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.
Like Richard Dawkins, I have a problem with calling a child of Muslim parents a “Muslim child,” but for some reason I have no problems with calling a cat from Scotland a “Scottish cat.” Here’s one of them.
Reader Alex, who attended my talk in Glasgow, sent a picture of his moggie Charlie and a brief history of the beast:
Charlie belongs to Kirsty and Alex, and is an 18month old mustachioed cat originally from Penicuik (which comes from the old Brythonic Pen Y Cog, meaning ‘Hill of the Cuckoo’) just outside of Edinburgh, but is currently residing in Glasgow. Like his human servants he is still adapting to the changes in local accent and slang that comes from moving from the East to West Coast of Scotland (even if it is only 52 miles!). He is named after Charlie Chaplin due to his little moustache that he regularly grooms. He is certainly a cheeky chappy.
Charlie enjoys sitting on, and crushing, important pieces of work; sprawling himself on the ground in inconvenient places; biting toes that poke out from under the bed cover; and making lots of noise. He spends most of his time looking cute after being particularly naughty.
Despite best efforts he refuses to read the book ‘Why Evolution is True’ and remains a staunch cat creationist, holding firmly to the belief that human evolution has been guided by cats to best serve the feline species. If he catches you reading such salacious books on evolution, he is liable to sit up on your chest and purr intensely to prevent you from reading.
Before you object that these pictures are fake or Photoshopped, let me assure you that they’re real; I’ve verified this by SuperSecret methods. At any rate, as the Daily News reports, photographer Dana Allen towed an artificial seal, made of rubber, behind his boat for three days near Cape Town, South Africa. And he got a spectacular series of photos of a great white shark (Carcharodon carcharias)breaching after grabbing the ersatz seal. Have a gander (and click to enlarge):
The shark was estimated at about 13 feet long.
Why is it breaching? Wikipedia has the explanation:
A breach is the result of a high speed approach to the surface with the resulting momentum taking the shark partially or completely clear of the water. This is a hunting technique employed by great white sharks whilst hunting seals. This behavior often takes place on cape fur seals at Seal Island in False Bay, South Africa but due to the randomness of the location of a shark’s breach, it was very hard to document. It was first photographed by Chris Fallows and Rob Lawrence who developed the technique of towing a slow moving seal decoy to trick the sharks to breach. Here, in the region of 600 natural predatory events are recorded annually from April to September each year. The seals swim on the surface and the great white sharks launch their predatory attack from the deeper water below. They can reach speeds of up to 40 kilometres per hour (25 mph) and can at times launch themselves more than 10 feet (3.0 m) into the air. Data recorded shows that the sharks are successful in just under 50% of all these natural predatory events. In 2011, a 3 metres (9.8 ft) long shark jumped onto a seven-person research vessel off Seal Island in Mossel Bay. The crew were undertaking a population study using sardines as bait, and the incident was judged to be an accident.
If this 12-minute clip, from the movie “Deli Man,” doesn’t make you hungry (and make you laugh), there’s something wrong with you. The food is wonderful, and the characters colorful. (Click on the Vimeo icon in the movie box to enlarge.)
I love delis, and, as the movie says, there just aren’t many left. My favorites in New York are the Second Avenue Deli and Katz’s, but I don’t spurn the Carnegie Deli either. The one I really want to visit is Harold’s New York Deli, in Edison, New Jersey. It’s famous for its huge portions, as are many Jewish delis. Some of the pastrami sandwiches at Harold’s look like this (btw, Harold’s has a “bread bar” where you can rectify the imbalance shown below):
Now that’s a sandwich! Like the best French bistros, Jewish delis are known for their largesse, and they’re no good if the portions aren’t copious.
Oh, and I don’t want to hear people kvetching about the portions being too big. You can always schlep the leftovers home.
According to MinutePhysics, the Templeton Foundation asked astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson to answer the question, “Does the universe has a purpose?” Now I’m not sure whether they paid him to answer (taking such money would, in my view, be offensive), but I don’t think they’ll like Tyson’s answer given in the short video below. (It’s illustrated with MinutePhysics’ drawings.) Tyson’s a wee bit on-the-fencey, but definitely suggests that creatures make their own purpose.
Give this a listen; it’s only 2.5 minutes long. And his answer, toward the end of the video, is pretty clear:
“So while I cannot claim to know for sure whether or not the universe has a purpose, the case against it is strong—and visible to anybody who sees the universe as it is, rather than as they wish it to be.”
If that’s not an explicit rejection of religion, I don’t know what is.
Tyson has risen again in my esteem, so long as he wasn’t paid by Templeton for this (and Templeton usually does pay for such answers).
Oh for crying out loud; I beg the readers not to not lecture me on whether I want to call this place a “website” or a “blog”. It’s one of my “idiosyncracies,” as Richard called them yesterday, and I really don’t appreciate lectures (often with dictionary definitions) of what a “blog” is. Some of the comments have been positively prissy, or even nasty. You can call it what you want, but for Ceiling Cat’s sake deep-six the lectures and strong-arming! I happen to think the word “blog” is hideously ugly, and prefer the classiness of “website”. Okay, gentle (and not-so-gentle) readers, let us not continue this semantic debate in the comments below, for it will not please the management.
And, if you haven’t realized the tongue-in-cheekness of my position, give yourself a humor check!
Well, after the Savita Halappanavar affair, in which a woman in Ireland was allowed to die rather than abort her miscarried fetus, you’d think some action would be taken. Even if the whole abortion issue in Catholic Ireland needs a full airing in the legislature, at least they can allow abortions where the mother’s life is in danger. That’s nothing that needs debate: is it better to let a mother and her fetus die rather than just the non-sentient fetus?
Indeed, those kinds of abortions are required for EU members. Nevertheless, the Irish have just voted down a bill that would permit only those types of abortions. And they voted it down by a substantial margin. As The Journal.ie reports:
AN ABORTION BILL put forward by Deputy Clare Daly has been voted down by 101 votes to 27 in the Dáil this evening.
It would have provided an interim legislative arrangement as required by the Council of Europe, for termination of pregnancy where as a matter of probability a real and substantial risk to the life of the pregnant woman exists.
It also would have made provision for the prevention of any curtailment, hindrance or preclusion of such treatment that may arise as a result of the pregnancy of the woman.
As explained here, the “X case” occurred 20 years ago, when a 14-year-old girl was raped, became pregnant and then suicidal, but an Irish judge ruled that despite the risks she had to remain pregnant. She ultimately travelled to the UK for an abortion, but miscarried before that.
Abortion is still illegal in Ireland, and the law is sufficiently hazy that even in cases where the mother’s life is in danger, doctors are hesitant to act lest they be found guilty of violating EU dictates. That’s why Savita died. This bill was a no-brainer, but the cowardly Irish legislature wouldn’t even pass this stopgap legislation because a. they’re awaiting “discussion” of a commission report about the issue (report here), and b. because the legislation was introduced by a woman who is not a member of the ruling party (she’s an Independent), and passing such legislation isn’t often done in Ireland.
And she’s not the only case: here’s a report on a related case in 2010 in which a pregnant Irish woman with cancer, Michelle Harte, had to travel to UK for an abortion before she could get treatment for cancer, for that treatment could endanger the fetus!. As the Irish Times reports, by the time she got permission to leave for the abortion, it was too late, and she died:
Her condition worsened significantly during this time and she was not able to receive cancer treatment because she was pregnant. She eventually travelled to Britain for an abortion; she had to be helped on to the aircraft due to a deterioration in her condition.
Mr Boylan of Augustus Cullen Law then sued the State on her behalf for infringing her rights under the ABC case, in which the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Ireland had breached the human rights of a woman with cancer who had to travel abroad to get an abortion.
In that case, the woman – “C” – had a rare form of cancer and feared it would relapse when she became unintentionally pregnant. However, the woman said she was unable to find a doctor willing to make a determination as to whether her life would be at risk if she continued to term.
Ms Harte’s lawyers served a statement of claim in May 2011 against the HSE, Ireland and the Attorney General. It was settled by July 2011. Mr Boylan declined to specify the amount but said it was substantial. Ms Harte died that November.
This is ridiculous: while the legislature, and hence Irish doctors, waffle about the ethics of abortion when the mother’s life is in danger (whether that danger be physical or, in the “X” case, mental), women continue to die. What’s right is right, and this defeat is an embarrassment for the Irish government.
Most of the Irish public favor some form of abortion on demand, but if the government can’t even resolve such a simple ethical (an issue that the EU demands be resolved), it looks as if abortion will remain illegal in Ireland.
Such is the power of the Catholic Church in Ireland, which of course opposes any such legislation, as well as of the ruling party, which doesn’t want to pass anything not approved by their own legislators. They have no idea what it means for someone to die while they equivocate. Every woman who dies in these situations has friends and family who love her; and even one such death is too many. I wish those legislators could put themselves in the place of these women, something they seem unable to do.
I have a penchant for cases of mimicry, not only because they served as some of the earliest evidence for natural selection in Darwin’s time, but also because they show how far natural selection can achieve “perfection”—that is, how far do developmental and physical constraints prevent the evolution of an “optimum phenotype.” The answer is that constraints don’t matter much.
There are few cases in nature where one can judge how “optimum” an adaptation is, and mimicry is one of them. (Sex ratio is another.) What it shows, as this post demonstrates, is that it can be remarkably precise; that is, natural selection is pretty good at molding animals (and some plants) to hide their true nature by evolving to resemble either another organism or their environment. The resemblance can be astonishingly precise.
Finally, many examples of mimicry are simply unexpected, cool, and stunning. The first one below was sent to me by Matthew Cobb who got it from a tweet by M.J. Walker from the Blue Planet Society. The photo is by Andrew Taylor.
One of these animals is a frogfish; the other is a sponge (yes, sponges are animals). If you look closely you can see which is which, but it may not be so easy for a predator or a prey item. (Frogfish are almost all predators.)
Frogfish, sometimes known as “anglerfish” are in the order Lophiformes and the family Antennariidae; 47 species are recognized.
Wikipedia has a good section on frogfish mimicry. I’ve reproduced it in the indented parts below, and inserted some pictures of different species of frogfish:
The unusual appearance of the frogfish is designed to conceal it from predators and sometimes to mimic a potential meal to its prey. In ethology, the study of animal behavior, this is known as aggressive mimicry. Their unusual shape, color, and skin textures disguise frogfish. Some resemble stones or coral while others imitate sponges, or sea squirts with dark splotches instead of holes. In 2005, a species was discovered, the striated frogfish, that mimics a sea urchin while the sargassumfish is colored to blend in with the surrounding sargassum.
Here’s the one, Antennarius striatus, that’s supposed to mimic a sea urchin:
Some frogfish are covered withalgae or hydrozoa. Their camouflage can be so perfect, that sea slugs have been known to crawl over the fish without recognizing them.
Here’s one that looks like an algae-covered rock:
Here’s another that looks like a sponge, hiding in a sponge:
For the scaleless and unprotected frogfish, the camouflage is an important defense against predators. Some frogfish can also inflate themselves, like pufferfish, by sucking in water in a threat display. In aquariums and in nature, frogfish have been observed, when flushed from their hiding spots and clearly visible, to be attacked by clownfish,damselfish, and wrasse, and in aquariums, to be killed.
Many frogfish can change their color. The light colors are generally yellows or yellow-browns while the darker are green, black, or dark red. They usually appear with the lighter color, but the change can last anywhere from a few days to several weeks. It is unknown what triggers the change.
To show how the mimicry works, here’s a sponge-mimicking frogfish nomming a cardinal fish. It’s fast!
Finally, a short clip of a frogfish feeding. It was filmed at 1000 frames per second and played at 10 frames per second, so this whole 17-second video represents 0.17 seconds in real time. Note how opening the mouth creates a suction that draws the prey in:
