“Only a theory”???

February 8, 2012 • 10:02 am

Technicianonline.com, which appears to be the student newspaper from North Carolina State University, has a new editorial called “Evolution: theory not fact” by deputy viewpoint editor Madison Murphy. It not only mischaracterizes evolution, but makes the crucial mistake of dismissing evolution as not a fact but “only a theory” (not her words, but an accurate characterization).  Murphy begins with a somewhat misguided definition of evolution:

The theory of evolution can be explained simply: Complex creatures evolved from simplistic creatures over time. All creatures come from a common ancestor. Over time, mutations in genetic codes were maintained as they aided in survival. This process of mutation is called natural selection. Eventually, these mutations build up until a complex creature is the result.

Leaving aside the hilarious misuse of the word “simplistic,” this paragraph gets natural selection wrong in several ways: mutations aren’t “maintained”, but increase in frequency; the currency of selection is reproduction, not survival alone; and selection is not just a “process of mutation”, but a process that involves the selective disposition of mutations via a deterministic process of gene sorting.

She then appears to favor teaching alternative creationist views, a deeply misguided notion, but in the process also conflates those views:

There are opposing theories to evolution, however, and they are also some of the most controversial theories to ever be discussed in science, politics, religion and education. These opposing theories are creationism and intelligent design. Some people lump these two together, but they are slightly different.

The theory of intelligent design states that the creation of a complex being could not have happened randomly or by chance. There had to have been a higher power that created this complexity. However, according to intelligent design, this “designer” could have been anyone.

The theory of creationism, on the other hand, states the designer was God. The extremes of creationism vary as well. Some people believe in what is strictly stated in the Bible in Genesis without any room for other possibilities. Others, such as Catholics, believe evolution could have occurred the way Darwin describes, but by the power of God. This belief also says evolution cannot account for the creation of the human soul.

Well, yes, IDers do avoid identifying the designer, but the differences are deeper than this.  Many advocates of intelligent design do admit that species evolved over time, and often did so via natural selection.  Some, like Michael Behe, even admit common ancestry of species. IDers usually affirm that not that all organisms were created ex nihilo, but that some features of organisms, like the famous bacterial flagellum, couldn’t have evolved via Darwinian natural selection, and thus required a designer.  Both ID and straight Biblical creationism are creationist theories, as is the theistic evolution described by Murphy in the last sentence.

But I weep for Murphy, and also for her biology professor, when she writes stuff like this:

Recently, I was sitting in a class in which my professor began to speak about evolution. As a believer of Biblical creationism, my interest is often piqued when evolution is brought up in a class. Normally, I do not mind a discussion of the theory since it’s so widely accepted by my peers. However, this time, it was different.

My professor started talking about the Theory of Evolution as if it was a fact. This is a problem. Evolution is not a fact, it’s a theory.

Defined, a theory is “an unproven assumption.” Let’s treat it as such. I have no problem learning about evolution if it’s presented as what it is: unproven. I don’t even mind learning about evolution without any mention of intelligent design or creationism, if it’s presented as a theory. But, when a professor begins to speak of it as though it’s a proven fact, I get bothered.

A scientific theory is not an “unproven assumption.”  Doug Futuyma explains the difference on p. 613 of his book Evolution (the textbook we’re using this quarter in my introductory evolution class). Not only Murphy, but all of us would benefit from reading these two short paragraphs:

A theory, as the word is used in science, doesn’t mean an unsupported speculation or hypothesis (the popular use of the word).  A theory is, instead, a big idea that encompasses other ideas and hypotheses and weaves them into a coherent fabric. It is a mature, interconnected body of statements, based on reasoning and evidence, that explains a wide variety of observations. It is, in one of the definitions offered by the Oxford English Dictionary, “a scheme or system of ideas and statements held as an explanation of account of a group of ideas or phenomena; . . .a statement of what are known to be the general laws of something known or observed.” Thus atomic theory, quantum theory, and plate tectonic theory are not mere speculations or opinions, but strongly supported ideas that explain a great variety of phenomena.  There are few theories in biology, and among them evolution is surely the most important.

So is evolution a fact or a theory? In light of these definitions, evolution is a scientific fact. That is, the descent of all species, with modification from common ancestors is a hypothesis that in the last 150 years or so has been supported by so much evidence, and has so successfully resisted all challenges, that it has become a fact.  But this history of evolutionary change is explained by evolutionary theory, the body of statements (about mutaitons, selection, genetic drift, developmental constraints, and so forth) that together account for the various changes that organisms have undergone.

And, of course, the myriad of facts supporting the theory of evolution is the subject of my book, Why Evolution is True.

What is most striking is that Murphy, like a Muslim who sees a teddy bear named Mohamed, is “deeply offended” at the idea that evolution might be true and its detractors blinkered:

This particular professor went on to state that those who don’t believe in evolution are wrong. He said that there are so many facts proving it’s truth that one would have to be ignorant not to believe it. I found this to be deeply offensive. I am not ignorant simply because I choose to believe one theory over another.

Yes she is, and for several reasons.  First, Biblical creationism is not a “theory,” it’s a fiction. Choosing to believe that over the fact of evolution is ignorance in the worst sense.

There are two ways to construe “ignorance”: as simple non-acquaintance with facts, or acquaintance with facts but choosing to ignore them.  The former is no crime, and is easily remedied by, say, reading my book.  The latter is an intellectual crime, and it’s one that Murphy has committed.  She is indeed ignorant in the second sense because she chooses to ignore the incontrovertible scientific evidence rather than the unsupported claims of her faith.  And she characterizes herself as a “Biblical creationist,” which means she ignores not only the evidence from biology, but from physics, geology, and astronomy as well.  She apparently thinks the earth is just a few thousand years old.  Now that is ignorance—willful, blind, obedient-to-God ignorance.

The misguided notion of evolution as “only a theory” reappears in Murphy’s closing:

If professors or teachers at any grade level are going to teach evolution, they should make sure their students are aware that it is a theory and not a fact. If a student who had never been taught evolution before had been sitting in that class, they would forever think evolution is a fact and those who believe otherwise are nutcases.

Not only do professors need to be wary of what they’re teaching, but students must also be cautious. Students, never take anything a professor says at face value. I encourage you to research things for yourself and make an informed opinion. You never know when someone could be teaching you theory and not fact.

Yes, Ms. Murphy, evolution is a theory and a fact as well.  Those who don’t accept it either don’t know the evidence or, as in your case, are blinded to that evidence by adherence to religion. Perhaps Murphy’s evolution professor didn’t give that evidence, and if that’s true he should have.  That’s why my first two lectures in Evolution are on the evidence for it, and why I wrote my book.  But before dismissing evolution as “only a theory,” Murphy should have “researched things for herself”.  She obviously didn’t.

Murphy’s piece has garnered 259 comments at the site.  Most of them are right on the mark, but some miss it widely. Here’s an example of each (click to enlarge):


Evidence for evolution: development of our kidneys

February 8, 2012 • 6:40 am

I’m teaching about this today in my introductory evolution class, and thought I’d include a video showing evidence for evolution that comes from the development of the human kidney. The video is in French, but I’ll explain what’s happening.

The evolutionary/developmental phenomenon of “recapitulation,” in which developing organisms are supposed to go through stages that reprise their evolutionary ancestry, has been in bad repute, but some of that is undeserved. (Recapitulation is often characterized with the phrase “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”, with “ontogeny” meaning development and “phylogeny” meaning “order in which ancestors evolved.”)

No, our own development does not successively resemble that of an adult fish, amphibian, and reptile before arriving at our own mammalian characteristics, but we do show developmental features resembling those of young ancestors.  And yes, in some cases the order in which developmental features appear often corresponds to the order in which the ancestors with those features evolved.

One example is the development of the human kidney, which is pretty much the same as the development of any mammalian kidney.  It turns out that, in utero, we develop three separate kidneys in succession, absorbing the first two before we wind up with the embryonic kidney that will become our adult kidney.  The first two of these reprise embryonic kidneys of ancestral forms, and in the proper evolutionary order.

The video below shows the production and disappearance of the two kidneys. (Note: there may be a few errors in what I say, since the information is gleaned from many different sources and was sometimes conflicting. Kidney-savvy readers can weigh in.)  Note too that the development of structures associated with the kidney—the urogenital system—differs between males and females. I show the male development, but you can see that of females here.)

Pronephric kidney (0-12 seconds in the video):  This appears first in the video, and begins to form at about three weeks into human development. It consists of an organ that, in lampreys and hagfishes (primitive jawless vertebrates), filters wastes from the coelom (body cavity) and excretes them to the outside.  But the pronephric kidney does not function in human and other mammalian embryos.  It begins to disappear shortly after formation and gives rise to the

Mesonephric kidney (14-40 seconds).  This kidney filters wastes from the blood, not the body cavity, and excretes them to the outside of the body via a pair of tubes called the mesonephric ducts (also “Wolffian ducts”).  The mesonephric kidney goes on to develop into the adult kidney of fish and amphibians. This kidney does function for a few weeks in the human embryo, but then disappears as our final kidney forms, which is the

Metanephric kidney (42 seconds into the video until the end): This begins developing about five weeks into gestation, and consists of an organ that, like the mesonephric kidney, filters wastes from the blood, but excretes them to the outside through a pair of new tubes, the ureters. In the embryo, the wastes are excreted directly into the amniotic fluid.  The metanephric kidney is the final adult kidney of reptiles, birds, and mammals.

It was Darwin, of course, who first noticed the phenomenon of recapitulation and used it as evidence for evolution: it forms part of Chapter 13 of The Origin, though, as I recall, Darwin doesn’t mention kidneys.

This bizarre formation of three successive kidneys, with the first not functioning at all and the first two degenerating completely, begs explanation. It doesn’t make a lot of sense under a creationist hypothesis: why would a creator bestow the embryo with three kidneys, trashing the first two (one of which doesn’t do anything) before making the final one?  The explanation involves the fact that the first two kidneys resemble, in order, those of primitive aquatic vertebrates (lampreys and hagfish) and aquatic or semiaquatic vertebrates (fish and amphibians): an evolutionary order.  The explanation, then, is that we go through developmental stages that show organs resembling those of our ancestors.  For we are, after all, descended from fish and amphibians (though cladists might argue with those terms).

Why do we still retain those early developmental forms? We’re not sure, but many suspect that development is such an integrated process that it’s “easier” for natural selection to remodel existing features than to form new ones de novo. The pronephric kidney, for example, may provide a key morphological or chemical stimulus for the formation of the mesonephric kidney, and the mesonephric for the metanephric kidney. So the first two kidneys appear in a transitory way to provide those stimuli.  This doesn’t always happen, of course: many features form without having to first reprise the ancestral condition of those features. Recapitulation is a phenomenon, not a law.

This ordering of developmental events that mimic those of our ancestors is not unique to the kidney: it also occurs, for example, in the way our blood vessels form, and Darwin gives other examples.  One of my favorite examples, which I’ll also teach about today, is the lanugo, the coat of hair that all human embryos develop and then shed about a month before birth (see my explanation here). The lanugo forms because we carry the genes for a full coat of hair, inherited from our primate ancestors.  We briefly express those genes in utero, and at about the same relative time of development as do embryonic chimps (who don’t lose the hair). Here’s the lanugo on a premature infant. It’s shed soon after birth.

Embryonic baleen whales, which don’t have teeth as adults, form tooth buds in the embryos, which then disappear. The same is true for toothless anteaters, which, like baleen whales, are descended from ancestors that had teeth.

Buried in our embryology are innumerable signs of our ancestry—innumerable proofs of evolution.  As Darwin said in The Origin,

“Embryology rises greatly in interest, when we thus look at the embryo as a picture, more or less obscured, of the common parent-form of each great class of animals.”

Connecting the events of development with evolution was one part of Darwin’s genius, and one reason why On the Origin of Species is such a fantastically insightful book. But that connection forms only one section of a single chapter out of fourteen. In the rest of the book, Darwin also connected evolution to the fossil record, to biogeography, to animal and plant breeding, and to the existence of vestigial organs.  And he also produced the correct explanation for the way evolution molded adaptations—natural selection.

The Origin is one of the monumental achievements of the highly evolved human brain—the best science book ever written. I’ve always said that it’s the one science book you must have read to be considered truly educated. (If you read WEIT, I’ll consider you fairly educated!)

An apology

February 8, 2012 • 4:22 am

After rereading the piece I wrote on Krauss yesterday, and considering the readers’ comments as well, I realize that I was indeed overly splenetic and intemperate in my criticism.  I don’t think Krauss is an accommodationist, and greatly appreciate his efforts to popularize science and to push the faithful toward a materialism that does explain the universe.

All I can plead is that, as Larry suspected, I did get up on the wrong side of the bed yesterday, and I took it out on a man who didn’t deserve that invective.  So I apologize to both Larry and the readers, and have to say that since I started posting three years ago, this is the only piece that I regret having written. Consider it retracted, and mea culpa.

Lawrence Krauss: accommodationist?

February 7, 2012 • 2:47 pm

UPDATE:  In the following post I have apologized for the intemperate nature of this piece and for the accusation that Krauss might be an accommodationist. I’m leaving this original post here as a testament to my peevishness and poor judgment.

_________

Lawrence Krauss’s new book, A Universe from Nothing, is supposed to be very good; one of its points, I think, is to show that science disproves the cosmological argument for God.  In today’s Notes & Theories from the Guardian‘s science desk, Krauss has an essay called, “The faithful must learn to respect those who question their beliefs.” I suppose this stuff needed to be said, but if Krauss is calling for accommodationism, as he seems to be doing, his argument is naive.  Saying that the faithful must learn to respect those who question their beliefs is like saying, “tigers must learn to be vegetarians.”

I was a bit peeved from the opening paragraph:

Issues of personal faith can be a source of respectful debate and discussion. Since faith is often not based on evidence, however, it is hard to imagine how various deep philosophical or religious disagreements can be objectively laid to rest. As a result, skeptics like myself struggle to understand or anticipate the vehement anger that can be generated by the mere suggestion that perhaps there may be no God, or even that such a suggestion is not meant to offend.

Really? Is it really such a struggle for Krauss to anticipate and understand the anger of the faithful? I think not. And yes, some of the strategy is to offend, directly or indirectly, because one of the best ways to reveal the emptiness of faith is to mock it, and mock it hard in front of the uncommitted. That’s what P. Z. was doing when he nailed that cracker, and what I was doing when I drew a picture of Mohamed.

After citing several familiar examples of how reviled atheists are in America, Krauss concludes:

It is fascinating that lack of belief, or even mere skepticism, is met among the faithful with less respect and more distrust even than a fervent belief in a rival God. This, more than anything, leads to an inevitable and deep tension between science and religion. When such distrust enters the realm of public policy, everyone suffers.

It is fascinating, but understandable.  If someone believes in a rival God, they’re at least confessing belief in a sky-fairy—something transcendent. I can easily see why that’s far less threatening than suggesting that one’s belief in sky-fairies is unjustified and ludicrous.  For deep down, many religious people are deeply worried that they may be wrong.  If you put the basic beliefs of Catholicism in simple language, for example, as I think P. Z. Myers has (and Ben Goren on this site), they sound absolutely ridiculous. No wonder religious folks get all huffy if you suggest that they’re wrong or deluded, and why, in the end, they resort to asserting that evidence isn’t relevant at all: what’s relevant is revelation and what feels good to believe.

Krauss continues:

As a scientist, one is trained to be skeptical, which is perhaps why many scientists find it difficult to accept blindly the existence of a deity. What is unfortunate is that this skepticism is taken by many among the faithful to be an attack not only on their beliefs, but also on their values, and therefore leads to the conclusion that science itself is suspect.

The first sentence is bloody obvious.  And yes, it’s unfortunate that this situation exists, but it’s also inevitable—for religious values stem from religious beliefs. Where else would you get the idea that aborting an early-stage zygote is the same as human murder, or that it’s a sin for a man to lie with another man?

Krauss, who appears to have done a good job showing that the Universe could have arisen ex nihilo, then turns accommodationist, saying that new scientific knowledge need not drive a wedge between science and society.

As a result, the longstanding theological and philosophical question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?”, like many earlier such questions, is increasingly becoming a scientific question, because our notions of “something” and “nothing” have completely changed as a result of our new knowledge.

As science continues to encroach on this issue of profound human interest, it would be most unfortunate if the inherent skepticism associated with scientific progress were to drive a further wedge between science and society.

As a cosmologist, I am keenly aware of the limitations inherent in our study of the universe and its origins – limitations arising from the accidents of our birth and location in a universe whose limits may forever be beyond the reach of our experiments.

As a result, science need not be the direct enemy of faith. However, a deep tension will persist until the faithful recognise that a willingness to question even one’s most fervently held beliefs – the hallmark of science – is a trait that should be respected, not reviled.

The last paragraph seems rather naive. Unless there are mercenary considerations at issue, I’m baffled why he thinks science need not be a direct enemy of faith.  It need not be a direct enemy of only one kind of faith: deism.  As for the remaining thousands of faiths that see God as interceding in the world, yes, science must be their enemy. For religion—especially theistic religion—is based on revelation, dogma, and indoctrination, while science is based on reason, doubt, and evidence. No rapprochement is possible.

Getting the faithful to show respect for the way science works will not bring about a truce between science and religion, for lots of religious people already have that respect for science. They just don’t apply it to their own beliefs. That “deep tension” will persist not until religion respects science, but until the hokum that is religion goes away forever. (And if you think that’s not possible, look what’s happened in Europe over the last 200 years.) I wish Krauss had had the guts to say that in his essay.  But then he wouldn’t sell so many books.

h/t: Matthew Cobb

Court overturns Calfornia’s ban on gay marriage

February 7, 2012 • 12:41 pm

This is certainly not the last act in this drama, but a federal appeals court in California has just ruled California’s gay marriage ban unconstitutional.

According to the New York Times,

A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 that a lower court judge correctly interpreted the U.S. Constitution and Supreme Court precedents when he declared in 2010 that Proposition 8 was a violation of the civil rights of gays and lesbians. [JAC: Proposition 8 was a referendum that banned same-sex marriages .)

The court said gay marriages cannot resume in the state until the deadline passes for Proposition 8 sponsors to appeal to a larger panel of the 9th Circuit. If such an appeal is filed, gay marriages will remain on hold until it’s resolved.

Lawyers for Proposition 8 sponsors have repeatedly said they would consider appealing to a larger panel of the court and then the U.S. Supreme Court if they did not receive a favorable ruling from the 9th Circuit.

Whatever happens, this ruling means that the issue will likely land in the U.S. Supreme Court: the final arbiter of law.  And I’m not at all confident that our conservative court would support gay marriage.

“Big Questions” is dead

February 7, 2012 • 9:06 am

There was a lot of ballyhoo when the Templeton Foundation launched its “Big Questions Online” website in 2010. Rod Dreher was in charge (and blogging), and, by promising to pay handsomely for articles, they solicited a bunch of accommodationist scholars to osculate the rump of faith.  I always thought of the site as sort of a BioLogos For Methodists.

I’ve visited there from time to time, and I’m happy to report that nothing has been put up at the site since last October, and very little since the middle of 2011. Last year Rod Dreher left Templeton as communications director to return to writing. “Big Questions” is dead.  Although the site was a source of endless accommodationist LOLs for me, it’s better off dead than as a living source of unintended humor.

But the site’s logo, which says a lot about the Templeton Foundation’s priorities, is still at the top:

Kitteh contest: Delilah

February 7, 2012 • 8:09 am

Reader Joe J. submits what he claims is a very malicious cat, Delilah.  Be sure to click on the links in his story:

I present Delilah, “The She Devil”  Don’t let that befuddled look fool you: she’s a terror on four paws! [JAC: What about the hind paws?]

Both the avian and rodent populations live in fear.  Pure Malevolence!

She started out my daughter’s kitteh at the University of Oregon, but due to the landlord, and one of her roommates’ general allergy to kittehs, Delilah came to live with me in Portland, Oregon.  She also is the bane of my other Kitteh, “Mr Spud,” who is not so  photogenic due to lethargic behaviour. He lives in hiding, only coming out long enough to stretch and sharpen his claws.

Costa Rica: a visit to the Skutch reserve

February 7, 2012 • 6:30 am

I am way behind in recounting my travels: I haven’t even finished with Spain.  But I do want to describe my visit (along with Dr. Judy Stone) to the Los Cusingos Neotropical Bird Sanctuary in Costa Rica last month. The Sanctuary is in south-central Costa Rica, near the mountains, and is position “C” on the map of my travels given below. (“Los cusingos” is plural for the local name of a bird:  the Fiery Billed Aracari, a lovely toucan shown below the map.)

A fiery billed aracari (Pteroglossus frantzii)

Los Cusingos is a well-known mecca for birders because it was the home of the famous ornithologist Alexander Skutch, who lived to be only eight days shy of 100 (1908-2008). Trained as a botanist, he travelled widely in Central America.  While working for the United Fruit Company to cure banana disease (see the interview here), Skutch became interested in birds and realized that although the names and ranges of many neotropical birds were well known, their behaviors—particularly their nesting behaviors—were largely unknown.

Skutch, now in love with the tropics, bought a plot of land in 1935, built a small open-air house, and lived there for the rest of his life: 73 years! (Clicking on all photos will enlarge them.)

The Skutch house at Los Cusingos

In 1950 he married Pamela Lankaster, daughter of the British naturalist Charles Lakaster.  By all accounts it was a long and happy marriage, with her devoting a lot of time to improving the land, especially the lovely gardens around the house. She died in 2001, and I found a picture of the two of them on the walls of the house, whose contents haven’t been changed since Skutch’s death.

Alexander Skutch and Pamela Lankaster

Naturalist and artist Manuel Antonio describes Skutch’s contributions to science:

Perhaps the most important contribution that Dr. Skutch made to ornithology was the complete studies of the life habits of close to 300 birds of the american tropic, including the Quetzal, “a bird of superlative beauty”, in his own words. Furthermore, he demonstrated that the procreation of tropical birds is slower than that of the same families in the northern hemisphere. He also studied the dispersion of seeds by birds and mammals.

Even though the study of birds was his priority, he would not omit the observation and description of many other animal species – mammals, insects, reptiles- of the tropical ecosystems which he explored. With his observations, ladened with patience and reflection, he was able to define the associations and interactions that some of these species establish with their environment.

It is important to underscore his contributions to botany. His studies and collections of tropical plants for different museums and botanical gardens resulted in the discovery of species of flora unknown to science. Of great relevance is the study of the crossed reproductive system of the “aguacatillo” (Persea cerulia), and his studies on the Guarumo tree (Cecropia sp.). In recognition to his important contributions to botanical science, many authors have given the name skutchii to the plant species they have discovered.

Dr. Skutch´s observational skills, and his capacity to reflect on the nature of life, led to his writing numerous texts on philosophy and ethics, and his personal meditations on animal and vegetal life. [JAC: Skutch’s last book was Moral Foundations: An Introduction to Ethics (2006)].

However, as important as his studies and his written work for scientists worldwide, is his life and his ideals narrated in his books “The Farm of a Naturalist”, “A Naturalist in Costa Rica”, “The Imperative Call”, and other books of great descriptive power and inmense natural, cultural and historical value.

A simple, unmarked mound of earth marks Skutch’s grave behind the house (I suspect his wife Pamela is buried there, too.)

Let’s look at the house before we get to the surrounding natural wonders. As I said, its contents appear completely unaltered (the local naturalist verified this) since the day Skutch died (I understand that there’s been some reconstruction to restore the house as it was). For example, the bedroom still has the two single beds occupied by Skutch and Lankaster, with their intervening night table.  You can tell who slept on each side of the table!

Here is Skutch’s closet (note that the shoes appear to be the ones he’s wearing in the photo above).  It’s a simple wardrobe, but I wonder why he needed so many ties!

Skutch’s workroom, with the typewriter on which he wrote some of his books:

The family record player, with two of their albums:

Skutch and Lankaster had an extensive library.  All the books are still there, moldering away in the tropical humidity. I took a pictures of some of the interesting volumes:

But Skutch’s interests were wide (I was told these were his books, but of course they could also reflect Lankaster’s interests):

For those of you who don’t know that Ian Fleming took the name of 007, James Bond, from another ornithologist, here’s one of the books, West Indian Birds, by the real James Bond,

Here’s the real James Bond from Wikipedia, which also notes his connection to Fleming:

Ian Fleming, who was a keen bird watcher living in Jamaica, was familiar with Bond’s book, and chose the name of its author for the hero of Casino Royale in 1953, apparently because he wanted a name that sounded ‘as ordinary as possible’. Fleming wrote to the real Bond’s wife, “It struck me that this brief, unromantic, Anglo-Saxon and yet very masculine name was just what I needed, and so a second James Bond was born.” He also contacted the real James Bond about using his name in the books and Bond replied to him, “Fine with it.” At some point during one of Fleming’s visits to Jamaica he met with the real Bond and his wife as shown in a made for DVD documentary about Fleming. A short clip was shown with Fleming, Bond and his wife. Also in his novel Dr. No Fleming referenced Bond’s work by basing a large Ornithological Sanctuary on Dr. No’s island in the Bahamas. In 1964, Fleming gave Bond a first edition copy of You Only Live Twice signed “To the real James Bond, from the thief of his identity”.

The real James Bond (1900-1989)

The gardens around the house are gorgeous, and replete with hummingbirds. Here are some flowers from that garden: an iris and a ginger (at two stages of development). I’m told that the ginger isn’t native to the New World, and I’m not sure about the iris.

But the surrounding trails of the 180-acre reserve contain much natural vegetation.  Here’s a palm showing “stilt roots,” which have been theorized as a way for a tree to maintain mechanical stability without having to invest in a thick trunk:

A fungus:

Army ants taking advantage of the trail’s constructed edge. (If anyone knows the species, weigh in below.)

Here is a tattered butterfly that has been identified as Eryphanis lycomedon by my friend and tropical butterfly expert Phil DeVries. He also says that the “rip” across the bottom of the hindwings is certainly due to a bird attack, and that the trapezoidal notch on the forewing is probably the remnant of a lizard bite. It’s tough for a tropical butterfly, but some, like this one, manage to survive with considerable damage.

I talked to Phil about the “eyespots” last night. In moths these spots, which appear on the hindwings, are classically thought to induce “startle reactions” in predators: the moth rests with wings open but hindwings covered by the forewings. When a predator (usually a bird or lizard) approaches, the moth uncovers its eyespots, startling the predator since those spots resemble vertebrate predators like owls.  This has been shown to scare away predators.  Here’s a saturnid moth with the “startling” eyespots (photo by Leroy Simon):

Leucanella lynx, a saturnid moth with eyespots

Phil thinks, however, that the eyespots of butterflies like the Eryphanis above have a different function. Unlike moths, these butterflies rest with the wings folded up, and don’t display them in a “startle” response.  Thus the predator sees only one eyespot at a time. Phil thinks, and his students have published on this, that the eyespots are “targets” that deflect a predator’s attention away from the vital body, so that it merely takes a chunk out of the wing.  He and others have shown that the areas of the wing that harbor eyespots are structurally weaker than the rest of the wing, and thus easily torn away. (A butterfly, as you can see above, does pretty well even with sizeable chunks of its hindwings missing.)  The thesis, then, is that weak areas of the wing co-evolve along with the eyespots to enable predators who have already spotted the butterfly to attack less important parts of the body.

The site harbors some really nice pre-Columbian petroglyphs:

And what would a visit to the Skutch reserve be without birds? Here are two that have already been identified by reader John Harshman as a Golden-hooded tanager (Tangara larvata) on the right, and a female Green honeycreeper (Chlorophanes spize) on the left.

I’m not sure what this species is, but I am sure that some reader will promptly identify it:

It was a pleasant few hours in the Skutch reserve, but we departed with pressing botanical business further south.

UPDATE:  An alert reader, Peter Scheers from Leuven, Belgium, found a few errors in my post, and has some addenda as well:

Thanks to google alerts I immediately received info about your travel to Skutch’s farm in Costa Rica. I visited the place in January 2011 and really do like your photos (also with his books and so on!) and impressions. As it turns out, I have your own book on my table, waiting to be read.
Just a few remarks: Skutch bought his farm in 1941 (in 1935, Costa Rica became his principal country of residence). The Skutch house as it is now is not exactly as it was before (due to restoration work after 2004; afterwards, most items have been placed back more or less in their original position. Last name of his wife was Lankester. Skutch died on May 12, 2004 (born May 20, 1904). Skutch is indeed buried next to his wife, in the garden. Moral Foundations was published after his death and is, in fact, a manuscript from the 1950´s (also: it already appeared in Spanish translation in 2000). Arguably, Trogons, Laughing Falcons and Other Neotropical Birds (1999) is his real last book (as it was indeed conceived in the same period, not a manuscript written many years before).
I have been working on a selection of unpublished texts by Skutch, which is expected to be published later in 2012 by the Tropical Science Center in San Jose (as part of their 50th anniversary celebrations). This will include a large section with Skutch´s own impressions about the first four years of his stay at Los Cusingos (1941-1945).