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.
Hey, I was cuddling Hili!
Hili: Look at this picture of Jerry. He was praying five times a day.
A: That’s true, but I’m not as perfect as Jerry.
Hili: Popatrz na to zdjęcie Jerrego, on się modlił pięć razy dziennie.
Ja: To prawda, ale ja nie jestem tak doskonały.
I haz a big melon:
And it’s seedless!!
There’s nothing better on a hot summer day than digging into the sweet, scarlet, crunchy meat of a chilled watermelon. And it’s even better when the watermelon is seedless: no spitting and less mess. We didn’t have seedless watermelons when I was a kid, so it’s still a great treat for me to eat one. And it’s even better when they’re like the one above, which I got at the produce store this morning. It must weigh at least 12 pounds, and cost only $3.59. I’ll get at least seven evening treats out of that puppy.
Seedless watermelons are in fact a triumph of genetics, for you can really design them de novo. You just double the chromosome number of a regular watermelon, so that instead of two sets of chromosomes it has four. The methods, outlined in this article, are simple: they involve treating watermelon seedlings with colchicine, a chemical derived from crocuses that inhibits cell division. By so doing, you can produce watermelon plants that have cells with 44 instead of the normal 22 chromosomes. These plants are called “tetraploids,” for they have four instead of the normal two sets of chromosomes (“diploids”).
When those cells produce flowers, the pollen (or eggs) in those flowers will have ½ X 44, or 22 chromosomes, while the pollen or eggs of a normal diploid watermelon will have ½ X 22 = 11 chromosomes. If you cross pollen of the latter to eggs from an engineered tetraploid melon, the zygote, or fertilized seed, will have 11 + 22 = 33 chromosomes. That seed can grow into a normal plant: a watermelon with three sets of chromosomes, called a triploid.
But when that triploid melon itself tries to make seeds, it has to do so through the process of meiosis, the same way we make sperm and eggs. That process begins with the members of chromosome sets pairing together in the cell before they split up for the reduction division. And if you have three representatives of each chromosome instead of the normal two, they don’t pair properly. When that happens, a normal female egg cell can’t form, and you get tiny, aborted seeds. In other words, triploid melons are sterile. They are the mules of fruit. (This is exactly how modern bananas are produced as well: they are also triploids, engineered to get rid of the seeds of their wild ancestors. When you cut across a banana and see those black specks in the middle, those are the aborted banana seeds.)
Ergo, we have a tasty triploid melon that lacks seeds: just what we want. The only problem is this: how do we grow more of them if they are sterile? Farmers get the triploid seeds from horticultural companies that produce them by the colchicine + crossing process. (Farmers can’t be bothered with all that technical stuff.)
The process is also described in a “Fun facts” FAQ from the National Watermelon Promotion Board. Their description starts out okay:
Where do seedless watermelons come from?
Seedless watermelons were invented over 50 years ago, and they have few or no seeds. When we say seeds, we are talking about mature seeds, the black ones. Oftentimes, the white seed coats where a seed did not mature are assumed to be seeds. But this isn’t the case! They are perfectly safe to swallow while eating, and don’t worry – no seeds will grow in your stomach.
So, how are seedless watermelons grown? Chromosomes are the building blocks that give characteristics, or traits, to living things including plants and watermelons. Watermelon breeders discovered that crossing a diploid plant (bearing the standard two sets of chromosomes) with a tetraploid plant (having four sets of chromosomes) results in a fruit that produces a triploid seed. (Yes, it has three sets of chromosomes). This triploid seed is the seed that produces seedless watermelons!
But then they screw it up. Can you spot the error, or at least the confusion, in the following paragraph?
In other words, a seedless watermelon is a sterile hybrid which is created by crossing male pollen for a watermelon, containing 22 chromosomes per cell, with a female watermelon flower with 44 chromosomes per cell. When this seeded fruit matures, the small, white seed coats inside contain 33 chromosomes, rendering it sterile and incapable of producing seeds. This is similar to the mule, produced by crossing a horse with a donkey. This process does not involve genetic modification.
Note too the somewhat duplicitous statement that seedless watermelon is not a genetically modified food. It sure is! Colchicine treatment, crossing, and so on, are all modifications of the genetic complement of a melon, and what you finally eat has three sets of chromosomes instead of two. How is that not genetic modification? The fear of GMOs, always greatly exaggerated, has gone too far, scaring even the National Watermelon Promotion Board.
At any rate, eating watermelon is much better for you than eating the other summer treat I love: ice cream (Breyer’s strawberry, please). Watermelon is nutritious and rich in lycopene. Here’s the nutritional information for a “standard serving”: two cups. (I probably eat twice that much.):
Note: only 80 calories. By comparison, a small pot of Greek yogurt (125 g) has about 144 calories.
Oy vey! I intended to just show the picture of my bargain watermelon, and look what happened. I went too far. But that reminds me of a joke, one I’ve told before:
An elderly rabbi, having just retired from his duties in the congregation, finally decides to fulfill his lifelong fantasy–to taste pork. He goes to a hotel in the Catskills in the off-season (not his usual one, mind you), enters the empty dining hall and sits down at a table far in the corner. The waiter arrives, and the rabbi orders roast suckling pig.
As the rabbi is waiting, struggling with his conscience, a family from his congregation walks in! They immediately see the rabbi and, since no one should eat alone, they join him.
Shocked, the rabbi begins to sweat. At last, the waiter arrives with a huge domed platter. He lifts the lid to reveal-what else?–roast suckling pig, complete with an apple in its mouth.
The family gasp in shock and disgust, and quickly turn to the rabbi for an explanation.
“This place is amazing!” cries the rabbi. “You order a baked apple, and look what you get!”
I’ll be here all year, folks.
This does not appear to be a joke, but a picture of a Photoshopped cow that, according to the website Creation Moments, is good evidence for the Great Designer:
While doing some research on the Internet recently, we came across this photo of a cow bearing a detailed map of the world on its hide. Was the cow born with these markings or are the spots the handiwork of a skilled Photoshop artist?
Given the presence of Madagascar, New Zealand, Cuba, Japan, and every other feature of the globe, the parsimonious explanation would be Photoshop. Only a creationist would leave even a tiny bit of doubt about that hanging in the air. But even if it’s just a put-up job, it’s still evidence for God!
Obviously, this cow’s spots were put there by a designer. But our question for evolutionists is this: If you agree that the cow’s spots are designed, why won’t you agree that the actual cow – which is so much more complex than the arrangement of its spots – was designed as well?
Evolutionists and atheists will agree that the pattern of the cow’s spots was designed, but they will not agree that the cow itself was designed. That’s because they are committed to their faith – yes, faith! – built on the premise that there is no Designer. Though they can see the complexities of nature all around them, they say that everything was the result of mindless, natural processes.
And that’s why Darwinists have a cow whenever they hear a Bible-believing Christian say that things which appear to be designed actually are designed! If they weren’t so biased against God, they’d know that the cow’s spots reveals the incredibly huge blind spot in their own minds.
The response is short: we have a good theory for how something complex like a cow could arise via purely naturalistic processes. And we have evidence for that theory. We have no good naturalistic theory for how a cow could develop a perfect replica of a world map on its flanks.
JEBUS!
h/t: Steve
by Matthew Cobb
Here are four crabs from the spot-the-crabs-post (circled). As I said, I wasn’t sure where they all were. I’m not entirely confident of the one in the middle on the left…
And there are probably more! Here’s a very confident set of spottings from reader Heather Hastie on the comments of the original post, who also reveals the source of her skills in an idyllic childhood…
1, 2, 3. One top left corner, one just below it, one between them but more to right (front pincers and front of body only peeking out).
4. Centre right. (This is the easiest to see.)
5,6, 7. There are three on same level as the one above on the other side of the tank, but all are mostly between the rocks with just some legs and partial body visible.
8. Bottom left.
I found two more at one point, but I can’t find them again to describe. (Perhaps they moved!:-)) Blame a childhood at the beach; I loved searching the rock pools.
The August 14 Dallas Morning News (headline below, click it to see the article) presents as “news” something that is neither new nor accurate:
This turns out to be just a report on the activities of the Institute for Creation Research (ICR) in Dallas. If you’ve been around a while, you’ll remember the ICR as the outfit founded in 1970 in San Diego by Henry M. Morris, co-author of The Genesis Flood (1961), the book that marked the beginning of the “scientific creation” movement, devoted to showing that the very facts of science were in absolute agreement with a literalist reading of the Bible. This was an attempt to sneak religious views into public schools usuing the claim that those views really were scientific. The Genesis Flood argued that geological features like the Grand Canyon reflected not gradualistic processes, but sudden, catastrophic flooding, as, for example, might have occurred in the time of Noah. All of the ICR’s publications reflected young-Earth creationism, assuming that the Earth was less than 10,000 years old.
In 1974, Morris produced Scientific Creationism, designed as the textbook for his movement. Tellingly, it came in two versions, one for public-school classrooms and one, aimed at general readers and religious schools, that was glutted with references to scripture. If ever there was evidence for a religious motivation for creationism, that was it.
And, in fact, scientific creationism came a cropper in 1982 with the decision of McLean v. Arkansas, in which a federal judge, William Overton, ruled that an Arkansas law mandating “balanced treatment” for evolution and “scientific creationism” was illegal because the latter was really religion in disguise. (That “balanced treatment act” was in fact partly drafted by the ICR.) Judge Overton’s decision in that case is a classic, and I’m still stirred by the words of his conclusion:
The application and content of First Amendment principles are not determined by public opinion polls or by a majority vote. Whether the proponents of Act 590 constitute the majority or the minority is quite irrelevant under a constitutional system of government. No group, no matter how large or small, may use the organs of government, of which the public schools are the most conspicuous and influential, to foist its religious beliefs on others.
I wish the principal of Lebanon High School in Missouri, along with the members of his school board, would absorb that lesson!
At any rate, the ICR is still chugging along, as documented by the Dallas paper, which includes an interview with Henry Morris III, William’s misguided son. They’re still pushing creationism, and still using the same old arguments, supplemented with a few new ones about the supposed finding of soft tissue in dinosaur bones (that finding is contentious and there’s still no consensus view).
The paper’s report is okay, but I wonder why they saw fit to publish something an article that isn’t really news. It doesn’t mention McLean vs. Arkansas, and there’s one inaccuracy in the paragraph below. Can you spot it?
When Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was published in 1859, it generated spirited scientific debate, but it did not become a social and political wedge issue for more than 60 years. At the urging of the American Civil Liberties Union in 1925, substitute science teacher John Scopes intentionally violated a new Tennessee law that made it a crime to teach any theory contradicting the Bible.
The paper starts its story with a tendentious video by ICR’s “director of research” Jason Lisle, who isn’t rebutted by any other talking heads. That’s a one-sided way to present news, especially since the news consists of lies. Here’s the “lab” where Lisle gives his spiel. Anybody who knows labs knows that there’s nothing going on in this place: the lab is completely devoid of activity. I suspect, as in other creationist videos, it isn’t even their lab; maybe a savvy reader can suss it out. A screenshot:
Further, the headline above isn’t accurate, for the ICR don’t really have “researchers” that do their own science. Rather, they comb the literature, as do many creationists, looking for things that could be twisted to disprove evolution. And anybody who sets out to “prove” something, rather than test it, isn’t really doing science. At least the newspaper poinsts that out. But first they report the wish-thinking and “research directions” of the ICR:
“Our attempt is to demonstrate that the Bible is accurate, not just religiously authoritative,” said Henry Morris III, CEO of the nonprofit with a 49-person payroll and an annual budget in the $7 million range.
. . . Jason Lisle, an astrophysicist and the research director at ICR, said he has no chance of winning a Nobel Prize, even if he makes a groundbreaking discovery. Secular scientists, he said, would never bestow the field’s highest honor on a creationist.
That’s simply not true. If the discovery didn’t involve creationism, or require invoking God, it would qualify. In fact, I’m pretty sure that at least a couple of Nobel laureates have been creationists, although I can’t name them. It’s just a matter of statistics. The article continues:
Many of ICR’s scientists, like Lisle, grew up in conservative Christian homes that promoted young-earth creationism, while others began questioning established scientific theories later in their academic careers.
“I think everyone here is doing it because we believe in the message and we ultimately want people to be saved,” he said. “We want people to realize the Bible is trustworthy in matters of history and when it touches science. And because you can trust it in those areas, you can trust it when it comes to how to inherit eternal life.”
Well, of course it you set out to prove something, rather than test it, and especially if your motivations are not understanding but buttressing religious beliefs that you won’t abandon, you’re about as far from being a scientist as you can get. You’re a theologian in a lab coat.
That bit is handily rebutted in the article:
The problem is, they’re not scientists,” said Ron Wetherington, who teaches human evolution and forensic anthropology at SMU [Southern Methodist University]. “They cherry-pick data in order to use it to justify the Genesis account of creation.”
Real science, he said, works the opposite way. Researchers don’t line up facts to support a hypothesis. Natural laws and theories like evolution are constantly pressure-tested by the scientific community, checking for flaws and leaks in the logic.
But, of course, the ICR claims that even nonreligious scientists have their agenda:
Scientists at ICR believe the Bible is the authoritative word of God, and are unapologetic about reviewing data with a Christian worldview.
“All scientists have a philosophy that guides their interpretation of the evidence,” said Lisle. “Most secular scientists are not even aware what their philosophy is — they tend to inherit it like the measles, from whatever their professors taught them. But we find that when we interpret the data through biblical lenses, it fits very well and makes sense.”
Surprise! But I wonder what my own philosophy is that makes me set out to “prove” something. In fact, I’ve never really had any pet theories, and so, fortunately, I’ve been able simply to explore the genetics of speciation, trying to find out if it shows regularities, and, if so, why.
I’ve thought long and hard about what “philosophy” could skew my own research, and I’ll be damned if I can detect anything other than pure curiosity. Of course there’s always a desire to gain renown among your fellow researchers, but that’s ambition, not philosophy. And anybody who fakes results to get famous, or prop up their pet ideas, is playing a very dangerous game. We do tend to fall in love with our own theories, and may be reluctant to abandon them, but that’s careerism and not philosophy. And if your theory gets sufficiently shot full of holes that it becomes untenable, hanging onto it doesn’t help your reputation.
Maybe I’m being a curmudgeonly evolutionist, but I wish the paper had also shown a video refuting the ICR’s arguments, said a bit more about the massive evidence for evolution, and mentioned Overton’s decision. nd I wish the piece hadn’t closed with a bit of accomodationism:
Wetherington carefully notes he is not criticizing or ridiculing people of faith. In fact, he says the vast majority of believers in the world have no problem reconciling Scripture with science.
“If you do not believe the text is literally true, but rather that it is metaphorically true, then in fact there is no conflict,” Wetherington said. “If you believe God created a world hundreds of billions of years ago that led to the evolutionary transitions that we see from the pre-Cambrian era all the way to today, that is at least as magnificent a testimony to creation as any words in the Bible.”
Well, I’m not sure that the vast majority of believers in the world really “have no problem reconciling Scripture with science.” Even in America, 42% of us accept a creationist account of human origins, agreeing that our species was created within the last 10,000 years. Another 31% accept a form of “theistic evolution” in which the process was somehow guided by God. So even in the U.S., 73% of adults do indeed see a conflict between scripture and science (evolutionary theory, of course, does not accept any intervention by God). Only 19% of Americans accept a truly scientific view of human evolution, with God having no part in guiding the process.
Some other countries, like those in northern Europe, show less adherence to creationism, but the problem is large in Islamic countries (the bulk of Muslims, as far as I can see, accept an instantaneous creation of humans by Allah); and many large countries, like India, simply haven’t been surveyed. So I think Wetherington is on shaky ground when claiming that most of the world’s believers have no problem reconciling evolution and science. It’s certainly not true in the U.S.
As for Wetherington’s claim that this reconciliation has been effected by most believers seeing scripture as “metaphorically true,” he’s just blowing smoke out of his nether parts. As my book will show, the vast bulk of Americans don’t read scripture that way, nor do many Brits. And of course it’s anathema to read the Qur’an as “metaphor.”
Really, does Wetherington think that most Christians see the divinity of Jesus, and his Resurrection, as “metaphorically true”? Regardless of how marvelous evolution is, and how it has the advantage of being—contra scripture—true, Wetherington’s well-intentioned accommodationism doesn’t hold water. In the end he’s simply saying what he wants to be true about believers, not what is true about them. In that sense he resembles the ICR’s creationists.
h/t: Derek
Today we get both visual and literary art. First, reader Gravelinspector was nice enough to send not one, but four good cat videos. The indented captions are his.
Fat cat in a pot. Maru syndrome, one step further.
Fat cat escapes from the pot.
One wonders how this cat developed this habit?
A cat burrows in snow:
Kitten, part-filled bath. Exactly what you’d predict.
*******
And the site Jumbo Joke has a series of cat haikus. Here are two. They’re okay, but not outstanding; feel free to write your own below. If there’s a really good one, it may win a free, autographed copy of WEIT with a drawn-in cat. (Professor Ceiling Cat will be the judge; and the prize may not be awarded. If they don’t meet the syllable requirements, they automatically lose.)
My brain: walnut-sized.
Yours: largest among primates.
Yet, who leaves for work?
and
Your mouth is moving;
Up and down, emitting noise.
I’ve lost interest.
If you do well, you may get something like this (my autographed book for Aaron, who won the World Cup contest by guessing the final teams and score. Since he was a Germany fan, he demanded a cat playing soccer while wearing the German national jersey:
h/t: Gravelinspector, Steve
Well, I still have a bit of a backlog, but hey, it’s summer and the critters are all out and the plants are blooming. Send photos–but remember, good ones!
First, two ‘hoppers from reader Mike McDowell (his website is here):
Acanalonia Planthopper – uncertain of species:
Treehopper, Archasia belfragei:
Two mammals from Steve Pinker’s trip to Tasmania:
Forester kangaroo, Macropus giganteus [Reader Diana McPherson will comment on the animal’s expression and thoughts]:
A snuffling short-beaked echidna, Tachyglossus aculeatus
From reader Jim Sulzer, two horseshoe crabs (Limulus polyphemus) in flagrante delicto, found on the Maine coast:
And, finally, I’m posting this just as a favor for Stephen Barnard, who has given us so many lovely photos from Idaho. He sent me this today with the title, “My d*g catching a Frisbee”, and with the caption, “Good technically. You may not like the subject.”
Dog: Canis lupus familiaris:
Well, it is good, technically. . .
