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.
Reader M.L. called my attention to the website and comic strip The Atheist Pig, a collection of writings and cartoons that, as in this this strip from October of last year, can be quite amusing—and on the mark:
Just another example of the hypocrisy of the Catholic Church, but a pretty bad one.
According to The Colorado Independent, Lori Stodghill, a 31-year-old woman, pregnant for 7 months with twins, went to St. Thomas More Hospital in Cañon City, Colorado, feeling ill. She promptly had a massive heart attack induced by a blood clot. The obstetrician was paged, but didn’t answer. Stodghill died and so did her twins.
Stodghill’s husband sued the hospital on the grounds of wrongful death, arguing that a Caesarian section could have saved the twins even if the mother died.
Now comes the hypocrisy, for the hospital is supposed to abide by Catholic directives:
The lead defendant in the case is Catholic Health Initiatives, the Englewood-based nonprofit that runs St. Thomas More Hospital as well as roughly 170 other health facilities in 17 states. Last year, the hospital chain reported national assets of $15 billion. The organization’s mission, according to its promotional literature, is to “nurture the healing ministry of the Church” and to be guided by “fidelity to the Gospel.” Toward those ends, Catholic Health facilities seek to follow the Ethical and Religious Directives of the Catholic Church authored by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. Those rules have stirred controversy for decades, mainly for forbidding non-natural birth control and abortions. “Catholic health care ministry witnesses to the sanctity of life ‘from the moment of conception until death,’” the directives state. “The Church’s defense of life encompasses the unborn.”
Yes, fetuses are people, unless the Church gets sued for letting fetuses die. My emphasis in the story below:
But when it came to mounting a defense in the Stodghill case, Catholic Health’s lawyers effectively turned the Church directives on their head. Catholic organizations have for decades fought to change federal and state laws that fail to protect “unborn persons,” and Catholic Health’s lawyers in this case had the chance to set precedent bolstering anti-abortion legal arguments. Instead, they are arguing state law protects doctors from liability concerning unborn fetuses on grounds that those fetuses are not persons with legal rights.
As Jason Langley, an attorney with Denver-based Kennedy Childs, argued in one of the briefs he filed for the defense, the court “should not overturn the long-standing rule in Colorado that the term ‘person,’ as is used in the Wrongful Death Act, encompasses only individuals born alive. Colorado state courts define ‘person’ under the Act to include only those born alive. Therefore Plaintiffs cannot maintain wrongful death claims based on two unborn fetuses.”
Well, Catholic Church, make up your mind. Are fetuses people with rights or not? I guess it depends on whether the Church stands to lose money when they make the call.
Naturally, Catholic Health Initiatives had no comment on the case.
A cool experiment from one of the 31 too-clever kids on BuzzFeed (original at Flickr). Tomorrow I’ll tell you about another cool science experiment that I did with my cat.
A few errors here, including equating the music cats like with what puts cats to sleep. There was no “silence” control, which would have demonstrated that cats sleep no matter what’s going on.
Last October I mentioned that the famous philosopher Thomas Nagel had produced a new book that proclaimed the falsity of neo-Darwinian evolution. I’ll quote from my earlier post:
As I’ve mentioned before, the respected philosopher of mind Thomas Nagel has joined the ranks of Darwin-dissers with the publication of his new book Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False. I am eager to read this, but haven’t yet had a chance because I’m travelling and reading Sophisticated Theology™ (this book may qualify in that genre).
Nagel has always evinced a sympathy for Intelligent Design creationism, and in fact he chose Stephen Meyer’s ID book Signature in the Cell as his “book of the year” in the respected Times Literary Supplement (read the letters following Nagel’s endorsement at the link). But Nagel is no slouch academically, and so it’s very surprising that he joins his colleague Jerry Fodor in bashing Darwin at book length.
Well, I never got around to reading Mind and Cosmos: I acquired a copy, but upon opening it and skimming it I was so disheartened that I just put it aside for the sake of my kishkas. So many books and so little time; did I really want to read another argument against evolution?
Now I’m glad I didn’t, for several people with the right expertise have read the book and they proffer a unanimity of opinion: thumbs way down.
The best of the reviews is by (ahem) my first student, Allen Orr, who, in the New York Review of Books, politely eviscerates Nagel’s ideas in a piece called “Awaiting a new Darwin” (free online). It’s a calm, informed, but absolutely skewering piece, and Orr is eminently trained to review it because he has a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology. (He’s a professor at the University of Rochester). In the end, his reasoned analysis makes Nagel’s book looks pretty worthless.
Among Nagel’s claims are that evolution is wrong because:
Now Nagel is not religious—he’s an atheist—so his teleology can’t involve a god. Instead, he apparently posits an unknown force that drives organisms onward and upward.
To a biologist (Orr is a Drosophila geneticist like me),the response is obvious: there is no direction in evolution, for when organisms evolve parasitism, or move into darkness, they often lose complex features like eyes and wings. And of course there are those dumb plants:
Nagel’s teleological biology is heavily human-centric or at least animal-centric. Organisms, it seems, are in the business of secreting sentience, reason, and values. Real biology looks little like this and, from the outset, must face the staggering facts of organismal diversity. There are millions of species of fungi and bacteria and nearly 300,000 species of flowering plants. None of these groups is sentient and each is spectacularly successful. Indeed mindless species outnumber we sentient ones by any sensible measure (biomass, number of individuals, or number of species; there are only about 5,500 species of mammals). More fundamentally, each of these species is every bit as much the end product of evolution as we are. The point is that, if nature has goals, it certainly seems to have many and consciousness would appear to be fairly far down on the list.
In fact, bacteria are still with us after billions of years, and they show no sign of a brain yet!
Allen’s conclusion about the value of Nagel’s teleology is measured and accurate:
The question, then, is not whether teleology is formally compatible with the practice of science. The question is whether the practice of science leads to taking teleology seriously. Nagel may find this question unfair. He is, he says, engaging in a “philosophical task,” not the “internal pursuit of science.” But it seems clear that he is doing more than this. He’s emphasizing purported “empirical reasons” for finding neo-Darwinism “almost certainly false” and he’s suggesting the existence of new scientific laws. These represent moves, however halting, into science proper. But science, finally, isn’t about defining the space of all formally possible explanations of nature. It’s about inference to the most likely hypothesis. And on these grounds there’s simply no comparison between neo-Darwinism (for which there is overwhelming evidence) and natural teleology (for which there is none). While one might complain that it’s unfair to stack up the empirical successes of neo-Darwinism with those of a new theory, this, again, gets the history wrong. Teleology is the traditional view; neo-Darwinism is the new kid on the block.
In my earlier post on Nagel’s book, I highlighted the review by Brian Leiter and Michael Weisberg in The Nation, so I’ll just give their conclusions here (the flaws they pick out are similar to those descried by Orr), which are stronger than Orr’s
We conclude with a comment about truth in advertising. Nagel’s arguments against reductionism are quixotic, and his arguments against naturalism are unconvincing. He aspires to develop “rival alternative conceptions” to what he calls the materialist neo-Darwinian worldview, yet he never clearly articulates this rival conception, nor does he give us any reason to think that “the present right-thinking consensus will come to seem laughable in a generation or two.” Mind and Cosmos is certainly an apt title for Nagel’s philosophical meditations, but his subtitle—”Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False”—is highly misleading. Nagel, by his own admission, relies only on popular science writing and brings to bear idiosyncratic and often outdated views about a whole host of issues, from the objectivity of moral truth to the nature of explanation. No one could possibly think he has shown that a massively successful scientific research program like the one inspired by Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection “is almost certainly false.” The subtitle seems intended to market the book to evolution deniers, intelligent-design acolytes, religious fanatics and others who are not really interested in the substantive scientific and philosophical issues. Even a philosopher sympathetic to Nagel’s worries about the naturalistic worldview would not claim this volume comes close to living up to that subtitle. Its only effect will be to make the book an instrument of mischief.
And indeed, the book is already being touted by creationists, though they have politely ignored Nagel’s atheism.
Finally, philosopher Elliott Sober, who also knows a lot about evolution, pitches Nagel his third strike in the Boston Review. I’ve had my differences with Sober, but his review is thorough and seems on the money. It’s more philosophical than Orr’s but that’s good: one man covers the biology base, the other the philosophical. Sober concludes, soberly:
Current science may suffer from fundamental flaws, but Nagel has not made a convincing case that this is so. And even if there are serious explanatory defects in our world picture, I don’t see how Nagel’s causally inexplicable teleology can be a plausible remedy. In saying this, I realize that Nagel is trying to point the way to a scientific revolution and that my reactions may be mired in presuppositions that Nagel is trying to transcend. If Nagel is right, our descendants will look back on him as a prophet—a prophet whom naysayers such as me were unable to recognize.
All three reviews are free online, so if you have any interest in Nagel’s ideas, go read them. I recommend you do this before you buy his book!
Bad Nagel! Bad Nagel!
h/t: Alberto, SP
Before you’re allowed to read this post, you have to go back and read about seahorses.
As for the latest Jesus and Mo, they’re not proving what they think. . .
Just FYI, a recent paper by Li and Durbin (reference below) shows that Adam and Eve could not have existed: the smallest bottleneck in human population size, one associated with the “out of Africa” migration event, was around 1200 individuals. That’s estimated from the amount of genetic variation present in living humans. There’s no way all modern humans could have descended from only two ancestors. Ergo, no Adam and Eve. This is why BioLogos is all in a kerfuffle about figuring out in what way these two progenitors could have been a metaphor. But that, of course, means that Jesus died for a metaphor.
By the way, the Jesus and Mo artist has added another comment (along with Giberson’s) to his list of “blurbs”:
Blaspheming, heretical, filthy Hell fodder. Council of Ex-Muslims
…humor is humor and this cartoonist doesn’t have it. Karl Giberson
___________________
Li, H., and R. Durbin. 2011. Inference of human population history from individual whole-genome sequences. Nature 475:493-497.
Attend and listen, oh my Best Beloved: I’m not going to even try to mimic Matthew Cobb’s famous use of Kiplingesque language to explain How the Beetle Got His Handles. Instead, I’ll use plain English to talk a bit about seahorses.
The other day I put up a funny video in the “True Facts” series, “True facts about the seahorse“, and at least one reader wondered why these silly animals even exist. They can barely swim (yes, they’re fish), and although they’re cute, they hang onto vegetation with their tails all day, snapping at small animals like shrimp or fish larvae to get food.
And the males get pregnant—females insert eggs in the males’ pouches, and the pregnant males have to do all the gestation. (That leads to a shortage of available males, by the way, for there are fewer non-pregnant males than there are females with eggs to donate. Thus, unlike what happens in most animal species, female have to compete for males. And this reverse sexual selection explains why if only one sex in a seahorse species is brightly colored or ornamented, it’s the females. For most animals it’s the reverse, since males are competing for females and evolve ways to call attention to themselves.) For you ladies who have suffered the pains of human childbirth, you can perhaps take consolation in this video of a male seahorse in “labor,” then producing a gazillion young:
Anyway, I’m not going to explain the pregnancy difference; I’m sure evolutionists have concocted a story, but I don’t know it. Instead I want to talk about a recent theory for why seahorses have that crazy shape—like tiny horses without legs.
Seahorses evolved, in fact, from straight fish, something probably like their closest relatives, the pipefish (subfamily Syngnathinae). You can see in the video below that, with their big eyes and long snouts, pipefish look like stretched-out seahorses:
Like seahorses, pipefish swim using only a single dorsal fin (a few species have other fins as well), which isn’t really a great way of swimming, but it does the job, especially since seahorses don’t swim very much.
We’re pretty sure that the ancestral seahorse was straight, and then evolution turned it into a horsey form, for molecular and morphologically-based phylogenies show that the “outgroup” for seahorses are pipefishes. That is, all seahorses have shared derived characters within a larger group that includes pipefish and then other fish:
So why give up your vocation as a straight-swimming pipefish to evolve a horselike morphology with a deep chest and then a prehensile tail to hang onto vegetation all day? That means that you no longer search for food (seahorses spend about 80% of their time attached to the substrate), but become a “sit-and-wait” predator that noms anything that swims by. When I was looking for other seahorse videos, I found one made by the journal Nature highlighting a 2011 paper on seahorses by Sam Van Aassenbergh, Gert Roos, and Lara Ferry (reference and link at bottom). It purports to explain the adaptive significant of the seahorse shape and behavior:
As Van Wassenbergh showed via both modeling and filming of seahorse feeding, by turning your body into a bent rather than straight shape, and developing that deep “chest,” seahorses are able to strike at prey at a farther distance from their eyes. As the paper notes:
Forward dynamic simulations of cranial rotation revealed two main effects of sharpening the angle between the head and the trunk in the first model (based on the morphology of the pipefish S. leptorhynchus). First, the velocity of the mouth decreased (Fig. 3a). Second, strike distance (defined as the distance between the starting position of the eye and the final position of the mouth) increased considerably (that is, + 28%) when gradually transforming the pipefish model into a more seahorse-like shape (Fig. 3b).
In other words, by aligning oneself so that the head is bent, and counterbalanced by a heavy “chest,” you can thrust up farther towards prey than you could if you were a straight-bodied and free-swimming pipefish.
A 28% increase in strike difference means, of course, that you can get more food, and that’s the supposed “selective advantage” of evolving that seahorse shape. The shape apparently evolved after the seahorse had already become sit-and-wait predators since some species of pipefish, the “pygmy pipehorses”, also attach themselves to the substrate but don’t have the bent body. Here’s one species, of pygmy pipefish: look at this camouflaged beauty!:
Anyway, in their abstract the authors claim that they’ve explained the adaptive advantage of turning from a pipefish into a seahorse. It’s feeding efficiency:
The results from the mathematical modelling were confirmed by kinematic data of prey-capturing syngnathids: compared with straight-bodied pipefish, all seahorse species studied consistently show an additional forward-reaching component in the path travelled by the mouth during their strikes at prey. This increased strike distance enlarges the volume of water they can probe for food, which is especially useful for tail-attached, sit-and-wait predators like seahorses. The biomechanics of prey capture thus provides a putative selective advantage that may explain the bending of the trunk into a horse-like shape.
But there’s one problem. Seahorses can strike farther than pipefish, but they also strike more slowly:
In accordance with the pipefish model results, our second model, based on the seahorse Hippocampus reidi, showed reduced velocities of the mouth travelling towards the prey (that is, − 36%) compared with more elongate versions of this model (Fig. 3c), whereas the body shape facilitated striking at prey located a greater distance away (Fig. 3d). Consequently, our model highlights a trade-off between strike velocity (favoured by a head in-line with the trunk) and strike distance (favoured by sharper angles between head and trunk as observed in seahorses).
That’s a problem! Seahorses can strike farther than pipefish, or something shaped like a pipefish, but they strike more slowly. And presumably speed of strike is important, too, because if you lunge too slowly, the prey will get away. So, as the authors note, there’s a “trade-off” between strike distance and strike speed.
Given the trade-off, how do they know that turning into a seahorse will, on the whole, get you more food? They don’t! They just assume it, and in this way the paper limns a clever but unproven evolutionary story, somewhat akin to the tales of bad evolutionary psychology. In fact, in the conclusion, the authors seem pretty sure that it’s feeding efficiency that drove the evolution of the seahorse shape:
If the evolution of the seahorse body shape occurred as a result of natural selection, this anatomical shift should have resulted in an increase in fitness, as might be facilitated by an increase in strike distance during feeding.
Well, I’m pretty sure that natural selection was somehow involved in this change (but wait—we haven’t yet heard from Larry Moran!), but I’m not convinced that it’s selection due for feeding efficiency. The authors haven’t shown, given that a bigger strike is also a slower strike, that feeding efficiency drove the evolution of that funny shape. It may in fact lower your food intake to have that shape, but that there’s some other advantage to the shape that we don’t understand. Remember that attachment to the substrate by a prehensile tail probably preceded the evolution of that shape, so there may be other reasons connected with reduced predation, inconspicuousness, and so on.
In the end, we don’t understand how the seahorse got its shape. We have one possible explanation, but it’s not very convincing. So, sadly, I can’t answer the readers’ question, but we can still marvel at these silly but endearing animals.
It’s embarrassing to me that the Nature video above doesn’t mention the big problem with the study—the problem of slower strikes associated with the seahorse’s shape. Instead, the narrator blithely concludes, after describing the study, “And that’s how the seahorse got its curiously curved shape.”
Well, no, we don’t know that. It may be true, but some caveats were certainly in order. One would expect better science reporting from Nature!
I end with an exhibit from Buzzfeed’s “31 kids who are too clever for their own good” (some funny stuff there):
h/t: SGM
_____________
Van Wassenbergh, S., G. Roos, and L. Ferry. 2011. An adaptive explanation for the horse-like shape of seahorses. Nature Communications 2011/01/25/online.
Too true!
UPDATE: Judging from the first few comments, I don’t think readers quite get what is going on here. Ergo, I append the sheet music for the normal rendition:
Oh, and Beyonce’s version of the Star-Spangled Banner that I liked during the Inauguration? Lip-synched!
h/t: Grania
These look like living moggies but are really made of wool. You can see more of them here. Perhaps a reader can translate the Japanese so we can have more information.
h/t: Su