One of National Geographic‘s photos of the week. (You can download it big and use it as a screensaver. Also, click below to enlarge).
There are others, too, including a caracal.
Lion about
August 12, 2012 • 8:39 am
Eric MacDonald on accommodationism
August 12, 2012 • 7:04 am
As usual, Eric takes a subject on which I’ve already posted and does a much better job than I did. I’d like to attribute this to the fact that he was an Anglican priest for many years, and thus knows a lot more about religion than do I, but I’m forced to conclude that he’s also a deeper thinker. But that’s okay, because I—and all of us—can benefit from reading him. And, after all, I’m a biologist whose knowledge of religion and philosophy was acquired on the side.
Yesterday I posted about an accommodationist article by Peter Kirkwood that included a video of a pretty dreadful defense of science/faith compatibility by Anglican clergyman Chris Mulherin. Eric has taken the same piece and, in his post “Science and religion again!“, which is—as usual for Eric—long but thoughtful, he dismantles Kirkwood’s and Mulherin’s accommodationism. I’ll leave you read it for yourself (what else is there to do on a gray Sunday morning?), but here are a few tidbits:
Kirkwood’s claim, however, that the new atheist belief that science and religion are at loggerheads is belied by “what many other theologians, philosophers and scientists tell us,” is not actually borne out by the evidence, for, while it goes without saying that most theologians are in some sense believers, most top ranking scientists and philosophers are not religious believers, and do not see the relationship between science and religion as one of complementary ways of discerning truth. Indeed, the greatest problem that religious believers have is accommodating different religions, with their very different core beliefs, into a single discipline of which acknowledged truth is the outcome. This is what Philip Kitcher calls the symmetry argument, and it is important to note that, while religion may be studied comparatively, comparative religion is nowhere near showing that different religious traditions are dealing with the same “truths”. Religions make incompatible and opposing claims, and so cannot be thought, without further evidence, as providing truth or knowledge at all. Whether they still have a valid cultural role, or are merely impediments to progress, is another and different question, and not one that either Kirkwood or Mulherin address.
. . . But this [Mulherin’s claim that the popularity of New Atheism is due to vested interested like media sensationalism] simply has to be wrong. The reason for the popularity of the new atheism is that religion is increasingly showing itself unable to cope with the modern world. Practically everywhere you look nowadays we see religion retrenching rapidly, trying to stave off the corrosive effects of science. And Mulherin has not given us a single reason to think otherwise. Indeed, he has demonstrated, in the course of the video, that religion and science are incompatible.
By denying that science provides a basis for a world view, he has simply misunderstood the impact of science, and the meaning of science. For science is not only about mechanism, as Mulherin supposes. Just as the idea of creation gave earlier peoples a grasp on their place in the world, so science provides a new appreciation of our place in the order of things. Carl Sagan used to account for the new world view by emphasising two things: (i) the microscopic role that human life plays in the vast immensity of the universe; and (ii) the fact that, insignificant on the cosmic scale as we are, human intelligence has at last reached the point where it has gained an insight into the very nature of things. And what we learn when we put those two points together is the fact that we are, as it were, orphans in a cosmic storm, but we are intelligent orphans, and must put our intelligence to work in producing a world view which is consistent with what we have come to know about ourselves and our place in the universe.
I’m thinking of removing my avuncular adjective “Uncle” from Karl Giberson (it was always meant as a compliment), and applying it to Eric. “Uncle Eric” has a nice ring, and, unlike Karl, he’s an atheist.
Penis snake?
August 12, 2012 • 5:14 am
This newly rediscovered species is being touted as a “penis snake”, but it’s neither penis nor snake. It is in fact a caecilian, and since you’re interested in biology (why else are you here?), you’ll need to know a bit about them. I found, via website io9, a description of a new caecelian species that happens to be the largest tetrapod (land-dwelling vertebrate) without any lungs. This one had actually been previously described from a couple of pickled specimens, but new work has found its natural habitat and has even led to observations of them alive in the wild. (See a more informative description of caecelians at National Geographic.)
But first, what is a caecilian? Before I did a bit of digging, I’d always thought they were simply legless salamanders, but that turns out to be untrue. True, like salamanders they are carnivorous amphibians and have species that are either fully aquatic or terrestrial (but bound to moist habitat). They’re found on three continents and central America, though caecelians (of which there are 187 species) are tropical. They’re also the only group of amphibians (the order Apoda, which means “no feet”) that reproduces entirely through internal insemination.
But they are not salamanders: they constitute a monophyletic group (i.e., a group in which all modern descendants go back to one common ancestor) that split of from the ancestors of modern salamanders around 150 million years ago. They are in fact a “sister group” of salamanders. Here’s where they fall on the tetrapod family tree:
So they ain’t salamanders, but they’re close to them. Anyway, a new paper by Marinus Hoogmoed et al. (free download) from Bol. Mus. Para. Emílio Goeldi. Cienc. Nat., Belém, describes several new specimens of Atretochoana eiselti from Brazil, and compares them to the known pickled ones. This turns out to be the largest tetrapod that does not have lungs: one female specimen was a meter long and weighed 570 grams (a pound is 454 grams). Here’s a photo:
Lunglessness is known in several species of salamanders and one species of frogs; breathing occurs by diffusion of oxygen through the skin.
And the head, showing the nostrils, mouth, and numerous little teeth:
The other finding of note is that, despite previous speculations that this species was limited to cold, fast-flowing streams (perhaps because such waters are highly oxygenated, helping an animal without lungs to breathe), this species was found along riverine beaches and in lakes and pools in tropical forest, including muddy mangrove pools. Apparently it gets enough oxygen to survive in those habitats; the mystery is how an animal as large as this gets sufficient oxygen solely through its skin.
Here are two more caecilians from National Geographic:
As for their evolutionary origins, here’s a candidate for something close to the common ancestor of caecelians: Eocaecelia micropoda, which has tiny limbs, clearly on the way out. It was described in the journal Nature in 1993:
This reminds me of an ancestral snake: snakes evolved from lizards by gradual diminution of the limbs, and this looks very much like an ancestral snake.
h/t: Grania Spingies
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Hoogmoed, M. S., A. O. Maciel, and J. T. Coragem. Discovery of the largest lungless tetrapod, Atretochoana eiselti (Taylor, 1968) (Amphibia: Gymnophiona: Typhlonectidae),in its natural habitat in Brazilian Amazonia. Bol. Mus. Para. Emílio Goeldi. Cienc. Nat., Belém, 6: 241-262
Do both science and faith produce truth?
August 11, 2012 • 10:47 am
As one reader noted, any post that begins with a question is invariably answered “no.” This won’t be an exception. Science produces truth; religion doesn’t.
This video, embedded in an article by Peter Kirkwood called “Why atheists are wrong about science and religion,” comes via eurekastreet.com.au. It starts off by flaunting the NOMA Gambit:
Back in April this year, Melbourne hosted the second Global Atheist Convention, a follow-up to the gathering of thousands of atheists from around the globe that took place there in 2010. Both events featured the most prominent of the so-called New Atheists, Richard Dawkins.
To believe Dawkins, and many of the other speakers at the conference, you’d think there is a deep gulf between science and religion, that the two are intractably at loggerheads and have nothing useful to say to each other.
But this is at odds with what many other theologians, philosophers and scientists tell us. They say science and religion are both quests for truth dealing with different aspects of human experience. This is well summed up in Galileo’s famous statement that ‘the Bible tells us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go’.
Well of course some people have an investment in reconciling science and faith. Imagine if a liberal clergyman told his congregation, “Yes, our beliefs are at loggerheads with science.” People with any education don’t want to be seen as anti-science, and so they’ll embrace any lifeline of accommodationism tossed to them. And of course lots of theologians do see parts of science, especially physics, cosmology, and evolution, at odds with religion. Finally—and I needn’t beat that drum too much any more—religion may be a quest for the truth, but it has no way of finding the truth, or verifying what it claims to find. Our knowledge of what God is like has not advanced one iota over the ideas of the 1500s.
And insofar as theological interpretation has changed, it’s done so not as a result of faith’s quest for truth, but of pressure from science and secular morality. Really, can any theologian, philosopher, or scientist tell me anything about God now that we didn’t know 500 years ago? Then ask a scientist what we know now about science that we didn’t know in 1500.
The article also presents a video by chris Mulherin:
Chris Mulherin, featured here on Eureka Street TV, similarly has a foot in both camps; an Anglican clergyman with a substantial academic background studying and lecturing in science and the philosophy of science.
He is now doing his doctorate on the relationship between scientific and theological ways of knowing. He argues they are different but complementary ways of understanding, and summarises the difference by saying that while science deals with mechanics, religion deals with meaning.
Mulherin claims that religion answers the “why” questions. Well, maybe he likes the Anglican answer, but how does he know that the Muslim, Hindu, Mormon, or Scientology answers are wrong? He also claims that science can’t test the supernatural, because our experiments assume that “God isn’t messing with the experiment.” If that were true, than how could scientists test for things like intercessory prayer, which they have done?
Come on, readers, give me one example of a question that religion has answered to everyone’s satisfaction—one example of a “truth” found in religion’s quest for truth.
The dissing of New Atheism, and Richard Dawkins in particular, begins at about 5:20. Mulherin blames a lot of the rise of New Atheism on the media’s thirst for controversy, adding that New Atheism is a “religion” because “we’re on a crusade.” Is that weak analogy enough to convict us of religion? I don’t think so. These people don’t know the difference between superstition and vigorous efforts to rid the world of superstition!
This video is a great example of how far a smart person can delude himself when it comes to religion. Mulherin is a young Terry Eagleton, but without the book smarts.
h/t: Chris
Science writing: lite and wrong
August 11, 2012 • 5:23 am
UPDATE: Malcolm Gladwell has been nice enough to come here and defend his methods in a comment. As always, be polite if you want to respond to that comment.
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Over at his eponymous website, writer and corporate consultant Eric Garland takes up an issue which has started to bother me lately: “science-lite” books that offer superficial analyses of and solutions to social problems or—most disturbing to me—superficial descriptions of scientific work. To me, these include books like Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point (a page-turner, but one that left me cold), Jon Haidt’s The Righteous Mind (with its unfortunate concentration on group selection) and The Happiness Hypothesis, David Brooks’s execrable The Social Animal, Nicholas Wade’s The Faith Instinct (funded and vetted by the Templeton Foundation), and all of the books and writing of the now-disgraced Wunderkind Jonah Lehrer.
What these books have in common is a) enormous appeal to the popular mind, especially the part that wants easy answers and doesn’t want to think too hard about science, b) good writing (usually), c) a “self-help” aspect, which promises that you can improve either your life or your business by applying or recognizing a few easily-digestible bits of modern science, and d) annoyingly superficial analyses of difficult problems.
I’m not the only one who shares these opinions. See, for example, Steve Pinker’s New York Times review of Gladwell’s What the Dog Saw, which contains these lines:
An eclectic essayist is necessarily a dilettante, which is not in itself a bad thing. But Gladwell frequently holds forth about statistics and psychology, and his lack of technical grounding in these subjects can be jarring. He provides misleading definitions of “homology,” “sagittal plane” and “power law” and quotes an expert speaking about an “igon value” (that’s eigenvalue, a basic concept in linear algebra). In the spirit of Gladwell, who likes to give portentous names to his aperçus, I will call this the Igon Value Problem: when a writer’s education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong.
. . . The common thread in Gladwell’s writing is a kind of populism, which seeks to undermine the ideals of talent, intelligence and analytical prowess in favor of luck, opportunity, experience and intuition. For an apolitical writer like Gladwell, this has the advantage of appealing both to the Horatio Alger right and to the egalitarian left. Unfortunately he wildly overstates his empirical case.
or Michiko Kakutani’s NYT review of another Gladwell book, Outliers:
“Outliers,” Mr. Gladwell’s latest book, employs this same recipe, but does so in such a clumsy manner that it italicizes the weaknesses of his methodology. The book, which purports to explain the real reason some people — like Bill Gates and the Beatles — are successful, is peppy, brightly written and provocative in a buzzy sort of way. It is also glib, poorly reasoned and thoroughly unconvincing.
Much of what Mr. Gladwell has to say about superstars is little more than common sense: that talent alone is not enough to ensure success, that opportunity, hard work, timing and luck play important roles as well. The problem is that he then tries to extrapolate these observations into broader hypotheses about success. These hypotheses not only rely heavily on suggestion and innuendo, but they also pivot deceptively around various anecdotes and studies that are selective in the extreme: the reader has no idea how representative such examples are, or how reliable — or dated — any particular study might be.
I’ve also discussed David Brooks’s The Social Animal here (I’ve now finished it); it’s a dreadful and completely superficial analysis of human behavior using principles of evolutionary psychology, which presents as hard fact evolutionary speculations that haven’t even reached the hypothesis stage.
Contrast these superficial treatments with Steve Pinker’s latest book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, which is long (832 pp.), requires thought (not a book for the beach!), and, especially, is meticulously documented and reasoned. It’s food for thought, and by the time you’ve finished it you’ve had a full intellectual meal. I’m not so much decrying the public for avoiding difficult books that require some thought as criticizing authors who, in search of a best seller, dumb down science to the point of distortion.
At any rate, Garland takes up two of these authors in his essay “Jonah Lehrer, Malcolm Gladwell, and our search for non-threatening answers.” Much of the essay is devoted to how these authors offer superficial solutions to social problems, and one might worry that, as a corporate consultant, Garland is afflicted with a bit of jealousy, but I think he’s right on the mark in several respects. As his essay argues:
Let us be clear – both Lehrer and Gladwell are worthy authors. Both write with tremendous fluidity and a gift for turning complex situations into engaging narratives. They are both excellent thinkers and world-class writers, period. But step back and look at the topics they cover:
- How trends emerge in the global economy
- How we make decisions
- How people are creative
- How people achieve success
Neither Gladwell nor Lehrer attempt to cover single subjects with both breadth and depth, like, for example, Mark Kurlansky does in Salt and Cod. They swing for the fences and attempt to explain how “things happen” or “how brains work.” They mix together enormous fields that are still in their infancy, such as neuroscience, with popular fields like art and music and sports. In works of less than 500 pages, Gladwell and Lehrer attempt to enlighten the reader on How the World Works, What People are Really Like, and How Greatness Happens without getting into any of the technical details that would absolutely overwhelm the majority of the readers traipsing through airport book shop before grabbing their flight home.
The incredible complexity of neurotransmitters, global supply chains, or police emergency response training is smoothed over, edited, reduced to a light and palatable narrative of someone with the speech pattern of an Ivy League education. More than actionable insights, this kind of popular analysis gives the reader something far more immediately valuable – the feeling that they have a sophisticated view of the world. Reading this kind of book, the sharp corners, uncomfortable realizations, insecurity, class struggle and information overload of the early 21st century is massaged away into a single comfortable feeling – our elites know what is going on, and the complexity of the world can be explained in a calm, hip, erudite way.
Right on. What all these “science books” lack is respect for the reader. That respect would entail laying out the complexities of science, the potential problems with attractive hypotheses, and presenting hard data and statistics. It’s not that the public can’t understand these things: popular books by Steve Gould and Richard Dawkins aren’t dumbed down, but simply present the complexities of science in wonderful prose. Have a look at Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man if you think readers can’t grasp sophisticated statistical analyses or complex arguments. (Granted, that book has its flaws, but my point remains.) The Extended Phenotype, by Dawkins, is similar, though mathless.
Now these aren’t “self-helpish” books, but ones trying to explain real science with all its problems, complexities, and wonder. The new crop of popular science writers, represented by Haidt, Brooks, Gladwell, and Lehrer, are, in contrast, slick and superficial. That is what happens when one tries to blend On the Origin of Species with People magazine. Perhaps I’m sounding a bit like a curmudgeon here, but science is hard and complex, and it takes a special kind of mind, and a special talent for writing, to convey it accurately.
What we need are not journalists and popular writers who turn their hand to science, but scientists who turn their hand to journalism and popular writing.
Caturday felid: how do falling cats right themselves?
August 11, 2012 • 4:22 am
Here’s a cat video with intellectual meat. Applying both slow-motion video and the principles of physics, a cat-loving scientist demonstrates how a falling cat rights itself. The solution involves angular momentum in a manner similar to that used by ice-skaters in their final spin. None of this, of course, is consciously decided by the cat: the motions have been worked out by natural selection programming the cat’s neurology.
The high speed camera used was a Phantom Miro M320S. Rent one yourself by clicking here: http://bit.ly/ON8gMg Tell them GiGi the cat sent you
h/t: Michael
Caracal kittens FTW
August 10, 2012 • 1:19 pm
It’s been fourteen months since we featured caracals (Caracal caracal), a mid-sized cat that ranges from sub-Saharan Africa through the Middle East into India. They’re famous for their huge, tufted ears and especially their leaping ability: they can jump ten feet into the air to take down birds on the wing. The video below shows that remarkable behavior. But today’s excuse is that 1. it’s Friday, and 2. a reader (whose name I can’t remember; apologies) sent me this picture of three caracal kittens.
And now the Big Leaps (I have posted this video before). Be sure to watch the whole video as it briefly goes dark at 2:00:
Wikipedia notes:
The caracal has been hybridised with the domestic cat at the Moscow Zoo. A domestic cat Caracal hybrid has been bred as an exotic cat, currently there are over 300.[16]
And I can’t help but provide reference 16; I read German but it’s still funny:
16.Kusminych, I, and Pawlowa, A (1998). “Ein Bastard von Karakal Hauskatze im Moskauer Zoo”. Der Zoologische Garten 68 (4).
Sadly, I can’t find a photo of the bastard.
More mimicry: beetles mimic flies
August 10, 2012 • 8:40 am
The panoply of mimetic plants and animals in nature is endless, and scientists are always discovering more cases. A really cool one is described in two papers cited below, summarized by Morgan Jackson in his Biodiversity in Focus website, from which I’ve taken the pictures (they’re from the second paper cited below, one that I cannot access).
I have read the Hespenheide paper, which you can dowload for free, and it describes a group of diverse Neotropical beetles with an unusual pattern: their head and front part of the thorax is red, the rest of the thorax is black, often marked with white to yellowish stripes, and the tips of the “elytras” (hardened wing covers) are golden yellow to pale gray. Hespenheide describes at least 60 species of beetles in five families that have this pattern. Here’s one example from the Vannin and Guerra paper, which I’ve taken from Jackson’s post that describes this single species:
Here’s a shot of the species in the wild; as the Hespenheide paper points out, these beetles (like their presumed models, which we’ll get to in a second) tend to sit on tree trunks. These are all beetles:
Looks like a fly, doesn’t it? And both papers suggest that this is the evolutionary force that gave rise to the beetle pattern: it’s mimicking a fly: a sarcophagid flesh-fly for the beetle shown above. Here’s a picture of a sarcophagid fly:
The mimicry’s pretty good, isn’t it?
Now there are several reasons for this mimicry. The fly, for example, could be distasteful or poisonous, and birds could learn to avoid its pattern. A tasty beetle, by evolving to resemble that pattern, could enjoy some protection from sharp-sighted bird predators that have learned to recognize and avoid it. That’s called Batesian mimicry. Alternatively, both beetles and flies could be distasteful/dangerous, and evolve to resemble each other because having a common pattern facilitates predator learning, conferring extra protection. That’s called Müllerian mimicry. Neither of these seem applicable in this case because flies simply aren’t distasteful to predators (mostly birds).
Both authors, however, suggest a different explanation—actually a variant of Batesian mimicry. The likely solution is that flies are simply hard to catch for birds—even entomologists with big nets have trouble nabbing flies (ask me!). Studies show that flies are rare in bird stomachs compared to other potential prey. Both authors, then, suggest that bird predators simply learn to avoid going after flies because they’re hard to catch, and the reward is unlikely to match the futile effort. Once a bird has learned to avoid catching flies, then any beetle (mimic) that looks like a fly (the model) would also be avoided. That’s the selective pressure on the beetle to accumulate mutations that make it resemble the model.
Now this could be tested: one could expose a naive bird to flies, watch it go after them, fail miserably, and then expose the bird to the mimicking beetles. It would presumably then avoid the beetles. However, birds that hadn’t been exposed to flies, and thus hadn’t experienced dipteran-related failure, would go after the beetles more readily. These kinds of tests have been done with other kinds of mimicry, and succeeded remarkably well. They haven’t, however, been done with these insects.
Nevertheless, the explanation is a good one, for the mimicry is so obvious, and it’s just another marvel that we lucky evolutionists get to read about every day.
If you’re a strict creationist, you should ask yourself why God would make a beetle look just like a fly. One could always answer, I suppose, that it pleased God to do so, or that His ways are mysterious. But that’s the end of the questioning. The evolutionary hypothesis leads to predictions, including the experiment I suggested above. Another is that beetles that mimic flies should live in the same areas that flies do, and encounter the same potential predators. That’s not a necessary prediction of the God Hypothesis.
h/t:Matthew Cobb
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Hespenheide, H. A. (1973). A novel mimicry complex: beetles and flies, Journal of Entomology Series A, General Entomology, 48 (1) 55. DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-3032.1973.tb00034.x
Vanin, S.A., & Guerra, T.J. (2012). A remarkable new species of flesh-fly mimicking weevil (Coleoptera: Curculionidae: Conoderinae) from Southeastern Brazil Zootaxa, 3413, 55-63. PDF Available Here