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.
Reader Steve Wagner sent me a bunch of bird photos. I don’t know where they came from, but here are some of the best. (Click to enlarge.) Feel free to identify two of the non-obvious owls and the songbirds.
This town is somewhere in Cornwall, I suspect; perhaps a reader can identify it. At first I thought it was St. Ives, where I was on holiday when the Kitzmiller et al. decision came down, but St. Ives doesn’t have those huge cliffs next to the town.
I just got an email from peripatetic reader Doc Bill, with a picture attached:
Jerry, Walking back to my lodge in a small Swiss town, Kandersteg, I passed this house with a door ajar. Looked like how I leave the door open for Kink [Doc’s beloved tabby], so I paused as I passed the house and waited. Sure enough, a little face appeared:
That Qat photo was taken with my iPhone, natural light about 9:30 PM.
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I’m off to rectify a case of evolution producing a trait that’s now maladaptive: a wonky wisdom tooth.
You know, this kind of stuff doesn’t even raise my eyebrows any longer, so common is homophobia in religious America. But perhaps non-U.S. readers will still be shocked at the insane lengths to which American pastors go in denouncing gays. In the New York Times article that brought my attention to the Pew survey below, “Down with religion?“, author Charles M. Blow mentions two recent homophobic videos of Baptist sermons. I’ve embedded them below and they’re short (about 2 minutes each), so have a look.
Here’s Pastor Sean Harris of the Berean Baptist Church in Fayetteville, NC. As the NYT says,
One pastor from North Carolina suggested that fathers should punch their sons if they showed any sign of being gay. He said, “the second you see your son dropping the limp wrist, you walk over there and crack that wrist.” He continued, “Man up! Give him a good punch.” He also warned against daughters “acting too butch.”
But see for yourself:
PuffHo discusses Harris’s subsequent notapology for what he said: it was a metaphor!
The North Carolina pastor whose violent anti-gay rant blew up across the blogosphere, said in an interview that his message to parents in a sermon — to “punch” a boy who is effeminate and “crack that wrist” if he is limp-wristed — were taken out of the “context of a ministry,” and that he meant them “figuratively,” claiming that Jesus, too, in the Bible, “conjures up violent images. . . In trying to explain why he used violence to convey his message even though he is now retracting the statements, Harris said: “In the context of the scripture, Mark, chapter 9, Jesus conjures up violent images as well, when he says, ‘If your hand is causing you to sin, cut it off.’ He’s not speaking literally. He’s speaking figuratively, using hyperbole to convey the importance of the offense.”
Yeah, I really believe that.
And here’s God’s pastor Charles Worley of the Providence Road Baptist Church in Maiden, North Carolina. The video is unbelievable; only part of it’s transcribed in the Times:
I figured a way out, a way to get rid of all the lesbians and queers, but I couldn’t get it passed through Congress. Build a great big large fence — 150 or 100 miles long — put all the lesbians in there, fly over and drop some food. Do the same thing with the queers and the homosexuals. And have that fence electrified so they can’t get out. Feed them, and you know what, in a few years they’ll die out. Do you know why? They can’t reproduce.
Somewhere among the ranks of accommodationists we’ll find someone who will excuse these views, saying that they don’t derive from religion but from social or political conditions. That’s bogus. While we rarely see this kind of anti-gay vitriol coming from atheists or even the liberal religious, we see it all the time in evangelical churches. And of course the Catholic Church, while unwilling to mandate concentration camps for gays, still considers their behavior a grave sin. And what is Hell but an eternal electrified fence with flames?
Religion just can’t keep its hands off the sexual behavior of consenting adults.
With the campaign season right around the corner, there’s a hopeful sign from a recent Pew Survey: Americans are getting sick of politicians talking about religion. These sentiments are running at their highest since the poll began in 2001. You can download the full pdf of the report here (about 1500 people were surveyed; the 95% confidence limits for the overall data is + 3% and for political parties about + 5-6% ). Here are some questions asked and the trends over 11 years:
Do you think there has been too much, too little or the right amount of expressions of religious faith and prayer by political leaders? (click to enlarge)
Here are the above data divided up by political party. Naturally the Republicans don’t see an excess of religious talk by political leaders, but in all three categories the numbers complaining about too much religious talk have tripled in only 11 years.
There are a lot more data, but I’ll highlight just two things. First, the public isn’t completely oblivious to party differences:
A majority of the public (54%) views the Republican Party as friendly to religion, while 24% say the GOP is neutral to religion and 13% say it is unfriendly toward religion. Roughly four-in-ten (39%) rate the Obama administration as friendly, with 32% saying it is neutral and 23% saying the administration is unfriendly to religion. The Democratic Party is seen as friendly to religion by 35% of the public; it is seen as neutral by 36% and as unfriendly by 21% of the public.
And second, we of the professoriate are viewed as religion-unfriendly:
About a third of the public (32%) perceives university professors as unfriendly to religion, while 37% describe professors as neutral to religion; far fewer (14%) say university professors are generally friendly toward religion. Compared with 2003 (when this question was last asked), there has been a noticeable rise in the number describing professors as unfriendly to religion and a slight downturn in the number saying professors are friendly to religion.
College graduates are more apt than those with less education to describe professors as neutral toward religion, while more of those who have not graduated from college express no opinion on this question. A majority of Republicans (56%) say that professors are unfriendly toward religion. By contrast, a plurality of Democrats (46%) says that professors are neutral toward religion. Among independents, 37% say professors are neutral toward religion, while 31% describe them as unfriendly and 16% say they are friendly to religion.
Among white evangelicals surveyed, 56% view professors as unfriendly toward religion. Among most other religious groups, pluralities or majorities describe professors as either neutral or friendly toward religion.
There is no control group here save the media, which gets about the same ratings from the general public. But the public clearly recognizes the pervasive nonbelief of professors. And Republicans see this unfriendliness three times more often than do Democrats.
What effect will this have on the campaign? Likely not much on the Presidential race, since neither Romney nor Obama make a big deal about religion. But the trend is pretty clear, and could filter down to congressional or more local races. It’s heartening that Americans are getting sick of politicians trying to out-Jesus each other.
Michael Coren, an English-born journalist from Canada, has written a book called Heresy: Ten Lies They Spread about Christianity; the Amazon blurb describes it like this:
Michael Coren explores why and how Christians and Christian ideas are caricatured in popular media as well as in sophisticated society. He takes on, and debunks, ten great myths about Christianity: that it supports slavery, is racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-intellectual, anti-Semitic, provokes war, resists progress, and is repressive and irrelevant. In a climate that is increasingly as ignorant of Christianity as it is good at condemning it, Coren gives historical background, provides examples of how these attacks are made, and explains the reality of the Christian response, outlining authentic Christian beliefs.
It’s not something I’ll be reading soon, particularly because Coren has written an excerpt from the book at The Catholic Register called “Christianity and Science do go together for Michael Coren” (yep, the title’s in the third person). The bulk of it is an attempt to show that there’s no conflict between Christianity and science using the lamest tactic of accommodation: showing that some famous scientists were or are religious. Kepler, Newton, Louis Pasteur and their ilk are trotted out to buttress Coren’s conclusion that “the Christian Church has been the handmaiden of science and scientific discovery.” He even argues that secularism has held back science, because the Big Bang theory, proposed by the priest Georges Lemaître,
was opposed by the secular, scientific world when it was first discussed, because it sounded too Christian. Who, then, had the open minds and who the closed?
That’s bogus. Hubble had already produced evidence for an expanding universe around the time Lemaître proposed the Big Bang, and the physics community was divided for a few decades between the steady-state and Big Bang theories. Fred Hoyle, who coined the name “big bang” as a derisive phrase, may have disliked it partly because of his atheism, but it’s simply not true that the “secular, scientific world” opposed Lemaître’s theory because it implied a creator.
But I digress. The vacuous quote of the week is simply the beginning of Corren’s piece (the emphasis is mine):
The idea that Christianity is somehow opposed to science, and that individual Christians cannot reconcile their faith to scientific discoveries, is a relatively modern canard, but successfully and damagingly promulgated, usually by people who know very little about science and its history, or about Christianity and Christians. It’s a part of the larger, “Christians are stupid” approach, usually offered by people who are inspired by talk shows rather than texts, and assume that because a television mini-series or popular novel has depicted Christians as being superstitious, foolish, reactionary and frightened of change, such must be the case. The science aspect of all this is particularly nauseating, not only because it is fundamentally untrue, but that it is thrown at Christianity at a time when society is arguably experiencing one of its most credulous and naïve stages and is only too willing to embrace any and every kind of non-scientific or anti-scientific nonsense, from alien invasion stories to ghost myths, and from conspiracy theories to supernatural animals. To paraphrase the great Christian writer G.K. Chesterton, when people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in something else, they believe in anything else.
Yes, we have to support Christianity because it’s our bulwark against all those other myths that aren’t true.
Oh, for a chaser go see Coren’s lovely editorial, “Church can’t be bullied into accepting homosexuality.“
The more I think about it, the more I realize that the huge number of books trying to reconcile science and religion (there is a very long shelf of them at the University of Chicago library) means that there is some fundamental dichotomy that prompts so many to try harmonizing them. The latest attempt is by Britain’s chief rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, who has always been a Sophisticated TheologianTM. Last Saturday’s Guardian reports on a new book by Sacks, The Great Partnership: God, Science and the Search for Meaning; the review is by Richard Holloway. Given that Holloway was once the Episcopal Bishop of Edinburgh, it’s not surprising that he’s pretty soft on what seems to be a dire book:
For [Sacks], the fate of civilisation depends on how we answer the God question. He remarks that while “individuals can live without meaning, societies in the long run cannot” – and only God, he claims, can supply the meaning we need.
His logic goes like this: quoting Wittgenstein, who said that the sense of the world must lie outside the world, he claims that since the meaning of a system has to lie outside the system, “the meaning of the universe lies outside the universe”. The universe cannot mean itself, only that which lies outside it and brought it into being can mean it.
That’s bogus, of course: for the meaning of our lives can indeed lie within our lives—and for atheists it does (indeed, Holloway says this in the next paragraph). And it’s palpably untrue that only God can supply the meaning we need. In many near-atheistic societies, as we see in northern Europe, meaning isn’t supplied by God at all.
Sadly, the good rabbi is engaging in what Jews call “pilpul‘: endless disputation that is meaningless. The statement “the universe cannot mean itself, only that which lies outside and brought into being can mean it” is gibberish to me. Perhaps I am too dense to understand Wittgenstein, but even attributing meaning to God is a human activity, something that takes place within the universe. That statement makes sense only if you think there’s an extra-universe deity that gives it meaning, but that’s presuming the conclusion.
In the end, Holloway finds tremendous virtue in Sack’s “passion,” which is mentioned three times in the piece, first in the article’s header:
Whether or not you accept the chief rabbi’s arguments for the existence of God, you cannot deny his passion.
Then Holloway says this:
What makes Jonathan Sacks such an attractive combatant in today’s wars of religion is the passion with which he engages in the conflict.
And this:
The compelling thing about Sacks is the passion with which he insists that only God can save us from the tragedy of nothingness. His argument may not persuade, but his passion almost does.
Passion in the cause of delusion is no virtue. Jerry Falwell was passionate. Pat Roberstson is passionate. Snake-handlers are passionate. Those are not attractive features. And anyone who is persuaded by passion alone is not thinking straight.
In a generally positive review of this book in the Independent, Ziauddin Sardar levels two criticisms:
However, Sacks’s argument about the complementary nature of the scientific and religious approaches, the one searching for explanation, the other searching for meaning is not particularly original. In the Islamic tradition, for example, it was debated for over six centuries. We find the best exploration in On the harmony of Religion and Philosophy by the great 12th-century Moorish philosopher, Ibn Rushd. Despite his claim to include Islamic tradition in his analysis, Sacks is rather unfamiliar with the rich heritage of Islamic discourse on reason and revelation.
There is also a problem with his central argument. Meaning of a system, he suggests, must lie outside it. Thus the meaning of our empirical world is located outside it, in something we call God. Science needs religion, or at least some philosophical understanding of the human condition, to provide meaning for it discoveries. This is a classical argument from the apologist tradition; and it has a structural weakness. It is easier to argue for the need for something beyond, more difficult to argue for a deity in general, and then quite demanding to argue for one deity rather than the other. It would have been more original to argue why God is needed in the first place.
Finally, one Guardian reader, “fuzzyatheist” made this comment:
Strange to hear Richard Holloway giving Sacks such an easy time. It always seemed perfectly clear to me that he was a perfect example of a Religious leader who didn’t even believe in God. Watch his excruciating interview with Howard Jacobsen and he can’t even bring himself to answer the question.
Curious, I looked up the video and found it; it’s a documentary in which Sacks is confronted with four atheists. Here’s the first part, and Jacobsen’s discussion with Sacks begins at 1:50. And, indeed, at 5:20, Jacobsen asks him if he’s sure his God really exists. Sacks waffles and finally mumbles something about “hope.”
Perhaps Sacks should enroll in Dan Dennett and Linda LaScola’s “Clergy Project,” which is a haven for pastors who don’t believe in God.
h/t: Matthew Cobb
New species of mammals aren’t found very often, but if one is, chances are it will be a bat. Bats are secretive, often nocturnal, and numerous. With more than 1200 species in the order Chiroptera, they represent 20% of all mammalian species (red in the pie chart below); the only bigger order is the rodents:
In 2005 a new species of bat was discovered in the cloud forests of Ecuador (perhaps reader Lou Jost has seen this one): Anoura fistulata, otherwise known as the tube-lipped nectar bat. (The short paper describing it, by Nathan Muchhala et al., is free for download here, and the reference is at the bottom of this post.) As National Geographic News reported last week, its unusual method of feeding—inserting an absurdly long tongue into flowers and lapping up the nectar—has just been filmed for the first time.
What is unusual about the bat is that its tongue is longer than its body!
The creature is only about two inches (five centimeters) long, but its tongue is nearly three and a half inches (nine centimeters) long—one and a half times longer than the bat’s body.
When not collecting nectar from the Centropogon nigricans flower, the bat’s tongue is retracted and stored in the animal’s rib cage.
That’s the longest tongue relative to its body size of any mammal, even longer than that of Gene Simmons! Just as a comparison (no griping, readers), if my own tongue were of similar relative size, it would be eight and a half feet long.
A. fistulata is distinguished from other species in the genus by having a lower lip that is elongated, extends further than the upper lip, and is rolled into a tube covered with papillae. And of course there’s that tongue. Both of these features are shown in the figure below, taken from the paper.
But of course what we want to see is how they use that tongue. This was filmed just recently by a National Geographic crew. As their article reports:
In the new high-def video—which aired Sunday as part of the National Geographic Channel’s Untamed Americas documentary series—the bat is shown feeding on the wing. (The Channel and National Geographic News are affiliated within the National Geographic Society.)
“These bats can hover,” said biologist Nathan Muchhala, who helped discover the species in an Andean cloud forest. “They’re like hummingbirds in that sense.”
In a close-up, the animal’s tongue slithers, snakelike, down the flower’s long neck. When the tongue reaches the pool of sweet nectar at the bottom, the tip transforms, becoming suddenly prickly as hairlike structures called papillae extend outward.
“Just before the bat retracts the tongue, the [papillae] stick straight out sideways,” said Muchhala, of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. “That maximizes the surface area, allowing it to act like a mop and sop up as much nectar as possible.”
Here’s the video, which shows the bat hovering like a hummingbird (this, by the way, is an example of “convergent evolution,” since these bats and hummingbirds independently evolved nectar feeding, long tongues, and hovering):
The narration is very good here: I love the line “necessity is the mother of evoluiton.”
As National Geographic reports, getting that video was no easy matter:
To get the super-tongue footage, National Geographic filmmakers flew to Ecuador, where Muchhala and his team were waiting with a bat they’d already netted. Filming took place in a special tent, in which the bat could freely fly and feed. To make the tongue visible to the camera, a small hole was cut at the base of the flower. “They put the camera behind the hole and got that amazing close-up shot,” Muchhala said. At first, the bats were bothered by the humans and the bright lights in the tent and would not approach the flower to feed, but they eventually adjusted.”They actually get so used to it that after a while,” Muchhala said, “you come into the tent and they come up to you and will land on your hand looking for nectar.”
The long tongue was first discovered before they knew anything about the bat’s ecology, but, like Darwin’s orchid and its pollinating moth, a long tongue in a nectar-feeding bat implies a flower with a long corolla tube. Muchhala published another paper in 2006 (reference below) verifying this and giving a diagram showing how the bat’s tongue is retracted into its abdomen with special muscles:
Dietary studies of Anoura in four reserves on the eastern and western slopes of the Andes confirm this prediction. During 129 nights of mist-netting in 2003–05, I captured 46 A. geoffroyi, 38 A. caudifer, and 21 A. fistulata, and identified the pollen on their fur and in their faeces. Pollen from Centropogon nigricans, which has corollas 8–9 cm long, was carried only by A. fistulata (Fig. 1d), as might be expected, given that other Anoura could not reach this flower’s nectar. During 55 hours of nocturnal and diurnal videotaping of 12 flowers of C. nigricans, ten bats were the only visitors. This observation, combined with the finding that A. fistulata was the only bat visitor, supports the conclusion that A. fistulata is the only pollinator of this plant.
Specialization on one species of pollinator is exceedingly rare in angiosperms, and C. nigricans is the only example known in flowers pollinated by bats. After the initial evolution of a glossal tube, the extreme tongue length of A. fistulata probably coevolved with long flowers such as those of C. nigricans. In an example of convergent evolution, pangolins (scaly anteaters) also have a glossal tube; despite their different diets, ant-eating and nectar-feeding animals face similar evolutionary pressures for highly protrusible tongues, and pangolins and A. fistulata have independently converged on a similar solution.
How did this evolve? Well, of course we’re not sure, but, as Muchhala (2006) suggests, it could be a form of “coevolution,” in which the bat evolved its long tongue in concert with the flower evolving its long corolla tube. A flower that is already being pollinated by bats (and whose nectar is being nommed) might accrue a reproductive advantage by making the nectar a little bit more inaccessible—a little farther away from the opening. That forces the bat to press its head up against the flower, ensuring a better contact between bat and flower (the pollen is carried between flowers on the bat’s head). And if the flower tube gets longer, that then gives an advantage to bats who have a longer tongue, since those individuals will be better at getting the nectar, and hence will be better fed and leave more offspring. And so tongue and flower, spurred on by each other’s evolution, mutually elongate.
True “coevolution” occurs when two species act as selective forces for each other, so that they evolve in concert. The word is often misused to imply one species adapting to another, as in certain forms of mimicry, but true coevolution involves reciprocal evolutionary adjustments between a pair of species. Although it’s probably common in nature, we don’t have a lot of good examples.
Will this system evolve until the flower gets three-foot nectar tubes and bats have three-foot tongues? Probably not. There’s a limit to how far this type of coevolution can proceed, presumably imposed by the evolutionary costs of making longer corolla tubes or producing longer tongues. For the same reason, the very long tails of male African widowbirds don’t become ten feet long, for although females prefer longer tails than males actually have, at some point the added sexual benefits of having a longer, more attractive tail are outweighed by the loss in fitness such a tail confers (it could, for example, seriously impede the male’s ability to fly).
There are no new evolutionary principles demonstrated by this example, but it’s nevertheless thrilling, for it shows us another unexpected way that natural selection has worked, producing adaptations that seem a priori inconceivable.
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Muchhala, N., P. Mena, and L. Albuja. 2005. A new species of Anoura (Chiroptera: Phyllostomidae) from the Ecuadorian Andes. J. Mammalogy 86:457-461.
Muchhala, N. 2006. Nectar bat stows huge tongue in its rib cage. Nature 444:701-702. [Isn’t that a terse and informative title? Hemingway could have written it.]
Here’s a video of Nik Wallenda’s 1800-foot tightrope walk across Niagara Falls Friday evening.
Granted, he’s wearing a safety harness, by stipulation of the ABC television network, but it’s pretty amazing nonetheless. He’s walking at night, and through heavy mist.
Some numbers: Mr. Wallenda is 33 years old, a seventh-generation acrobat who first tackled a tightrope at age 2. He crossed 1,800 feet of wire in a little over 25 minutes, ending just after 10:30 p.m. Friday, suspended 200 feet above the gorge and becoming the first person to walk directly over the falls. Five of his forebears have perished performing such stunts.
. . . Afterward, he promised to follow up his exploit with a walk across the Grand Canyon in the next few years.
That should be something, for a Grand Canyon travers has never been done.
