Is this dog smart or dumb?

May 13, 2011 • 3:09 am

by Matthew Cobb

Dog wants man to throw ball. But man is statue. Dog is confused. (NB the statue is in Sackville Gardens, in Manchester, UK…) EDIT: As ATP points out in a comment below, and as I should have known, the statue is of UK computer scientist Alan Turing, who committed suicide by eating an apple laced with cyanide (this is the “ball”). He had been prosecuted for homosexuality. [EDIT#2 – see comment 12 below] The government has since apologised (!) for his prosecution/persecution, and he is celebrated in Manchester, with a large street named after him, and a new building at the University for maths, computer science etc.

A morning in Banff

May 12, 2011 • 4:52 pm

It’s not morning any more, but it was a good one. The meetings here don’t start till this evening, and even then it’s just registration and a social, so I took the opportunity to explore.  First I got Canadian money, and remembered that the one-dollar coins have a loon on the back.  They’re called “loonies” (the two-dollar coins are called “toonies”).

On the front side, Queen Elizabeth has aged:

Flush with loonies, I had a late breakfast at Coyote’s Southwestern Cafe: huevos rancheros and coffee. The coffee was excellent, the huevos rancheros (fried egg, salsa, chiles, cheese, black beans, sour cream, and avocado on a blue corn tortilla) were good but overpriced, and service was mediocre. I won’t eat there again.

After breakfast I wandered the streets, checking with the rangers about the endemic thermophilic snails in the hot springs.  The springs are temporarily closed, but I may be able to get access by calling the ranger in charge.

To reward myself for due diligence, I bought some ice cream at the highly regarded Cows on Banff Avenue. I had a chocolate cheesecake cone, which was good but expensive ($4.25 for one scoop!).  A sign in the window quotes a travel site’s list of the ten best places in the world to get ice cream, and Cows is ranked #1. I strongly disagree.  My choice would be Christina’s Homemade Ice Cream in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which has the absolute best flavor in the world:  burnt sugar. If you’re ever there, try it. (I rank Berthillon in Paris [marron glacée is sublime] and Dr. Mike’s in Bethel, Connecticut as tied for #2, but I’ve never explored the gelatos of Italy.)

On the advice of readers, I took the gondola up Sulphur Mountain, and it was absolutely spectacular. At $31.00 for the round trip, it’s not cheap but it’s well worth it.  The cable car goes up to a viewpoint near the peak, and the ride is long and gorgeous. I had an entire gondola to myself:

At the top you’re greeted by a 360-degree view of peaks, lakes, and the town of Banff far below.  It’s one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been.   Here’s a taste, with Banff at lower left (click to enlarge).  The Banff Centre, where I’m staying, is the isolated group of buildings on the small hill in the “centre.”

Oh, and on the walk home I saw this cute bird. Now for a biologist I’m abysmally unable to identify birds. Can an alert reader enlighten me?

Moar theodicy

May 12, 2011 • 12:57 pm

I’ve always thought that the existence of both human-caused and physical evils forms the most powerful argument against religion—at least those many religions that posit a powerful and loving God. With the proper logic-chopping one can rationalize murder and rape as necessary aspects of God-given free will, but there’s simply no credible way to do that for things like cancers and earthquakes.

Religious folks, too, realize that this is the Achilles heel of faith, and spend considerable time engaging in theodicy, i.e., the rationalization of bad stuff.  I find this branch of theology vastly amusing.

A few days ago, Jeffrey Small, who appears to be a new-agey spirutual type, gave his solution at PuffHo: “The question of theodicy: If God is all powerful, why must evil and suffering exist in the world?”  What does he do? He simply reconceives god not as a sky father, but as some nebulous “ground of being”:

The problem of evil and suffering is only a problem when we view God as a supernatural Zeus-like being. If we instead understand God as the power of being itself (as I wrote in an earlier post here), then this problem disappears.

The question then is not how can God permit evil? God does not permit anything other than the creative state of being, which by its very nature includes freedom. Freedom is what leads to sin and consequently evil. Freedom also leads to growth and life itself. We can thus read the story of the forbidden fruit in Genesis as a metaphorical explanation of the inherent freedom within the world and our knowledge and experience of this freedom as the ultimate cause of suffering.

Yeah, and did God have to give the Earth “freedom” to create earthquakes, volcanoes, and tsunamis, and did he give the genome “freedom” to have oncogenes that can mutate to childhood cancers? What is “freedom” for the lithosphere?

God, when understood as Paul Tillich’s “ground of being,” rather than a supernatural being who intervenes occasionally in the universe, allows for a power that supports all existence as its creative ground but does not make a choice as to which unfortunate events to intervene to change. The nature of existence (as grounded in God) is such that humankind is free. To be free, we must have the ability to do evil, to turn away from God, the true ground of who we are. Thus, the possibility (and reality) of sin is built into the very fabric of life.

To argue whether God could not have found a better mechanism for life and existence fails because it falls into the fallacy of seeing God as a supernatural being designing the universe as a watchmaker might (opening God up to the criticism of being an incompetent watchmaker) or playing with the universe in an ongoing chess game according to some divine plan (opening God up to the criticism of being a cruel chess master) rather than understanding God as the creative structure of existence itself. Thus, the problem of evil is ultimately one of perspective: from a micro view we may see the sufferings that happen in the world, but from a macro view we can understand that this suffering is part of the very fabric of the nature of existence itself — an existence that on balance is good.

Yes, but “on balance” a creative God could have made things better.   He could start by leaving out the tectonic plates and oncogene mutations.  And what does it mean to say that God “supports all existence”. Those are fine-sounding words that mean precisely nothing.  Does God do anything or not?  If he does, what exactly does he do?

Small’s solution, increasingly adopted by desperate theologians, is to see God as a “ground of being.”  The deity apparently didn’t “create” anything, but apparently “supports” everything.  And even if Small doesn’t define his terms, I’m amazed at his ability to specify that God is a “ground of being”. Who told him?

And has Small considered the alternative hypothesis that there is no God, and that this hypothesis might better explain the existence is of all that bad stuff? As Delos McKown said, “The invisible and the nonexistent look very much alike.”

Clearly Small won’t persuade many religious people with this bogus philosophy, especially the many who want to believe that God cares for each and every one of them, and will send them to heaven if they’re good. Remember that most Americans aren’t deists, but theists. Small has a big job.

The only good thing about this palaver concerning the impotent “power of being” is that, for many, it’s the first step to abandoning God completely.

Myrmecomorphs

May 12, 2011 • 7:16 am

Ants are one of the most abundant groups on earth, but, curiously, not a lot of things eat them.  Yes, there are anteaters (who also eat a lot of termites), and some lizards specialize on ants, but the little critters are full of noxious chemicals and pheromones that put them way down on the list of predators’ preferred foodstuffs.

Because of this, many other insects and arthropods have evolved to mimic ants, taking advantage of the aversion of predators to anything antlike.  These mimics are called myrmecomorphs, and they’re the subject of a really nice eponymous feature in this week’s Current Biology  (access is free, too).  The name comes from the Greek “myrmecos”, for ant, and “morph” for form. The authors are Florian Maderspacher, the journal’s senior reviews editor, and Marcus Stensmyr, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology at Jena.

I won’t summarize the text, which talks about the history of work on these beasts; you should read that for yourself.  But I do want to show some of the amazing photographs of ant mimics.

When a perfectly edible species evolves to resemble a noxious one that is avoided by predators, thereby gaining protection from being eaten, it’s called Batesian mimicry, after the English naturalist and explorer Henry Walter Bates, who described the phenomenon.

We’ve read a lot lately about the amazing shapes of treehoppers (membracids). Here are some photographs of  the treehopper Cyphonia clavata, whose helmet (pronotum) has evolved to resemble an ant.

The picture below shows the hopper with a sympatric (living in the same place) noxious ant, Cephalotes atratus.

As the authors note:

Notably, the ant-mimicking structure seems to be inverted, with the imitated head facing towards the back of the treehopper. That way, as the treehopper moves forward, it probably creates a rather good impression of a reversing and agitated ant in erect defensive posture, deterring any would-be predators. To complete the illusion, the terminal segments of the treehopper’s hindlegs, coloured like the ‘ant’, most likely serve as the ‘ant’s’ forelegs, which provides the static protrusion with the illusion of movement. Too bad our specimen was dead.

Of course, for this mimicry to evolve (and work), the noxious ant “model” and its edible mimic have to live in the same area, and be encountered by the same potential predators.

Some mimics imitate the ants only during part of the life cycle.  Here’s a nymph of the Texas bow-legged bug (a true bug), Hyalymenus tarsatus (left) imitating an ant of the genus Ectatomma (right).

Some of the most remarkable cases of ant mimicry involve spiders. To pull off the trick, the spiders have to make their extra pair of legs look like antennae, put a constriction in their cephalothorax to resemble the separate head and thorax of ants, thin out their body, and, often, evolve fake eyespots to look like the large eyes of ants.  Here’s a spider Sphecotypus niger (left) looking like the ant Pachychondela villosa (right), which the authors describe as a an “aggressive and predatory ant.” Note how the spider extends its first pair of legs forward to look like antennae:

There are several types of ant mimicry.  Besides Batesian mimicry, we have “aggressive mimicry,” in which an animal will evolve to resemble another animal so that it can deceive it into thinking it’s one of its fellows, who then unwittingly allows it to approach.  (There are other types of aggressive mimicry as well: some mantids imitate orchids, hanging from trees and waiting to eat the hapless insects who come to pollinate it.)

Here’s a remarkable case of aggressive ant mimicy.  The animal on the left is actually the crab spider Aphantochilus rogersi, which resembles ants of the genus Cephalotes (right). It’s hard to tell them apart!  The spider’s head is biting the ant’s neck, so the ant’s head is bent down. It’s a goner.

This type of mimicry implies that the “model” ants must have pretty good vision, for otherwise there would be no selection on the spider to resemble an ant so closely.  And indeed, ants of this group do see pretty well: you can see that its eyes are quite large.  From this you’d predict that mymecomorphs who prey on ants that don’t see very well might be less perfect mimics.

I love cases of mimicry, for they truly show the power of natural selection.  The degree to which mimics resemble models—and it’s often spot-on—shows that there is lots of genetic variation in the model that can be used by natural selection, and that the selection is strong enough to affect many features of the mimic. It’s one of the few cases—sex ratio is another—in which biologists know a priori what the optimum result of selection should be, and how closely selection can achieve that target. As you see from the photos above, it comes damn close!

The power of selection acting on pervasive genetic variation is, of course, also responsible for the power of artificial selection, something that Darwin highlighted in The Origin:

“Breeders frequently speak of an animal’s organization as something plastic, which they can model almost as they please.”

I won’t use the word “spiritual” to describe my feelings when I see the remarkable forms that have resulted from blind, materialistic processes acting on DNA molecules, but they certainly evoke considerable wonder.

No theists at 30,000 feet

May 12, 2011 • 6:34 am

by Greg Mayer

I mentioned to Jerry a while back that I’d heard somewhere the phrase “there are no atheists at 30,000 feet” (i.e. in an airplane), but that it’s actually just the opposite: anyone in a plane off the ground is fervently attached to Bernoulli’s principle, Newton’s laws, fluid dynamics, etc. At 30,000 ft., everyone is a rational materialist, and you damn well better make sure your pilot is, too. (Unlike the infamous Tuninter airline pilot in Italy a couple of years ago “who paused to pray instead of taking emergency measures before crash-landing his plane, killing 16 people”; the praying pilot survived.)

I was reminded of this by PZ’s recent post about his son, who is a Lieutenant in the U.S. Cavalry*, which drew some comments about foxholes. I decided to try to track down the source of the airplane phrase and reaction to it, and, as I’d suspected, Richard Dawkins was the source (although I might have first read it as quoted by the behavioral ecologist John Krebs). My recollection of it was a bit mangled. Here’s what Dawkins wrote in River Out of Eden (1995, pp. 31-32):

Show me a cultural relativist at thirty thousand feet and I’ll show you a hypocrite. Airplanes are built according to scientific principles and they work. They stay aloft and they get you to a chosen destination. Airplanes built to tribal or mythological specifications such as the dummy planes of the Cargo cults in jungle clearings or the bees-waxed wings of Icarus don’t.

So, he was addressing cultural relativism, but I think the point holds for theism as well. And I also found that the original phrase is usually stated as there are “no atheists on airplanes crashing from 30,000 feet”, but I think the Tunisian pilot story puts paid to the idea that that might be a good thing.

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*Although Lt. Myers wears crossed sabers and an all-blue uniform, there actually aren’t any horse soldiers in the U.S. Army anymore. The army has recently adopted a blue service uniform (reminiscent of Civil War uniforms), and cavalry insignia are used for certain armored units.

What’s a bug?

May 11, 2011 • 7:38 pm

A few days ago I used the term “true bug” when referring to a specific order of insects. This engendered some confusion, as a few people didn’t know the difference between “bugs” in common parlance and “true bugs” in scientific parlance.

You will want to know the difference, and Alex Wild explains at Myrmecos:

An issue that invariably surfaces when entomologists interact with non-entomologists is the “bug problem“.

I don’t mean pest infestation troubles. Rather, I mean that entomologists use a different definition of the word “bug” than the general English-speaking populace, with confusing results.

To most people, a “bug” is any small crawly animal. Like a spider, or a centipede, or maybe a chihuahua. To an entomologist, a “bug” is . . .

Go to his website to see.

Banff: 2

May 11, 2011 • 7:14 pm

Banff has a spectacular setting in the Canadian Rockies.  I’m staying at the Banff Centre above the town, a arts/convention operation with lots of rooms.  I wandered downtown for dinner, and was pleased to see a cervid walking across the street right in front of me. I’m a city boy, and not used to wild artiodactyls on the public thoroughfares. I followed the deer into someone’s backyard and got within about four feet of it:

And then I passed a bear-proof garbage can. I’m not in Chicago any more.

The downtown, which is small, is surrounded by towering, snow-clad mountains.  It’s a tourist town, replete with souvenir stores, candy emporia, and expensive restaurants, but you can’t beat the setting. (Apologies for the annoying camera smudge, which we’ll have to live with until I get it cleaned.)

I hadn’t eaten all day—save a bagel at 7 a.m.—so I tucked into a comfort meal of fish and chips (quite good) and a pint of IPA (decent, but no match for my favorite pint, Timothy Taylor Landlord) at the Banff Avenue Brewing Company.  My serious gustatory explorations will begin anon.