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.
Take a look at this photo of rock in Cappadocia, Turkey. Notice anything odd about the shape of the rock at the bottom of the picture?
A rock in Turkey. With a man in the background for scale. Detail of Figure 2 from Antoine et al (2012)
If you squint at it, it looks like there are something like a pair of ears or eye-sockets. Cappadocian pareidolia? Ceratotherium neumayri. Not only does this look like it might be the head of a large mammal, it is. (Strikingly, if you want, you can see the muzzle of a beast to the right. The muzzle is pareidolia.)
According to Pierre-Olivier Antoine et al writing in PLoS ONE, this is the skull of a large extinct two-horned rhinoceros, Ceratotherium neumayri, which got stuck in a lava flow about 9.2 million years ago. Here’s the rest of their Figure 2:
Detail from Figure 2, Antoine et al (2012)
The story is fascinating: in June 2010 a team of vulcanologists from Hacettepe University were out doing field work on ignimbrite flows (i.e. rock formed by dense currents of gas, ash, and other debris) in the mountains when they came across the fossil:
a coronal-plane section of the cerebellar area was cropping out in a vertical bank of a small stream incised within an ignimbrite flow (N 38°41.819’, E 34°36.811’, 1029 m above sea level; Figure 2). The skull was excavated three days later with the help of a French-Turkish palaeontological team including other authors.
Here’s the excavated skull:
Caption: Articulated cranium and mandible (HU-2011-1). a. Left lateral view, with upper/lower cheek teeth angle (ca. 26°) and tentative reconstruction of the lacking parts (maxillae, nasals, parietals, and occipital bone). b. Upper cheek tooth series, with left P2-M3, in occlusal view. c. lower cheek tooth series, with left p2-m3, in labial-occlusal view. The corrugated aspect of the bony surface (3a, 3c) is interpreted as resulting to a long exposure to warm volcaniclastics. Scale bar: 50 mm.
And here’s a picture of what the beast might have looked like in life, taken from here:
Antoine and his co-workers think that the poor old rhino – in fact, a young adult 10-15 years old –got too close to a cloud of ash and volanic debris, died instantly, and had its head separated from the rest of the body (which will presumably be lurking elsewhere in the rock). The mouth opened because of rapid dehydration as it was surrounded by the red-hot matter. As the authors summarise it, an ignimbrite flow:
i) provoked the instant death of the Karacaşar rhino, before the body of the latter ii) experienced severe dehydration (leading to the wide and sustainable opening of the mouth), iii) was then dismembered within the pyroclastic flow of subaerial origin, the skull being separated from the remnant body and baked under a temperature approximating 400°C, iv) then transported northward, rolled, and trapped in disarray into that pyroclastic flow forming the pinkish Kavak-4 ignimbrite, and v) was incidentally found by four of us in 2010, ~30 km North from the upper Miocene vent.
So there you go, young rhinos – keep away from the ignimbrite! And the next time you look at a rock and think there might be something in there, perhaps you’ll be right.
h/t @TetZoo
[EDIT: Glaring geological inaccuracies removed thanks to Callan Bentley in comment 2 below. Others may remain!]
Reference:
Antoine P-O, Orliac MJ, Atici G, Ulusoy I, Sen E, et al. (2012) A Rhinocerotid Skull Cooked-to-Death in a 9.2 Ma-Old Ignimbrite Flow of Turkey. PLoS ONE 7(11): e49997.
In about 14 minutes, that is 4:30 p.m. British time, our own Matthew Cobb will be on the BBC Radio 4, participating in the “Infinite Monkey Cage” with Marc Abraham and Brian Cox and WEIT reader Robin Ince. You can listen live at this site. [EDIT: You can listen again here]
On October 23, 2010, I published (with the writer’s permission) an email I’d gotten from someone who’d been a dyed-in-the-wool, prosyletizing creationist, but had given that up because of this website. I verified his identity to be sure it wasn’t a hoax. Here are two excerpts from that email:
I’m a 25-year-old fellow from the backwoods of the Appalachias with little education to speak of. I was raised Southern Baptist, donated time and money to the Discovery Institute, and participated in anti-evolution debates and seminars. I was one of the True Believers who would tell someone straight to their face that they were going to hell if they didn’t kneel down that instant and accept Lord Jesus into their hearts. And I’d say it with a smile. . .
[Interlude: reader describes reading about evolution to use as ammunition for his creationism]
You probably know the rest. The initial rejection of what I’d read, trying to get someone to explain to me why all the evidence pointed toward evolution instead of away, realizing that the answers that I was getting from the creationist side were either evasive, inconsistent, or deceitful. And the long, slow, painful process of shedding a belief I’ve had instilled in me since childhood.
The whole point of this mini-autobiography is that if people like you weren’t out there making such a ruckus, then people like me wouldn’t have the chance to break out of the destructive, irrational belief system that serves as a mental and moral cage. I know you don’t need me to tell you to, but I hope you’ll keep on being a strident, arrogant, uncompromising bastard. The world needs more like you.
I posted that letter to show that, yes, “stridency “does make converts, too. If you go back and look at the 94 comments following that post, you’ll see that many of you who were reading back then were very supportive, suggesting books to read, urging the reader to go to college—that the age of 25 was not too late—and giving some of your own experiences if you used to be a diehard Christian, too.
So here’s an equally heartening update: after two years, I’ve received an email from the same person, giving his progress. He’s in college and on his way to a biology-and-math degree. Oh, and he gives us a bonus kitteh.
Dr. Coyne,
I wrote to you a few years back giving thanks for your work in advancing reason in the United States (and the world), and for your part in helping people like me understand the value of evidence. The time has come, I think, for another bit of gratitude. These thanks are extended not only to you, but to the readers of your website.
In that letter, I mentioned my “biggest regret”–that I had never pursued the opportunity to study biology academically. I now proudly report that in another two weeks or so, I will have completed my first semester as an undergraduate in biology and mathematics. Your book, your site, and the comments of encouragement that your readers posted in response to my first letter were all instrumental in nudging me toward my current position in life. And I couldn’t be happier!
It took two years of work in the banking industry (blech!) in order to build up enough cash to see me through my education. The investment, however, has already paid off in spades. My first semester is not even fully complete, and I am already doing more with my life than I ever thought possible. I am currently working in my genetics professor’s lab as a research assistant for one of his grants, designing my own independent study project, and helping another professor write a textbook! (By “helping,” I of course mean “being an enthusiastic gopher.”) In another couple of years, I should be set to pursue a PhD—something I never would have even considered five years prior.
Many important things have happened in the interim between my first letter and the present that influenced this decision (including the extremely fortuitous acquisition of an Olympus CX21 microscope for my personal enjoyment), yet I feel that my current trajectory was certainly aimed by your initial influence. So, please accept the thanks of a 27-year-old former creationist from the hills of Appalachia for helping open his eyes to a world wider, deeper, and more beautiful than anything suggested by the ancient scratchings of superstitious goatherds and Greek cultists.
To a more reasonable world,
Daniel Metz (name NOT redacted!)
As a post-script, I have attached a photograph of my very best feline friend and companion, Shadow. He is 18 years old, and we have been together ever since I convinced my mother all those years back to let me adopt the little 5-month-old kitten at the local pound. Despite his age, he is as rambunctious as a kid goat. He and I both enjoy reading your website–especially the Caturday felid segments!
I explicitly asked Daniel if he wanted his name removed, and he said, “There is no need for redaction at this point. Your efforts, and the efforts of those like you, are daily reshaping the U.S. into a place where one need not hide his lack of faith for fear of repercussions.”
Yesterday I travelled from Edinburgh to St. Andrews to visit an old friend. I had expressed a desire to revisit Anstruther (a place we’d gone when I was doing a sabbatical in Edinburgh), home of what I thought was the best fish-and-chips shop I’d visited in the UK, The Anstruther Fish Bar. (It’s won many awards for its F&C; check out the Wikipedia entry). It’s located in the lovely seaside town of Anstruther, in Fife. There is also an excellent pub nearby, the Dreel Tavern, for one needs at least a pint to wash down a fish supper.
But my friend convinced me that there was a newer shop that was even better: The Wee Chippy (that’s about as twee a name as you can get), just a few doors down in Anstruther, in Fife. So to The Wee Chippy we went:
(Click all pictures to enlarge.)
There was some hubris there, as evinced by the sign in the window (my image is evident in the photo). “The best place in the world to eat fish & chips”, indeed! That’s a challenge!
To test the claim, I had the full “fish supper” (haddock and chips), with malt vinegar on the chips. It was delicious, at least the equal of the Anstruther Fish Bar’s product. And there were too many chips to finish (the way it should be):
Off to the Dreel Tavern, a small, dark, and atmospheric place with a real coal fire and real ales on tap:
We then returned to St. Andrews, home of Scotland’s oldest university, founded in 1413. In biology it’s famous for being home of the great biologist D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson. His Meisterwerk was the book On Growth and Form, which advanced the thesis that many aspects of animal development and evolution could be understood as mathematical transformations of growth parameters (no specific developmental mechanisms were adduced). It’s a well-written book, and influenced many subsequent biologists, including Steve Gould and those who maintain that things like stripes and other patterns can be the result of simple molecular diffusion, but its influenced has waned.
Any any rate, we visited the Museum of the University, and there was Thompson’s typewriter:
There was also a drawing of two cats by the famous Scottish artist Elizabeth Blackadder, described in Wikipedia as Dame “DBE, RA, RSA (born 1931, Falkirk) is a Scottish painter and printmaker. She is the first woman to be elected to both the Royal Scottish Academy and the Royal Academy. . . Her work can be seen at the Tate Gallery, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and has appeared on a series of Royal Mail stamps.
The Museum and University sit beside the frigid and turbulent North Sea. When I lived in Edinburgh I tried swimming there, but even in the “heat” of a Scottish summer it was simply too cold. But cormorants ply their trade in those icy waters; here’s one drying off after foraging:
Nearby is the world’s most famous golf course—the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews, which owns the famous “Old Course.” Tourists from all over the world pay huge sums of money to play this course, and at all times of year.
Running along its northern perimeter is a beach that you might recognize:
This is where the opening “running” scene of the movie Chariots of Fire was filmed. Toward the end of the clip you can see St. Andrews, and the clubhouse of the Royal and Ancient:
If you are a fan of the Royal Family (a mindset I can’t fathom), you’ll know that St. Andrews is where both Prince William and Kate Middleton went to university, and where they met. There’s a plaque in the museum commemorating their visit.
And, in town, this humorous (and somewhat deceptive) sign in a coffee shop:
“Where Kate met Wills” with “for coffee!” as a remark in parentheses and in smaller type! Well, this is certainly not the spot where the two first encountered each other, and since there aren’t many coffee shops in St. Andrews, yes, I’m sure they had coffee there at least once. But it’s a bit misleading to imply that the Royal Love blossomed in this caf.
Finally, my friend has a lovely tuxedo cat named Amber, whose picture I’m including here. Amber is microchipped and has a “catflap” (what they call a “cat door” in the US), which is programmed to let in only the cat with the right chip. (You can program it to allow entry of up to 32 cats, which shows how crazy some folks are!).
Amber has the distressing habit of catching pigeons in the garden, carrying them through the catflap (they’re almost as big as she is), and nomming them in the house. She eats all of the bird save the feathers and feet. But she’s a lovely cat, and very affectionate for a formerly feral animal. Here she is demonstrating her penchant for feathered prey:
Today I’m in Glasgow to speak about evolution for the Glasgow Skeptics in the Pub (no drinking for me before a talk!). Info about the event is here. Tomorrow I fly back to the U.S. for the end of a long series of journeys.
As both an undergraduate and graduate student, I was fortunate to be taught statistics by some of the best statistical minds in biology: Robert Sokal and Jim Rohlf at Stony Brook, and Dick Lewontin at Harvard. All three have influenced biostatistics enormously, not just through their many students, but also through writing textbooks, the former two coauthoring the still essential Biometry (4th edition, 2012), the latter joining the great G.G. Simpson and Anne Roe in revising the seminal Quantitative Zoology (2nd edition, 1960). In my first year of graduate school, while on a two month field course in Costa Rica, other students, knowing I’d already “done” Sokal and Rohlf, would consult with me on statistical questions. Towards the end of the interview that got me the position I currently hold, I was casually asked if I could teach a course in “quantitative biology”, to which I replied “yes” (the position had been advertised for evolution and vertebrate zoology). The course, now entitled biostatistics, has wound up being the only class I have taught every academic year.
I mention these things to establish my cred as, if not a maven, at least an aficionado of statistics. It was thus with some professional interest that I (along with others) noted that towards the end of the recent presidential election campaign, pollsters and poll analysts came in for a lot of flak. Polling is very much a statistical activity, the chief aim being, in the technical jargon, to estimate a proportion (i.e., what percent of people or voters support some candidate or hold some opinion), and to also estimate the uncertainty of the estimate (i.e., how good or bad the estimate is, in the sense of being close to the “truth” now [which is defined as the proportion you would get if you exhaustively surveyed the entire population], and also as prediction of a future proportion). The uncertainties of these estimates can be reduced by increasing the sample size, and thus poll aggregators, such as those at Pollster and Real Clear Politics, will usually have the best estimates.
In the last weeks before the election, a large swath of the punditry declared that polls, and especially the aggregators, were all wrong. Many prominent Republicans predicted a landslide or near-landslide win for Mitt Romney. The polls, it was claimed, had a pro-Obama bias that skewed their results, and a website called UnSkewed Polls, to ‘correct’ the skew, was even created. Nate Silver, the sabermetrician turned polling aggregator of 538.com (at the New York Times), was the subject of particular opprobrium. Joe Scarborough of MSNBC had this to say:
Nate Silver says this is a 73.6 percent chance that the president is going to win? Nobody in that campaign thinks they have a 73 percent chance — they think they have a 50.1 percent chance of winning. And you talk to the Romney people, it’s the same thing. Both sides understand that it is close, and it could go either way. And anybody that thinks that this race is anything but a tossup right now is such an ideologue, they should be kept away from typewriters, computers, laptops and microphones for the next 10 days, because they’re jokes.
Dylan Byers of Politico mused that Silver might be a “one-term celebrity”, apparently referring to Silver’s accuracy in 2008 , but apparently not noticing his accuracy in 2010 as well. The nadir of these attacks, offered up by Dean Chambers, was not just innumerate, but vile; Silver, he wrote, is
a man of very small stature, a thin and effeminate man with a soft-sounding voice that sounds almost exactly like the ‘Mr. New Castrati’ voice used by Rush Limbaugh on his program.
[Chambers has removed this passage from his piece, but many, including Jennifer Ouellette at Cocktail Party Physics and Andrew Sullivan, captured it before it was taken out.] I’ve seen Silver on TV many times, but he’s usually sitting, so I have no clear idea of his size, and I have no idea what Chambers finds effeminate about him (unless this is a code to reveal that Silver is gay, something that a follower of Silver’s analyses would never know– I didn’t). But even if Chambers physical description were true, what could it possibly have to do with the veracity of Silver’s statistical analyses?
Averages of large numbers of polls have rarely if ever been as far off as these pundits would have had us believe, but in polling, as in science, the proof is in the pudding. As the results came in, Fox News analyst Karl Rove, one of those who had foreseen a Romney victory, seemed to enter a dissociative state, as his inability to assimilate the election results was painfully displayed before the viewing audience. Anchor Megyn Kelly eventually asked him, “Is this just math you do as a Republican to make yourself feel better?” So just as paleontologists can boast “we have the fossils, we win”, poll aggregators can now boast, “we have the election results, we win”.
To me, it seems that there is a class of related, and unfounded, positions taken up primarily by conservatives that have a common source: the determination that when the facts are inconvenient, they can be wished away. As scientists, we’ve seen it mostly in scientific issues: embryology, evolution, the big bang, global warming, the age of the Earth. Some conservatives don’t like the facts, so they create a parallel world of invented facts, or dream up conspiracy theories, and choose to dwell in an alternate reality that, unfortunately for them, isn’t real. In a curious convergence with postmodernism, the very notion of “fact” is disdained. Paul Krugman has noted that the problems are at root epistemological, constituting a “war on objectivity“, and that these conservative pundits have this problem not just with science, but with political reality as well. Andrew Sullivan is also mystified by the divorce from reality.
The poll-based statisticians, all of whom predicted an Obama victory, were broadly correct. Several analyses of which analyst did best have already appeared. Nate Silver has compared the pollsters, although Pollster notes it may be too early tell. The LA Times has self-assessments by several pundits and poll aggregators.
Being, as I said, a statistics aficionado, and a few weeks having passed since the election, I thought I’d compare the prognostications myself. I chose to compare the three poll aggregators that I followed during the run-up to the election.
All three did a state-by-state (+ District of Columbia) analysis, which, under the electoral college system, makes the most sense. Electoral-vote.com, run by Andrew Tanenbaum, the Votemaster, has the simplest aggregating algorithm: non-partisan polls from every state are arithmetically averaged over a one-week period starting with the most recent poll. Each candidate’s electoral votes are whatever the states he’s leading in add up to.
The Princeton Election Consortium, run by Sam Wang, takes the median of recent polls, assumes an error distribution to give a win probability, then calculates the probability of all 2^51 possible outcomes, creating a probability distribution over the possible electoral vote outcomes. Wang prefers to look at the median, but this distribution also has a mode.
Finally, Nate Silver at 538 takes a weighted average of state polls, where the weights discount known “house effects” of particular pollsters and the recency of the poll, and then throws in corrections for various other non-polling data (e.g. economics), national polling data, and things that effect polling (e.g. convention bounces). This all leads to a win probability, which again leads to a probability distribution of electoral vote outcomes. Silver emphasizes the mean, but this distribution also has a mode. When polling data is dense, and especially when the election date is near, all three should have about the same result. When polling data is sparse, Silver’s method, because it uses other sources of data for predictive inference, might be better.
So, how’d they do? We can look at how they did on state calls, electoral vote, and popular vote.
State (including District of Columbia) Calls.Nate Silver got all 51 right. Sam Wang got 50 right, missing on Florida, which he called for Romney, but noted it was on knife edge. The Votemaster got 49 right, called North Carolina a tie, and called Florida for Romney. It’s of course easy to call Texas, New York and California correctly, so the test is how they did in toss up and leaning states. They all did well, but advantage Nate.
Electoral Vote. Obama got 332 electoral votes. Nate Silver’s model prediction was 313, Sam Wang’s prediction was 305, and the Votemaster gave Obama 303.
In addition to their predictions, we can also add up the electoral votes Obama would get based on the state calls—I term this the “add-up” prediction. For this prediction, Nate gave Obama 332 (exactly correct), and Sam gave him 303 (because he got Florida wrong). The Votemaster’s prediction is the add-up prediction of his state calls, so it’s again 303. We could perhaps split the tied North Carolina electoral votes for the Votemaster, giving 310.5 for Obama, but this brings him closer to the final result only by counting for Obama votes from a state he lost.
For the two aggregators that showed full distributions of outcomes, we can also look at the mode of the distribution (remember, Nate prefers the mean of this distribution, Sam prefers the median). Nate’s mode is 332, again exactly right, while Sam’s mode is 303, although 332 was only slightly less likely an outcome in his final distribution. All of them did pretty well, each slightly underestimating Obama, but once again a slight advantage goes to Nate.
Popular Vote. The Votemaster does not make a prediction of national popular vote, so he can’t be evaluated on this criterion. Sam Wang doesn’t track the popular vote either (stressing, correctly, the individual state effects on the electoral college), but he did give every day what he calls the popular vote meta-margin, which is his estimate of the size of the shift in the national vote necessary to engender an electoral tie. Also, in his final prediction, he did make a popular vote prediction, a Bayesian estimate based on state and national polls.
Even more problematic than the predictions is knowing what the election results are. As Ezra Klein (see video 3) and Nate Silver have both noted in the last few days, there are still many votes to be counted, and most of them will be for Obama.
The compilations of major news sources, such as the New York Times or CBS News, are derived from the Associated Press, and have been stuck at one of two counts (Obama 62,211,250 vs. Romney 59,134,475 or Obama 62,615,406 vs. Romney 59,142,004) for some days now, with latest results not added.
Wikipedia is in general an unreliable source (perhaps more on this later). However, David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report, despite his article being for subscribers only, has been posting his invaluable collection of state results in Googledocs. The latest results are Obama 64,497,241, Romney 60,296,061, others 2,163,462, or 50.80%, 47.49%, 1.70%. (Rounding to the nearest whole number, this gives Romney 47% of the vote, a delicious irony noted by Ezra Klein in the video linked to above.) We could also calculate the two-party percentages, which are Obama 51.68%, Romney 48.32%
Nate Silver predicted an all-candidate popular vote distribution of Obama 50.8%, Romney 48.3%, others .9%. This is spot on for Obama, and a tad high for Romney. We can, however, convert Nate’s numbers to two-party percentages, and get 51.3 vs. 48.7; this slightly underestimates Obama. Sam Wang gave only a two-party vote prediction, 51.1 vs. 48.9; this is a slightly greater underestimation of Obama’s percentage. Sam’s final popular vote meta-margin was 2.76%, and this is closer to the actual margin (3.31% [all] or 3.36% [two-party]). So one last time, advantage Nate.
(I should note that Nate Silver’s and the Votemaster’s calls are not personal decisions, but entirely algorithmic, with Nate’s algorithm being complex, and the Votemaster’s very simple. Sam Wang’s calls are algorithmic up until election eve, at which point he makes predictions based on additional factors; for example, this year he expanded his usual one week polling window in making his final predictions. In fact, his last algorithmic prediction of the electoral vote, 312, was slightly better than his final prediction.)
More refined analyses of the predictions can be made (political science professors and graduate students are feverishly engaged in these analyses as you read this). We could also do individual state popular votes, and extend the results to Senate races, too. (Quicky analysis of the 33 Senate races: Silver 31 right, 2 wrong; the Votemaster 30 right, 0 wrong, 3 ties; Wang a bit harder to say, because he paid less attention to the Senate, but I believe he got all 33 right.) But overall, we can say that the pollsters (on whose work the predictions were based) and the aggregators did quite well. Of the three I followed closely for the presidential election, Nate Silver gets a slight nod.
The critics of statistics and the statisticians got several things wrong.
First, they did not understand that a 51-49 poll division, if based on large samples, doesn’t mean that the second candidate has a 49% chance of winning; rather, it is far smaller.
Second, they thought the polls were biased in Obama’s favor, but, if anything, they slightly underestimated his support and slightly overstated Romney’s (Obama’s margin will increase a bit further as the last votes are counted).
And finally, they thought that the predictions were manipulated by the biases of the aggregators. But the opinions of the aggregators enter only in setting up the initial algorithms (very simple for the Votemaster, most complex for Nate Silver), and in most cases seem to have been well chosen.
Rather, it is the pundits who engaged in what Sam Wang has rightly mocked as “motivated reasoning”; Andrew Sullivan has also noted the bizarre ability of pundits to precisely reverse the evidential meaning of the polls. It was the pundits who were guilty of picking through the polling data to find something that supported their preconceived notions (scientific creationism, anyone?); it was not the aggregators, who, especially in Silver’s case, were generally paragons of proper statistical humility.
If you’re not an American, perhaps you don’t know about “Black Friday.” That’s the Friday after Thanksgiving Day (which falls on Thursday), and that Friday traditionally marks the beginning of the Christmas shopping season. Many stores open at midnight or early in the morning, and have incredible bargains, like waffle makers for only two dollars. Consumers line up for hours to be the first through the doors, for there is only a finite number of bargain items.
This is evolutionary psychology at work, but instead of the meat from a felled mastodon, the modern humans are fighting for consumer goods. People (both consumers and employees) have been killed in the door-opening rushes, and, on a more amusing note, there are tussles over the goods (for videos and more information on these frenzies, go here). As far as I know, nobody was killed in this video taken two days ago, but it shows the madness of Americans that emerges on Black Friday.
Back in January, while Jerry was on a trip somewhere, I posted a poem by the writer and translator, E. V. Rieu, and went on to discuss the controversy over what exactly Homer meant by ‘wine-dark sea’. To liven up the post, I included what I thought was a photo of E. V. Rieu:
“I think the photo you show is of Anton Chekhov, not E.V. Rieu!”
Once this is pointed out, it’s obviously not Rieu – Rieu was born in 1887 and the man in this portrait is in his 40s. Neither the shirt not the glasses seem right for a photo that would therefore have been taken in the late 1920s or early 1930s.
Neither myself nor Jerry noticed Drew’s comment, but yesterday Eben van Tonder asked whether the photo of Rieu was indeed of him. I dug about a bit, and discovered to my embarrassment that the photo I posted is clearly a portrait of Anton Chekhov.
This minor misteak raises an interesting epistemological point. I thought I took the photo from Rieu’s Wikipedia page but the history of the page doesn’t say anything about deleting a photo, so I guess I just copied the first thing I found on Google. Here’s the lesson: a Google image search of the photo above reveals 139 results. The first page sources all identify him as E V Rieu, and that’s Google’s best guess. But if you dare to enter the second page of results, you come up with loads of Russian language sites, all of which name the face as that of Anton Chekhov. Indeed, apart from 10 ids as Rieu (including my post), the internet is convinced that this is Chekhov, which indeed it is.
As far as I can see on the internet there is no portrait of E. V. Rieu. I have tweeted two of the UK’s leading classicists – Mary Beard and Tom Holland – and they don’t know of a portrait either, but Tom helpfully said he would ask the Penguin Classics folk (who publish Rieu’s translations) whether they knew what he looked like.
What does all this have to do with Why Evolution Is True? Not a lot, but it reminds us – and me – to indicate my sources, and above all to go past the first page of a Google search.
I had a free day before my talk on Theology versus Science, so, after a big Scottish breakfast (minus the beans and black pudding), I went to the National Museum of Scotland, a wonderful place that combines Scottish technology, natural history, and human history. A few highlights:
My first Irish elk (actually a deer)! This species, Megalocerus giganteus, lived from about half a million years ago to about 10,000 years ago, and may have gone extinct owing in part to human predation. It had the largest antlers for its size of any deer we know of: the males had 90-pound antlers on a five-pound skull! And they had to be regrown each year! As I tell my students, imagine yourself walking around all day with a teenage girl on top of your head.
Imagine, too, the metabolic energy (and neck strength) that these antlers required—all in the name of sexual selection (males with big horns were more attractive to females). This was the first complete skeleton of the animal to be found, recovered on the Isle of Man in 1819. It’s thought to be about 12,500 years old:
A rear view of the skeleton showing the lovely open interior of the museum (exhibits are around the side):
A saber-toothed cat (they didn’t give the species, but it’s probably the amusingly-named Smilodon):
There is simply too much to show from the Museum, but I highly recommend a visit if you’re in Edinburgh. Entry is free.
Here’s what is supposedly the world’s largest example of scrimshaw: two sperm-whale jaws that were extensively carved by a sailor:
Jackie Stewart’s (now “Sir Jackie”) Formula 1 racing car is there, too. The cockpit is extraordinarily small! It’s the most successful Formula 1 chassis of all time, with 8 wins in 1971 and 1972, powered by a Ford-Cosworth DSV engine. The variety of stuff in the museum is astounding, and you can spend many hours in there, no matter what your interests:
Don’t miss the rooftop terrace, with a fine view of Edinburgh and the castle:
Solipsistic self portrait (in shadow) with Edinburgh. I had to climb up on a wall to take this, and the guard eventually yelled at me to get down, but not before I snapped this panorama:
Museum-going is of course thirsty work, so I repaired to the nearby Guildford Arms, my favorite pub in Edinburgh. It has a gorgeous Victorian interior and about ten real ales:
Which to choose? (This is only half of their selection):
I drink only one pint at lunch, so it was a hard choice between Harviestoun Bitter and Twisted and one of my favorite dark beers, Orkney Dark Island. I chose the former, but was able to accompany it with a steak-and-ale pie made with the Dark Island:
If you are in Edinburgh, the Guildford is only a short 2-minute walk from Waverley Station, the main railroad station. It’s one of my favorite pubs in all the UK.
I am in St. Andrews today, visiting an old friend, but will head to Glasgow for my talk tomorrow evening at Skeptics in the Pub (information here).
Caption: Articulated cranium and mandible (HU-2011-1). a. Left lateral view, with upper/lower cheek teeth angle (ca. 26°) and tentative reconstruction of the lacking parts (maxillae, nasals, parietals, and occipital bone). b. Upper cheek tooth series, with left P2-M3, in occlusal view. c. lower cheek tooth series, with left p2-m3, in labial-occlusal view. The corrugated aspect of the bony surface (3a, 3c) is interpreted as resulting to a long exposure to warm volcaniclastics. Scale bar: 50 mm.
