Caturday felid: mousers at St. Petersburg museums

July 23, 2011 • 4:24 am

Since I’ll be in St. Petersburg on Sunday, I had to check out the kitteh situation.  I’ve learned that are more than 70 cats living in the Hermitage (one of the great art museums of the world), seventeen others in the Russian National Library, and one on the museum aboard the icebreaker Krasin.  All but the last serve as mousers, protecting Russia’s national treasures.  Although I’ll be in the Hermitage next week, I doubt that I’ll see any cats, for they all live in the basement.

Here’s a video from Russian television showing the official cats:

Another short video of the Hermitage cats:

Once a year the Hermitage celebrates “The Day of the March Cat,” when locals come and fete the felids, while children compete for the best cat drawing.  The cats even have a Twitter page!

ABC News has a detailed article about the cats, which turn over as they are adopted.  You can get one—complete with a Hermitage Certificate!

Just outside the cattery, Popovets runs into Tisha who has lived at the museum for eight years. The plump gray and white male is not in the mood for a petting, swiping at Popovets. She laughs off his attack, letting him gnaw on her arm.

There’s another cat at every turn of the basement’s green and white halls. Likely because plastic food and water bowls are stationed throughout the belly of the museum. The warm pipes that line the tunnels are particularly popular during St. Petersburg’s fiercely cold winters.

Most of the cats don’t stay as long as Tisha, the turnover is about 10 to 15 every year. Word of the program has spread and cats are abandoned at the museum because people know they’ll be taken in. Khaltunin welcomes requests to adopt Hermitage cats. They come complete with a Hermitage certificate, adding a certain pedigree usually not associated with stray cats.

Marc Hauser resigns from Harvard

July 22, 2011 • 10:11 am

Beleaguered psychologist Marc Hauser, who was disciplined by Harvard University for scientific misconduct, has just resigned his position there.  As the New York Times reports, he was originally given a year’s leave and other punishments, but was not fired.  It’s not clear why he’s resigned now.  His resignation letter, published in the Boston Globe (click to enlarge), says he’s doing interesting work on at-risk teenagers, and has been offered “exciting opportunities in the private sector.”

Hauser is still under investigation by the federal government, presumably because his research on primates was sponsored by federal grants.

Rabbi Yoffie gets morality from God: presumably accepts stoning and genocide

July 22, 2011 • 6:58 am

Over at the HuffPo religion section, the rabbis continue to embarrass me. The latest embarrassment was penned by Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the Union for Reform Judaism. In his column, “For moral guidance, look to religion—not neuroscience,” he “reminds us why religion is the best and indispensable guide to moral behavior.”‘

Yoffie takes out after neuroscientists like Sam Harris who claim that moral “truths” can be found through science, but especially excoriates Patricia Churchland, a neuroscientist from San Diego who, he claims, is a complete moral relativist.  I haven’t read Churchland’s writings on morality, but clearly Sam Harris and Jon Haidt are not relativists.  Sam, in fact, is always attacking moral relativists.

So if we don’t get our morality from science (and, I would add, from evolution), where does the good Rabbi get his? One guess.

As a rabbi, I welcome research into neuroscience but believe that as much as we are the products of biology, we also transcend it. I make choices about right and wrong by studying sacred texts that record a 2,500-year history of men and women struggling with God’s message and with each other as they attempt to define what is moral and what is not. I also draw strength and inspiration from a religious community that cares about values and deepens its search for the good through the practice of ancient rituals and traditions.

I don’t believe in easy answers to moral questions. As a liberal person of faith, I reject simplistic moral codes, and I am aware that different religious traditions arrive at different conclusions about good and evil. Nonetheless, the process of moral decision-making that my tradition offers has left me convinced that, as Jonathan Haidt has argued, there is a moral structure to the universe, and despite our differences, the great religious traditions largely agree on what our moral foundations are. And in the moral world in which I live, infanticide and wife burning are always, always wrong.

Now Rabbi Yoffie is a Jew, so he doesn’t accept the New Testament.  So what kind of morality can he get from the Old Testament? Well, here are a few of the things that Yahweh approves or sanctions in that book:

  • slavery
  • genocide, including women and children
  • the killing of adulterers
  • the killing of homosexuals
  • the stoning to death of nonvirgin bride

That stuff was okay by God.  Is it not okay by Rabbi Yoffie? If not, why not?  Was it okay back then, but not now? Or if it was never okay, then why doesn’t the Rabbi approve of this stuff? Could it be that Yoffie picks and chooses his Biblical morality based on secular considerations?  Maybe he should read Plato’s Euthyphro.

“Adaptive” hybridization in mice

July 22, 2011 • 5:30 am

One of the newer “expansions” of the modern synthetic theory of evolution is the idea that the genetic variation “used” by either natural selection or genetic drift can arise not just through mutations within a species, but also through hybridization with another species.  Hybridization between different species usually yields maladaptive offspring, but occasionally a fertile hybrid can be the source of a new gene that can spread through a species that didn’t originally have it.  (I’ve previously written about work showing that an adaptive color gene in aphids was acquired not by hybridization, but by ingestion.)

Such a case of “adaptive introgression” (“introgression is simply the acquisition of genes by one species or population from another by interbreeding) was just reported in Current Biology (reference below), and you can read a summary of the results in a piece by Kai Kupferschmidt in Science NOW (I’m quoted).

As reported by Song et al., the house mouse, Mus musculus domesticus, acquired a gene for rodenticide resistance by mating with a close relative, the wild mouse Mus spretus.  The rodenticide is the famous poison Warfarin, which is used widely to kill mice and rats.  It works by inhibiting the synthesis of blood clotting factors that themselves are dependent on vitamin K.  The mice then bleed to death internally. Warfarin is also used to inhibit the formation of blood clots in humans, but is called “Coumadin” for medical uses.  Since its introduction in the 1950s, many populations of mice have become resistant to the poison: this is a classic case of natural selection that isn’t as widely known as examples of bacterial resistance to antibiotics.

The poison.

Song et. al.  found through DNA sequencing that populations of the house mouse in Spain and Germany had one region of their genome, on chromosome 7, that actually came from Mus spretus. (The two species were formerly “allopatric”, i.e., lived in different places, until they become geographically contiguous when the house mouse moved with its human host.)  This region includes genes for Warfarin resistance, and experiments showed that house mice containing the introgressed spretus region lowered mortality from Warfarin and a similar poison from 84-100% to 9-20%.  The amino-acid sequence of the introgressed gene (vkorc1spr ) differed between the two species.  The authors haven’t done the definitive experiment—actually putting the spretus version of the gene into a house mouse genome and seeing whether it alone confers resistance to poison—but the mortality rates of introgressed house mus versus those lacking the gene are pretty good evidence.

Finally, the authors showed by population-genetic analysis that the spretus gene entered the house mouse population between 61 and 71 mouse generations ago, which corresponds to about 13-22 years in the wild, so the adaptive introgression occurred well after the poision was introduced. This again supports the notion that the spread of the spretus gene in house mice was promoted by natural selection for resistance to poison.

There are two questions to ask about this situation:

1. How common is adaptive introgression?  My guess (which you can see in the ScienceNOW link above), is probably that it isn’t very common.  Why? Because if it were, we would see it using DNA-based phylogenies.  Adaptive introgression would show up as a region of the genome that was much more similar to a region in a related species than could have occurred by simply genetic drift or natural selection in the first species.  We don’t see that kind of similarity very often. (It also could have other causes, like a variant in the common ancestor of the two species that simply was inherited by its descendants.)  So I suspect that while the capture of adaptive genes by hybridization occurs occasionally, it won’t be an important source of variation compared to mutation.

Further, most species (we are one) simply can’t form fertile hybrids with a related species, a condition that is necessary for adaptive introgression to occur. The genus Drosophila (the flies on which I work) contains about 1500 described species, but hybrids are known in only about a dozen cases, and most of these hybrids are sterile.

2.  Can species be selected to hybridize with other species?  Some biologists—especially botanists—have theorized that natural selection will foster those traits that facilitate one species mating with another one, so that it can capture alleles to facilitate its own evolution.  That doesn’t wash, because in the vast majority of cases the hybrids between different species are less fit than the parental species: hybrids can be sterile or inviable (the spretus/domesticus hybrids, for example, are largely sterile).  So, although hybridization may occasionally capture a “good” gene, most of the time it produces maladapted hybrid offspring.  Natural selection, then, would act to prevent rather than facilitate hybridization, because the beneficial effects of mating between species are far outweighed by the bad ones.

As the famous evolutionist Ronald Fisher wrote in 1930:

The grossest blunder in sexual preference, which we can conceive of an animal making, would be to mate with a species different from its own and with which hybrids are either infertile or, through the mixture of instincts and other attributes appropriate to different courses of life, at so serious a disadvantage as to leave no descendants. … it is no conjecture that a discriminative mechanism exists, variations in which will be capable of giving rise to a similar discrimination within its own species, should such a discrimination become at any time advantageous.

Mus spretus. Wild mice are incredibly cute, and I could never bring myself to kill them in traps.


______

Song, Y. et al. 2011.  Adaptive introgression of anticoagulant rodent poison resistance by hybridization between Old World mice.  Current Biology: doi:10.1016/j.cub.2011.06.043

Apple releases new operating system

July 21, 2011 • 7:10 am

A few days ago Apple announced the release of its latest operating system, Lion.  As Mac users know, for a long while new operating systems have been given the names of felids:  Jaguar, Panther, Snow Leopard, and so on.  They’re going to run out of cat species soon, and, recognizing the wide appeal of domestic cats on the internet, Apple quietly announced the name of its next system, and also released the box logo:

Why is religion stronger in economically unequal societies?

July 21, 2011 • 5:21 am

If, like many of us, you’d like to work toward weakening religion’s grip on the world, it behooves you to know why people are religious in the first place.  Increasing evidence suggests that religion is promoted by personal insecurity, including economic inequalities in one’s country, the availability of health care and welfare systems, the dysfunction of one’s society (e.g, the amount of crime), and so on.  What this means is that turning people away from faith involves more than just expounding the weaknesses and perniciousness of religion.  It also involves eliminating those social conditions that promote religion.  And that, indeed, may be a nobler goal.

The idea that economic inequality fosters faith is the subject of new paper by Frederick Solt, Philip Habel, and J. Tobin Grant in Social Science Quarterly: “Economic inequality, relative power, and religiosity.”

The purpose of this study was threefold:

  1. To test the hypothesis that economic inequality among nations really is associated with increased religiosity.
  2. If such a relationship does exist, why does it exist?  Is it that in inegalitarian societies poor people increasingly embrace religion? Or is there another explanation?
  3. If such a relationship does exist, is it because economic inequality promotes religiosity, or because increased religiosity promotes economic inequality?

Unlike the paper of Nigel Barber I discussed recently, Solt et al. appear to have done the study correctly, using sophisticated statistics.  First, they used survey data from 76 different countries on both the degree of economic inequality (quantified by the Gini index that ranges between 0 for complete equality and 100 for complete inequality) and the degree of religiosity, using 12 different measures of the strength of faith (see figure below).

Their first finding is that every single measure of religiosity—and there are 12 of them—shows a highly significant positive correlation with economic inequality.  Here is Figure 1 from their paper, showing these correlations and (I think) the best-fit regression:

Then, using a sophisticated multilevel analysis of data from both countries themselves and individuals within in those countries, they found the following:

  1. There is a very strong relationship between how economically developed a country is and its religiosity:  less developed countries are significantly more religious.
  2. Muslim countries were considerably more religious (using a joint measure of religiosity involving the measures shown above) than other religious societies, and Catholic and Orthodox societies were more religious than Protestant ones.  The lowest religiosity was found among Communist or formerly Communist countries.
  3. Most important to the authors was their finding that “economic inequality is estimated to powerfully increase religiosity and to do so regardless of income.” (My italics).

In other words, in economically skewed societies, both the rich and the poor are more religious.  In fact, they found that, for nearly all of the measures of religiosity, when societies are more unequal, the richer people become more religious than the poorer people (this association was positive for all 12 measures of religiosity and was statistically significant for four).

This last finding is important because it bears on two hypotheses about why unequal societies are more religious.  The first, called the “deprivation theory,” is that in economically unequal societies, poorer folks turn to religion for reassurance and comfort.  This is certainly the hypothesis I believed before I read this paper.  The second hypothesis, which is the authors’ theory, is called the “relative power theory.”  This holds that as societies become more economically unequal, richer people become more religious so they can disseminate religion to those who aren’t so fortunate.  As the authors note:

. . . many wealthy individuals, rather than simply allowing redistribution to be decided through the democratic process as such median-voter models assume, respond to higher levels of inequality by adopting religious beliefs and spreading them among their poorer fellow citizens. Religion then works to discourage interest in mere material well-being in favor of eternal spiritual rewards, preserving the privileges of the rich and allowing unequal conditions to continue.

Their findings thus suggest that both the deprivation and relative power theories are needed to explain the data. In economically unequal societies, rich people promulgate religion to keep their own place in the hierarchy, and, rather than fighting for more equality, poor people accept religion as an easy form of solace. Granted, the relative power theory sounds a bit weird to me, but the deprivation theory can’t explain why the upper classes become more religious when their societies are more unequal.

The authors also note that the relative power theory explains why the U.S. is so religious despite the fact that its citizens are generally well off.  It is, they say, because the U.S. shows considerably more economic inequality than other developed countries (and that is true).

Finally, the authors sought to explain why there’s a positive relationship between economic inequality and religiosity.  Does the former promote the latter, or is it the reverse? (After all, perhaps religion could, as several commenters noted earlier, act to create inequitable societies.)

To answer this question, the authors did a time series analysis of religiosity in the U.S. from the mid-1950s to the present.  Over this period, as the figure below shows, religiosity showed big fluctuations in America.  They then analyzed these fluctuations with respect to similar fluctuations in income inequality (for statistical mavens, they used vector autogression, or VAR).  This method enables them to see how the present values of either religiosity or inequality affect subsequent measures of the other factor.  They also factored in general well being of the society (per-capita gross domestic product, or GDP).

Their two findings from this analysis are:

  1. “Increases in inequality in one year predict substantial gains in religiosity in the next,” while “past values of religiosity do not predict future values of inequality.” In other words, the correlation between religiosity and inequality is driven by the former responding to the latter, and not the other way around.  Unequal incomes lead to societies becoming more religious.
  2. “Holding inequality constant, gains in per-capita GDP are estimated to depress subsequent levels of aggregate religiosity.” In other words, increasing the average economic well being of people makes them less religious.

This seems to be a sound and thoroughly-researched study, although I have to say that I’m slightly uncomfortable with the “relative power” theory, perhaps because I just don’t notice rich people in America trying to spread religion among the poor.

An additional bonus of this study is Figure 4, which shows the “aggregate religiosity” of America—a measure that combines several different indices of faith—over a period from 1955 to 2005:

So much for the common claim that religion in America is here to stay!

_________

Solt, F., Habel, P. and Grant, J. T. (2011), Economic inequality, relative power, and religiosity. Social Science Quarterly, 92: 447–465. DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-6237.2011.00777.x

Multiverses

July 20, 2011 • 8:54 am

I’m busy preparing for my trip, and so will have to send you around a bit the next few days. Worth reading today is Jason Rosenhouse’s take on multiverses: the idea that there could be more than one universe.  Jason was stimulated by an article in Scientific American about the concept (sadly, not free in its entirety), and responses by physicists by Alexander Vilenkin and Max Tegmark defending the possibility of multiverses (fortunately, free here).  A few years ago, having talked to several physicists about the idea, I wrote about it in The New Republic:

The idea of multiple universes may seem like a desperate move–a Hail Mary thrown out by physicists who are repelled by religious explanations. But physics is full of ideas that are completely counterintuitive, and multiverse theories fall naturally out of long-standing ideas of physics. They represent physicists’ attempts to give a naturalistic explanation for what others see as evidence of design. For many scientists, multiverses seem far more reasonable than the solipsistic assumption that our own universe with its 10,000,000,000,000,000 planets was created just so a single species of mammal would evolve on one of them fourteen billion years later.

It’s important for all of us to at least become acquainted with this theory because, as Jason points out, it has theological implications—not only about whether our planet is the special object of God’s attention, but because multiverses are relevant to the “fine-tuning” argument for God beloved of religious scientists.  Theologians often sneer at the multiverse theory as a ploy atheistic physicists to reject what they see as strong evidence for God. That’s why it’s important (beyond simply keeping up with exciting ideas in cosmology) to know why physicists posit multiverses, and to see that the idea is not something scientists concocted to get around the fine-tuning arguments.  And, as Rosenhouse notes:

And let us not forget that the God hypothesis, which is, after all, the preferred alternative of Haught and Polkinghorne, also puts forth a speculative, unobservable entity without a trace of experimental support. The multiverse hypothesis at least arises as a natural consequence of certain theories that have a sound, evidential basis. The God hypothesis is just invented from whole cloth, and is supported solely by philosophical gobbledygook like the cosmological argument.

Vilenkin and Tegmark discuss the science, and Rosenhouse goes after the theology.  They’re all short pieces, so do read them.

Speaking of the cosmological argument, if you can stand any more Edward “You-Can’t-Understand-It-Until-You’ve-Read-Dozens-of-Books” Feser, he has a new post on the subject,”So you think you understand the cosmological argument?”  We don’t, of course, for we haven’t read Feser’s two books on the topic.  As Feser says, “while the basic structure of the main versions of the argument is fairly simple, the background metaphysics necessary to a proper understanding of the key terms and inferences is not.”  Oy gewalt!