Curiosity sends nice high-res photo from Mars

August 28, 2012 • 9:36 am

Courtesy of The Guardian, we have a lovely high-resolution photo taken by the Mars rover Curiosity and some description of what it means.  The first thing you’ll see in the photo is that this mountain has strata, and we’ll need an explanation for that, since on Earth strata are sedimentary rocks, and that means water.

NASA is showing off a high-resolution colour picture sent back by the Mars rover Curiosity, detailing the mountain where scientists plan to focus their search for the chemical ingredients of life.

The image reveals distinct tiers near the base of the three-mile-high mountain that rises from the floor of Gale Crater, where Curiosity landed on 6 August.

Scientists estimate it will be a year before the rover reaches the layers of interest at the foot of the mountain, 6.2 miles from the landing site.

From earlier orbital imagery, the layers appear to contain clays and other hydrated minerals that form in the presence of water, Nasa has said.

Previous missions to Mars have uncovered strong evidence for vast amounts of water flowing over its surface in the past. Curiosity was dispatched to hunt for organic materials and other chemistry considered necessary for life to evolve.

In this picture, the layers above where scientists expect to find hydrated minerals show sharp tilts, offering a strong hint of dramatic changes in Gale Crater, which is located in the planet’s southern hemisphere near its equator.

A lot of the geological excitement here centers around the search for hydrated minerals, which form only in the presence of water; this would give indisputable evidence for the presence of liquid water on that planet at some time, at least, and we all know why that’s interesting! (Mars has frozen water, of course—its polar caps—but the existence of water as a liquid is still controversial.

In this picture, the layers above where scientists expect to find hydrated minerals show sharp tilts, offering a strong hint of dramatic changes in Gale Crater, which is located in the planet’s southern hemisphere near its equator.

Mount Sharp, the name given to the towering formation at the centre of the crater, is believed to be the remains of sediment that once completely filled the 96-mile-wide basin.

“This is a spectacular feature that we’re seeing very early,” said John Grotzinger, a project scientist with the California Institute of Technology. “We can sense that there is a big change on Mount Sharp.”

The higher layers are steeply slanted relative to the layers of underlying rock, the reverse of similar features found in the Grand Canyon.

“The layers are tilted in the Grand Canyon due to plate tectonics, so it’s typical to see older layers be more deformed and more rotated than the ones above them,” Grotzinger said. “In this case you have flat-line layers on Mars overlaid by tilted layers. The science team, of course, is deliberating over what this means.

“This thing just kind of jumped out at us as being something very different from what we ever expected.”

Take out plate tectonics and the most likely explanation for the angled layers has to do with the physical manner in which they were built up, such as being deposited by wind or by water. “On Earth there’s a whole host of mechanisms that can generate inclined strata,” Grotzinger said. “Probably we’re going to have to drive up there to see what those strata are made of.”

A fish with genitals on its head

August 28, 2012 • 4:26 am

The temptation to call this a dickheaded fish is overwhelming, but the females also have genitals in the same place.  And it’s an evolutionary mystery.

I saw this on National Geographic Daily News (h/t: M. Cobb), which gave a picture of the new species, Phallostethus cuulong, and noted that it’s the 22nd member of its family (Phallostethidae [“penis chest”]) to be described. All of these species have genitals on the ventral (lower) side of their heads.  They’re also called “priapiumfish,” another name based on their genitals (biologists are just as salacious as everyone else). 

Here are the male (top) and female (bottom) from the Nat Geo article; you can see the male’s genitals on the head:

(From the paper):Freshly-collected specimens of Phallostethus cuulong. A) CTU-P 2494, male, 22.5 mm SL, Tra Vinh Province,Vietnam; B) CTU-P 2327, female, 23.7 mm SL, Sóc Trăng Province, Vietnam. Photographed and retouched by L.X. Tran and K. Shibukawa, respectively

 

The species, captured in the Mekong in Vietnam is described in a new paper by Kochi Shibukawa et al. (reference and link below) in Zootaxa.

The fish have internal fertilization, so the male has an intromittent organ on the head which he inserts into the female’s urogenital opening. Here are better pictures of the male and female genitalia, also from the paper:

Head and anterior part of the body of male

The males have a clasping organ, the ctenactinium, which is used to hold onto the female when mating; here’s a cleared and stained speciment of a male clearly showing the genital apparatus:

Lateral view of head and anterior part of body of cleared and stained specimen of Phallostethus cuulong. CTU-P 5020, male, 23.5 mm SL. Photographed by L.X. Tran.

Sadly, the paper doesn’t describe the behavior (it’s a straight morphological and taxonomic description), but the Nat Geo article helps answer at least one of the two obvious questions.

1. How do they mate?  This gives new meaning to the phrase “dancing cheek to cheek,” since they obviously have to put their genitals next to each other; one of the fish must therefore be upside down. Nat Geo describes the act, obviously hard to see since it requires keeping them alive in captivity and being there at the right time:

As with all Phallostethus—“penis chest” in Greek—species, the male uses its bony “priapium” to clasp a female while he inserts sperm into her urogenital opening, also located on the head, said Lynne Parenti, curator of fishes at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.

Parenti remembers seeing another species of priapiumfish mate at a lab in Singapore. Attached at the head and together forming a v, the fish “looked like a little pair of scissors, darting around the tank together,” she said.

For many fish, such as guppies, mating is almost instantaneous, but priapiumfish “actually couple, staying together for a remarkable period of time,” she noted.

2. How did it evolve? To me, this is the really interesting question. But the Nat Geo article doesn’t offer much help:

Partly due to these overlooked and possibly unappealing study sites, the fish “tend to be ignored by a lot of biologists,” she said.

That may explain why the fish’s front-loaded genitalia remains an evolutionary mystery, she added.

There are some clues, though: For one thing, the Phallostethidae family is part of a larger group that includes many species that fertilize their eggs internally. (The vast majority of fish species fertilize their eggs outside the body.)

Many of the males in the family have physical modifications that allow them to internally fertilize females, so it makes sense that priapiumfish would also have evolved an adaptation.

For another thing, head-to-head mating is apparently “a very efficient way to do it,” Parenti added. While examining preserved female priapiumfish, she has found oviducts filled with sperm, meaning almost all the eggs had been fertilized.

Well, presumably the fish’s relatives, whose genitals are in the normal place further back on the body, can also mate efficiently, so that’s not much of a hypothesis. And other fish also have similar types of genital modifications. Perhaps something about the fish’s environment—shallow rivers, perhaps in areas with low visibility—explains it, but who knows?

And I’m curious about how genitals on the head evolved from genitals on the rear: what were the intermediate stages of evolution, and how were they adaptive? During that evolutionary process, the male and female genitals would have to be placed in a way that made copulation easy, so perhaps the change in position evolved concurrently in both sexes.

I have no answers here, but maybe some readers with an ichthyological bent can offer solutions.

__________

Shibukawa, K., D. D. Tran, and L X. Tran. 2012. Phallostethus cuulong, a new species of priapiumfish (Actinopterygii: Atheriniformed: Phallotstehidae) from the Vietnamese Mekong. Zootaxa 3363:45-51.

Fred Astaire Week: Fred and Rita Hayworth

August 27, 2012 • 6:19 pm

I love this clip—it’s full of energy and brio. How can you not smile when you watch it? Rita Hayworth makes a great partner for Astaire, and although she can’t match his grace (nobody possibly could), she matches his energy and still makes it look effortless.

They dance to “The Shorty George,” whose name comes from the dancer in the second video below.  The song is by Jerome Kern, and the orchestra conducted by Xavier Cugat. As far as I know, the YouTube notes below are completely accurate:

You Were Never Lovelier was Rita’s third and last film released in 1942 and her second time as Fred Astaire’s dancing partner. Except for “The Shorty George” number, all their dances were rehearsed in the attic of a funeral parlor! They had to stop every time a funeral procession came through and couldn’t start up again until all the mourners had left. But if those conditions disrupted rehearsals, it didn’t show on-screen. The results were fabulous. Rita later called this movie one of her favorites, but it was also memorable to her for another reason. During rehearsals of “The Shorty George”, Rita experienced one of her “most embarrassing” moments when she fell down during the dance and knocked herself out cold! The film is set in what was one of Hollywood’s favorite locales at the time, Buenos Aires, and also features Xavier Cugat and his Orchestra to add to the Latin flavor of this memorable musical.

“Shorty George” Snowden was a renowned dancer at the Savoy, one of New York’s great black ballrooms of the jazz era.  He’s said to be the one who invented the name “Lindy Hop,” a famous dance of the 30s and 40s that started in Harlem (my parents could do it!). Here’s Shorty Lindy Hopping with his much larger partner:

Shorty George Snowden was the top dancer in the Savoy Ballroom from its opening in 1927 into the early 30’s, when he formed the first professional Lindy Hop troupe, the Shorty Snowden Dancers. They performed with the Paul Whiteman Orchestra at the Paradise Club downtown through most of the thirties.

Although he was barely five feet tall, Snowden made his height an asset rather than a liability. With comic genius, he parodied himself in his signature “Shorty George” step, in which his bent his knees, swinging from side to side, exaggerating his closeness to the ground. [JAC: note that Astaire does this at the beginning of the dance above, and both Astaire and Hayworth do it at 3:51.]

Shorty’s partner, Big Bea, towered over him. They often ended their routines in a comic move in which she carried him off the dance floor on her back. Frankie Manning says that this move inspired him to create his first air step, in which his partner started out on his back and then she flipped over his head and landed on the ground. Ironically, Shorty was defeated by Manning in a major competition when Manning introducted this first air step in 1935. Manning replaced Snowden as reigning king of the Savoy.

A big insect saved from extinction

August 27, 2012 • 11:36 am

In March I did a post about the Lord Howe Island stick insect Dryococelis australis, the heaviest flightless insect in the world (0.9 oz or 25 gm). Go have a look at the pictures and read the story.  Anyhow, it was nearly extinct, but a few were recovered by climbers on a spire of rock (“Ball’s Pyramid”) offshore of Lord Howe (these islands are in the Tasman Sea between Australia and New Zealand). The insects are now being bred in captivity for reintroduction in the wild.

Over at Scientific American, Bora Zivkovic has posted a really lovely video of one of these stick insects hatching in the Melbourne Zoo, where they’re being brought back from extinction. (Becky Crew, also at Sci Am, give a fuller story).

 

Seventeen beheaded by Taliban for mixed-sex dancing

August 27, 2012 • 8:49 am

The horrors of extreme Islam cannot be exaggerated. Reuters reports today a horrible mass murder in Afghanistan, occasioned by—dancing!

Fifteen men and two women were found beheaded in Afghanistan’s southern Helmand province on Monday, punishment meted out by Taliban insurgents for a mixed-sex party with music and dancing, officials said.

The bodies were found in a house near the Musa Qala district, about 75 km (46 miles) north of the provincial capital Lashkar Gah, said district governor Nimatullah, who only goes by one name.

“The victims threw a late-night dance and music party when the Taliban attacked” on Sunday night, Nimatullah told Reuters.

There were no immediate claims of responsibility.

In ultra-conservative Afghanistan, men and women do not usually mingle unless they are related, and parties involving both genders together are rare and highly secretive affairs.

I hope that, out of mercy, the murdering thugs shot the victims before beheading them, for having one’s head severed with a knife is a slow and horrible way to die. I’ve watched one video of such a murder, and it still haunts me.

Seventeen deaths—seventeen families and groups of friends in mourning, all because one religion mandates murder for dancing with someone of the opposite sex.

I would like to see Muslims to condemn this brutality, but judging from the past, and by one response to a twitter post by Richard Dawkins on this, I don’t have much hope (Dawkins’s quote is from a longer Reuters piece):

Kitteh contest: Mingus

August 27, 2012 • 7:32 am

Reader James presents his cat in a very elegant pose:

Here is a photo of my cat Mingus, named after the jazz bassist Charles Mingus. A friend bought him for us as a surprise gift from a couple who got him from a rescue home in Putney (London). Unfortunately, they found their larger cat was bullying him, so they had to let him go. We guess he was 7-weeks when we got him, and he’s now 7 months old.

He was very apprehensive and jumpy at first, but eventually seemed to realize he now has a permanent home. He loves Post-It notes, and has learned how to ‘fetch’ them. He also has a habit of jumping on my shoulder after I get out of the shower to lick my (black) hair. I presume he wonders why I let my fur get soaking wet.

Our friend Hannah Steedman recently came round to take pictures of him for a sketch she’s planning to do and caught this ‘hiding-in-the-British-Museum’ pose. As you can see, he’s feeling right at home!

Mingus has also been used in an online post about how to toilet-train your cat.

Catholics proclaim complete harmony between science and their faith, trot out Aquinas again

August 27, 2012 • 6:23 am

As science advances, shrinking the domain of explanation previously provided by religion, the faithful frantically seek ways to show that religious dogma remains compatible with science.  All too often this involves retrofitting: retinkering with or reconceiving of scripture in a way that comports what you must believe (if you accept science) with what you want to believe (your faith).

In January of this year the Pope established a “science and faith” foundation designed to wrest some kind of harmony out of these disparate magisteria. As The Catholic News Agency reported:

Pope Benedict XVI launched a new foundation at the Vatican aimed at building a “philosophical bridge” between science and theology.

“I don’t think most people necessarily see science and faith as being opposed but I do think there is confusion as to where to put faith and where to put science in their life,” said executive director Father Tomasz Trafny.

“So the question for us is how to offer a coherent vision of society, culture and the human being to people who would like to understand where to put these dimensions – the spiritual and religious and the scientific,” he told CNA on Jan. 19.

The Science and Faith Foundation will be headquartered at the Holy See under the leadership of Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, President of the Pontifical Council for Culture.

This foundation was mentioned in a meeting this week in Rimini, Italy, where two religious academics, Ian Tattersall of the American Museum of Natural History (a well known anthropologist who works on human evolution) and William E. Carroll, a theologian at Oxford, firmly proclaimed that science and faith are best friends forever.

Their reasons will be familiar to readers. As CNA reported yesterday, Tattersall and Carroll called for a productive dialogue between science and faith.  They also engaged in a bit of theology:

“A proper understanding of creation, especially an understanding set forth by a thinker such as Thomas Aquinas, helps us to see that there is no conflict between evolutionary biology or any of the natural sciences and a fundamental understanding that all that ‘is’, is caused by God,” Professor William E. Carroll of Oxford University’s theology faculty told CNA Aug. 22.

“Evolutionary biology is that area of science which helps us to understand better the origin and development of human beings, but whatever those arguments are in evolutionary biology they, in principle, do not conflict with the fundamental understanding that all that ‘is’ is created by God,” Carroll said.

. . . “God causes the world to be the kind of world which it is and the natural sciences help to disclose what kind of a world we have,” Carroll explained.

. . . “One of the great insights of the Pope, which he continually emphasizes, is an enlargement of reason, a recognition that rationality is not limited to what the natural sciences do but that there’s a larger sense of rationality that includes both philosophy and theology,” Carroll said.

Who is to blame for the Big Rift between science and religion? One guess:

[Carroll] suggested that the recent debate has occasionally become confused by the interventions of high-profile scientists like Richard Dawkins or Lawrence Krauss.

Both, he claimed, “are really ignorant of philosophy and theology, and so they make all sorts of goofy philosophical and theological claims.”

Sorry, but the debate has been “confused” ever since science began showing that the claims of religion, including Catholicism, are not credible. And that debate has been lively since 1896, when Andrew Dickson White, co-founder of Cornell University, published his two volume anti-accommodationist opus History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom. It continued, of course, with the writings of atheists like Bertrand Russell, H. L. Mencken, and Carl Sagan. (If you want to see how stridently anti-religious the Old Atheism could be, read Bertrand Russell’s “An outline of intellectual rubbish.“)

The key to Carroll’s weaselly accommodationism lies in two phrases: “a proper understanding of creation” and “whatever those arguments are in evolutionary biology they, in principle, do not conflict with the fundamental understanding that all that ‘is’ is created by God” (my emphases).

“Proper understanding,” when spoken by a theologian, always means “my understanding,” that is, the speaker’s own interpretation of scripture.  And that translates further to this: “I am the authority on which parts of the Bible were meant literally, and which metaphorically.” The fact is that Carroll’s understanding of the Bible and of God is no better than anyone else’s. Yes, we know that science has rendered huge swaths of religion—nearly all of it, in fact—unbelievable. But the faithful still want to hold onto some science-defying religious truths, like the reality of Adam and Eve, the existence of a soul and Original Sin, the virgin birth of Jesus, and Jesus’s resurrection.  Does Carroll accept, then, the reality of Adam and Eve as the progenitors of humanity, a doctrine officially affirmed by the church in Humani Generis (article 37)?  That, of course, is absolutely contradicted by recent findings in population genetics showing that modern humans could never have had a population smaller than about 1200.

And no conflicts “in principle”? All that means is that with the proper tweaking of theology, reading bits of it (without justification) as metaphor, we can comport some bits of the Bible with scripture. The problem is that many Americans (about 40%), a sizable fraction of Christians and Jews in other lands, and nearly all Muslims don’t accept that principle, and see the Genesis story or some kind of instantaneous creation as literally true. So Carroll is simply telling Catholics how to read the Bible. And, as usual Aquinas is dragged out as The Great Metaphorizer, ignoring the many other Catholic theologians (including the Pope himself) who see parts of the Bible as absolutely incompatible with science.

And was Aquinas really such a metaphorizer? Not nearly as much as most people think. While he’s famous for saying that scripture could be read metaphorically, he actually argued that scripture could be read both literally and metaphorically; in other words, he waffled. And if there was a conflict, scripture won.  Here’s Aquinas’s discussion of Paradise from Question 102, Article 1, of Summa Theologica:

On the contrary, Augustine says (Gen. ad lit. viii, 1): “Three general opinions prevail about paradise. Some understand a place merely corporeal; others a place entirely spiritual; while others, whose opinion, I confess, hold that paradise was both corporeal and spiritual.”

I answer that, As Augustine says (De Civ. Dei xiii, 21): “Nothing prevents us from holding, within proper limits, a spiritual paradise; so long as we believe in the truth of the events narrated as having there occurred.” For whatever Scripture tells us about paradise is set down as matter of history; and wherever Scripture makes use of this method, we must hold to the historical truth of the narrative as a foundation of whatever spiritual explanation we may offer. And so paradise, as Isidore says (Etym. xiv, 3), “is a place situated in the east, its name being the Greek for garden.” It was fitting that it should be in the east; for it is to be believed that it was situated in the most excellent part of the earth. Now the east is the right hand on the heavens, as the Philosopher explains (De Coel. ii, 2); and the right hand is nobler than the left: hence it was fitting that God should place the earthly paradise in the east. [My bolding of the answer.]

So Aquinas was a waffler, at least on the question of Paradise, but seems to come down on its historicity. People like Carroll always ignore then when they tout Aquinas as the prescient, science-friendly theologian.

Aquinas’s overall views on things relevant to evolution seem to have been the following (see here and here; the quote below is from an ID proponent but gives the relevant references to Aquinas’s views):

Aquinas believed in a 6,000-year-old Earth. Far from believing in an old Earth, he was actually inclined to believe that the work of the “six days” in Genesis 1 was actually accomplished in an instant, and that plants and animals were simultaneously created by God at the very beginning of time. Aquinas also maintained that plants and animals were made by God, according to their kind (with the exception of those that were capable of arising by spontaneous generation). Additionally, Aquinas taught that the bodies of Adam and Eve must have been produced immediately by God, and by God alone. Finally, Aquinas held that Christians were bound to believe that Adam and Eve lived in a real Paradise, that Adam’s descendants, Seth, Enosh, Kenan, Mahalalel, Jared, Enoch, Methuselah, Lamech and Noah, were all real historical figures, and that Enoch was Adam’s great-great-great-great-grandson. For Aquinas, no Christian could deny that Lamech begat Noah, or that Elcana begat the prophet Samuel, without also denying Scripture.

So let us hear no more about Aquinas showing that there’s no conflict between the Bible and science, since the Bible could be read as metaphor. It seems to be Carroll, not Dawkins or Krauss, who displays his ignorance of theology—and he’s a theologian! Actually, I’m sure he knows about Aquinas’s views, but is merely dissembling to pretend that there’s no conflict between science and faith.

Let me add one more fact about Catholicism: the Church officially accepts the existence of demons that can possess people, as evidenced by many church statements and the existence of official church exorcists (there’s a Head Exorcist in the Vatican). Does Carroll want to claim that there’s no conflict between science and demons?

As for Tattersall, he trots out the same tired arguments for accommodationism:

“Science is a different way of knowing than spiritual faith, both answer to a need that humans have ‘to know,’ but they are answering different parts of the question,” added Tattersall.

In fact, Tattersall pointed out, “many scientists are believers, so there’s certainly no incompatibility in principle between the two.”

My response is two-fold, and not new, either.

1.  Spiritual faith is a way of trying to know, but not of knowing itself, for, based on revelation and dogma, it cannot arrive at truths about anything. Spiritual faith has never answered any question with certainty—not even whether there is more than one god.  It may give you personal “answers” that make you feel better, but those are merely self-help bromides, not universal truths.  Unlike religion, science does more than pose questions: it answers them.

2.  The assertion that some scientists believe in god is the cheapest and sleaziest way to comport science and faith. It says nothing about their different methodologies, their different philosophies, and the differences they arrive at when tackling questions about the universe.  That is the fundamental incompatibility between science and faith.  Saying that compatibility is proved by the fact that some scientists are believers is like saying that there’s compatibility between Catholicism and child rape because many Catholic priests are pedophiles.  Such facts demonstrate not compatibility, but the widespread ability of humans to hold two conflicting views in their head at the same time.  Newton, remember, believed in alchemy. Does that show a compatibility between alchemy and science?

When I read attempts of people like Tattersall and Carroll to revise theology so that it becomes science-friendly, I’m reminded of this statement by Carl Van Doren in his wonderful essay, “Why I am an unbeliever,” as strident as anything Dawkins ever wrote, but produced in 1926:

“With respect to the gods, revelation, and immortality, no man is enough more learned than his fellows to have the right to insist that they follow him into the regions about which all men are ignorant.”

There can be no productive dialogue between science and faith.  The dialogue is actually a monologue: science tells faith that its tenets are wrong.  That does nothing for science, and just forces the faithful into continual rationalizations and retrofitting of dogma.  Whether that’s productive or not is up to the faithful.

h/t: Justin Vacula, Grania Spingies