—was bizarre in other ways.  In addition to his lack of remorse, Lehrer blamed his downfall on, well, his intelligence:

The oddness of Lehrer’s thinking came into focus when he allowed himself to consider some of the factors that may have eased his way down the path of iniquity. One, he said, is his high intelligence. “For some cognitive biases, being smart, having a high IQ, can make you more vulnerable to them,” he said.

Another is just how in demand he was as a writer, speaker and all-around public intellectual. Why consider yesterday’s mistakes, he suggested, when you can contemplate tomorrow’s $20,000 speech?  ”For me, the busyness was a way to avoid the reckoning,” he said.

Bercovici is rightly incensed:

Lehrer’s intention in submitting himself to a public grilling was to show the world that he’s ready to return to journalism, that we can trust him because he knows now not to trust himself. All he proved is that he’s not wired like the rest of us. If he can figure out why that is, that would be a neuroscience story worth publishing.

When I was interviewed by Lehrer for his New Yorker story on E. O. Wilson, and saw the result, I sensed something amiss.  There was such a disconnect between the science I taught him and what came out on the page that I suspected Lehrer was more interested in making a big splash than in the scientific truth.  And, sure enough, truth has always taken a back seat to Lehrer’s self-promotion and desire to make a big splash at a young age.

In truth, and given the content of this speech, I sense that Lehrer is a bit of a sociopath.  Yes, shows of contrition are often phony, meant to convince a gullible public (as in Lance Armstrong’s case) that they’re good to go again. But Lehrer can’t even be bothered to fake an apology that sounds meaningful.  Call me uncharitable, but if I were a magazine editor, I’d never hire him; and we shouldn’t trust anything by him that’s not fact-checked by a legion of factotums. This is what happens when careerism trumps truth.

And he got $20.000 for his fake apology. . .

A new movie starring Dawkins and Krauss

February 18, 2013 • 8:55 am

A new movie, “The Unbelievers” (Facebook page here) follows Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss around the world as they promote science and reason and go after religion at the same time.  According to a post at the Richard Dawkins Foundation, the movie includes, among others, these talking heads:

Ricky Gervais
Woody Allen
Cameron Diaz
Stephen Hawking
Sarah Silverman
Bill Pullman
Werner Herzog
Tim Minchin
Eddie Izzard
Ian McEwan
Adam Savage
Ayaan Hirsi-Ali
Penn Jillette
Sam Harris
Dan Dennett
James Randi
Cormac McCarthy
Paul Provenza
James Morrison
Michael Shermer
David Silverman

Here’s the trailer for the movie, which has already passed 112,000 views in ten days:

I’m curious to hear Richard’s answer to Krauss’s question, “Richard, what’s more important in some sense: if you had a choice—to explain science or destroy religion?”

That would be a tough one for me. How do you think Dawkins answered? And how would you have answered if you possessed Dawkins’s proficiency at explaining evolution as well as his enormous public profile as an atheist?

And if anyone’s seen this, weigh in below.

A new forcepfly—and a disquisition on insect genitals

February 18, 2013 • 6:44 am

“Our faculties are more fitted to recognize the wonderful structure of a beetle than a Universe.”

—Charles Darwin, Notebooks

From Eurekalert we have the description of a new species in a group I didn’t know existed (reference and link to open-access paper below): the forcepflies.  Austromerope braziliensis is the newest species described in the family Meropeidae, one of the smallest insect families (it’s in the small order Mecoptera). In contrast, the family Chrysomelidae, or leaf beetles, contains 35,000 species.

The family Meropeidae held only two species until A. braziliensis was just described (from Brazil, of course).

Wikipedia describes this small and enigmatic family:

The Meropeidae are a tiny family of the order Mecoptera with only three living species, commonly referred to as “earwigflies” (or sometimes “forcepflies”). They are: the North American Merope tuber, and the Western Australian Austromerope poultoni, and the newly-discovered South American Austromerope brasiliensis. The biology of these species is essentially unknown, and their larvae have never been seen. The disjunct distribution suggests a common origin before the breakup of the ancient supercontinent of Pangaea.

They’re called “earwigflies” because their “forceps” resemble the pincers of earwigs, an unrelated group in the order Dermaptera. Earwig pincers (below) are used to capture prey and defend themselves. Their name comes because they were erroneously thought to enter human ears and then drill into the brains with the pincers:

An earwig, Forficula auricularia
An earwig, Forficula auricularia

The new paper in ZooKeys by Machado et al.  shows A. braziliensis with enormous “pincers,” which in this group aren’t defense organs but genital claspers, presumably found only in males (the paper describes only one specimen, and I haven’t found much about the females in this group):

Meropi tuber, photo by Dr. Renato Jose Pires Machado
Austromerope brasiliensis, photo (and those below) by Dr. Renato Jose Pires Machado

 Many insects have bizarre genital structures in males that presumably help secure or grasp the female, and probably arose via sexual selection. (For a great scientific book on this topic, read William Eberhard’s book Sexual Selection and Animal Genitalia.) In fact, when two insect species are very closely related, the character most likely to distinguish them is the shape and size of the male genital structures. (This is true in many groups besides insects, by the way). In contrast, the genitalia of females from related species are often nearly identical. Those two facts (I’d call them “Coyne’s Rule”, except there’s already a “Coyne’s Rule” in biology) imply that sexual selection on males is one of the most common evolutionary processes.

How does that selection work? The ability to reproduce is, of course, the sine qua non of natural selection, so one would expect strong selection on those traits connected most directly with reproduction. Any male who is better able to grab and hold onto a female with his genitals will have a reproductive advantage over other males, and this could lead to the elaboration of male genitals. There are other explanations, too, including the suggestion that the bizarre shape of some male genital structures, which don’t seem to help them hold on, somehow stimulate the female’s “tactile preference”, inducing her to mate. (This is called the “sensory bias” hypothesis.) There are other explanations, too, which you can read about in Eberhard’s book. The forcepfly pincers, however, are likely to be adaptations for grasping females, though we don’t know for sure.

Here are the male pincers in closeup:

Ouch!
Ouch!

Eurekalert gives more on the new paper:

A new species of forcepfly Meropeidae (Mecoptera) from Brazil was described, representing only the 3rd extant species described in this family and the 1st record of the family from the Neotropical region. The distribution and biogeography of the family are discussed and it is even proposed that Meropeidae originated before continental drift and then divided into two branches, northern and southern, with the breakup of the old supercontinent Pangea. The study was published in the open access journal ZooKeys.

Despite all previous collecting efforts in this area the species had never been recorded before. The specimen was collected in a private ranch near a forest fragment surrounded by farms in the Atlantic Forest biome, one of the most threatened in Brazil. It can be found in a variety of habitats, including woodland, Jarrah forest, and sand plain vegetation. What makes forcepflies special is the fact that little is known about their biology and the immature stages remain a mystery to scientists. The adults, who are nocturnal and seem to live on the ground, are also capable of stridulation, or the production of sound by rubbing certain body parts.

“The discovery of this new relict species is an important signal to reinforce the conservation of Brazilian Atlantic Forest biome. Certainly there are many more mecopterans species yet to be discovered in these forests”, said the lead author Dr Renato Machado from the Texas A & M University, College Station, USA.

Here’s the beast’s head, missing one antenna:

Head

And the lovely antenna, which resembles a stalk of wheat:

antennae

Just for fun, here’s a figure from Eberhard’s book showing a unique and nefarious structure in male damselflies: the “penis scoop.” Female damselflies often mate with several males, and when a male tries to copulate with an already-inseminated female, he uses special structures on his genitals to scoop out the sperm from the previous males before ejaculating his own! That’s of obvious reproductive advantage to males, and instantiates the old adage “evolution is cleverer than you are.” But it’s also of interest that males from different but closely related species have differently-shaped scoops.

One would have thought that there is only one optimal design for a penis scoop, but there are obviously other factors in play here. Different tactile preferences of the females may apply, as well as the possibility that the internal sperm-storage organs of females from different species may have evolved by “antagonistic sexual selection” to counteract the male’s attempts to remove the sperm she carries. And the way a female evolves to counteract the males’ penis scoops may differ in different species.

The recurved spines are used to collect the sperm of previous males and remove them, much like a fishhook:

Picture 1

h/t: A tweet from Ed Yong via Matthew Cobb

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Machado, R. J. P., R. Kawada, and J. A. Rafael (2013) New continental record and new species of Austromerope (Mecoptera, Meropeidae) from Brazil. ZooKeys 269: 1–10. doi: 10.3897/zookeys.269.4255

(Note: the link given at the Eurekalert page is wrong.)