Stunning duets in a neotropical wren

November 14, 2011 • 5:58 am

There’s a new paper in Science, brought to my attention by Ritchie S. King in the New York Times, that describes an amazing behavior in plain-tailed wrens (Pheugopedius euophrys). The species is neotropical: found in tropical forests in the mountains of Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia.  Here’s a photo from Wikipedia:

What’s amazing about this species is that the duet sounds like a single song, but actually consists of males and females alternating “syllables” at a rate of up to six per second.   When the female’s song has a tiny gap, the male fills in.  You can hear all this in the video below, and I’ll embed some songs from the paper.  The function of these songs is unknown, but they are probably involved in joint defense of territories.

The researchers, Eric Fortune et al., spent several months in the bamboo forests of Ecuador, recording wild and captive birds.  They also did playback experiments using “artificial song”.  The main results are described very well in this three-minute Science video below, presented by Fortune.  You’ll hear the duets as well as the single songs of one sex, showing the gaps that are filled in by the partner.

The authors found that the partners don’t just sing a stereotyped song, but adjust their songs to fill in whatever gaps are provided by the partner.  In other words, they’re sensitive to audio feedback from their mate, and, as the authors note, “are not relying on fixed-action patterns in the brain to generate duet song.”  As Fortune notes above, the female seems to play the “lead” in these songs, much like a partner who leads during a waltz.

Now I’m not sure if you can see this for free, but I’ll put the links to two movies of caged, duetting wrens. Below each movie is a sonogram that shows which partner is contributing which syllable.

Movie 1. “Top bird is the male wren, bottom the female. At the bottom is an oscillogram with the male and female parts marked in blue and magenta, respectively. The female initiated the duet, and the male moves its beak in its first interval but did not produce a syllable (1.11 to 1.36 seconds in the movie).”

Movie 2.  “This movie shows duetting in a captive pair of plain-tailed wrens. The bird visible at the start of the movie is the male, and the female becomes visible in the upper right hand corner. At the bottom is an oscillogram with the male and female parts marked in blue and magenta, respectively. Singing-related movements can be seen in both birds, but is particularly evident in the tail of the female at the end of the duet.”

And some audio recordings from the paper, showing both duets and single-sex songs:

Audio S1 Audio recording of the plain-tailed wren duet song shown in Figure 1A.
Audio S2  Audio recording of the solitary female plain-tailed wren song shown in Figure 1A.
Audio S3  Audio recording of the plain-tailed wren duet song shown in Figure 1B.
Audio S4 Audio recording of a solitary male plain-tailed wren song shown in Figure 1B.
Audio S5 Audio recording of a plain-tailed wren duet song in which the male skips a motif, as shown in Figure 1C.

______

Fortune, E. S., C. Rodríguez, D. Li, G. F. Ball, and M. J. Coleman.  2011.  Neural mechanisms for the coordination of duet singing in wrens.  Science 334:666-670.

An illuminated Origin of Species

November 13, 2011 • 9:51 am

Here’s a felicitous combination of art and science that looks really cool. Kelly Houle, a calligrapher and natural-history artist in Arizona, has embarked on a daunting project: producing a complete hand-lettered and illuminated manuscript of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. She briefly describes the project here, with a nice video, and the project’s full website is here. I find it pleasingly ironic that the technique used for so long to produce artistic Bibles is now being applied to a book that’s actually true.

You can see specimens of Kelly’s work on her website.  Here’s a maribou stork (Leptoptilos crumeniferus; oil on board, reproduced, as are all illustrations in this post, with permission of Ms. Houle, and all are copyrighted):

Here is Chrysina gloriosa, also called the “glorious scarab”:

And a sample page of the manuscript with a cotton plant.  Kelly tells me that this (and the drawing) is just a preliminary sketch to get a sense of the layout:

And the book will be big!  Here’s an idea of how large each page will be:

This manuscript will be a one-of-a-kind production that will deserve a place in a library or other institution. What better book to turn into art than the best science book of all time? (I’ve signed on as a gratis scientific advisor.)

Given the length of The Origin (Kelly’s using the first edition), she estimates it will take her five to ten years to do the whole thing. She’s trying to raise $9000 by November 17 to create the first ten pages, and has nearly reached this goal.

If you like this project, please make a donation to get it started. You can make your pledges here, and you get a nice gift even with pledges as low as $10.  For only $30, for instance, you get eight embossed gold greeting cards like this one (you’ll recognize Darwin’s sketch of the first “tree of life” in history):

And for just $250 you get an original 8″ X 10″ illuminated, hand-painted picture of your favorite beetle. Where else can you find a bargain like that?  The artwork alone is worth far more. And check out what you get if you can spare $600!

Here’s Kelly at work; if you have any questions for her about the project, put them in the comments, for she’s promised to answer.

Dog breeding: the debasement of the American cocker spaniel

November 13, 2011 • 6:29 am

If you frequent this site, you’ll know that I’m much more partial to cats than to dogs, but dogs do excel in one respect: they better demonstrate the power of artificial selection.

Every year I present to my students a much-tattered poster, made by the now-defunct Gaines dog food company, showing the various dog breeds recognized by the American Kennel Club. I use it to show the students how the lineage of the gray wolf (the ancestor of all domesticated dogs) contains ample genetic variation for almost any trait you choose: size, body shape, coat color and texture, and even behavior.

This, in turn, demonstrates that selection—artificial selection rather than natural selection in this case, but the principle is the same—has plenty of raw material to work with. As Darwin famously said in The Origin, “Breeders habitually speak of an animal’s organisation as something quite plastic, which they can model almost as they please.”  And if that kind of genetic variation is present in one rather inbred lineage, then it is certainly present in nature.  Remember that neither natural selection nor genetic drift could operate, nor selection produce complex adaptations, if genetic variation wasn’t ubiquitous. Demonstrating the pervasiveness of inherited variation was, then, an important task in verifying Darwin’s theory, and one reason he devoted so much space to artificial selection in The Origin.

The problems that afflict dog breeds, however, also demonstrate two other principles of genetics: inbreeding and pleiotropy. Inbreeding, because many breeds stem from only a few founders, and so bad recessive alleles can accumulate, causing genetic disease and malformations. (Breeders do attempt to eliminate this by outcrossing, but of course that dilutes the desired traits of the breed).

“Pleiotropy” is simply the observation that an allele (form of a gene) can affect several traits independently.  Many eye-color mutations in flies, for example, reduce fertility independent of the mutant color.  As an example in dogs, the short snouts of breeds like bulldogs can lead to respiratory problems.

Given that, here, from the website Pedigree Dogs Exposed, is a splenetic take on the evolution of the American cocker spaniel, one that  sounds as if it were written by Andy Rooney. The change in this breed over 100 years shows not only the power of the breeder to change a lineage in only a few generations, but at least one pleiotropic effect of a change in the coat:

This breed needs to be re-classified as a Toy breed. Its retention in the Gundog Group does a disservice to those breeds that can and do still do the work for which they were bred. And, frankly, this amount of coat is a welfare issue  – not perhaps directly (as long as it is groomed regularly), but because top show dogs can’t possibly get much of an opportunity to be dogs. There’s certainly no way they could do a day in the field – it would ruin that all-important coat.

And how on earth do the males pee without soaking their coat?

Here’s what the Americans have done to the Cocker…  from sturdy sporting dog to dome-headed,over-coated, increasingly-brachycephalic hairdresser’s dog in 120 years. [JAC: I’ve chosen but a few pictures from their series.]

I make no claims for the veracity of this analysis, so if you own an American Cocker Spaniel, don’t complain to me!

The American Cocker spaniel, originally a sporting dog bred to find and bring back game to hunters, diverged from the English cocker spaniel in the late 19th century. One could, then, consider this divergence an example of incipient speciation, except that the breeds will almost certainly not become full species as they remain reproductively compatible. (My students often ask me whether dog breeds are separate species, and I say “no” because of this reproductive compatibility.)

As for the results of inbreeding and pleiotropy, one dog-breeds website reports this:

Some major concern in American Cocker Spaniels are cataracts, glaucoma and patellar luxation. Some minor concerns are hip dysplasia, ectropion, entropion, PRA, allergies, seborrhea, lip fold pyoderma, otitis externa, liver disease, urolithiasis, prolapse of nictitans gland, CHF, phosphofructokinase deficiency, and cardiomyopathy. Occasionally seen are gastric torsion and elbow dysplasia. Also IMHA (Immune Mediated Hemolytic Anemia) One owner stated, “Our cocker never had a sick day in her life until she suddenly became lethargic and urinated blood. Six days later, and $3000 in vet bills, she died. I know you can’t list every illness due to space limitations, but the internal medicine specialist that treated our dog said that IMHA is relatively common in cockers, and almost always fatal.  It’s a fast-acting, silent killer.

This information all was inspired by a piece at the Manchester Evening News reporting a £ 500,000 grant given to researchers at Manchester University. These include our own Matthew Cobb, and the Evening News describes the study as follows:

The unique study will see zoologists and historians going back in time to see how far dogs have been transformed over the last century. Michael Worboys, an expert in the history of science, said breeding, training and socialising meant many of today’s breeds were barely recognisable from their 19th-century ancestors.

He said: “The dog was transformed in the 20th century by the application of science and medicine. No animal species has been more altered in size, shape, colour or temperament by human selection.

“No species has a closer relationship with humans. And no species has their health treated in a manner so close to what humans enjoy.

“We will study how changing ideas and practices with breeding, feeding, training and treating have essentially remade the modern dog – whether as pet, show dog or working animal.”

Here’s a picture of Professors Worboys (l.) and Cobb (r.) with Melsha the dog. I hasten to assure readers that Matthew is more partial to cats, and has two of them. I regard this grant, in fact, as a provisional act of treason.

More religious incursion into science

November 13, 2011 • 5:02 am

UPDATE:  The DoSER program is also supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH)/ELSI program (that is, the “Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications” initiative of the National Human Genome Research Institute of the NIH), as well as the Smithsonian Institution, so your taxpayer dollars are funding this brand of accommodationism.  I’m not sure which money goes where, but since some of the DoSer activities are explicitly sectarian (like this one), it may be a violation of the First Amendment.

Oh, and for more pollution of science by religion, the AAAS has an essay by Elizabeth A. Johnson that says this:

In dialogue with contemporary science, theology understands that the Creator God is neither a maker of clocks nor an instigator of anarchy, but the one ceaselessly at work bringing overall direction and order to the free play of the undetermined realms of matter and spirit, “an Improvisor of unsurpassed ingenuity.”(34) In this evolutionary world, the essential role of genuine randomness does not contradict God’s providential care but somehow illumines it. To use Christopher Mooney’s lovely phrasing,

Wave packets propagate and collapse, sparrows fall to the ground, humans freely decide for good or for ill; yet hairs of the head nevertheless get numbers, elusive quantum particles eventually statistically stabilize, and “where sin increased. grace abounded all the more.” (35) 

The world develops in an economy of divine superabundance, gifted with its own freedoms in and through which God’s gracious purpose is accomplished. “The Love that moves the sun and the stars,” (36) it now appears, is a self-emptying, self-offering, delighting, exploring, suffering, sovereign Love, transcendent wellspring of all possibilities who acts immanently through the matrix of the freely evolving universe.

________

As I’ve pointed out before, the John Templeton Foundation has given a $5.3 million dollar grant to America’s most famous scientific organization, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), to promote a “dialogue on science, ethics, and religion.”  Most scientists I know subscribe to the AAAS publication Science, which, along with Nature, form the most prestigious pair of scientific journals in the world.

If you’re curious what this Templeton-funded program is doing, have a browse around the “DoSER website.” (Note: browsing may be deleterious to your well being.)

As reader Steersman pointed out, among the many accommodationist materials available is an essay by Georgetown theologian John Haught: “Does evolution rule out God’s existence?” (guess the answer!). It’s about the mutuality of evolution and religion. Here’s the last paragraph, which explains why, after all, God’s plan for the world had to involve evolution:

However, there may be an even deeper way in which faith in God nourishes the idea of evolution. The central idea of theistic religion, as the Catholic theologian Karl Rahner (among others) has clarified, is that the Infinite pours itself out in love to the finite universe. This is the fundamental meaning of “revelation.” But if we think carefully about this central religious teaching it should lead us to conclude that any universe related to the inexhaustible self-giving love of God must be an evolving one. For if God is infinite love giving itself to the cosmos, then the finite world cannot possibly receive this limitless abundance of graciousness in any single instant. In response to the outpouring of God’s boundless love the universe would be invited to undergo a process of self-transformation. In order to “adapt” to the divine infinity the finite cosmos would likely have to intensify its own capacity to receive such an abounding love. In other words, it might endure what we now know scientifically as an arduous, tortuous and dramatic evolution.

Viewed in this light, the evolution of the cosmos is more than just “compatible” with theism. Faith in a God of self-giving love, it would not be too much to say, actually anticipates an evolving universe. It may be very difficult to reconcile the religious teaching about God’s infinite love with any other kind of cosmos.

Note again: this is on the website of a scientific organization.  I invite Dr. Haught to tell me if I’ve taken these words out of context.

I am offended by not only the inanity of these empty apologetics (what in the world is the sweating theologian trying to say?), but also by this stuff being offered at America’s premier science organization as a way to reconcile science with religion. It says nothing, means nothing, and should offend anyone who values clear thinking.  Any scientist writing this kind of stuff would immediately be challenged by her peers with the question, “How do you know that?”

Theology is seemingly immune to such challenges because in that field, like much of lit-crit, opacity is a virtue and lucidity a vice.  But at least the AAAS shouldn’t be polluted with this kind of nonsense.

Andrew Sullivan reveals what he’s learned from the New Atheists

November 12, 2011 • 8:48 am

A reader asks Andrew Sullivan, “What have you learned from the writings of the New Atheists?”  The answer, apparently, is not much. As always, Sullivan responds as a cartoon figure, world-weary and pretentious, and here proffers a dismissive three-minute answer:

[vodpod id=ExternalVideo.1007456&w=425&h=350&fv=]

On Hitchens: He didn’t teach Sullivan much. Apparently God is Not Great “didn’t address God” and “didn’t address the questions that bring [Sullivan] to God.”  WTF? The first claim is a lie, the second irrelevant.

On Harris: Sullivan says that Sam is “so honest, so lucid, so clear that he misses something.” WTF? He does like The End of Faith, though, but calls Sam an “unwitting theist.”

On Dawkins: Sullivan doesn’t like the “contempt and disrepect” toward religion that he sees coming from Dawkins and other New Atheists. (Do recall that Sullivan is the man who, when I said that many people took the story of Adam and Eve literally, asked, “Has Coyne read the fucking thing?”  (Sullivan’s view is that that story “screams parable,” and was never meant to be taken as literal truth).  I’d aver that that characterization of me shades a bit toward contempt.

In general, Sullivan sees some value in the New Atheists having addressed the “crisis in Christianity” that Sullivan sees in today’s America. What’s an example of the crisis? The “prosperity gospel”, which I guess means the gimme-dollar “theology” of television and radio hucksters like Creflo Dollar.

But the New Atheists really didn’t have much to say about that sort of “crisis.” Their real contribution was, of course, precisely the request for evidence for belief, the refusal to afford respect to those faiths (read all faiths) that didn’t provide any, and the singling out of the damages of religion.

Sullivan didn’t learn much from New Atheists not because they didn’t address God, but because he’s a closed-minded git.

h/t: Bob

A deluded rabbi explains why everyone is a believer

November 12, 2011 • 5:22 am

Much to my chagrin, the Parade of Apologist Rabbis continues in the religion pages of PuffHo.  Here is Rabbi Adam Jacobs of New York, with “The God test: why really everyone believes.” It really is the dumbest piece written by a rabbi that’s been HuffPo on my watch, and that’s saying something.

The good rabbi’s thesis is that if we’re really all just collections of molecules governed by the laws of physics, then nothing has any meaning: human kindness, evil, morality—the whole schmear.  The underlying thesis, of course, is that all such meaning comes from Yahweh. And to the extent that we atheists have morals and perceive meaning in our lives, we’re all secret believers!

Here’s the dumbest of Jacobs’s many stupid statements.

“Often, I’ve inquired of non-believers if it at all vexes them that nothing that they have ever done or will ever do will make the slightest difference to anyone on any level? “

Do I need to refute this?  How many of my readers’ lives have been saved by medical intervention? Isn’t that meaningful?  I’ve turned several students toward studying evolution, and convinced many more that evolution has meaning and value in understanding the world.  Doesn’t that make a difference?  Any atheist could make a list of things we’ve done that have made a difference.

Jacobs then poses three questions, and if you answer these in the “right” way (i.e. you wouldn’t sell off your parents’ ashes for a bag of kibble), then you’re a believer!

Here are the three questions that we atheists have to answer, and if you say “no” to #1, “don’t smash that person’s head in!” to #2, and “yes, art is intrinsically significant,” then don your kippah take your place in the synagogue!

“1. Would you be willing to sell your parent’s remains for dog food?”

“2. You and someone you dislike are stranded on a desert island with a functioning ham radio. One day you hear that there has been a terrible earthquake that has sent a massive tsunami hurtling directly for your island and you both have only one hour to live. Does it make any difference whether you spend your last hour alive comforting and making amends with your (formerly) hated companion or smashing his head in with fallen, unripe coconuts? ”

“3. Is love, art, beauty or morality intrinsically significant?”

I needn’t refute this article; it’s a waste of electrons.  Poor Rabbi Jacobs.

h/t: Sigmund