Evolution in the City

July 26, 2011 • 9:31 am

by Greg Mayer

Carl Zimmer has a nice piece in today’s New York Times on studies of evolution-in-action in a variety of species in New York City. Researchers have found that the fragmentation of natural and even artificial habitats by urbanization has led to genetic isolation and differentiation, and also adaptation to the urban environment. For example, Jeff Levinton of SUNY Stony Brook has found that a worm in the Hudson near West Point evolved resistance to the toxic metal cadmium. Following a cleanup, the worms have reduced resistance, due to gene flow from surrounding populations that had not been exposed to cadmium.

Desmognathus fuscus from Highbridge Park, Manhattan. Damon Winter/New York Times.

This is a dusky salamander from Manhattan. They’re pretty small, less than a handful; about a spoonful, I suppose. John Kieran in his classic book thought it “the most common salamander within the city”. They’re known from the Bronx, Manhattan, and Staten Island, but I know of no definite records for Long Island (which includes Brooklyn and Queens). Mike Klemens of the American Museum of Natural History did not find them in surveys of Central Park, so I was surprised to see they are holding on in other parts of Manhattan.

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Bishop, S.C. 1941. The salamanders of New York. New York State Museum Bulletin 324:1-365.

Gibbs, J.P., A.R. Breisch, P.K. Ducey, G. Johnson, J.L. Behler and R.C. Bothner. 2007. The Amphibians and Reptiles of New York State. Oxford University Press, New York.

Kieran, J. 1959. A Natural History of New York City. Houghton Mifflin, Boston.

Klemens, M. 1982. Herpetofaunal Inventory of Central Park. MS report, American Museum of Natural History.

St. Petersburg: 1

July 24, 2011 • 10:16 pm

I finally got a glimpse of this beautiful city on the way to  St. Petersburg State University this morning. It’s like a cross between Amsterdam and Venice, with large, beautiful buildings and lots of water and canals.  I can’t wait to explore it on foot after our meetings end.  After today’s session and dinner, we get a city tour, and on Wednesday we have half a day at the Peterhof Palace:

Our symposium (on marine snails) at the University is about to begin, in a very old building that once housed Mendeleev.  Here is a photo of our small lecture hall (there are about 40 scientists here), taken with Photobooth. It is, without doubt, the fanciest place in which I’ll ever speak.

On the veiling of children

July 24, 2011 • 8:28 pm

I’ve just discovered Maryam Namazie’s website, and I can’t believe I’ve missed it for so long.  (In case you don’t know her, she’s a strong activist against the evils of Islam, especially sharia law, and a strong promoter of secularism.)

I’ve previously written about the segregation of  Muslim schoolgirls in Canada during prayer (and the hyper-segregation of menstruating girls, who aren’t allowed to pray with others at all), but Namazie has a graphic illustration of this segregation in her post, “How sexual apartheid works with children—in photos.”  There are three versions of a picture of the Parsian Children’s Ensemble, with two of them rejected by censors since boys and girls were (horrors!) sitting together, the girls were unveiled, and too much skin was showing.  The last one, with full veiling and segregation, was the one that was approved.

Namazie also quotes a great piece by Mansoor Hekmat on the veiling of Islamic children (and remember that they have no choice about whether to be “Islamic”). So much for the Islamic argument that this mode of dress is freely chosen by women!

‘The child has no religion, tradition and prejudices. She has not joined any religious sect. She is a new human being who, by accident and irrespective of her will has been born into a family with specific religion, tradition, and prejudices. It is indeed the task of society to neutralise the negative effects of this blind lottery. Society is duty-bound to provide fair and equal living conditions for children, their growth and development, and their active participation in social life. Anybody who should try to block the normal social life of a child, exactly like those who would want to physically violate a child according to their own culture, religion, or personal or collective complexes, should be confronted with the firm barrier of the law and the serious reaction of society. No nine year old girl chooses to be married, sexually mutilated, serve as house maid and cook for the male members of the family, and be deprived of exercise, education, and play. The child grows up in the family and in society according to established customs, traditions, and regulations, and automatically learns to accept these ideas and customs as the norms of life. To speak of the choice of the Islamic veil by the child herself is a ridiculous joke. Anyone who presents the mechanism of the veiling of a kindergarten-age girl as her own ‘democratic choice’ either comes from outer space, or is a hypocrite who does not deserve to participate in the discussion about children’s rights and the fight against discrimination. The condition for defending any form of the freedom of the child to experience life, the condition for defending the child’s right to choose, is first and foremost, to prevent these automatic and common impositions. Anyone who thinks that in the matter of the veil there is ‘no difference’ between the child and the adult, should, before becoming a member of any editorial board or any Scandinavian Committee of any organisation, urgently do something about her own backwardness and ignorance about the basics of the issue under discussion. ‘

Two new books on religion and money

July 24, 2011 • 7:45 am

In today’s New York Times, the prolific Garry Wills, who was a Catholic last time I looked, reviews two books on religions and how they are funded: Inside Scientology, by Janet Reitman, and Render Unto Rome: The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church, by Jason Berry.  Both seem worth a look.

Although many of us know the way Scientology bilks its adherents through expensive courses and “auditing” sessions, the Catholics have their own machinations:

The Vatican issues statements of its assets — in 2007 the amount was 1.4 billion euros —but the Vatican Bank is off the books, as is a metric ton of gold, and other things not reported. On a list of papal assets, St. Peter’s Basilica and other historic sites are listed as worth one euro each. No wonder, as Berry says, “the Holy See’s true net worth is invisible.”

Surprisingly (at least to me), Wills is very hard on his own faith, especially its secrecy about priestly pedophilia. He concludes his review with these words:

Some are surprised that religion is so corruptible. They should not be. When secrecy is used to protect a higher order of knowledge, it can make the keepers of the secrets think of themselves as a higher order of humans. Corruptio optimi pessima, goes the old saying. Blight at the top is the deepest blight. It is the sin of taking God’s name in vain.

Well, them’s strong words but betray Wills’s own Catholicism.  “Taking God’s name in vain” is a sin?  And in what respect is Catholicism (or Scientology for that matter) a “higher order of knowledge”? In what sense is it knowledge at all?

Peregrinations: in transit

July 24, 2011 • 1:25 am

Jetzt bin ich in München, after a long and VERY bumpy transatlantic flight. It was so bouncy, and for such a long time, that it was the first flight I’ve ever taken that I thought might crash.

A three-hour flight to St. Petersburg awaits in an hour, and I am sitting in the lounge with actual Russian people (the three young lads next to me are drunk, and it’s not yet noon).

Reading my travel guide, I have discovered that the Hermitage has two Leonardos, and that Dostoevsky’s last home is also in St. Petersburg, kept just as he left it, including the study in which he wrote The Brothers Karamazov. (I still prefer Crime and Punishment, which is also set in St. P.) Here’s his study:

The medical museum has what is reputed to be Rasputin’s penis (there’s a photo of the thing in my book, which, at ten inches long, resembles a giant priapulid); I’ll try to see that too. You can read about it and see a picture at this site, which is properly dubious about the species from which this paternal apparatus derived.

Rosenhouse on Feser on the cosmological argument

July 23, 2011 • 6:14 am

As I pointed out a few days ago, Edward Feser has posted a long defense of the cosmological argument for God, claiming that critics like Jason Rosenhouse and I simply don’t understand its subtlety.  And we have no credibility to refute it until we’ve read many books on the topic, including (of course) two of Feser’s own.

Over at EvolutionBlog, Jason responds, showing how Feser distorted the words of Robin Le Poidevin, a critic of the cosmological argument.   After exposing Feser’s intellectual dishonesty, Jason then dismisses the cosmological argument, and I have to say that, based on my latest readings about that argument (not yet including Feser’s books), Jason is right:

As for the cosmological argument itself, I make no apology for being dismissive. Depending on what version you are considering, you can expect to find concepts like causality or probability being used in domains where they do not clearly apply, or dubious arguments for why an actual infinity cannot exist, or highly questionable premises about the beginnings of the universe or about how everything that began to exist must have had a cause, or groundless invocations of the principle of sufficient reason. You inevitably come so perilously close to assuming what you are trying to prove that you may as well just assume God exists and be done with it.