A deeply confused lad claims that biogeography isn’t evidence for evolution

July 27, 2012 • 5:06 am

A young lad who goes by the alias of GreenSlugg (he also notes that his name is Greg) has put up a YouTube video, “Biogeography and Creation—a response to Jerry Coyne” that claims to be a decisive refutation of the evidence for evolution from biogeography that I summarized in my book WEIT and in subsequent lectures. He is, of course, a Christian, and has a website that tells you how to bring Jesus into your life.  (This is additional evidence that virtually all opposition to evolution is based on religion.)

Greg apparently hasn’t read my book, for he cites only one lecture in which I mention biogeography in passing. But, as I note in WEIT—where I devote a whole chapter to the topic—I consider the data from biogeography some of the strongest and most irrefutable evidence for evolution.  No form of creationism, especially Biblical literalism that invokes Noah’s Ark, can begin to explain the multifarious data from both continents and islands.  Creationists often go after the fossil record, evidence from vestigial organs, and imperfections of “design”, but they almost never tackle biogeography.

I can’t say this is even a game try, but rather than refute it myself, I thought I’d let the readers have a try. Leave a comment pointing out one mistake in Greg’s presentation (let the other readers have a try, too!) If you’ve read my book, or studied biogeography, you’ll know how to do it.

Here is nine and a half minutes of confusion and ignorance.  This guy really buys the Noah’s Ark thing, which is the absolute worst way to explain the distribution of species on earth.  Given his love of Jesus, I doubt that he’s capable of being convinced by data, but perhaps a reader can link to this post (after there are comments) on the YouTube site.  Perhaps that would prompt yet another video!

A few comments.  He says that the data from biogeography are explained solely by migration. Oh, and by mutation and natural selection and evolution as well (8:10). What is he talking about? It can’t be the creationist “microevolution but not macroevolution” canard, since the biogeographic data clearly explain macroevolution as well.

His invocation of the Australian fauna reminds me of Darwin’s complaint to his mentor, the geologist Lyell, about how naturalists tried to explain island fauna by positing huge land bridges between continents, bridges for which there was no evidence. As I say in WEIT, “Darwin grumbled to Lyell that these bridges were conjured up ‘as easily as a cook does pancakes’”).

This dude is cooking a lot of pancakes.  It’s a stunning display of ignorance, and certainly willful ignorance since a simple reading of one chapter of my book would make the video irrelevant.  He says that I, too, am ignorant since I apparently don’t know the totally convincing story of Noah’s Ark, but of course I’ve read that part of the Bible innumerable times.  It clearly tells us that Noah didn’t need fish or whales on the ark because all marine and freshwater creatures could surely have survived the mixture of salt and fresh water, combined with a thick slurry of silt and boiling temperatures, that constituted the seas during Noah’s voyage!

The Decisive Moment, felid style

July 27, 2012 • 4:32 am

If you’re a photography buff, you’ll recognize the source of this post’s title. At any rate, BuzzFeed has collected a series of 32 “Cat photos taken at just the right moment.” If you’re an ailurophile, it’s well worth three minutes to peruse them, but here are my five favorites.

There are several nice BuzzFeed reader contributions too; here’s Tickles the cat drying off after a bath:

h/t: Grania

A honking big cat

July 26, 2012 • 12:45 pm

From the fantastic Milky Way Scientists Facebook page, meet the world’s largest living individual cat. It’s a big one!

Baby Liger Aries Joins Record Holder Big Brother Hercules

Hercules, famous for being the Guiness Book of World Record holder of largest cat, is now also a big brother – and at 900 pounds and standing at almost 6 feet tall, he is a really BIG brother!

Aries arrived four weeks ago at the Myrtle Beach Safari wildlife reserve in South Carolina. Aries, like Hercules, is a hybrid of a male lion and a tigress. [JAC: this is the cross that produces “ligers” of Napoleon Dynamite fame; the reverse cross produces “tiglons”.]

(T.I.G.E.R.S.) estimates that Aries will gain almost one pound a day (imagine having a “baby” that does that!)

The coupling of a lion and a tiger is almost unheard of outside of captivity, mostly because the two species are located on two different continents.

This last sentence is wrong: there are still a few lions native to Asia: they’re found in the Gir Forest of India.

Heeerre’s Hercules (And Aries):

The Wikipedia article on ligers (link above) says this about Hercules:

Jungle Island, an interactive animal theme park in Miami, is home to a liger named Hercules, the largest non-obese liger, who is recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records as the largest living cat on Earth, weighing over 410 kg (904 lb).[7] Hercules was featured on the Today Show, Good Morning America, Anderson Cooper 360, Inside Edition and in a Maxim article in 2005, when he was only 3 years old and already weighed 408.25 kg (900 lb). Hercules is completely healthy and is expected to live a long life. The cat’s breeding is said to have been a complete accident. Sinbad, another liger, was shown on the National Geographic Channel. Sinbad was reported to have the exact weight of Hercules.

Can these hybrids be fertile? Wikipedia suggests that one such hybrid did produce an offspring, but I think the documentation in general is spotty. The New World Encyclopedia says that male ligers are sterile but female ligers are often fertile. This is in accordance with Haldane’s rule, the generalization that if, in a cross between two different species, only one sex is sterile or inviable (the other being fertile and/or viable), the afflicted sex is the heterogametic one—the one whose sex chromosomes are different (i.e., XY in the case of ligers). In birds and butterflies, the heterogametic sex is female, and those are the sterile and inviable ones in species crosses. I spent much of my career trying to understand the reasons for this “rule.”

An extraordinarily rapid case of speciation

July 26, 2012 • 10:35 am

In my book Speciation, written with Allen Orr, we give some estimates about how long it takes to make a new species. These estimates vary, of course. In the case of speciation that involves instantaneous genome doubling, as in auto- or allopolyploidy, a new “hybrid” species can arise in as few as three generations. But under normal conditions the process usually takes hundreds of thousands to millions of years. The record we found for “normal” speciation is the production of five species of cichlid fish in lake Nabugabo, a satellite of Lake Victoria cut off by a sand bar. In that case, each of the five species has its closest relative in Lake Victoria, and the differences between these “sister species” is not large, involving mostly changes in color.

Now, however, a case of equally rapid speciation, involving even more genetic change, has been reported in a new paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society by Jonathan Puritz et al. (reference and link below; free download). The two species are starfish, Cryptasterina pentagonia and C. hystera. They both live on the northeast coast of Australia, separated by about 375 km. In the figure below, the distribution of C. pentagonia is shown in blue and that of C. hystera in red (the latter has a more limited distribution):

Although the species are ecologically similar and look pretty much the same, there’s a profound difference in their life histories. C. pentagonia is a “broadcast spawner” that spews its gametes into the sea (eggs and sperm unite in the water column), while C. hystera is not only a brooder, keeping fertilized eggs in a body pouch until the larvae hatch, but is also “selfing”: an individual is a hermaphrodite that fertilizes its own eggs.  This is a pretty profound change that involves many aspects of morphology and physiology.

Nevertheless, genetic evidence establishes these two species as each other’s closest relatives (i.e., “sister species”). The genetic analysis involved five “microsatellite” loci and two loci on the mitochondrial DNA (remember this week’s caveat about mtDNA),  but they also sequenced two gene fragments from nuclear DNA, so it’s a pretty good genetic sample.  What they found is this:

  • The selfing species has almost no genetic variation. That’s what you’d predict since self-fertilization erodes variation, but there’s virtually zero variation in C. hystera.
  • Conservative age estimates of the divergence between these two species, based on the “molecular clock” (using DNA divergence to estimate age) range between 905 and 22,628 years.  The best estimate is ca. 6000 years (6159, to be precise). That is an extraordinarily fast rate of speciation given the extensive restructuring of the reproductive system involved. I almost have trouble believing it could happen so fast.
  • How do we know these are true species?  Under the “Biological Species Concept” (BSC), the thing that counts is that the entities be reproductively isolated; that is, they can’t exchange genes.  Well, that’s true to some extent in this case.  One can’t really claim that the selfing “species” is reproductively isolated from its nonselfing relative because individuals of the selfing species are just as isolated from each other as they are from members of C. pentagona (selfers don’t mate with any other individuals). But individuals of C. pentagona are reproductively isolated from the selfer, because in principle they could coexist with that species and deluge them with sperm and eggs, but that wouldn’t produce hybrids since individuals of C. hystera fertilizes only themselves.  This is a mistake we made in our book when claiming that the evolution of self-fertilization from a species that “outcrosses” does not cause reproductive isolation. It does—but in only one direction.
  • What were the evolutionary forces that led to the evolution of selfing from normal outcrossing? (That was the ancestral condition, as we know from phylogenetic analysis.) The authors don’t know, but one possibility is the association of self-fertilization with cold waters in marine invertebrates. The southern species, which selfs, happens to be located south of a geographic break in water temperature where the ocean becomes colder along the cost of Australia. Another reason is “reproductive assurance”: if the selfer descended from a small number of colonists, or perhaps only one, then there’s a strong selective pressure to fertilize yourself (if you don’t have another individual to mate with you don’t leave any genes unless you can self).

This is a good paper, and I hope the young age holds up with further molecular analysis (more is needed). I have only one beef, and that’s about the discussion, where the authors say this:

The timing of these evolutionary changes is critically important for testing and rejecting some alternative hypotheses for speciation in Crypasterina. In particular, our results are not consistent with the slow, gradual loss of shared alleles (and of reproductive compatibility) via genetic drift in allopatry (classic geographical speciation), or with divergent adaptation to broadly sympatric microhabitat differences such as different intertidal heights.

The authors have made a serious mistake here by associating “allopatric speciation” (that is, the creation of new species after populations are isolated from each other by geographic barriers) with genetic drift, and “sympatric speciation” (speciation in small areas without geographic barriers) with natural selection.  I have found this error pervasive in the evolutionary community: it was mentioned several times at the evolution meetings in Ottawa.  The fact is that speciation of geographically isolated populations can occur by either genetic drift or natural selection, and everybody really knows this. That’s what happens, after all, when a colonist invades an island and forms new species after much modification by natural selection in a new environment.  For reasons that Allen and I discuss in our book, we think that natural selection is far more important than genetic drift in cases of allopatric speciation.  In sympatric speciation, selection is also likely to be involved because that form of speciation requires evolutionary forces strong enough to sunder an interbreeding population, and selection is much more likely to do that than is random genetic drift.  But let’s get the record straight here. If you’re an evolutionary biologist, burn this sentence into your brain:

Just because speciation occurs among geographically isolated populations, that does not mean that the evolutionary force producing those new species was genetic drift rather than natural selection.

Got it? Now tell that to your colleagues.

I’m not sure where this mistake comes from, but it seems to be promulgated by the concentration of evolutionists’ effort on cases of speciation that occur without geographic isolation: sympatric or parapatric speciation. Because those often involve ecologically-based natural selection, somehow that’s been taken to mean that speciation that does involve geographic isolation doesn’t require ecologically-based natural selection.  Serious error of logic.

______________

J. B. Puritz et al. 2012. Extraordinarily rapid life-history divergence between Cryptasterina sea star species. Proc R Soc B 2012 : rspb.2012.1343v1-rspb20121343.

A note on courtesy and posting behavior

July 26, 2012 • 4:52 am

Reading this post at Scientific American, “Why is everyone on the internet so angry?“, I was prompted to reiterate some guidelines for posting at this website.  The general internet problem highlighted by authors Natalie Wolchover and “Life’s Little Mysteries” is this:

These days, online comments “are extraordinarily aggressive, without resolving anything,” said Art Markman, a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. “At the end of it you can’t possibly feel like anybody heard you. Having a strong emotional experience that doesn’t resolve itself in any healthy way can’t be a good thing.”

Some of the reasons for this behavior:

A perfect storm of factors come together to engender the rudeness and aggression seen in the comments’ sections of Web pages, Markman said. First, commenters are often virtually anonymous, and thus, unaccountable for their rudeness. Second, they are at a distance from the target of their anger — be it the article they’re commenting on or another comment on that article — and people tend to antagonize distant abstractions more easily than living, breathing interlocutors. Third, it’s easier to be nasty in writing than in speech, hence the now somewhat outmoded practice of leaving angry notes (back when people used paper), Markman said. [Infographic: A Typical Day on the Internet]

And because comment-section discourses don’t happen in real time, commenters can write lengthy monologues, which tend to entrench them in their extreme viewpoint. “When you’re having a conversation in person, who actually gets to deliver a monologue except people in the movies? Even if you get angry, people are talking back and forth and so eventually you have to calm down and listen so you can have a conversation,” Markman told Life’s Little Mysteries.

Now I don’t think that this website is severely afflicted by the kind of vitriol that characterizes some blogs, and I do try to keep people on topic and steer them away from name-calling.  I also try to read every comment, though sometimes it’s hard to keep up with them. That’s why the lucubrations of trolls, and some nasty name-calling, sometimes intrudes.  When I’m aware of commenters insulting each other, I try to intervene, either on the site or via private email. Nevertheless, people seem to have become a bit more splenetic around here lately, perhaps as a spilloff from squabbles that afflict other websites.  I want, then, to emphasize some guidelines for posting here.

1.  If you can, please use your real name rather than a pseudonym when posting. I recognize that people may have good reasons to be anonymous, and won’t demand the disclosure of names, but I’m convinced that people are more civil when they have to take public responsibility for their remarks. I never comment anonymously on other people’s sites. Please try to avoid using pseudonyms unless you have good reasons for doing so.  Again, I won’t ban anyone for not using their real names, but do consider taking responsibility for what you say.

2.  Do not insult other commenters.  Sometimes it’s okay to call public figures names like “morons”—I do this myself, but am going to try to cut down on that—but readers of the site should have some respect for each other as persons.  If I see an egregious insult, I try to intervene, often asking for an apology. If it happens twice, I’ll ban the person.  You will not change anybody’s mind if you insult them as a person. (Granted, it’s hard to change anybody’s mind about some of the topics we discuss.)

3. Please try to stay on topic.  I am quite proud of my commenters, who are diverse, educated, usually classy, and often have instructive and useful things to say about a post. As I’ve said many times, I learn more from the comments than from writing the posts themselves.  If there is an intellectual or moral issue under discussion, try to stick to that.  Countering my own arguments, or those of other posters, is welcome—I want free discussion.  But it’s not okay to make a comment that simply insults someone else without adding anything else.  Try to avoid obscenity if possible: that degrades the tone of the site. (I realize that sometimes this is impossible.)

4.  Don’t post if you don’t have something to add.  Reactions like “I like this post” or “I hate this post” are okay only if you give reasons. Posting “sub” to subscribe is okay.

5.  Please don’t tell me that I shouldn’t have written about something, or that you don’t like posts about cats, food, boots, or whatever.  I write about what strikes my fancy, and that is not going to change. If you don’t like the content here, you are welcome to go to other places having more congenial material.  Also, don’t insult me.  By all means take issue with what I say, but try to avoid saying I’m disingenuous, lying, or other such stuff.

6.  Religious people often will post here.  Many times they are simply trolls (you wouldn’t believe the comments I’ve put directly in the spam file!), but sometimes they have sincere arguments. Do not call them morons, or deluded fools, or other such names.  Yes, most of us don’t like religion, but calling religious people names will not foster any dialogue. Remember, some of them can be swayed.  My policy, though, is if you make a post asserting something like the reality of God, I will usually demand that you immediately provide us with the evidence for your deity.  That evidence then becomes fair game for discussion. But remember, attacking religious believers is not the same thing as attacking religious belief. Go after ideas, not people. I do believe that religion is a terrible thing for society, and have no problem excoriating the stupidity of religious belief. Quite often the religious person takes that as a personal insult, but that is their problem, not ours.

7. Please don’t insert the URL for YouTube videos in comments if you can avoid it–a link will suffice.  The URL will put the entire video in the comment, which eats up bandwidth.

8.  Please write posts, not essays.  Some comments are extraordinarily long, and often aren’t germane to the discussion. I don’t have a word limit, but sometimes write privately to people to shorten their comment before I’ll post it.

9. I know from private emails that a lot of people lurk here but never comment. That is perfectly fine, but I encourage lurkers to join in from time to time. If you have a question that you want answered, by all means ask it. As I tell my students, “There’s no such thing as a stupid question, and if you don’t ask you won’t learn.”

10. Remember that all first-time posters are automatically subject to moderation. Once I approve the first post, everything you write thereafter will appear automatically. Since I’m not at the computer 24 hours a day checking email, first-time approval may take some time. (If your first post is wacko, though, it won’t get approved!)

11. Use your real email address when making a comment. I will never disclose it without permission, but if I have to communicate with readers (for example, if you don’t close your italics properly!), I’ll need a valid email address.

I encourage readers, as always, to send me interesting material via private email; my university address is easily obtainable with a bit of Googling. Many of my favorite posts have been prompted by reader submissions. I always try to acknowledge these with a “hat tip” (“h/t”), but sometimes I forget or lose the original email. Forgive me if you’re not acknowledged, as I get a lot of suggestions.  And forgive me as well if I don’t take you up on a suggestion for a topic worth posting about.  There are simply too many of these, and I can’t use them all. But I do appreciate every suggestion.

And of course I welcome pictures of your cat along with a paragraph of information about it.  I have a long queue of readers’ cats to post, but that’s good.

Finally, I again want to thank the readers for their thoughtful commentary.  I have learned a lot (and changed my mind!) on many issues, especially that of free will and other philosophical matters. I am a biologist, not a philosopher or an expert on politics or literature. On the latter issues I post as a tyro. (Even when I post on biology I often make mistakes, and am usually corrected within an hour!) Yet we have such a diverse readership that I—and others—can learn a lot from experts who comment on these other fields.  There is hardly a profession (or nation) not represented by one or more readers.  Do remember that we have an international readership, so things immediately comprehensible to Americans may be unfamiliar to others.

kthxbye.

Runners up in KittenQwest: pictures as kittens and adults

July 26, 2012 • 3:51 am

Although Napping Kitten (my entry) won the KittenQwest Contest for cuteness, there were two moggies I want to highlight as well.  The runner-up, owner of the ineffably cute Greebo, gets an autographed copy of WEIT, and my own favorite was Trix.  I’m posting below both of these original entries.  Both kittens have now grown up, and I’ve gotten photos of them as adults and ancillary information.

Greebo was submitted by reader Paul B., who sent this email:

Thank you very much for awarding Greebo a consolation prize.

For information, Greebo is a tom, is just about three years old, and is what we in the north of England describe as a cross between a doormat and a sack of chisels ie a moggy.

He is very much an outdoors cat who loves covering himself in all sorts of muck, seeds, twigs, and, for some strange reason, small black slugs. Being a true moggy he can kill anything up to a Wood Pigeon and medium size rat. Unfortunately he hasn’t managed to get a Grey Squirrel yet. He is named after Terry Pratchett’s creation, who also was a Mister Fluffy when a kitten.

Attached is photo of him in a similar pose to the competition shot. Surprisingly, he isn’t too grubby. As you can see, he has managed to grow into his head successfully.

So thank you again, and also many thanks to those people who kindly voted for Greebo and offered encouraging comments.

Trix was submitted by reader George. who sent a new photo and an update:

This is Trix sitting in her foodbowl.  She entered our lives in 2008.  I was lazily napping in bed when I began to hear faint kitten cries.  I went outside but did not see any possible source of the sound, so I assumed I imagined it.  Soon I started hearing it again and asked my husband to come and listen.  He didn’t hear anything and said I was imagining it.  Later, after dark, the sound persisted.  I went outside with a flashlight and noticed a small opening in the foundation under the house.  Surely, a kitten couldn’t have gotten through there.  But the flashlight picked up two little eyes in the dark crawlspace under the house.  Despite my claustrophobia and the good chance that I would be disturbing brown recluse spiders, I found the entrance to the crawlspace and crawled in after the kitten.  It turned out due to large ductwork and a bricked off section, I could not get to the area where the kitten was.  Alas, I would not be her rescuer.  But the little rascal got out on her own through that tiny opening.  She walked right up to me and demanded to be taken inside.  Now she spends her days lounging on the bed, directly above where she had been “trapped” under the house.

And now Trix has grown up into a beautifully-marked longhair:

 

Darwin on the beach

July 25, 2012 • 12:29 pm

On April 1 a sand-sculpture competition was held at Tottori Dunes in Japan. The theme was “Great Britain.”  Among the amazing artworks was one of Darwin and Newton by Karen Fralich of Canada (photo by Buddhika Weerasinghe):

Chuck looks a little “off” in a way I can’t quite discern, but it’s impressive nonetheless. Go here to see many more photos.

Quiz: in what other way was Darwin involved with sand?

h/t for photos: Matthew Cobb

A free online course in genetics and evolution by Mohamed Noor

July 25, 2012 • 10:31 am

My second Ph.D. student, Mohamed Noor—now a professor and assistant chair of biology at Duke—is offering an online course this fall called`”Introduction to genetics and evolution.”  It’s intended for people interested in biology who haven’t had previous courses in the field. (High-school biology is really all you need.)  I think this is a fantastic idea and a course that any of you wanting a solid grounding in these fields should take. The course is 9 weeks long, starts in early October, and, best of all, is free. All you have to do is sign up at the link above.

There will be recorded lectures, a chatroom for students to discuss things, and I’ll be Skyping in to answer students’ submitted questions. (Disclaimer: the course will be using WEIT as an ancillary text, but that’s not why I’m touting this! I want more people to learn about evolution, and it has the added benefit of giving you a leg up when reading my biology posts.)  Just be warned, at least 10,000 people will be listening in, so don’t expect personal interaction with the instructor!

Here’s the course description and syllabus:

A whirlwind introduction to evolution and genetics, from basic principles to current applications, including how disease genes are mapped and how we leverage evolutionary concepts to aid humanity.

Course Syllabus

  • Evidence for evolution
  • Introduction to basic genetics
  • Recombination and genetic mapping simple traits
  • Complications to genetic mapping
  • Genes vs. environment
  • Basic population genetics and Hardy-Weinberg
  • Gene flow, differentiation, inbreeding
  • Natural selection and genetic drift
  • Molecular evolution
  • Evolutionary applications and misapplications
  • Adaptive behaviors and species formation

Mohamed is a terrific lecturer, as I know from having heard him, and he’s won several awards for his teaching, including:

2012 David and Janet Vaughan Brooks Teaching Award
2010 Dean’s Award for Excellence in Mentoring
2007 Gordon G. Hammes Faculty Teaching Award, Duke University School of Medicine
2000 Louisiana State University, College of Basic Sciences Undergraduate Teaching Award

But be warned: Mohamed talks fast (fortunately, the lectures are recorded). Mohamed’s Ph.D.-defense lecture at Chicago must have set some kind of record for brevity: it was about 32 minutes long! (An hour is usual.) As he says in the FAQs:

  • Does Prof. Mohamed Noor ALWAYS talk that fast?  Yes.