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.
It’s been a good day, what with the dosh we got for the Fancy Book, so how about some foxes jumping for joy.
You have to admit that this video beats “snakes on a plane” ten ways from Sunday. I know nothing about it, and may well have posted it before, but it’s worth watching again.
Note that the “pouncing” behavior is used by foxes in the wild, especially when they’re jumping on rodents hidden beneath the snow.
h/t: Doris
Let me confess at the outset that I am no expert on Iran’s uranium-enrichment capabilities, nor about the subtleties of diplomatic negotiations on nuclear weapons. All I know is what the average person would know who reads, say, the New York Times about our (and Europe’s) negotiations with Iran about lifting economic sanctions in return for their damping down their nuclear program. What I give here is just a layperson’s view.
Last night an agreement with Iran seemed out of sight; today it seems closer. But who seriously believes that any agreement will prevent the country from acquiring nuclear weapons? They aren’t going to stop their program entirely, maintaining that it’s for peaceful uses—and does anybody believe that?). If an agreement is reached it will only defer the building of weapons for 5 or 10 years. Meanwhile we lift the sanctions, giving Iran an economic leg up. And of course Iran’s history of cheating and hiding its weapons program is well known.
Obama has said that the U.S. won’t tolerate an Iran with nuclear weapons, but in fact he’s making sure that will happen—maybe just a bit later than it otherwise would. And he won’t be president much longer, either. If we’re truly afraid of an Iran with The Bomb, it’ll be our kids who actually face the problem.
I am not of course in favor of bombing Iran, though Israel may try to do that, but I see no long-term solution to a rogue theocratic state developing nuclear weaponry. It’s going to happen, and all we can do is hope that they have the sense not to use it—or sell it to fanatics who don’t mind dying if they can take a lot of us with them.
Well, my wildest dreams have been exceeded, for here is the final price of the multiply-autographed and Houle-illustrated copy of WEIT:
That is a LOT of medical aid, and Kelly and I are chuffed! All of this goes, of course, to Doctors Without Borders, and I hope they’ll be pleased, too. Thanks to all the people who autographed the book and made comments about naturalism; to Ben Goren, who suggested that I should send the book to Kelly for her to illustrate, despite my claim that such a request was too presumptuous, and who also provided a pawprint of the famous Baihu Goren; and, finally, to Kelly, who put in more work than all of us combined by illustrating and illuminating it—and procuring a velvet presentation box, preparing the announcement, and running the auction.
It is finished. Into thy hands, buyer, we commend this book.
Here’s a new cartoon from the Pictoral Theology site of reader Pliny the In Between:
Until recently I didn’t know of the English writer Nick Cohen (we Americans are so parochial!), but having read several of his pieces in the last few months, I’m becoming more and more impressed. Although I’m told he’s been in bad odor in the UK for having supported the Iraq War (shades of Christopher Hitchens), that is no reason to devalue the pieces he’s writing now defending good old-fashioned liberalism.
And, in the April issue of Standpoint, Cohen has perhaps the best essay on free speech that I’ve seen in several years, “Political correctness is devouring itself.” Not only does it reprise the classic arguments for free speech, but shows how the principle is being rapidly eroded by the very people who once espoused it—the Left. More and more, Cohen—as I—finds himself alienated from the Left, but no less disdainful of the Right, as the principles of the Enlightenment are effaced by identity politics, the mantra of “hate speech”, and other aspects of political correctness. It’s a sad situation when, for example, I find myself agreeing more with Fox News than with Jon Stewart about Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s new book (but more on that soon).
Read Cohen’s essay, please, as it’s a Professor Ceiling Cat Recommendation™. I’ll give just a few excerpts.
Cohen traces the resurgence of free-speech prohibitions to the attempt by some feminists to ban pornography without any empirical evidence showing its purported harms. He then reprises the understandable reasons why people are “wounded” by offensive speech but then adduces the main reason we should ignore such hurt feelings:
Few contemporary theorists grasp that people oppose censorship not because they respect the words of the speaker but because they fear the power of the censor. It is astonishing that professed liberals, of all people, could have torn up the old limits, when they couldn’t answer the obvious next question: who decides what is offensive?
If it is the representatives of a democracy, you have the tyranny of the majority to discriminate against “offensive” homosexuals, for instance. If it is a dictatorship, you have the whims of the ruling tyrant or party—which will inevitably find challenges to its rule and ideology offensive. If it is public or private institutions, they will decide that whistleblowers must be fired for damaging the bureaucracy, regardless of whether they told the truth in the public interest. If it is the military, they will suppress pictures of torture for fear of providing aid to the enemy. If it is the intelligence services they will say that leaks about illegal surveillance must be stopped because they might harm national security, just as pornographymight harm women. Why should they have to prove it, when liberals have assured them that there is no need to demonstrate actual damage?
That is positively Hitchensian. And I couldn’t help think of certain strains of left-wing atheism, the so-called “social justice warriors,” whose idea of of social justice is to obsessively comb the writings of other atheists, even dead ones, for rhetorical infelicities—when I read this:
Identity politics and the demands for freedom from offence it breeds create a Hobbesian world where everyone can demand the censorship of everyone else. There is no better proof of this than the fate of the politically correct themselves.
Strip away the appearance of a solid ideology, and you see the contradications. The tendency of the modern liberal-left to excuse radical Islam is supported by the politically correct belief that liberals should support a religion of the disadvantaged. In the name of liberalism, they fail to fight a creed that is sexist, racist, homophobic and, in its extreme forms, genocidal and totalitarian. Their political correctness has turned their principles inside out, and led them to abandon their beliefs in female and homosexual equality.
But the difficulties in pretending there are no conflicts between groups are as nothing compared to the pretence that there are no conflicts within them. Michael Ezra, a friend who is researching the growth of the illiberal intelligentsia, says that he is constantly reminded of Trotsky’s warning about the Bolshevik party’s claim that it represented the working class. A rapid descent follows, Trotsky said: “The organisation of the party substitutes itself for the party as a whole; then the Central Committee substitutes itself for the organisation; and finally the ‘dictator’ substitutes himself for the Central Committee.” Or in the case of feminist identity politics the people with the loudest voices substitute themselves for an entire gender.
. . . We have gone from the principle that only speech that incites crime can be banned to the principle that speech that incites gross offence can be banned to the principle that speech that provokes discomfort can be banned. This is not so much a slippery slope as a precipitous drop.
Cohen mentions a lot of censorship and free-speech bullying by the left: the Hirsi Ali retraction at Brandeis, the National Union of Students blacklist, and so on, and fixes the epicenter of free-speech opposition on college campuses. That’s absolutely correct.
Cohen’s is a long piece—five single-spaced pages printed out in 10-point type—but eminently worth reading. Cohen is a brave man: a liberal who doesn’t shy away from criticizing the excesses of liberalism, or from saying what a lot of us think but are reluctant to vocalize, as he does at the end of his piece:
Despite the Crash, the Occupy movement has fizzled out, and the American Left’s apparent candidate is Hillary Clinton, a shifty politician of no fixed conviction, who has been pretty much bought by Wall Street. And with today’s retreat come all the 1990s’ problems of speaking in private PC codes, which are as alien to ordinary voters as Nancy Mitford’s U and Non-U English. With the retreat comes the pathetic insistence on reforming language rather than reforming society, and the old seductive delusion that you can censor your way to a better tomorrow.
The rest of the population should worry about the future too. The politicians, bureaucrats, chief police officers and corporate leaders of tomorrow are at universities which teach that free debate and persuasion by argument are ideas so dangerous they must be banned as a threat to health and safety. Unless we challenge them in the most robust manner imaginable, whatever kind of country they grow up to preside over is unlikely to be a free one.
h/t: Ken
Instead of going to church today, we can have our special Alain de Botton-Approved Religion Substitute by worshiping at the church of Our Lady of Natural History. There is in fact a wonderful new discovery about frogs, one described in a new paper in the Zoological Journal of the Linnaean Society by Juan Guayasamin et al. (reference and free link below; there’s also a precis in LiveScience).
I can state the results concisely: the authors found a new species of frog in Ecuador that can dramatically change its body shape from spiky to smooth in a matter of only a few minutes. They then found another species, somewhat but not extremely closely related to the first, that can do the same thing. This kind of change in morphology, induced by the environment, is called phenotypic plasticity. And its observation in the frogs suggests two conclusions:
1. A lot more frogs can do this than have been described, but you need special conditions to see it, so it’s been largely undescribed. Other abilities of amphibians to change shape or color within a short time may also have been missed.
2. Since new frog species are often identified by their appearance after having been collected and pickled in alcohol, there may be described species that are identical to species with other names, but were misidentified because frogs collected at different stages of shape-changing could be mistaken for two different species. This is especially problematic because a large proportion of new species in both invertebrates and vertebrates (18% and 19%, respectively) are described from only a single specimen.
The paper gives other information as well, including genetic data, a phylogenetic analysis of the genus showing how the two shape-shifting species are related, other genetic information about differences between populations, and a description of the frog’s call and morphology, important for describing it as a new species. But those issues are of more professional interest and need not detain us.
In amphibians, most variation among individuals of a species is in color, but those differences are permanent (like hair and skin color in humans) and don’t change over time. Those traits that do change over time in amphibian species, like crests in newts or tubercules in frogs, change during the breeding season, usually in males as a way to attract mates, and then revert back after the season. They thus change seasonally rather than over just a few minutes, like the frog described in this paper. The rapidity of change in the species is thus novel.
The new species, Pristimantis mutabilis (note the species name!), was first spotted in 2006 in the cloud forests of the Ecuadorian Andes, but its ability to change shape wasn’t detected until three years later. Under normal conditions the frog is spiky, with tubercules and points, but it changes when they’re picked up. As the authors describe in the paper:
All individuals of Prismantis mutabilis presented a markedly tubercular skin texture when found on vegetation or hidden in moss during the night. Large tubercles were evident on the dorsum, upper and lower lips, upper eyelid, arms and legs. After frogs were captured, they all showed a sudden and drastic change in skin texture; all tubercles became reduced in size, and the dorsal skin became smooth or nearly smooth (i.e., few tubercles are visible, mainly on the upper eyelid and heel). When frogs were returned to mossy, wet en- vironments, they recovered a tuberculate skin texture. We speculate that explanatory variables involved in frog skin texture change are stress, humidity, and back-ground. Our observations do not support light availability as a source of texture variation as we observed skin texture change at day and night. The time rate of skin texture variation might depend on the variables mentioned above; we only have one quantitative measure, which is summarized in Figure 2.
Here’s Figure 2: As you can see, the spiky frogs become relatively smooth within five minutes after capture. It’s not yet clear what physiological/biochemical systems are involved in this dramatic change:
Here are two more pictures of individuals changing:
In this photo, from Figure 3, a sub-adult male is first photographed in its natural habitat (A) and then in the laboratory (B). You can see the change very clearly:
And here’s one more with the caption from the paper. These are small frogs, ranging in snout-vent length between 17 and 23 mm (0.7-0.9 inches):
The authors also identified another species that does the same thing: a congener (frog in the same genus) named Prismantes sobetes. Since the two shape-shifting species are not closely related—a phylogeny shows many other species are more closely related to either than the two are to each other—either the ability to change body texture has evolved twice, or it’s present in some of the intervening species since it evolved in a common ancestor, or it is the remnant of a feature in their common ancestor that has been lost in all other species in the group. Since we don’t know about the abilities of those other species to shape-shift, more work is needed to distinguish among these explanations.
This leaves one big question: Why on earth do the frogs do this? Let’s assume as a working hypothesis that the shape change is an evolved one, and that individuals that could change shape had a selective advantage in the ancestral lineage. (It’s also possible that this is simply a nonadaptive physiological response to stress.) The authors suggest, probably correctly, that the tubercles and spiky appearance help camouflage the frog in the cloud forest, where it often sits among moss, vegetation, and epiphytes (plants growing on other plants); and they also raise one possibility for how they change their shape:
We suggest that skin plasticity is associated with environmental camouflage rather than sexual selection or dimorphism. Pristimantis mutabilis and P. sobetes are geographically distributed in montane cloud forest habitats that are abundant in epiphytes, vegetation, and moss. In these habitats, skin texture that has the appearance of moss or detritus likely conceals the individual from visual predators, such as birds and arachnids. While the physiological mechanisms of how texture changes in such a short time are unknown, we speculate that it could involve allocation of more or less water to existing small structures (e.g. warts and tubercles) on the skin.
But what’s missing here is an explanation for the change itself, which I can’t find in the paper. That is, why do they change from the presumably camouflaged shape to a smooth shape? And here I, who have no knowledge about amphibians, come up short. Perhaps being smooth helps you escape from predators if you’re caught, or helps the frogs jump better. Experiments (some of them involving predation!) could help settle this. I suspect some readers who know more about frogs than I (I’m looking at you, Lou Jost) can suggest evolutionary reasons why shape-shifting may be adaptive. Please give your suggestions in the comments.
__________
Guayasmin, J. M. et al. 2015. Phenotypic plasticity raises questions for taxonomically important traits: a remarkable new Andean rainfrog (Pristimantis) with the ability to change skin texture. Zool. J. Linnaean Soc. 173:913-928.
h/t: Barry
Three oddments today, the first a trio of rescue birds from reader Joe Dickinson (and yes, non-domestic rescue animals count as wildlife!):
Didn’t know rescue birds counted as wildlife. Here are three from the Sitka Raptor Center, Alaska. First, a Northern Pygmy Owl (Glaucidium gnoma), then a Snowy Owl (Nyctea scandiaca) and, of course, a Bald Eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus).
From reader Harry C.:
While vacationing in Telluride, Colorado, I looked out the window and saw this bobcat (Lynx rufus). I took these with my cellphone. The third photo is my cat, Woodstock.
From Wikipedia:
In a Shawnee tale, the bobcat is outwitted by a rabbit, which gives rise to its spots. After trapping the rabbit in a tree, the bobcat is persuaded to build a fire, only to have the embers scattered on its fur, leaving it singed with dark brown spots.
Harry slipped in his own moggie which, according to Timetree, is about 7 million years diverged from the bobcat:
From reader Tim Anderson:
Here is a picture of part of the Milky Way showing the Southern Cross (just to the left of the dark area in the middle) and the Pointers (the two bright stars toward the bottom).
If you draw an imaginary line through the long axis of the Southern Cross and second one at right angles through the midpoint between the Pointers, the lines cross very close to the Southern Celestial Pole (true south).
The bright collection of stars above the dark area is the Running Chicken Nebula. [JAC: What??]
Taken with a Canon 70D paired with an 18-35mm zoom lens, made from a stack of 41 15-second exposures.
