Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
UK readers might want to watch the third episode of Adam Rutherford’s new BBC TV series, The Beauty of Anatomy, which is on tonight, Wednesday 27th, at 20:30 on BBC4 (I’m afraid it clashes with the Great British Bakeoff if you’re into that). Adam’s 5-part series traces the history of anatomy through both the great anatomists and the art they inspired.The third episode, which is about Rembrandt, features me talking about science in the 17th century Dutch Republic. As this trailer shows, it also has Adam’s wonderfully genuine response to The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Tulp.
The first two episodes, dealing with Galen and Leonardo, and with Vesalius are available on the BBC iPlayer for those of you in the UK – for the next few weeks only. Someone has uploaded the first two episodes to YouTube (see below), but I’m not sure how long they’ll last. If the third episode is posted, we’ll post that later.
Each programme is only 30 minutes long, but captures both the spirit of the time, and the art that was created. Warning – these contain scenes of dissection of human bodies.
You can also watch this episode of a fantastic 2013 Dutch TV series about the Dutch Golden Age, which focused on Dutch naturalist Jan Swammerdam, and includes a section of me talking about Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson. The programme is in Dutch, but sadly I don’t speak Dutch, so my bits are in English. They are at around 10:20 – 13:20, and 16:00 – 20:30, and 31:50 – 34:00 (NB, there are some gruesome bits in the Dutch sections…)
This just popped up in my Tw*tter feed, and was in this morning’s Daily Telegraph. A couple in Winchester, England, had not been in their spare bedroom for several months. What they did not realise is that they had left the bedroom window open. In the intervening period, a wasp queen had come in and started to make a nest. The point of wasps (like the point of everything) being to make more wasps, that’s exactly what she did:
Photo: M&Y
Inevitably, I suppose, the pest controller was called in and the estimated 5000 wasps were killed. At least he showed some remorse:
Pest Control worker John Birkett said: “The client was terrified. In 45 years I have never seen anything like it. There must have been 5,000 wasps.
“It was a job to deal with it. I had protective gear on and used spray to kill them. At one stage there must have been 2,000 wasps buzzing around me.
“If someone had gone in to the room and not known what it was it would have been pretty serious.
Mr Birkett, who runs Longwood Services exterminators, used chemical spray to kill the insects during a two-hour operation on Sunday afternoon.
“I thought ‘what a shame’, but I had a job to do and the client was terrified. Afterwards, the entire room was filled with dead wasps. It was like the apocalypse.”
It’s a glass frog from Peru, one of four newly-discovered species described in a new paper in Zootaxa by Evan Twomey et al. (reference and link below, but you’ll get only the abstract, and would have to pay big bucks for the paper. Thanks to Evan for sending me the pdf). There’s also a National Geographic blurb which is more accessible than the 87-page monograph, which goes into detail about the frogs’ discovery, description, anatomy, biogeography, phylogeny (based on both nuclear and mitochondrial DNA), “environmental niche models,” their vocalizations and so on. It’s an excellent and comprehensive analysis of this group. And, because I’m a good boy, I went through the whole monograph last night rather than spoon-feeding you what’s in the National Geographic summary. Here are some photos and a few of the authors’ conclusions about the frogs.
Glass frogs are in the family Centrolenidae, which, according to Amphibiaweb, has 151 species in 12 genera. They’re called “glass frogs” because you can see through their bellies, and also through selected parts of their bodies, as we’ll see below. Their transparency reveals their viscera: heart (“pericardium”, the sac containing the heart), liver, and other guts. A weird thing: three of the speices have green bones, a first for frogs!
Twomey et al. summarize the data showing that there are 33 species in Peru, and their paper describes four new ones. Here is one—the same one pictured above. It’s Centrolene charapita, and from the vental aspect you can see into its belly. These pictures and captions are all taken from the paper:
This was found at one location: along a stream in northern Peru. The name of the species comes from the resemblance of the pattern on its back to Aji charapita (peppers); here are some of them, which start of green and turn yellow:
The bottoms of hands and feet of C.charapita. See the bones? They’re green! The authors hypothesize that this color comes from the sequestration of a pigment from bile, biliverdin. Whether or not the green color was simply an accident, or is a result of natural selection (perhaps to aid camouflage) isn’t known.
Voilà, another new species, Chimerella corleone, named after the patriarch of the Godfather movies. It was named because it has a spike sticking out of the upper arm that males may use to fight each other. (The authors clearly have a penchant for colorful species names, which I like.) These are very small frogs: C. corleone, for instance, is only 2 cm long: about 0.8 inch.
Here’s the “type locality” of C. corleone. It would be nice to do field work in such a place!:
Reproduction in species of Chimerella, including C. corleone (a, b, and d; see caption of figure). Males apparently guard the egg masses, which are laid on leaves, and tadpoles, when they hatch, drop into the water:
The third new species, Cochranella guayasamani:
Here are its tadpoles, which also start out transparent but are pink (reasons for the color and transparency unknown). On the right you can see the eggs hatching and the tadpoles dropping off the leaves into the water:
And the fourth new species, Hylinobatrachium anachoretus, the only one found in cloud forest (2050 m). In (b) you can see the ventral view, with the veins, viscera, and heart clearly visible. In (e) you can see a male guarding its clutch; these frogs have parental care. Why are they transparent? Who knows?
Finally, here are ventral views of three species in the genus Hylinobatrachium, showing their transparency. Look at the heart, the veins, and the guts!
These frogs live in relatively inaccessible places, and even in the places where they live they aren’t common. There are many questions about them, including the reasons for their remarkable transparency), but the answers will be hard to come by. How do you figure out why a frog that is so rare is transparent? What kind of experiments can you do?
Reader Jente Ottenburghs, who studies biology in the Netherlands, sent some photos taken in Tanzania and a note:
In April I went to Tanzania for a two-week birding trip. Because it was low-season, it was very quiet on the savannah, in terms of jeeps. But it is the best time for bird watching. During the trip, I realized that most tourists don’t give a hoot about the birds, they are only interested in the big mammals. They don’t know what they are missing!
It’s been a looooong day, but the Albatross is flying well. I have nothing to offer beyond this series of gifs, from College Humor, all showing the familar “cats knocking stuff off of tables” behavior. I can understand it when it’s meant to wake an owner up, but there seems to be more to it than that. . . .
The Khan Academy is a site and an educational method that is widely used in America. Founded by Salman Khan, it’s free, and consists of a number of videos that are supposed to teach you just as well as, or better than, conventional classroom education. The videos are crude, drawn by hand during the presentation, and accompanied by free exercises to see what you’ve learned. I haven’t done a lot of research on the method, but a “60 Minutes” show a while back said that it was a revolution in education and gave better results that group lessons in a class.
You couldn’t however, prove it by the two evolution videos I’ve watched today (there are seven, actually, that you can find on this site). What bothers me is not the material on evolution per se, which is generally good (though I think I could do better), but the attempt in at least two of the videos to reconcile not only evolution and religion, but evolution and Intelligent Design.
Here’s the first video, called “Intelligent Design and Evolution”
Note that about five minutes into this, the narrator (I don’t know if it’s Khan) begins asseverating that his purpose is not to equate evolution and atheism, or to dispel students’ ideas of God, but to try to “reconcile” Intelligent Design (aka God) with evolution.
After pointing out some of the flawed traits of organisms that suggest that the designer, whoever it is, doesn’t go for perfection, the narrator then begins wading into theology. He claims that if there really is an omnipotent God (and again says he’s not passing judgement on its existence), that god would not focus on designing particular features. Rather, that god would actually design a system (evolution) that could produce complex features, though they may be imperfect. In other words, the narrator’s pushing a notion of theistic evolution in which God’s wonder is suggested not by perfect design, but by an elegant system (natural selection and evolution) that allows “designoid” things to emerge on their own. The video claims that if you really want to appreciate the all-powerful God, you should marvel that he created a “system that comes from simple and elegant basic ideas”: natural selection and mutation. The narrator argues that this is a better god than the old design-each-feature god, saying that evolution “speaks to a higher and more profound design”. What the hell?
That’s straight accommodationism. Although the narrator repeatedly says he’s not taking sides on a God, he keeps emphasizing that if you want to believe in one, the way to do it is to accept evolution as the true sign of God’s cleverness: “If one does believe in a God. . . then this idea of [naturalism] is a very profound design and it speaks to the art of the designer.”
Whoa! What is that doing in a series of instructional videos for kids? Why even mention Intelligent Design and God? You wouldn’t be able to do that in a public school, so why here? Any why push this kind of theological argument which, after all, is rejected by nearly half of all Americans? Is the Khan Academy telling people how they should practice their religion? I see no other conclusion.
The video finishes with a long disquisition about how fractal equations can produce complexity from simplicity—just like evolution does, kids! But that’s just an analogy, and doesn’t really clarify or explain anything about evolution. Evolution is not fractal in any meaningful sense of the word.
After making that video, the narrator apparently wanted to clear up a few points about evolution and ID, so he made a second video, “Evolution Clarification”:
Here he just gets in an even bigger mess, calling the ID/evolution debate (at 5:10) an “artificial one.” Now his criticisms of ID as science are good, but then he somehow tries to reconcile ID with evolution, as if ID were the idea of God itself. Well, ID incorporates the idea of God (they call it a “designer,” but nobody’s fooled by that), but it isn’t God, and you can’t reconcile ID and evolution, period. They are inimical views of nature, and the contentions of ID have been demolished.
Somehow the narrator (or Khan) feels compelled in this video to not be “disrespectful of those who believe in this belief system” (i.e., religion), and that drives the last half of the second video.
Again, why is this stuff part of instruction on evolution? Let the kids and their parents sort out the implications of evolution for God. The job of the Khan Academy, I think, is to teach evolution, not confect a kind of theology that is friendly to evolution. They’re acting like BioLogos here, and I’m surprised they’re not funded by Templeton.
At any rate, if I were a parent, particularly one who was not religious, I wouldn’t use these videos to teach about evolution. They’re full of stuff about the nature of God, and about how a really wonderful God would have used evolution to create life. The videos are enablers of theistic evolution, and thus don’t teach evolution as the naturalistic process that scientists hold it to be.
