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.
Yes, there are too many posts today, but there’s a lot of hot news: a solar transit of Venus, the secularization of Norway, and now a depressing bit of news, reported today by Nature:
Mention creationism, and many scientists think of the United States, where efforts to limit the teaching of evolution have made headway in a couple of states. But the successes are modest compared with those in South Korea, where the anti-evolution sentiment seems to be winning its battle with mainstream science.
A petition to remove references to evolution from high-school textbooks claimed victory last month after the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (MEST) revealed that many of the publishers would produce revised editions that exclude examples of the evolution of the horse or of avian ancestor Archaeopteryx. The move has alarmed biologists, who say that they were not consulted. “The ministry just sent the petition out to the publishing companies and let them judge,” says Dayk Jang, an evolutionary scientist at Seoul National University.
The campaign was led by the Society for Textbook Revise (STR), which aims to delete the “error” of evolution from textbooks to “correct” students’ views of the world, according to the society’s website. The society says that its members include professors of biology and high-school science teachers.
. . . The STR is an independent offshoot of the Korea Association for Creation Research (KACR), according to KACR spokesman Jungyeol Han.
Surely Korean scientists, both in that country and throughout the world, can do something to prevent their country from looking so stupid. I think this is the first technologically advanced nation in the world whose national government has campaigned against teaching evolution in the schools.
Maybe I can find a way to deploy my ten remaining Korean copies of Why Evolution is True.
Yay for the Norwegians! According to Canada’s National Post, all legislative hurdles have been cleared to remove Lutheranism as the official state religion. The change takes effect June 15:
“The Evangelical Lutheran religion will no longer be the state’s official religion,” parliament wrote in a statement, pointing out that the church would receive public financing “on par with other religious and belief-based societies.”
The bad news:
It stressed though that “the Norwegian Church will continue to have a special basis in the constitution and the state will be built upon ‘our Christian and humanistic heritage’.”
The good news:
The Norwegian Church, which supported the change, counts nearly four million of Norway’s 4.7 million inhabitants as members. . .
The current requirement for at least half of all government ministers to be members of the Church will also be scrapped, and even the minister of church affairs will no longer need to belong to the church.
But the royal family will still be required to belong to the church. No Jewish King of Norway!
In honor of this positive move toward secularism, I’ll post a photo of one of the most awesome (and fluffy) cat breeds, the Norwegian Forest Cat:
UPDATE: This other NASA site shows you what it will look like from your location, and also provides a live feed.
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Today you’ll get the rare chance to see a transit of Venus across the Sun. You’ll probably be dead by the time the next one occurs. A piece at the Guardian will answer all your questions, including these:
A rare astronomical event that happens when Venus travels across the face of the sun and appears as a small black dot on its surface.
Here’s what it looks like (WARNING: DO NOT LOOK DIRECTLY AT THE SUN WITHOUT EYE PROTECTION!):
An astronomer points to Venus on a projection from the solar telescope at the Astrophysical Institute of Potsdam in Germany on 8 June 2004 – the century’s penultimate transit of Venus. Photograph: Sven Kaestner/AP
When does it happen?
Transits occur in pairs eight years apart. There are two in December that repeat every 121.5 years, and two in June that repeat every 105.5 years.
The last transit of Venus of the 21st century occurs on Tuesday and Wednesday (5 and 6 June 2012) depending on where you are viewing from. The transit starts at 11.04pm BST (6.04pm ET) on Tuesday, when it will be visible from the US. The final hour of the transit will be visible from the UK just before 5am BST on Wednesday (12am ET US), clear skies permitting. The transit will not happen again until December 2117.
How long does the transit last?
Venus takes nearly seven hours to cross the face of the sun, but the event is divided into four “contacts” that mark different phases of the transit. Venus makes first contact when it encroaches onto the disc of the sun. Twenty minutes later, on second contact, the planet will be fully silhouetted. On third contact, at 5.37am BST (12.37am ET), Venus will begin to leave the sun, and the transit will be over on fourth contact at 5.55am BST (12.55am ET).
NASA will host a live streaming of the transit (from Hawaii) that you can see here; it starts at 5:45 p.m. EST in the US or 11:45 p.m. London time. The site links to other live webcams in Europe and America, which of course operate at different times.
Besides being a rare spectacle, the transit was used in what may have been the first international scientific collaboration: 200 astronomers observing the transit in 1769 and using trigonometry (see the method here) to calculate, from the transit time, the size of the solar system. Another article in the Guardian describes the endeavor (do read it: it’s informative and has some quite dramatic incidents):
The major British expedition for the 1769 transit was Captain Cook’s voyage to Tahiti. Following success with the measurements on the island, Cook sailed on. Cook’s return to England in 1771 allowed the final calculation of the sun’s distance to be made. The combined results from all the various missions were within about 4% of the modern accepted value of 93m miles (150m kilometres). At the next pair of transits, in 1874 and 1882, the accuracy was improved to 1%.
Only since the Second World War have radar experiments with radio telescopes bettered those results. Yet the 18th century transits will always stand out. They represent the first time in history that the distances to the Sun and planets were measured, and the first global scientific collaboration.
This morning’s Science Times has a short piece on chewing in tuataras, based on new work (abstract) by Marc Jones of University College London and colleagues that is in press in the Anatomical Record. We’ve sung the praises of tuataras before here at WEIT. But the Times piece repeatedly refers to tuataras as lizards! As all budding herpetologists learn early in their careers, the tuataras of New Zealand are the sole survivors of an otherwise extinct order of reptiles, now usually called Sphenodontida.
Tuatara (Sphenodon punctatus) at a North Island, NZ, zoo.
The story of the discovery of the tuatara, and the realization by Albert Gunther that they were not lizards, is one of the most exciting in 19th century natural history. Clifford Pope (1955) put it this way:
The discovery of the tuatara was just as startling to the scientific world as the capture of a dinosaur would have been. In fact, the ancestors of this little reptile reached their highest development before the reign of the dinosaurs…
Tuataras are related to the Squamata (lizards + snakes), but are more primitive. Major groups of reptiles are often distinguishable by the opening(s) in the sides of their skulls. Tuataras and squamates are both diapsids– they have two holes (an ‘apse’ is a hole), but squamates have a more derived condition in which the lower temporal bar (the bone along the bottom edge of the lower hole) is lost, thus freeing the quadrate bone at the back of the skull to become movable, thus making the skull kinetic (having joints within the skull for movement of skull parts). This kinetic ability is taken to its most extreme in snakes, where the skull can basically come apart and the various parts move independently (allowing snakes to eat things which are much bigger than their heads).
Tuatara skull by Arthur Weasley, from Wikipedia.
Bone 9 is the jugal, which is the largest part of the lower temporal bar. Bone 12 is the quadrate, which is mobile in squamates. Squamates also have hemipenes, paired male copulatory organs, which tuataras have in only a very rudimentary form. The following video allows you to see the differences between a tuatara and lizard skull. Note how strut-like is the bony framework of the Komodo dragon (a lizard) skull compared to the tuatara.
Tuataras can’t seem to get any vernacular name respect. In addition to being called lizards, they’ve also not infrequently been called dinosaurs (including in the otherwise great Nature film, Land of the Kiwi), a misnaming we’ve mentioned before here at WEIT.
UPDATE. Reader truthspeaker asks about the tuatara’s “third”, or pineal eye (which is perhaps better called the parietal eye). Located on the midline on the top of the head, the parietal eye is also found in many lizards. (Remember, although tuatara [to use the proper Maori plural] are not lizards, the squamates (lizards+snakes) are their closest relatives [together they are the extant lepidosaurs], so the sharing of features is not unusual or exceptional.) There can be up to four evaginations (together known as the pineal complex) from the region of the forebrain called the epithalamus, one of which, the parietal organ, can be photoreceptive, and can have a lens and a retina, forming the parietal eye. The eye is overlain by a translucent scale, easily visible in many lizards. It cannot, as far as is known, form an image. It’s also present in lampreys, where it appears as a whitish oval on the otherwise dark skin of the middle of the head. The pineal complex also has endocrine gland functions (e.g. secreting melatonin), and the combination of photoreception and melatonin secretion has led most people to consider that they are involved in circadian rhythms, but I’m not aware that the whole story has been well worked out.
The point reader Frank makes in the comments about the word “primitive” being better applied to characters rather than taxa is well taken, and, indeed, my point about the primitiveness of tuatara is that they retain the (primitive) fully diapsid skull, and do not have the derived state of the copulatory organ. When applied to taxa, primitive is often intended to indicate a preponderance of primitive characters, as in the term “primitive sister group”, even though, by definition, if extant, sister groups have been evolving for exactly the same length of time (and thus might be expected to have similar numbers of derived states among neutral characters). Primitive might also be used to refer to the chronology of branching sequence in phylogeny (a more primitive taxon having branched off earlier). But it is best to always be “tree thinking“, and to look at a phylogeny from multiple perspectives, although at any particular time some particular approach may be of more interest. One of my favorite New Yorker cartoons depicts a corporate boardroom, around which many captains of industry are seated. In one chair, though, sits a dog, who speaks up: “May I offer a different perspective?”
Reader DV wonders what the famed Chicago herpetologist Clifford Pope (whose perhaps most famous paper we considered earlier here at WEIT) meant by “highest development”. Since he is no longer with us, I would venture three possibilities, none of which are idiosyncratic to Pope. First, he might have meant highest species richness– there’s only one species of tuatara now, but there were many more species of sphenodontids in the past. Second, he may have meant greatest adaptive diversity, i.e. not necessarily number of species, but number of distinctive ecologies and ways of life (there was an aquatic group in the order, pleurosaurs, in the Mesozoic). Third, he may have meant that the most distinctive, derived features of their morphology appeared at that time, and have not changed (much) subsequently (i.e. they are “living fossils”). At the time Pope wrote, rhynchosaurs (a fairly diverse early Mesozoic taxon now thought to be allied to archosaurs [birds and crocs among extant taxa]) were thought to be related to sphenodontids, and this might also have influenced his notion of “highest development”.
Pope’s book, by the way, The Reptile World, is still a great store house of reptile natural history, and worth a read. There have been advances in both classification and our knowledge of natural history since it was published, though, so I would also recommend Harry Greene’s Snakes, Eric Pianka and Laurie Vitt’s Lizards, and Andy Ross’s Crocodiles and Alligators.
Finally, Ichthyic (by implication) and Paul Coddington note that the proper plural of “tuatara” is “tuatara” (like “deer” and “deer”). As part of an earlier consideration of the tuatara (note my avoidance of the plural!), in response to a question I posed, reader Shuggy provided the following details:
I’m not a native speaker, but my Māori (2 years university, 40 yrs informal) is good enough for this. You show the plural by using a plural article; ngā tuatara, or a number; he tuatara e rua, two tuatara.
But to tell the truth, most non-Maori-speaking New Zealanders, which means most New Zealanders, would say two tuataras too.
I keep wondering whether the Catholic Church is on the Red Ball Express toward self-destruction, or whether, by holding the hard line on things like masturbation and homosexuality, it can still maintain adherents. I think that, unless they reform radically, they’ll ultimately become insignificant, but that will take a long time, and what do I know?
The growing breach between the Vatican and even its own official minions is clear in a new piece in the Guardian, “Vatican denounces nun’s book on sexual ethics.” The details (I’ve added a link to the book):
The Vatican has condemned a leading American nun for writing a book in which she praises female masturbation and approves divorce and gay sex and marriage, warning that the book must not be used by catholic educators.
The Vatican’s criticism of Sister Margaret Farley, a professor emeritus of Christian ethics at Yale University, comes amid escalating tension with America’s nuns, after the Holy See accused them of preaching “radical feminist” ideas.
In a statement approved by pope Benedict and issued on Monday, the Vatican’s doctrinal office claims Farley’s book, Just Love, a Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics, “ignores the constant teaching of the Magisterium or, where it is occasionally mentioned, treats it as one opinion among others”.
The statement singles out Farley’s claim that many women “have found great good in self-pleasuring – perhaps especially in the discovery of their own possibilities for pleasure – something many had not experienced or even known about in their ordinary sexual relations with husbands or lovers.”
Masturbation, she concludes, “actually serves relationships rather than hindering them”. That view, the Vatican stated, contradicted the Catholic belief that masturbation is a “gravely disordered action”.
Farley’s approval of gay sex ignored “Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity”, while her backing for gay unions was tantamount to “approval of deviant behaviour,” the Vatican said. Her openness to divorce and remarriage was deemed as “contravening God’s law”.
When Just Love was first published in 2006, it was adopted by catholic educators in the US and won a prestigious religious book prize.
This is how the Vatican keeps its hold on people, starting with the young. Show me a teenager who hasn’t masturbated, and therefore isn’t guilty of a “gravely disordered action.” That of course, could send you to hell unless you go into the booth and say, “Forgive me, Father, for I have touched myself three times this week.” How the priests must lick their lips at that! Any reader who hasn’t engaged in self-pleasuring, weigh in below—if I don’t hear anything, I’ll assume that everyone has.
And, of course, the Church still views homosexual acts as another possible cause of mortal sin, something that can send one to hell (reconceived, of course, as “separation from God”). I wonder why any gays—people like Andrew Sullivan—can remain members of a church that condemns them so seriously. The excuse that “I’m changing it from the inside” won’t wash.
Well, the church still holds the hard line. Should this continue, we’ll wind up with a Catholic faith in which virtually every member (including nuns and priests) regularly commits grave or mortal sins. The Guardian comments further on the Vatican’s report:
That approach runs contrary to pope Benedict’s firm belief that the Catholic church will only survive if it clings to its core beliefs without compromise.
The report warned: “Sister Farley manifests a defective understanding of the objective nature of the natural moral law. This approach is not consistent with authentic Catholic theology.”
Well, if the moral law is objective, it can’t be changed—ever. Unlike other churches, this is the ultimate reason why Catholicism is doomed to irrelevancy. If you want a good laugh, read about “natural law” here.
This kind of thing happens all the time in the U.S., but I didn’t think it was a problem in Canada. One of our regular readers and posters, Veronica Abbass from Ontario, Canada—one of the writers of the Canadian Atheist website—is featured in the local papers (see here and here), for she’s suing the city of Peterborough for incursion of religion into local government. Apparently meetings of the city council and government committees begin with a recitation of the Lord’s Prayer. The Peterborough Examiner notes:
In an affidavit filed with the Ontario Superior Court of Justice, Veronica Abbass argues that reciting the Lord’s Prayer at the beginning of council and committee meetings is unconstitutional and violates the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
“My distress from the feelings of discrimination, exclusion and rejection have reduced my ability to enjoy living and participating in a democratic country and in municipal affairs,” she states in the affidavit. “As a non-religious person, the Christian prayer practice of my local council makes me feel like an outsider in my city.
Abbass is seeking a court order stopping the reciting of the Lord’s Prayer or the use of any other religious ceremony at the city’s council and committee meetings. She also asks for $5,000 for breaching her Charter rights and money to cover her legal costs.
. . . . . In an Ontario Court of Appeal decision in 1999, Madam Justice Kathryn Feldman ruled that Penetanguishene’s use of the Lord’s Prayer at meetings was unconstitutional and infringed on Henry Freitag’s Charter right to freedom of religion.
The city’s defense will be familiar to Americans who know about such cases:
Peterborough’s not breaking the law, Acting Mayor Henry Clarke said.
“No one is forced to take part. They are invited if they choose…. We have added the silent reflection for anyone who wishes to, whichever deity or thought process they follow,” Clarke said. “We are abiding by the law and being respectful of all.”
. . . Mayor Daryl Bennett made a similar comment in an email to Abbass on Oct. 24.
“I always make a point of inviting rather than directing those who wish to recite the prayer to do so. It has been my experience that some attendees at the meeting do recite the prayer and others do not,” he states in the email.
That’s such a lame defense. Nobody has to take part! Nope, it’s just ducky if the nonbelievers sit there in silence, sticking out like a sore thumb while everyone else prays.
I wish Veronica the best of luck. The case will be decided toward the end of the year and I’ll report back.
In response to elebenty gazillion readers who sent me this item, I am not going to post the video of Orville, a tabby who was run over by a car and had his flattened carcass turned into a flying helicopter with a propeller at each paw.
It’s gross, and no way to respect your dead moggie.
Even a cat can look at a queen, but this one doesn’t like all the brouhaha she sees, and of course hates that fricking thimble on her head!
After all, cats are royalty too. Gi-Gi, an unpleased Canadian cat, comes courtesy of pinch-blogger Greg Mayer, who spotted the photo on the BBC’s gallery of Diamond Jubilee images.
It is not just men, women and children marking the occasion. Peter Crawford, in Toronto, Canada, said: “Here is a photo of our our cat Gi-Gi on her throne celebrating the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee.”
Just for my own interest, how many Commonwealth readers think the royalty should be abolished? I’ve been surprised at how many liberal Brits, for instance, argue for the retention of their monarchy.
