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.
I don’t know what this insect is, but I’m sure one of my readers does. But first you have to see it! It took me a while to spot it, but of course that’s why it has evolved.
Have a gander (from Wimp.com’s photos):
h/t: Matthew Cobb, as usual!
There are three terms that have been bugging me because their definitions are elusive: “New Atheism,” “scientism,” and “Islamophobia.” Yesterday we dealt with “New Atheism.” In the past few days, Jason Rosenhouse and Massimo Pigliucci have duked it out on their websites about “scientism” (Massimo here, Jason here and here; read all three because the exchange is informative). I think Jason definitely has the upper hand in the scientism debate, which he sees as a distracting kerfuffle about semantics. On the other hand, while Massimo makes some good points—e.g., some questions have answers that aren’t found by science, like what is the mathematical relationship between the sides of a right triangle and its hypotenuse—he doesn’t show how philosophy or math answers questions about what exists in the real world, and he seems overly huffy about biologists’ neglect and criticism of philosophy.
So let’s take up the third term, “Islamophobia.” I hear it a lot, particularly when applied to Sam Harris. But I don’t know what it means, and nobody ever explicitly defines it. It is used by atheists often, but yet those same people never use the term “Christianophobia” or “Hinduphobia.” I can think of only two definitions:
It would help if those who throw these terms around would say what they mean, because “Islamophobia,” like “misogyny,” means very different things to different people.
No New Atheist I know of falls under the second definition, though Sam Harris has been accused of bigotry because he favors some forms of religiously-based profiling (and remember, there is a case to be made for that: it appears, for instance, that El Al does it). But even Harris is not a Muslim-hater, and his “profiling” stand is based not on dislike of Muslims, but on the danger he perceives that the faith’s adherents pose to air travel.
Are there other definitions of Islamophobia that make sense? I see it as a term that shouldn’t be used without an attendant definition.
I get a fair number of creationists trying to post, and I often (but not always) block them. If I let them post, it’s usually because they’re at least coherent and articulate—rarities among this crowd. The following comment by “Aaron” arrived two days ago, and my first impulse was to block him. But then I thought that I should let his comment go through, since it instantiates the quality of thought exuded by creationists. I am not going to respond in detail, except to say a few words, but feel free to have at it. Here’s what “Aaron” sent:
When will society wake up and realize how foolish the theory of evolution really is. There is so much that evolution does not and cannot explain when it comes to origins. For example, what came first – the heart or the brain. If the heart – what controlled its function absent the brain. If it was the brain – by what did it recieve [sic] blood absent the heart. If they came together – well that just rules out evolution completely. You see, it requires throwing out all levels of common sense to force your mind to believe in the incredulous [sic]. Take for instance the complexity of the brain. Even the most die hard [sic] evolutionist would agree that the most brilliant scientists in the world would not know where to begin to be able to design such a complex machine. Yet these same evolutionists would have us believe the brain designed itself. Enough said.
Indeed, more than enough!
I’ll just bring up two modern species that might bear some resemblance to our ancient ancestors. The first is a flatworm, which has a primitive brain but no heart or circulatory system. Nutrients and oxygen simply diffuse through the body wall into the animal.
Something a little bit more “advanced,” like velvet worms (onycophorans), have both brains and hearts, but no formal circulatory system (i.e., no closed system of blood vessels). The circulatory system is “open,” with a muscular pump (calling it a “heart” is generous) that simply circulates “hemolymph” (the “blood” of arthopods, mollucs, and other invertebrates) through the body cavity, directly bathing the organs. The hemolymph is then returned to the “heart” for more pumping. A “closed” circulatory system with a real self-contained network of blood vessels obviously evolved later.
Traits can develop in sequence, of course, all the while being adaptive, or two primitive and connected features could evolve in concert. There’s no problem with envisioning that.
As for the complexity of our brains, and how that disproves evolution, well, I’ll leave that to the readers as an exercise.
_____
UPDATE: The “Thinking Christian,” who has his/her own website, sent me this comment:
You’re a scientist, Dr. Coyne. You know better than to present a single, non-randomly chosen, anecdotal case as typifying a group. This message represents the quality of its own sender’s thought, not the thought that is “exuded” by a group.
LOL! Why, first of all, is it nonrandom? In what respect? Because I didn’t select one creationist out of all of them in the world? It’s “random” with respect to “creationists who write fairly literate posts on evolution websites” (it has only two errors of spelling or usage).
As far as this comment not typifying the thought of a group, all I can say is that the Thinking Christian hasn’t been doing his/her homework: this is actually perfectly representative of the views of many creationists. It instantiates not only the God-of-the-gaps argument with respect to the complexity of the brain, but also the “irreducible complexity” view that two organs that seem to need each other (although they actually don’t!) can’t have evolved together. It must have been God! Above all, it bespeaks the embarrassing ignorance of biology—willful or otherwise—evinced by creationists.
Thinking Christian, put your thinking cap back on.
There are a million mysteries in the Naked City of Biology, and some of them get solved. This is one of them, taken from the Japanese culture site Spoon & Tamago. It’s described in the post “The deep sea mystery circle—a love story”
Several decades ago, a Japanese “salary man” named Yoji Ookata quit his office job to pursue his real love—underwater photography. Recently, diving 80 feet down off the island of Amami Oshima (one of the Amami islands between Japan and Taiwan), Ookata saw something that nobody had ever seen before. It was a large, radially symmetrical pattern in the sand, and looked like this (note underwater camera for scale):
The site describes this bizarre structure:
On the seabed a geometric, circular structure measuring roughly 6.5 ft in diameter had been precisely carved from sand. It consisted of multiple ridges, symmetrically jutting out from the center, and appeared to be the work of an underwater artist, carefully working with tools. For its resemblance to crop circles, Ookata dubbed his new finding a “mystery circle,” and enlisted some colleagues at NHK [a Japanese television station] to help him investigate. In a television episode that aired last week titled “The Discovery of a Century: Deep Sea Mystery Circle,” the television crew revealed their findings and the unknown artist was unmasked.
What on earth could have caused that? Was it some kind of elaborate prank, like crop circles? Not likely: this structure wouldn’t retain its integrity for long in the face of currents. But what? Try to guess before you read further.
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It’s a fish! Or, rather, a single small male pufferfish who digs the structure in the sand:
Here it is digging:
Now why on earth would a small fish go to all this trouble to do this? (Note how elaborate the sculpture is, and how symmetrical.)
If you’re an evolutionary biologist, you might have guessed: sexual selection. A male sculpts this thing to attract females for mating. And the sculpture is decorated, too!
Underwater cameras showed that the artist was a small puffer fish who, using only his flapping fin, tirelessly worked day and night to carve the circular ridges. The unlikely artist – best known in Japan as a delicacy [JAC: perhaps this is the fugu, or edible pufferfish that has a toxic liver], albeit a potentially poisonous one – even takes small shells, cracks them, and lines the inner grooves of his sculpture as if decorating his piece. Further observation revealed that this “mysterious circle” was not just there to make the ocean floor look pretty. Attracted by the grooves and ridges, female puffer fish would find their way along the dark seabed to the male puffer fish where they would mate and lay eggs in the center of the circle. In fact, the scientists observed that the more ridges the circle contained, the more likely it was that the female would mate with the male. The little sea shells weren’t just in vain either. The observers believe that they serve as vital nutrients to the eggs as they hatch, and to the newborns.
What was fascinating was that the fish’s sculpture played another role. Through experiments back at their lab, the scientists showed that the grooves and ridges of the sculpture helped neutralize currents, protecting the eggs from being tossed around and potentially exposing them to predators.
It was a true story of love, craftsmanship and the desire to pass on descendants.
What we have here, then, is the underwater equivalent of the bowers built by Australian bowerbirds: elaborate structures to attract females (bowers, too, are often decorated, and you can see their variety among species here). One difference between the pufferfish’s structure (perhaps readers would care to name it?) and bowers is that the latter are built by birds solely to attract females, and are places where matings occur. Eggs are not laid in the bowers, but elsewhere in regular nests. The deadbeat male absconds for good after mating.
In both cases, it seems, the more elaborate the structure, and the more decorations it bears, the more attractive it is to females. We’re not sure why this is: perhaps it’s a sign to the female of the male’s vigor (indicating either good genes or the ability to dispense lots of good paternal care), or perhaps females simply have an inherent preference for more elaborate structures (I doubt this, but that was Darwin’s theory. He thought that females had an innate aesthetic sense that males evolved to cater to). Females may also have the ability to judge whether the ridges are good enough to protect their eggs.
Evidence favoring the good-genes model is that males of both bowerbirds and pufferfish don’t tend the eggs or offspring after they’re laid, so there aren’t any “direct benefits” a male able to build nice structures can give to his offspring (except making the ridges good enough to protect eggs from currents). Beyond that, males bequeath only genes. I asked my colleague Steve Pruett-Jones—an expert on the evolution of bird behavior, who also gets up early—about bowers, and he sent this answer:
Males never see the nests of females (as far as anyone knows). Despite the ‘bower’ and all of the unusual aspects of bowerbirds, the situation in bowerbirds is exactly the same as it is in birds of paradise or any other lekking species [JAC: “leks” are behaviors in which males of a species gather together in competitive displays to attract onlooking females], whether they be grouse, manakins, hummingbirds, fish, flies, etc. The question of why females should prefer males with elaborate bowers is exactly the same as why females of lekking species should prefer the males that they do. Females only get genes, nothing more. And, you know at least indirectly the literature on lekking species. There are lots and lots of correlations between aspects of male display and mating success, but very few data on the benefit to females of making the choices that they do. It is unlikely that there is only one answer, but people now generally accept the notion of good genes (as opposed to ‘no’ benefit through runaway sexual selection). Nevertheless, figuring out what those genes are and what they do for the female’s offspring remains a challenge.
There are other explanations for female preference, too, but I won’t go into them. A firm explanation for female preference still, as it does so often, eludes our grasp.
To close, here is an elaborate bower built by the male satin bowerbird, Ptilonorhynchus violaceus. Their bowers are often decorated with objects purloined from humans, and the females (ergo the males) seem to have a preference for blue. Experiments show that the females prefer to mate with males whose bowers are decorated more elaborately.
Females enter and inspect the bower before mating, and the males also perform an elaborate behavioral display as well. Here’s the artist and the consumer. Note the sexual dimorphism in color, itself an indication that sexual selection is going on here:
Here is the mating display of the male satin bowerbird. Note how the female keeps a close watch on his behavior:
And, just to show how far sexual selection can go, here’s an Attenborough piece of the masterpiece of bowers—that constructed by the Vogelkop bowerbird, Amblyornis inornata.
Sexual selection is a marvelous thing, sculpting both behavior and structures like the bower and “fish circle” (things that Dawkins would call “extended phenotypes”) throughout the animal kingdom.
h/t: Matthew Cobb, Steve Pruett-Jones
Since I renewed the offer of an autographed copy of WEIT (plus gratis cat drawing) in return for a donation of $100 or more to Doctors Without Borders, I’ve been swamped with requests. (I think the picture of Dozer getting fusses did the trick.) Since Wednesday there have been 18 new donations ranging from $100 up to $1000 (awesome!). The total amount we’ve given to DWB, including the proceeds from D. P. R. Jones’s eBay auction of two of my books, is now approaching $5000.
I’m grateful to all the generous readers who stepped up to the plate for such a good cause. In fact, I have run out of books! I had four paperbacks left and didn’t anticipate the response. But no worries: I’ve ordered more from my publisher, and nobody will go bookless.
Since I’m off to Europe next week, most books won’t go out until after mid-October, so if you’ve donated please be patient. I promise to come through and to do my best on the drawings. And for those of you who haven’t yet donated: the offer is still open.
To paraphrase George M. Cohan: Doctors Without Borders thanks you, D. P. R. Jones thanks you, and, most assuredly, I thank you.
by Matthew Cobb
At Reid Park Zoo in Tucson, Quito the baby Southern Tamandua (aka a lesser anteater) is weighed in a routine procedure. He’s less than two weeks old… To keep him happy, the zookeepers give him this teddy bear to cling onto (photos and info from www.zooborns.com):
Here’s a close-up of him being held by keeper Leslie:
And here he is, his arms around his bear pal, on the scales:
Southern Tamanduas, Tamandua tetradactyla, are found in scrubland in South America east of the Andes. The BBC website says it is:
An anteater with strong claws and a long, powerful, prehensile tail. Its coat is fawn to dark brown, and in some individuals from the south-eastern part of its range there is a black or dark brown ‘collar’ running from the shoulders to the rump. The nose and tail only have very short, sparse fur. As with otheranteaters, the nose and jaws are very long, the ears and eyes small, and the tongue can be extended 40cm from the mouth.
Tamanduas are solitary, active both during the day and the night, and spend a large proportion of their time in trees, using their long claws and prehensile tails for grip. The tail also acts as a prop on the ground, allowing the animal to stand on its hind legs and slash at attackers with its claws. They break open social insect nests with their claws, and then use their long sticky tongues to eat as many as they can very fast. They avoid solider ants or termites, and move on when the insects’ defences start to take action. They will also attack bees’ nests and feed on the grubs and honey.
Mating takes place in the autumn, and a single young is born in the spring after a 130-150 day gestation period. The young are born well developed, with a coat that ranges from white to black and lacks the adult markings. The youngster clings onto its mother’s back and is carried around, but is often hung on a branch nearby a favourite feeding spot or left in a nest of leaves.
Here’s a picture of what Quito might look like when he’s a little older (this one is three months old). As we’ve often noted here, there is a strong tendency for mammals to change their markings from infancy, for reasons (both genetic and evolutionary) that aren’t entirely clear, but must have something to do with their lifestyle and predation risks.
Finally, mother Tamanduas can take their babies for a ride—you can see why Quito is clinging to the bear:
And here’s a comparison of a Tamanduan foot with that of other Xenarthra – a two-toed sloth, a three-toed sloth and an armadillo.. As the Tamandua’s Latin name indicates, it has four toes:
The Tamandua has been separated from you and I for over 100 MYr, and from the sloth for over 55 MYr, says timetree.org . Photos from here, here, here and here.
h/t Sam Pearson on Twitter
People—usually critics of “New Atheism” (NA)—keep repeating that there’s nothing “new” about it except perhaps the stridency of its advocates. And indeed, not much that New Atheists have said hasn’t been said already, as one can see by reading Hitchens’s The Portable Atheist (highly recommended). The novelty of NA is the topic of short piece by Lois Lee in The Guardian’s “Comment is Free” section,” titled “What does the ‘new’ in ‘new atheism’ really mean?”
The piece is pretty lame: its main point seems to be that there are many “denominations” of NA (it mentions another CiF piece on “atheism +”), and of course we knew that already, since we recognize the disparate interests and foci of different New Atheists. Lee’s one attempt to define NA, however, intrigued me for two reasons. First, it incorporates the dread word “scientism” into the definition (my emphasis):
In fact, when Plessentin and Zenk organised a conference on the topic last year, there was some consensus in support of a common sense definition of new atheism. Most identified new atheism with a particular and identifiable cultural movement, necessarily associated with the work of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens. Despite the notable differences in their approaches and interests, the combined work of these authors describe the cultural movement as a whole: a movement that is critical of “religion” and “theism”, promotes radical secularism and takes a view which is particularly informed by contemporary science (especially genetics and cognitive science) and scientism. This general definition makes it possible to use the label as a measure of other things, not merely as a way of identifying a body of literature and broadcasts by these particular people.
Well, I disagree with the characterization of “radical secularism” (I’m not exactly sure what that is, anyway), as well as the pejorative term “scientism” (why isn’t “science” sufficient?). I don’t know any of the New Atheists, at least of the more prominent ones, who think that all questions are of interest only insofar as they can be answered scientifically, or who have no interest in the arts or humanities.
The problem is that Lee doesn’t define scientism, and since the word almost always is intended to have bad connotations, the reader is left with a bad taste in the mouth about NA. But if “scientism” means the view that “all questions about what really exists in the universe are amenable only to empirical observation, reason, and agreement among different observers,” then yes, I am guilty of scientism, though some other NAs aren’t.
But this definition got me thinking about what does distinguish New Atheists from “Old” Atheists like Bertrand Russell, Sartre, Camus, and the like. I don’t want to bang on about this at length, for everyone has an answer and, in the end, distinguishing NAs from OAs isn’t nearly important as fighting for our beliefs. But I did think of four things that distinguish NAs from OAs, and here they are:
1. The repeated and strong emphasis on having evidence for your beliefs. Although this has always been a theme of atheists—after all, the absence of evidence is the reason most people are atheists—the force with which we challenge theists to document and support their beliefs is something new. I wasn’t around in Bertrand Russell’s day, but I doubt there were as many debates between atheists and believers then. The Internet (reason #4) is one reason for their proliferation.
2. The emphasis on science. This is one aspect of NA that I think Lee gets right, and it’s closely connected with #1. If you’re science oriented, as so many NAs are, then you’ll naturally challenge believers on the evidence. This, I think, is one reason why NA has been so successful, for the faithful simply have no evidence.
Just to take the “four horsemen”: Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist, Sam Harris got his Ph.D in neurobiology, Dan Dennett works on the philosophy of science and knows a ton about evolution and neuroscience, and Hitchens, though a journalist, was deeply read in science and was friends with the other three (see #3 below). I got Hitchens, for example, to endorse WEIT. And don’t forget Victor Stenger and Larry Krauss, both physicists and vociferous atheists. Steve Pinker is a psychologist with close ties to data (see The Better Angels of Our Nature).
The connection between science and disbelief is an obvious one, but seems much stronger in NA than OA.
3. Collaboration and friendship between prominent NAs. The Four Horsemen, of course, were a pals before Hitchens died, and I also know all three living ones pretty well. Most of them know Krauss, Stenger, Pinker, Grayling and Shermer, and several are good friends with Ayaan Hirsi Ali. (The NAs have been dominated by males—largely because the Four Horsemen all wrote bestselling books—but that dominance is, I hope, on the wane.) The collaborative and interactive nature of many prominent New Atheists has created a synergism that helps spread the word. I am not aware that prominent OAs formed their own community or had much interaction around nonbelief.
4. We have the Internet. Because of the Internet, the sense of community among atheist leaders has grown to encompass the rest of us who aren’t as prominent. Websites like those of Harris and Dawkins, blogs—or website collections like Freethought Blogs—provide an online community for freethinkers that simply couldn’t exist without the internet. A good essay (like the one Harris put up yesterday) is instantly disseminated throughout the community, heartening us all. And through discussions on websites, we recognize kindred (or nonkindred!) atheist spirits. By lessening our isolation, that also strengthens our movement.
This all seems obvious, but, lacking free will, I am compelled to put down what I see as the dominant traits distinguishing NAs from OAs. Let me add that the common accusation that we are more vociferous and strident than OAs is, I think, wrong. What is new is not that individual voices are louder, but that the community’s voice is louder. A collective voice is more powerful than a solitary one, however “strident” one person may be. To the extent that we become connected, so we become more willing to speak up, and that creates a self-perpetuating increase in the volume of our message. The faithful are beginning to hear that collective voice, and they are running scared. That wasn’t the case for OA, which never posed a serious challenge to faith.
It’s all encompassed in this cartoon:
I’m sure most readers have their take on what, if anything, is “new” about NA, and I invite them to weigh in below.
p.s. For a good critique of the scientism canard, see Jason Rosenhouse’s new post, “More sillness about scientism, part one.“
I’m not an advocate of violence to settle disputes (I was a certified conscientious objector as a youth), but the behavior of Muslim extremists—nay, Islam in general—against women has been so vile that it’s hard not to suppress a frisson of pleasure when the tables are turned. Here’s a new report from CNN. The title is clever, too.
Putting the ‘jab’ in ‘hijab’: Girls beat up Iran cleric when he tells them to cover up
Tehran, Iran (CNN) — They may be a far cry from their Western counterparts fighting for the acceptance to breast feed — or go topless — in public, but two girls clobbered a cleric recently in a small town in Iran, when he admonished one of them to cover herself more completely.
The cleric said he asked “politely,” but the girl’s angry reaction and some pugilistic double-teaming with her friend landed the holy man in the hospital, according to an account in the semi-official Mehr News Agency.
Hojatoleslam Ali Beheshti says he encountered the girls on his way to the mosque in the village of Shahmirzad for noon prayers in late August.
He told one of the girls to cover up, the report said.
“She responded by telling me to cover my eyes, which was very insulting to me,” Beheshti said. So he asked her a second time to cover up and also to put a lid on what he felt was verbal abuse.
She hit the man of the cloth and he hit the ground.
“I don’t remember what happened after that,” he said. “I just felt her kicks and heard her insults.”
I love this bit: “She responded by telling me to cover my eyes, which was very insulting to me”.
h/t: Sigmund