More discussion with Dawkins

February 19, 2012 • 7:01 am

I don’t know how Richard manages to keep turning out pieces at the same time he’s trotting around the world giving talks and interviews.  He must be able to turn out his inimitable prose very quickly.  Yesterday he wrote about his interview with the odious reporter Adam Lusher; and yesterday he published an exchange of letters with Will Hutton of the Observer in that paper: “What is the proper place for religion in Britain’s public life?”

Both men admit to being “cultural Anglicans,” (what is that, exactly? How can you be a cultural Anglican when there’s no Anglican food?), and Richard points out that his Foundation doesn’t exist to promote atheism (though he’s glad to do that personally), but “reason and science,” in other words, secularism.  Hutton takes issue with that:

I also think your distinction between atheism and secularism is sleight of hand. Secularism unsupported by atheism is nonsensical. The reason why a secularist objects so strongly about the extension of religion into the public sphere – and even its private practice – is because its adherents are delusional, and, using your own words, imposing a delusional set of values and practices on others.

If you take “secularism” in the sense of “not favoring one religion, or no religion, over others,” then the distinction is not a “sleight of hand.”  As Dawkins points out, plenty of religious people and religious organizations promote secularism in the public sphere not because they think religion is a “delusion,” but because they worry about one religion getting the upper hand, forming a theocracy, and banning or marginalizing the others.  Now I think that secularism will inevitably erode religion, because by refusing to marginalize atheists it prevents religion from dominating the public sphere, and also allows freedom of speech to those who espouse reason rather than superstition.

Richard makes a point that hasn’t been sufficiently emphasized:

That doesn’t mean religious people shouldn’t advocate their religion. So long as they are not granted privileged power to do so (which at present they are) of course they should. And the rest of us should be free to argue against them. But of all arguments out there, arguments against religion are almost uniquely branded “intolerant”. When you put a cogent and trenchant argument against the government’s economic policy, nobody would call you “intolerant” of the Tories. But when an atheist does the same against a religion, that’s intolerance. Why the double standard? Do you really want to privilege religious ideas by granting them unique immunity against reasoned argument?

Somebody needs to analyze why religious belief is so different from political belief. Perhaps the readers can weigh in here. Obviously your faith has much more powerful implications for your behavior and, especially, your postmortem fate, and perhaps that’s the reason.  But I’ve seen nothing written about this.

Hutton:

Of course we can agree that nobody wants a theocracy, and the founders of both the American and Indian constitutions were right to protect their countries from that risk given the historic and cultural contexts in which they founded their states. But there was little risk of church and state eliding in Britain 200 years ago despite our very imperfect unwritten constitution; there is zero risk today. To raise its spectre is specious.

Zero risk? What about faith-based schools in the UK, where children are brainwashed and evolution is minimized or criticized?  And doesn’t Hutton know about America, where theocratic values are being imposed by the government—even under Obama? Just read Sean Faircloth’s new book, Attack of the Theocrats, to see how the “wall of separation” between church and state has been severely eroded. (By the way, I highly recommend that book and will be reviewing it here soon.)

Hutton:

Jürgen Habermas says that human nature needs both secularism and rationality on one hand, and faith and belief on the other; that to imagine pure secularism is utopian. I am in the same place.

One-word response: Scandinavia.

I’ll let Richard have the last word, because, in my admittedly biased view, he gets the better of Hutton in this debate.  Go read it.

It has been obvious since the publication of The God Delusion in 2006 that many supporters of religion have preferred to ignore its arguments and just repeatedly claim that it’s full of rage and hatred, fundamentalism and intolerance instead – traits that are not recognised by most people who have actually read it. The less-than-subtle message is: “He’s strident and shrill so you can ignore what he says.” Yet this alleged stridency consists in nothing more than clearly and reasonably challenging religious claims in the same straightforward way that no one bats an eyelid over when the subject is anything other than religion.

And now, when the issue is not atheism at all, but the role of religion in public life, the same stunt is being pulled. The mere act of commissioning a scrupulously factual survey from a highly respected, impeccably impartial polling organisation has been described by an editorial in one of our leading newspapers as “hysterical”, and others are piling in with similarly intemperate words and rather desperate attempts to divert attention from the cool and sober findings of the research. . .

. . . arguing against religious belief is not hysterical, militant, or totalitarian. It’s what we do in all other fields of discourse, where no one viewpoint can claim privileged immunity to argument.

And that should be the last word.

Want art with your coffee?

February 19, 2012 • 6:21 am

Artists “o i see RED” wakes us up with a portrait of Tawainese musician Jay Chou made entirely with wet coffee on the bottom of a cup.  As she says in the notes:

What inspired me?
The project was inspired by the opening line in Jay Chou’s song, ‘Secret/不能说的秘密’. It is inspired by the opening sentence, about lifting up a coffee cup off the saucer, “冷咖啡离开了杯垫” and the ending of the song about autumn leaves and fragmented pieces, “飘落后才发现 这幸福的碎片, 要我怎么捡?”. This is shown through the portrait as a whole – how it’s formed by many individual rings, many of them broken and imperfect like fallen autumn leaves, forming Jay Chou’s portrait. The story of the song is about a girl who travelled forward 20 years in time and met Jay in 1999, and they fell in love. She then went back to 1979 and sketched out the portrait of him. My painting is meant to look like a sepia-toned old photograph to capture the essence of this story.

I find the music a bit cloying; you may want to turn it off.

Her method is to paint without using a brush.  In o i see RED’s other YouTube video, she paints a portrait of NBA star Yao Ming with a basketball dipped in red paint.

Telegraph produces expected slur: Dawkins makes money from slavery

February 19, 2012 • 5:33 am

Yesterday I reported about Richard Dawkins’s interview with Adam Lusher, a reporter for the Telegraph, and how it looked like Lusher was set to smear him in today’s issue.  The expected has transpired.  If your blood pressure is sufficiently low, read “Slaves at the root of the fortune that created Richard Dawkins’s family estate.”  At least Lusher didn’t report that Dawkins had “slaveholding genes” (Dawkins does mention the issue), but he makes a huge deal about the source of the Dawkins family “estate”:

He has railed against the evils of religion, and lectured the world on the virtues of atheism.

Now Richard Dawkins, the secularist campaigner against “intolerance and suffering”, must face an awkward revelation: he is descended from slave owners and his family estate was bought with a fortune partly created by forced labour.

One of his direct ancestors, Henry Dawkins, amassed such wealth that his family owned 1,013 slaves in Jamaica by the time of his death in 1744.

The Dawkins family estate, consisting of 400 acres near Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire, was bought at least in part with wealth amassed through sugar plantation and slave ownership.

Lusher then goes into great and tedious detail about the history of the Dawkins family in Jamaica, beginning in the mid-seventeenth century. Oh, and one of Richard’s ancestors also voted against Wilberforce’s parliamentary motion to abolish the slave trade. The piece is tedious, tendentious, and unspeakably stupid.  For in the end, this is what Richard is guilty of:

Richard Dawkins’ sister Sarah Kettlewell, 67, is thought still to live on the estate, which has a farm shop and pedigree cattle. According to Companies House records which list Professor Dawkins as a director, Over Norton Park Limited made a £12,000 profit last year.

[Dawkins] insisted: “The estate is now a very small farm, struggling to make its way, and worth peanuts. The family fortune was frittered away in the 19th Century. Such money as I have is scarcely inherited at all.”

But Lusher still manages to write as if Richard is defensive about it all, including a mention of his “disparaging” the Bible:

In 2010 Richard Dawkins wrote an obituary for his father, describing how John Dawkins had inherited Over Norton Park from a distant cousin and how the estate, in the Cotswolds area of outstanding natural beauty, had been in the family since the 1720s. He omitted, however, to mention how previous generations made their money.

He quoted Scripture – disparagingly – to insist: “I condemn slavery with the utmost vehemence, but the fact that my remote ancestors may have been involved in it is nothing to do with me.

“One of the most disagreeable verses of the Bible – amid strong competition – says the sins of the father shall be visited on the children until the third or fourth generation.”

Audibly irritated, he added: “You need a genetics lecture. Do you realise that probably only about 1 in 512 of my genes come from Henry Dawkins?

“For goodness sake, William Wilberforce may have been a devout Christian, but slavery is sanctioned throughout the Bible.”

Disparagingly, indeed!  Does Lusher approve of the Bible’s views on slavery and view of inherited guilt. (The offending phrase isn’t a direct quote from the Bible, but probably a paraphrase of Exodus 20:5, where the sin of idolatry is laid on descendants for three to four generations.  Similar words can be found in Euripedes, Horace’s “Odes” and Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice.”)

Lusher managed to dig up one person who thinks Dawkins should make reparations:

He is now facing calls to apologise and make reparations for his family’s past.

Esther Stanford-Xosei, of Lewisham, south London, the co-vice chairman of the Pan-African Reparations Coalition in Europe, said: “There is no statute of limitations on crimes against humanity.

“The words of the apology need to be backed by action. The most appropriate course would be for the family to fund an educational initiative telling the history of slavery and how it impacts on communities today, in terms of racism and fractured relationships.”

This is, of course, absurd.  All of us, if you dig back far enough, would have ancestors who held ideas considered immoral or oppressive today, for a few hundred years ago nearly everyone believed in God—many in the torture of those who didn’t share their views—the innate inferiority of women and blacks, and so on.  If that’s the worst that Dawkins can be accused of, let Lusher mention that the ancestors of many Germans were Nazis, that the current Pope was a member of the Hitler Youth, and that every Catholic bears the guilt of the Inquisition. And let Lusher not forget the most egregious example of inherited guilt: for millennia the Catholic church held Jews responsible for the death of Jesus.

Lusher can’t resist, in his last paragraph, bringing up Dawkins’s inability to instantly produce the full title of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in a radio debate last week.  This so angered my colleague Matthew Cobb that he inserted his own editorial comments in his email to me (reproduced in bold below):

The revelations come after a difficult few days for the campaigner.

On Tuesday 14 February, some critics [name them!] branded him “an embarrassment to atheism” [where?] after what many listeners [how do you know?] considered a humiliation [the interviewer didn’t think that Dawkins was humiliated!] in a Radio 4 debate with Giles Fraser, formerly Canon Chancellor of St Paul’s Cathedral, in which the professor boasted [No he didn’t: he just answered ‘yes’ to a question] he could recite the full title of Charles Darwin’s “The Origin of Species”, then when challenged, dithered and said: “Oh God.” [Jesus H. Christ! He also gave what the interviewer said was ‘a pretty good answer’!  Did Adam Lusher listen to the programme?] 

Matthew’s editorializing is not only on the mark, but shows what a horrible job of journalism Lusher did—and that’s on top of having written a scurrilous, almost libelous piece.  Mr. Lusher, have you no decency at long last?  Must you contribute to turning The Telegraph into The Sun?

I won’t bash Lusher too hard because he’s had a rough time himself: a battle with multiple myeloma and Guillain-Barré syndrome, which he wrote about movingly, but his journalism is execrable.  What is accomplished by taking one person and showing that his ancestors had views that we’d consider immoral today? Every one of us is guilty of the same thing.  But then we’re not the world’s most vocal atheist.

Athletic monkey versus tall human

February 18, 2012 • 1:43 pm

The YouTube page hosting this video implies that it shows an attack display by a monkey (it looks to me like a species of spider monkey, but I’m sure a reader will identify it) (Update: readers immediately identified it as a gibbon, but haven’t yet pinned down the species):

This is at the cafe inside the Memphis Zoo. The manager of the cafe told me that the alpha male monkey noticed me the second I walked in the door and started going crazy, because, as the alpha male, he feels threatened by tall males. So she told me to go stand by the window and turn my back on him and that he would “attack” me…

I can’t vouch for the “reason” for that behavior, but this is an amazing display of simian acrobatics.

h/t: Michael

The smear continues: Dawkins accused of condoning slavery

February 18, 2012 • 9:34 am

This would be hilarious if it weren’t so pathetic.  Over at Richard Dawkins’s site, he reports a conversation with Adam Lusher, a reporter from the Telegraph who, writing a story on Richard, insinuated that he not only condoned slavery, but carried genes for slaveholding, and perhaps is still financially benefiting from slavery.  In “The sins of the fathers,” Richard tells the story:

Yesterday evening I was telephoned by a reporter who announced himself as Adam Lusher from the Sunday Telegraph. At the end of a week of successfully rattling cages, I was ready for yet another smear or diversionary tactic of some kind, but in my wildest dreams I couldn’t have imagined the surreal form this one was to take. I obviously can’t repeat what was said word-for-word (my poor recall of long strings of words has this week been highly advertised), and I may get the order of the points wrong, but this is approximately how the conversation went.

“We’ve been researching the history of the Dawkins family, and have discovered that your ancestors owned slaves in Jamaica in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. What have you got to say about that?”

I replied, “Your ancestors probably did too. It’s just that we happen to know who my ancestors were and perhaps we don’t know yours.”

There’s more:

I’d scarcely had time to re-open my lecture notes when he rang back: “Darwinian natural selection has a lot to do with genes, do you agree?” Of course I agreed. “Well, some people might suggest that you could have inherited a gene for supporting slavery from Henry Dawkins.”

“You obviously need a genetics lesson,” I replied. Henry Dawkins was my great great great great great grandfather, so approximately one in 128 of my genes are inherited from him (that’s the correct figure; in the heat of the moment on the phone, I got it wrong by a couple of powers of two).

There’s another nasty bit:

His next volley was the suggestion that I should make financial reparation for the sins of my ancestors.

And if that weren’t enough, there’s this:

His parting shot (actually it was I who did the parting) was to suggest that Henry’s ill-gotten gains [Henry Dawkins, born 1698, apparently owned slaves in Jamaica] might have been used to purchase the English “estate”, a small fraction of which my family still owns. I told him that far from being an estate, it is a small working farm, struggling to make ends meet in a bad time for farming.

This stuff may all appear in tomorrow’s Torygraph, and I’ll try to find the piece if it appears.  But the insinuations and sheer sliminess of this journalist are revolting.

Why is this happening now? People have always gone after Dawkins, but it’s usually for his godlessness, his “militant” atheism, his so-called “shrillness.”  Now, however, he’s jumped on for not remembering the long title of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, and for being descended from slaveholders (remember, many Germans are descended from Nazis).

My own guess is that this character assassination stems from the new Ipsos MORI poll comissioned by the Richard Dawkins Foundation, a poll (see here and here) showing that UK Christians aren’t as religious as everyone thought, that many of them don’t even know the tenets of their own faith, and that many oppose the incursion of religion into public life.  It’s one thing for Dawkins to write books and speak against religion—detractors could argue that he’s simply crying in the wilderness—but it’s a completely different thing to show that religion is actually losing its grip on the UK.  And could it be that Dawkins has in some way helped weaken that grip?  I suspect that while Richard has had a hand in this, the increasing secularism of the UK is simply the continuation of a historical European trend that is at a more advanced stage in continental Europe than in Britain.  But the faithful have to blame someone for it, and it’s going to be Richard.

Again, I’m just guessing here, but I have no other explanation for the sudden tide of completely ridiculous vitriol that’s washing over Dawkins.  It has to be the militant secularism that’s insinuating itself into British culture.

Stay tuned for tomorrow’s Torygraph.  Oh, and if you want another laugh, see Andrew Brown’s ham-handed attack on “militant secularism” at the Guardian.

Faith is on the run.

A colleague wrongfully disses modern evolutionary theory

February 18, 2012 • 7:16 am

UPDATE:  Dr. Shapiro sent me a response to my critique below and asked me to post it; I have done so in the comments (here), and have written a brief response directly below it.

____________

Jim Shapiro is a professor in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology here at the University of Chicago, so I suppose he could be considered a colleague, though I’ve had almost no interaction with him.  I have, however, followed his activities in the literature—and with some dismay.  Shapiro, it seems, has devoted much of his writing to pointing out that the modern theory of evolution (“neo-Darwinism”) is deeply flawed and needs a new paradigm.

That, I think, is the thesis of his book, Evolution:  A View from the 21st Century, which was published in June of last year. I haven’t read it, but Shapiro presents a summary of its thesis in a piece at the HuffPo science page, “What is the key to a realistic theory of evolution?” His thesis is that, contrary to Darwin’s views, and those of modern evolutionary biologists, evolution is not as “gradual” as we think:

Darwin put it this way in Chapter 6: “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find no such case.”

There has always been controversy about whether random variation and natural selection for improved fitness can truly explain biological evolution over time. Today we can apply genome sequence data to test Darwin’s theory. It answers clearly about gradualism.

Many genome changes at key stages of evolution have been neither small nor gradual.

Now what one means by “gradual” is a matter of taste.  Nearly all of us agree that large changes in phenotype—the complex of traits that distinguish, say, genera or families, don’t occur instantaneously but take thousands to millions of years to accomplish.  Sometimes these changes are faster than others (this is the basis of the “pattern” part of punctuated equilibrium theory), but they never happen overnight.  And we know from the fossil record that gradualism is often the case: the transformation of land-dwelling artiodactyls into whales, for example, took about ten million years, and the transformation of reptiles into modern mammals took three or four times that span.  We know this because we see the gradual transformation of fossils.  Theory also tells us that such profound evolution can’t happen instantly: it’s unlikely to see a single mutation that would, for example, transform a theropod dinosaur into a bird (many traits must change before that happens), and the coordinated change in many traits that differentiate these groups takes time, as we must await the buildup of many mutations. There’s also a limit to how fast selection can transform populations.

I’m comfortable with saying, then, that big changes in form in evolution are—and must be—gradual, with “gradual” meaning tens of thousands to millions of years.

Shapiro, however, points out that there are instances of more rapid evolution:

  • Polyploidy and other forms of speciation involving hybridization.  Sometimes different species in nature can hybridize, and, though the hybrids may be sterile, they can undergo doubling of the hybrid set of chromosomes to produce a fertile “allotetraploid” species that is fertile because each species’ chromosomes can pair during gamete formation.  This has happened many times in nature (we estimate that 2-7% of all flowering plants arose this way), and it’s very quick: about 2 generations.  We have actually seen this occur in a human lifetime in nature: this is described in WEIT. New species can also arise in this way by doubling of the chromosomes of a single species, forming an “autotetraploid”. Or, sometimes, interspecies hybrids can form new species without doubling their chromosomes; their genes sort out in a way that makes them reproductively isolated (and morphologically different) from the two parental species.  This process, called “diploid hybrid speciation,” occurs relatively quickly as well: I believe that some diploid hybrid sunflowers arose in about 50 generations.  Darwin, of course, didn’t know about this because the genetics wasn’t worked out till much later.   Polyploidy is a rapid form of evolution and speciation, one that is fairly common in plants, but very rare in animals. (The reason for its rarity in animals isn’t understood, but we discuss the theories in the book I wrote with Allen Orr, Speciation.

Many domesticated species arose by either deliberate hybridization by humans or selection on naturally-occurring hybrids.  Wheat, for example, cited by Shapiro as an example of near-instantaneous evolution, did arise by humans picking out a naturally-occurring hybrid; this probably happened twice, so that modern wheat contains the genomes from three wild species of grass. But much of the selection that makes for modern wheat was also artificial: humans picked out the variants with bigger heads that remained on the plant. So the differences between wild and cultivated wheat don’t completely exemplify near-instantaneous evolution in nature.

  • Symbiosis.  We all know, thanks to Lynn Margulis, that the evolution of the eukaryotic cell involved two rapid evolutionary events: the acquisition of mitochondria via the ingestion of one bacterium by another cell, and, in plants, the origin of chloroplasts via a similar route. Centrioles (a group of microtubules involved in cell division) may have originated via symbiosis.  And some species, like lichens, are actually a mixture of two distinct species—in the case of lichens, an alga (or cyanobacterium) and a fungus. That fusion probably happened quickly as well.

Margulis theorized that symbiosis was not only important in evolution, but ubiquitous, involved in nearly all cases of speciation and macroevolution. She was wrong. We know now that the rapid origin of new taxa by symbiosis, while critical for some evolutionary transformations, is rare.  It can hardly be used to discount the notion that “Darwinian” evolution is usually gradual.

  • Acquisition of DNA from other species.  This uptake of DNA between species, also called “horizontal gene transfer” (HGT) happens sometimes, and although rare (especially in animals), may be more common than we think.  I regard it as a form of mutation, since the acquired gene is, after acquisition, subject to evolution via natural selection.  Given its rarity (if it were common we wouldn’t be able to make good DNA-based trees of various species) and the subsequent modification of the acquired DNA by natural selection, it’s doubtful whether HGT qualifies as “instantaneous evolution.”
  • Genomic changes other than slight changes in DNA sequence.  Shapiro cites several of these which have been involved in the evolution of new genes, including gene duplication (a whole gene gets copied in its entirety, which can lead to the origin of “gene families”) and the formation of new genes by pasting together bits of old ones (this is the topic of research by my Chicago colleague Manyuan Long).  But while these pheomena are “rapid” on the DNA level, they’re not necessarily a cause of rapid evolution on the organismal, biochemical, or even genomic level.  After all, those new genes, particularly the duplicated ones, must undergo their own gradual divergence via natural selection: that’s how the different opsins in our eyes, the divergent genes in our immune system, and the different types of human hemoglobin arose.  That differentiation took a long time, because the new genes have to await mutations.

So yes, evolution can be almost instantaneous in the case of symbiosis and polyploidy, and there are mechanisms of mutation not dreamt of in the genetics of Watson and Crick. But does this invalidate the paradigm of neo-Darwinism? Shapiro thinks it does:

Was Darwin simply mistaken about the gradual nature of hereditary variation? Such ignorance would be unavoidable before we knew about Mendelian genetics and DNA. Or was there a deeper flaw in the theory that he (and Alfred Russell Wallace) propounded? The answer may well be that it was a basic mistake to think that optimizing fitness is the source of biological diversity.

Here he’s completely wrong.  Yes, evolution can sometimes be rapid, though most of the time it’s gradual, but in all cases—all cases—adaptive evolution occurs by natural selection, and that means “optimizing fitness.”  Shapiro is getting Darwinism wrong here, for he’s conflating the materials of evolutionary diversity (mutations and new genes that arise randomly) with their disposition by natural selection, a nonrandom process that does involve “optimizing fitness.” Given that adaptive differentiation between species involves natural selection, you simply cannot say that “optimizing fitness’ is not a part of biological diversity.  That attack on neo-Darwinism is misguided, and it’s wrong to suggest it to lay readers.

Shapiro’s piece then rapidly goes downhill as he starts repeating creationist arguments. Here’s one:

The first problem with selection as the source of diversity is that selection by humans, the subject of Darwin’s opening chapter, modifies existing traits but does not produce new traits or new species. Dogs may vary widely as a result of selective breeding, but they always remain dogs.

You’ll recognize this as the old creationist canard.  Yes, of course we can’t turn a dog into a cat by artificial selection, because that would take millions of years, and we’ve only been selecting on dogs for a couple of thousand years.  But the true refutation of this idea is in the fossil record: we can see land-living artiodactyls (resembling small deer) turning into whales, we can see fish turning into amphibians, we can see early reptiles turning into mammals, we can see theropod dinosaurs turning into birds, and we can see our apelike ancestors turning into more modern humans. In other words, we find in fossils precisely those transformations that Shapiro says are impossible.  I deplore that a colleague of mine makes this misguided argument, and in the Science section of HuffPo, which I’m increasingly beginning to deplore as well.

Shapiro also goes after the neo-Darwinian idea that mutations are random:

The second problem is that Darwin understood only “numerous, successive, slight modifications” as the sources of inherited change. His neo-Darwinian followers have modified this position to assert that all mutations occur randomly. They insist there is no biological input into the change process. For them, the genome determines organism characteristics. They think of it as a read-only memory (ROM), which only changes by accident.

Well, he’s wrong again here.  What we mean when we say that mutations are “random” is not that there’s no biological input into the mutation process (that would be a truly stupid assertion), but that the biological inputs into diversity occur irrespective of whether they would be useful to the organism. Mutational change occurs by accident, or as a byproduct of something else (like a gene being accidentally duplicated, or the ingestion of DNA from another species), but those changes occur whether or not they’d be “good” (i.e., increase the reproductive output of)  individuals in the species that has mutated.  Gene shuffling, gene duplication, horizontal gene transfer: all of these are biological accidents that are just the precursors of adaptive differentiation—the fuel of evolutionary change.  They’re the gas that fills the tank of the car, which moves by natural selection.  Adaptive differentiation still requires the process of natural selection: the nonrandom differential reproduction of genes (and individuals), usually involving greater success in the environment.

While Shapiro rightfully points out that there are more sources of genetic variation than were dreamt of in your genetics, Watson and Crick, he is misguided in thinking that these new sources of variation completely destroy the Darwinian idea of gradualism and natural selection.  We see many examples of gradual evolutionary change in the fossil record, and natural selection is still the only game in town when in comes to explaining adaptations.  If Shapiro knows any other way that adaptation can occur, let him tell us.

Neo-Darwinism has certainly expanded since it began to form in the 1930s, and it should: evolution is a vibrant science with new discoveries occurring weekly. But it’s simply wrong to think that those new discoveries have invalidated (or even caused a serious reassessment of) the major tenets of neo-Darwinism.  That theory is regularly pronounced dead—as it is here by Shapiro—but it refuses to lie down.

The oldest cat video of all time

February 18, 2012 • 5:44 am

Courtesy of The Atlantic, we have an ancient film of felid pugilism. It’s a bit cruel, but I present it as a historical curiosity (if the movie doesn’t work on this site, see it here):

This 1894 film, one of the earliest produced by Thomas Edison’s movie studio, features two cats boxing — but it’s not actually the first recording of a cat in motion.

[vodpod id=ExternalVideo.1012825&w=425&h=350&fv=]

Rumor has it that a famous secularist has a cat named after a famous boxer, and that this cat not only likes to be “misted” daily (sprayed with a plant-misting bottle), but also uses a human treadmill for exercise and has learned to turn it on.  Perhaps if there’s enough acclaim here, we can persuade said secularist to send us the videos.

And here’s the earliest photograph of a moving cat:

But is this the first recording of a cat in motion? That credit, it seems, goes to Eadweard Muybridge for his animal locomotion studies, which include this 1887 motion study of a cat running, below. Muybridge pioneered motion capture by inventing a setup of multiple cameras in sequence, which recorded continuous movement, frame by frame.