RIP Lynn Margulis, ctd.

November 24, 2011 • 11:38 pm

by Greg Mayer

The New York Times has published an obituary. It’s dreadful. Here’s the worst part:

The hypothesis was a direct challenge to the prevailing neo-Darwinist belief that the primary evolutionary mechanism was random mutation.

Rather, Dr. Margulis argued that a more important mechanism was symbiosis; that is, evolution is a function of organisms that are mutually beneficial growing together to become one and reproducing. The theory undermined significant precepts of the study of evolution, underscoring the idea that evolution began at the level of micro-organisms long before it would be visible at the level of species.

I’ll leave the dissection of this nonsense as an exercise.

JAC addition:  I agree with Greg; it’s dreadful.  And here’s Margulis’s dismissal, given as a quote in the obituary, of an entire cadre of evolutionary biologists:

“I work in evolutionary biology, but with cells and micro-organisms. Richard Dawkins, John Maynard Smith, George Williams, Richard Lewontin, Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould all come out of the zoological tradition, which suggests to me that, in the words of our colleague Simon Robson, they deal with a data set some three billion years out of date.”

As if the work of these people has nothing to contribute to evolutionary biology because it applies to modern-day species!  It’s like saying a mechanic can’t work on modern cars because he doesn’t know anything about Stanley Steamers or Model Ts!.

Modern organisms are hardly “out of date”, and they do obey the rules of population genetics. Margulis might as well have dismissed all the architects of modern evolutionary theory, including J. B. S. Haldane, Sewall Wright, Ronald Fisher, and Bill Hamilton.

Margulis’s legacy would be far more positive if she hadn’t spent the last few decades going around saying that she alone had the correct handle on evolutionary biology, and everyone else was wrong.  And it would have helped had she not been an HIV-AIDS denialist, asserting that the virus didn’t even exist and the disease was really syphillis, rendered undetectable because the spirochete became symbiotic with our cells. How do we weigh that deadly denialism against her positive contributions about symbiosis?

And then there were her views that the 9/11 destruction in New York was due not to an act of terrorism but to deliberately set bombs. In the video below she explains this crazy idea, and you can read her essay about it here.

Margulis’s legacy in science is secure: because she walked among us, we understand much more about nature than we would have otherwise.  Her pushing the theory, in the teeth of doubt and criticism, that some cellular organelles descend from ancient bacteria, is a major advance in our understanding of life.

But her legacy is not unmixed, and her life leaves us with another lesson: if a scientist has a Big Idea that turns out to be right, that does not automatically make her right about everything else. None of us, however famous, should be immune to the criticism that characterizes our discipline. As we remember her on this sad occasion, let us at least have a balanced view of her life.

Women scientists talk about evolution

November 24, 2011 • 1:32 pm

by Matthew Cobb

Interesting set of comments from women scientists about the importance of evolution and why it should be taught in public (= state) schools. It’s clearly aimed at high school kids or general members of the public, and does a good job. I’m bemused by the very first comment – ‘Accepting evolution doesn’t mean abandoning your personal beliefs’ (surely that depends on what you believe – what if you were a creationist, for example?), but the rest seem pretty spot on to me:

via Ed Yong on Twitter @edyong209

Aussies surprisingly nonreligious

November 24, 2011 • 7:52 am

Rejoice, Brother Blackford, for you live in a nation that, according to a new survey, is surprisingly godless.

Based on the reports about resurgent creationism and goddiness in Australian schools, I was prepared to think that Australia lies somewhere between the U.S. and England in the degree of religiosity.  But a new “Australian Communities Report,” a survey of 1094 adults commissioned by Olive Tree Media, seems to show the country nearly as atheistic as Scandinavia. Equally surprising, Olive Tree Media appears to be a religious outfit that produces Christian-based media.

Here’s a summary of the report from The Age, a daily newspaper from Melbourne:

Olive Tree director Karl Faase, who is releasing the report at a forum of 70 religious leaders, said the survey sought to identify the ”blocker issues” that turned people off faith.

The obstacle that annoys Australians most is the celebrity endorsements of religion so common in the United States – 70 per cent said they were repelled by it, questioning the motives behind it. Claims of miraculous stories (58 per cent) also repelled non-believers.

The biggest problems Australians have with the church is abuse by the clergy (cited by 91 per cent), hypocrisy and judging others (both 88 per cent) religious wars (83 per cent) and issues around money (87 per cent).

When it comes to church teachings, the main objections are its ideas about homosexuality (69 per cent), hell and condemnation (66 per cent), and the role of women and suffering (both 60 per cent). But 52 per cent were open to philosophical discussion and debating ideas; 54 per cent were impressed by people who lived out a genuine faith, and 60 per cent acknowledged a personal trauma or significant life change might change their attitude to religion.

About 40 per cent of Australians consider themselves Christian, compared with the 2006 census response of 64 per cent, the survey shows. Another 10 per cent identify with other religions; 19 per cent call themselves spiritual but not religious, and 31 per cent identify as having no religion or spiritual belief. Of those who identify with a religion, about half say they don’t actively practise it.

This is all pretty heartening, especially the 24% drop in self-identified Christians in only five years. Perhaps Aussie readers can weigh in about whether they’ve noticed such a striking change.  And 31% with no religion or spiritual belief? That compares very favorably with the least religious countries of Europe.

Sadly, you can’t see the entire report without purchasing it (here), but Olive Tree has provided a nice pdf file of figures showing the results. Here are a few screenshots (click to enlarge):

Here’s a five-minute video of the first presentation of the report’s results:

Advance Australia fair!

h/t: Marella

Happy Thanksgiving!

November 24, 2011 • 4:17 am

Being in Madrid, I’m unable to indulge in the gustatory excess that so characterizes America on this day, but don’t pity me: tonight the evolution conference is having our official Congress dinner by the penguin tank (the pingüinario) at Madrid’s Faunia Nature Park.  I see that the polar exhibit has no fewer than six species of pingüinos on display.  I am of course, a penguinophile, and am much looking forward to it. Here are our dinner companions:

I wonder if we’ll have fish for dinner!

The meeting of the Spanish Society for Evolutionary Biology has been great so far.  It’s well organized and they’re treating us excellently.  Sadly for me, many of the talks are in Spanish, and though I’ve gone to a few, my comprehension is abysmal.  Most of the plenary talks, though, have been by anglophones. I talked on speciation, Richard Fortey gave an engaging talk on the morphology and presumed lifestyle of trilobites (he’s a delightful man who has enlightened me in several conversations about these ex-beasts), Helena Cronin talked this morning about innate differences between men and women and how they translate into performance in the workplace, and tomorrow Nick Lane, author of the fine book Life Ascending, will discuss the role of mitochondria in evolution.

So enjoy el pavo; I’ll be sitting at the table with aquatic birds.

Susan Jacoby: Christian politicians are professional victims

November 24, 2011 • 3:15 am

Update:  When this post was sent out by email, I mistakenly said that the author of the piece was Paula Kirby instead of Susan Jacoby.  Blame it on lack of coffee and a similarity of names and views. My apologies.

___________

The other day I posted the video of the astounding Thanksgiving Family Forum in Iowa, in which six Republican presidential candidates vied with each other in professing their love of God and fealty to American superiority.

In yesterday’s Washington Post’s “On Faith” forum, Susan Jacoby takes up another prominent feature of this forum: the propensity of politicans, especially religious Republican ones, to use either their suffering or that of others as a reason to elect them.  Here’s how she starts her piece, “Christian politicians exalt suffering in GOP campaign”:

Imagine that the year is 1932 and presidential candidate Franklin D. Roosevelt, instead of addressing himself to the economic paralysis that has gripped the nation, talks endlessly about the polio-induced paralysis of his own legs as some sort of unique qualification for the presidency. He blathers on about his deep faith in God as the reason he should be elected, weeps at the memory not only of his struggle with polio but of his own sins, and generally talks to the Americans as if they were choosing a Confessor/Penitent-in-Chief instead of a president.

That was exactly the spectacle presented last Saturday by Republican presidential candidates at a forum stressing faith and family in Des Moines, Iowa. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rich Santorum and the pizza impresario Herman Cain broke down when they spoke, respectively, about the brain tumors of a friend’s son, the birth of a daughter with a severe genetically determined disability, and being diagnosed with cancer.

Boo-hoo, gentlemen. Having endured the ordinary vicissitudes or the extraordinary and unfathomable tragedies of life and having sought the help of whatever God in whom you believe has absolutely nothing to do with your suitability for the nation’s highest office. An atheist would face the same tragedies without invoking God’s help and that, too, would have nothing to do with his or her fitness for the presidency.

The Iowa forum was a triumph of the union of psychobabble and public religiosity that has come to dominate American politics. President Obama’s refusal to engage in this kind of faith-infused psychological exhibitionism is one of the main reasons why the media (and not only conservative media) have tagged him as a cool professorial type who does not know how to make a connection with ordinary people. . .

Suffering does not always ennoble but, on the contrary, can sometimes create a grandiose sense of entitlement. . . .

While I would never advocate a return to the days when photographers would, out of misplaced deference to the office of the presidency, agree not to take pictures of the president in a wheelchair, being in a wheelchair (metaphorically or literally) tells you nothing about whether a man is an effective leader. It reveals a good deal about the character of a candidates, however, when they think that they deserve votes because they’ve had cancer or a brain-damaged child. This use of personal faith and personal suffering in politics is nothing less than an obscenity.

Jacoby then contrasts this view of suffering as ennobling with Republicans’ own and vaunted unwillingness to alleviate the suffering of others through government intervention.

I think that the same problem afflicts part of the atheist movement, the part in which either real or ostensible offense—and that is about the mildest form of suffering—is seen not only as a badge of honor, but as a plea for approval or affirmation from others, a kind of affirmation that, I think, deflects us from the goals of our movement.  How does it advance our agenda to heap tons of opprobrium on a misguided purveyor of gelato—especially one who immediately apologized—or to blame our personal failures on discrimination against atheists?  Aren’t we, after all, the ones who always say, “Nobody has a right not to be offended?”

We know we’re a reviled minority, so let’s accept that, call it out when it seriously impedes our mission, and get on with the job.

h/t: Diane G.

The history of Earth in 60 seconds + another 20

November 23, 2011 • 4:35 pm

by Matthew Cobb

Following on from our discussion about what life might like to do with the remaining 20% of its time on Earth (ie 1 billion years before the sun makes it too darn hot), this excellent video by Claire L. Evans shows the history of the planet in 60 seconds. I show this to my first year students every year, as it gives a real impression of the importance of that long period when life was busy being only unicellular, inventing photosynthesis, setting up symbiotic relationships with smaller energy-generating cells (ciao Lynn Margulis!) – that kind of thing. And then everything went mental in the last 5-6 seconds (sorry if that was a spoiler for anyone). Now all you have to do is imagine how that recent exuberance would continue for another 15 seconds or so…

NB It is of course ‘last banded iron formations’ not ‘ion formations’…

Burrowing owls

November 23, 2011 • 9:35 am

by Greg Mayer

Update: see below for additional owl photo.

These two inquisitive looking Burrowing owls (Athene cunicularia) form a fitting (but not quite as cute) follow up to  Jerry’s recent owl post.

Burrowing Owls (Athene cunicularia) in Cape Coral, FL, November 18, 2011, by Gary Wood.

Burrowing owls nest in burrows in grasslands, and, unlike most owls, are active during the day. These two habits combine to make them excellent photographic subjects. James Bond (yes, the Bond, James Bond) wrote of them

When alarmed they have an amusing habit of bobbing up and down, during which performance they gaze intently at the intruder.

Burrowing owls are widely distributed in the western US and unforested parts of South America (e.g., the llanos and pampas). In the eastern US they are limited to Florida, and there are scattered populations in the West Indies. A number of West Indian populations have become extinct, some very recently and likely due to post-Columbian human activity, but others are known only from late Pleistocene fossils. The spotty distribution of the bird in the West Indies is evidently relictual due to post-Pleistocene loss of dry, grassland habitats, which would also leave them more vulnerable to human disturbance (e.g. introduced mongoose).

From Pregill and Olson (1981).

Reader Ben Goren has sent me the following lovely portrait of a burrowing owl at the Phoenix Zoo.

Burrowing owl at Phoenix Zoo, by Ben Goren.

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Bond, J. 1936. Birds of the West Indies. Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia.

Bond, J. 1950. Check-List of Birds of the West Indies. 3rd ed. Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia.

Pregill, G.K. and S.L . Olson. 1981. Zoogeography of West Indian vertebrates in relation to Pleistocene climatic cycles. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 12:75-98. pdf

Two Guardian posts gratuitously sympathetic to religion

November 23, 2011 • 7:15 am

David Lahti is an evolutionary ecologist in New York city, but also has a Ph.D. in philosophy. That can be a dangerous combination, leading to all sorts of strange pronouncements. Sure enough, in Tuesday’s Guardian, Lahti ponders the conflicting tendencies of humans to be both cruel and cooperative.  One might expect both of those tendencies, of course, to evolve in a social species like ours. But we can also, as Richard Dawkins and Peter Singer have emphasized, use reason and empathy to exercise a degree of altruism beyond that vouchsafed by our genes.

None of this has anything to do with religion. Nevertheless, in a piece called “Why does religion keep telling us we’re bad? (subtitled “Evolution has carried us a long way, but we can become complacent, which is where religious admonitions come in”), Lahti somehow manages to slip in some gratuitious praise for faith as a way to keep us on a moral path:

Many of the evolutionarily savvy among us have chosen one of two roads with regard to describing our moral nature. One is the comforting notion that we are generally prosocial nice folks except for those odd meanies who must be explained as having some strange allele or bad childhood environment. The other common option is a descent into moral scepticism or nihilism where nothing matters anyway because it’s all just a product of our evolution. These alternatives together look remarkably like a sour grapes attitude: either we are fundamentally good, or else forget it there’s no such thing as good and bad. The main reason for Isaiah’s admonition to remember how we fall short, as for most Jewish and Christian moral admonitions come to think of it, is to counteract our tendency to look at ourselves with rose-coloured glasses and become complacent. It looks like we could use a dose of my father’s old time religion after all.

Well, we’re neither “fundamentally” good nor bad; we have evolved (and cultural) tendencies in both direction, and different aspects predominate at different times—precisely as you’d expect if those tendencies evolved to be adaptive in different situations. Sometimes it paid our ancestors to be aggressive, or even murderous; at other times our best interests were served by being cooperative.

Let us accept this, then, and work on the good parts.  We don’t need religion to remind us of how often we go “bad,” particularly since religion is a particularly powerful stimulus for that behavior. I have no idea why Lahti saw fit to mention scripture.

Meanwhile, also at the Guardian, atheist Andrew Brown continues to osculate the rump of religion, reminding us that social democracy in Sweden has failed because it couldn’t replace the authority of God (his piece, called “Social democracy and the loss of trust,” is subtitled, “The rejection of God by Social Democrats and societal values by neoliberals has left a moral vacuum that will be difficult to fill”):

Taken together, these scandals show that both left and right are in trouble. The old Social Democratic model is completely broken, but the new, competitive model doesn’t work very well, either. In both cases, people don’t believe in society partly because they no longer have any reason to fear it.

The conformism of Sweden is something almost every visitor notices and complains about. But many foreigners suppose that it is imposed from above, on a duped or unwilling population. I don’t think that was ever true. The way it really worked was written in gothic script outside the German church in the old town of Stockholm: “Fürchtet Gott! Ehret den König!” – “Fear God and honour the king!”

Of course, very few people fear God in Sweden today. At some stage in the 20th century, God was replaced by the future. The future, which everyone was confident could be trusted, appeared to have the attributes of God, an inscrutable wisdom that could nonetheless be trusted, and was, in any case, authoritative. In the end, the future could talk to you with the crushing authority of God talking to Job. . .

. . . Social democracy spent decades smashing up the old authority structures, among them God and the traditional family, in order to take over their authority. From the 1980s onwards the neoliberals spent decades smashing up Social Democratic beliefs. And at the end of this process, the future has let both sides down. The idea of society as a place of mutual service has disappeared or at least attenuated to an ideal.

Our Swedish readers may want to weigh in on this nonsense.  It really is time for the Guardian to retire Andrew Brown. He’s lost even his ability to be controversial—for he no longer makes sense.