It’s official: Smokey is the world’s loudest cat

May 9, 2011 • 11:30 am

About five weeks ago Matthew Cobb posted an item here about Smokey, a British cat reputed to have the world’s loudest purr.  Well, it’s just now been made official: the Guinness Book of World Records has recorded Smokey at an astounding 67.7 decibels, making her the holder of the title for Loudest Purr by a Domestic Cat.  That noise, sixteen times louder than the average purr, is roughly equivalent to the sound of a vacuum cleaner, right at the threshold of “annoying loudness.”

How loud is Smokey? Have a listen:

A funny MSNBC piece, including an interview with both Smokey and her owner, is here.

The Guinness site helpfully compares this to other animal sounds:

The loudest animal sound is the low-frequency pulses made by blue whales (Balaenoptera musculus) and fin whales (B. physalus) when communicating with each other. These whales reach an amazing 188 dB on the decibel scale, creating the loudest sounds emitted by any living source. Total silence is 0 dB, a lawnmower – 90 dB, car horn – 110 dB, – a rock concert — 120 dB. Blue whales and fin whales are louder than all of these!

Congratulations, Smokey!

Treehoppers redux: a cool video

May 9, 2011 • 9:57 am

Last week I wrote about treehoppers (membracids) and the new evidence, published in Nature, that their bizarre “helmets” are actually homologous to ancestral wing structures.  This evidence included the observation that, like wings, the treehopper helmet is heavily covered with veins, and, like wings, is inflated shortly after the final moult, which produces the adult. (There was also genetic evidence: the same “key” genes induce both wing and helmet development.)

Via Bug Girl’s Blog, where BG has just posted on that paper, we have this video from Nature showing a treehopper, right after its final moult, inflating first its wings and then its helmet. I can’t embed it here, but click on this link to watch it.  It’s a graphic demonstration of the relatedness of these two structures.

Here are three screenshots showing the inflation of first the wings and then the helmet.

Statistics

May 9, 2011 • 8:41 am

I received this email from pinch-blogger Matthew Cobb:

I was idle, so I Googled these:

Google hits: 2 billion for “sex” and “food”. “Death” & “porn” =  900 million.  ‘Life’ > 4 billion. “man” > 3 billion, “woman” = 900,000, “cat” = 2 billion! dog <900 million.

So the modal web page would be about a man who has a life and thinks about cats and sex and food…

Need I say more?

Ecklund and Long: Scientists are totally spiritual

May 9, 2011 • 6:22 am

Elaine Ecklund, a sociologist at Rice University, has gotten tons of mileage out of her Templeton-funded study on science and religion.  Over and over again (I’ve written about this many times here: just search for “Ecklund”), she’s claimed that scientists are far more religious than people think (even though they’re far more atheistic than the general public), and used her results to bash scientism, promote religion, and urge scientists to bring up their faith in the classroom.

Now she and Elizabeth Long have a new paper in Sociology of Religion examining the atheist scientists who are “spiritual.”  The paper is highlighted at PuffHo, and I’ve read the whole thing (you can download it here).  I’d urge you to skip it, though, for it’s turgid, boring, and horribly written.

The main finding is that 26% of all interviewed scientists (72/275) describe themselves as “spiritual” in an “identity consistent” way, and that 22% of atheist scientists see themselves as “spiritual.”  As with Ecklund’s findings of normal religiosity in scientists, they find this “surprising”.

However, we found that 72 of the 275 natural and social scientists see themselves as pursuing what they describe in various ways as an identity consistent spirituality. These scientists are not the majority of those interviewed,but they are a very substantial minority, around 26 percent of those interviewed

. . . a small but theoretically important minority of academic scientists who are spiritual but not religious perceive spirituality as consistent with their identities insofar as it engages their everyday lives, and is instantiated in their practices as teachers, as citizens of the university and as researchers.

Note the weasel words “very substantial minority” and “theoretically important minority” (what on earth is that?), all meant to puff up the results. (Ecklund has a history of such rhetorical inflation.)  And I don’t know how in the world she squares these results with this conclusion:

In this paper, we ask how scientists understand spirituality in their own terms. Our results show unexpectedly that the majority of scientists at top research universities consider themselves “spiritual.” . .

Majority of scientists? I don’t see this anywhere, unless somehow Ecklund is lumping together religious people with “spiritual” ones.

But lest you see the spirituality of scientists, as Ecklund and Long somehow do, as vindicating faith or religion, look what the data really mean:

For those academic scientists who are spiritual, their sense of how spirituality is defined is congruent with their ideas about science. For example, a significant proportion sees science as more congruent with spirituality than it is with religion. Evidence from the qualitative interviews reveals that religion and spirituality are not overlapping categories to these scientists. For example, about 40 percent of academic scientists who see themselves as spiritual have not attended religious services in the past year. In their view, spirituality, in contrast to religion, is open to individual inquiry, having more potential than religion to come in line with scientific thinking and reasoning, which they see as the pursuit of truth. Our results show that scientists hold religion and spirituality as being qualitatively different kinds of constructs.

These people are nothing more than atheist scientists who sometimes have a feeling of transcendence, awe or wonder. Hell, that could be me if you catch me at the right moment.  This one statistic is the only interesting thing in the piece, and it’s not all that interesting.  And it’s buried in 22 pages of postmodern gobbledygook.  (The only funny thing is Ecklund and Long’s failure to deal with the palpable fact that scientists are far less religious than the general public.) To get a flavor of modern sociological prose, have a gander at the abstract:

We ask how scientists understand spirituality and its relation to religion and to science. Analyses are based on in-depth interviews with 275 natural and social scientists at 21 top U.S. research universities who were part of the Religion among Academic Scientists survey. We find that this subset of scientists have several distinct conceptual or categorical strategies for framing the connection spirituality has with science. Such distinct framings are instantiated in spiritual beliefs more congruent with science than religion, as manifested in the possibility of “spiritual atheism,” those who see themselves as spiritual yet do not believe in God or a god. Scientists stress a pursuit of truth that is individualized (but not characterized by therapeutic aims) as well as voluntary engagement [sic] both inside and outside the university. Results add complexity to existing thinking about spirituality in contemporary American life, indicating that conceptions of spirituality may be bundled with characteristics of particular master identity statuses such as occupational groups. Such understandings also enrich and inform existing theories of religious change, particularly those related to secularization.

The distinct framings are instantiated! As H. L. Mencken once wrote about Thorstein Veblen’s equally verbose and pompous Theory of the Leisure Class, “Well, what have we here? What does this appalling salvo of rhetorical artillery signify? What was the sweating professor trying to say?” Templeton must love this kind of stuff.

h/t: Sigmund

________

Ecklund, E. H. and E. Long.  2011. Scientists and spirituality.  Sociology of Religion, advance access.  doi:10.1093/socrel/srr003

Philadelphia Inquirer: Is the Catholic Church down with evolution?

May 9, 2011 • 5:05 am

I spent some time last week talking with Faye Flam, a chatty and engaging science reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer who doubles as a trapeze artist in her spare time.  Inspired (so to speak) by Pope Ratzi’s Easter Homily, which said strong stuff about evolution, Faye was writing a column about whether Catholics see evolution and their faith as compatible. She had already talked to Catholic scientists about evolution, and called me to get the take of an outspoken heathen.

Her column, “Catholicism and evolution: Are they contradictory?” appeared in this morning’s paper.  It’s a pretty good piece, and shows, for one thing, that Catholic scientists are all over the map.  But all of them, of course, claim that evolution and Catholicism are perfectly compatible.  How could they not?

Kenneth Miller (Catholic), who has previously written that God could have intervened to guide evolution through either setting up the laws of physics, or directing things by intervening on the quantum level:

Or, as Brown’s Miller puts it, “What makes us truly special is our ability to reason.”. . . [JAC note: Reason is not unique to humans, but has been seen in other primates, non-primate mammals, and birds!]

Miller says he rejects the ID position because it makes erroneous claims about biology.  Evolution, he said, explains many of the structures that ID theory cites as proof of a “designer’s” intervention,” including the flagellum.

And in Catholicism, he said, God wouldn’t micromanage that way. “Surely he can set things up without having to violate his own laws.”

In Miller’s view, God created the whole process of evolution. “We’re here because a creator God created a universe in which it was possible for beings like us to arise.”

Miller and other Catholic scientists say that even though they believe we were created by a creator, they are not creationists– a term they reserve for the official Intelligent Design movement and biblical literalism.

Whenever I see theistic evolutionists like Miller deny that they’re creationists, I remember the story (probably apocryphal) attributed to George Bernard Shaw.  He supposedly asked a woman at a party if she’d sleep with him for a million pounds.  She responded, “Well, I’d have to think about that.”  Shaw then asked, “Well, would you sleep with me for one pound?” The woman answered indignantly, “Certainly not! What kind of woman do you think I am?”  Shaw answered coolly: “Madam, we’ve already established that.  Now we’re just haggling over the price.”  Miller, too, is just haggling over the price.

Martin Nowak, Catholic and Templeton-funded Harvard evolutionist, sees God as intervening in the evolutionary process (I understand that he refused to be explict about how this happens):

Catholic scientists say they are not Deists. “God is always present, not only as a creator but also a sustainer,” said Harvard biologist Martin Nowak, who is Catholic.

Stephen Barr, physicist and Catholic, is deeply confused:

Physicist Stephen Barr of the University of Delaware says it is possible to believe simultaneously in a world that is shaped by chance and one following a divine plan. “God is in charge and there’s a lot of accident,” said Barr, also a Catholic. “It’s all part of a plan. . . . God may have known where every molecule was going to move.”

I love Flam’s dry comment about this view, “There are quite a few molecules to keep track of, though he is God, after all.”  But if God knew where every molecule was going to move, and that movement followed a divine plan, then none of it could have been an accident.

The heathens include

Leonard Finegold, physicist:
The other problem with the pope’s words is that there really is randomness inherent in the natural world, said Drexel University physicist Leonard Finegold, who teaches a course in science and religion. And that is hard to square with a universe moving along some divinely directed course.
Et moi, and I absolutely stand by my words, though I object to the characterization of this website as a “blog”:
Catholics “cannot accept evolution as we scientists accept it – as an unguided, materialistic process with no goal or direction,” said University of Chicago biologist Jerry Coyne, who writes about science and religion in his blog, “Why Evolution Is True.” . . .
. . .Many biologists are not religious, and few see any evidence that the human mind is any less a product of evolution than anything else, said Chicago’s Coyne. Other animals have traits that set them apart, he said. A skunk has a special ability to squirt a caustic-smelling chemical from its anal glands. Our special thing, in contrast, is intelligence, he said, and it came about through the same mechanism as the skunk’s odoriferous defense.

LOL!  I wonder if Bill Donohue is going to issue a Catholic Fat-Waah against me for comparing human intelligence to skunk butts. (Again, I stand by my analogy.)

Flam’s ending, which gives me an idea of whose side she’s on, came up when we were discussing my view that there are several bits of evidence against divinely directed evolution, including our knowledge of how the process actually works, and the amount of suffering involved, which doesn’t comport with a benevolent God.  Flam said it better:

This brings up some thorny issues with disease, natural disasters, and other sources of suffering. As one of Woody Allen’s characters put it, if God is in charge, it’s a wonder everyone doesn’t file a class-action lawsuit.

I’ve appended below some Pope-y statements that will give you an idea of the “official” Catholic position on evolution, which seems consistent in holding humans as evolutionarily different from other species.
_______________

Appendix:  Recent views of evolution by Popes.

In 1950, Pope Pius XII expressed some doubt about whether humans had ever evolved.  Sixteen years later, John Paul II deemed evolution more well established, but still insisted that humans differed from other creatures by the possession of a divinely installed soul.  This year, Pope Benedict regressed a little, asserting that humans could not have been the product of “random evolution.” It’s debatable what he meant by “random”.  Ratzi could have meant either 1) unguided evolution itself, which is actually a combination of random processes, mutation and genetic drift, and nonrandom ones, like natural selection; or 2) that evolution itself is purely “random.” Either interpretation bespeaks an ignorance of how evolution works.

Regardless, all three Popes have been unanimous in asserting that humans did not evolve like other creatures, for we not only have divinely installed souls, but the evolutionary process was somehow designed or impelled to cough up humans as its ultimate, god-worshipping product.

The emphases in the following statements are mine:

Humani Generis, Pope Pius XII (1950)

. . for the Catholic faith obliges us to hold that souls are immediately created by God. However, this must be done in such a way that the reasons for both opinions, that is, those favorable and those unfavorable to evolution, be weighed and judged with the necessary seriousness, moderation and measure, and provided that all are prepared to submit to the judgment of the Church, to whom Christ has given the mission of interpreting authentically the Sacred Scriptures and of defending the dogmas of faith.[11] Some however, rashly transgress this liberty of discussion, when they act as if the origin of the human body from pre-existing and living matter were already completely certain and proved by the facts which have been discovered up to now and by reasoning on those facts, and as if there were nothing in the sources of divine revelation which demands the greatest moderation and caution in this question.

Address to the Pontifical Academy of Science: Pope John Paul II (1996)

As a result, the theories of evolution which, because of the philosophies which inspire them, regard the spirit either as emerging from the forces of living matter, or as a simple epiphenomenon of that matter, are incompatible with the truth about man. They are therefore unable to serve as the basis for the dignity of the human person.

6. With man, we find ourselves facing a different ontological order—an ontological leap, we could say. But in posing such a great ontological discontinuity, are we not breaking up the physical continuity which seems to be the main line of research about evolution in the fields of physics and chemistry? An appreciation for the different methods used in different fields of scholarship allows us to bring together two points of view which at first might seem irreconcilable. The sciences of observation describe and measure, with ever greater precision, the many manifestations of life, and write them down along the time-line. The moment of passage into the spiritual realm is not something that can be observed in this way—although we can nevertheless discern, through experimental research, a series of very valuable signs of what is specifically human life. But the experience of metaphysical knowledge, of self-consciousness and self-awareness, of moral conscience, of liberty, or of aesthetic and religious experience—these must be analyzed through philosophical reflection, while theology seeks to clarify the ultimate meaning of the Creator’s designs.

Easter Vigil Homily, Pope Benedict XVI (2011)

As believers we answer, with the creation account and with John, that in the beginning is reason. In the beginning is freedom. Hence it is good to be a human person. It is not the case that in the expanding universe, at a late stage, in some tiny corner of the cosmos, there evolved randomly some species of living being capable of reasoning and of trying to find rationality within creation, or to bring rationality into it. If man were merely a random product of evolution in some place on the margins of the universe, then his life would make no sense or might even be a chance of nature. But no, Reason is there at the beginning: creative, divine Reason. And because it is Reason, it also created freedom; and because freedom can be abused, there also exist forces harmful to creation.

Everyone under the bus!

May 8, 2011 • 9:41 am

The squabbles between Gnu Atheists and Accommodationist Atheists are paralleled by a more serious battle in the community of evangelical Christians.  And, not surprisingly, it involves how to interpret the Bible.  Albert Mohler, a Southern Baptist bigwig and president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, is peeved at Karl Giberson, recently departed vice president of the BioLogos Foundation, whose goal is to reconcile science and evangelical Christianity. Giberson’s sin was to write a piece for the CNN Belief website called “Jesus would believe in evolution and so should you.”  The title says it all, but Uncle Karl added this:

Evolution does not contradict the Bible unless you force an unreasonable interpretation on that ancient book.

To suppose, as the so-called young earth creationists do, that God dictated modern scientific ideas to ancient and uncomprehending scribes is to distort the biblical message beyond recognition. Modern science was not in the worldview of the biblical authors and it is not in the Bible.

But of course to call literalism “an unreasonable interpretation” is not going to sit well with a lot of people.  Do remember that 40% of Americans see creation as having been recent and instantaneous, and 60-70% believe in the literal existence of heaven, hell and Satan.  Mohler is one of these, and fires back on his own website with a piece whose title is pretty accurate, “Throwing the Bible under the bus.”

So, according to Professor Giberson, Genesis contains “wonderful insights,” but no authoritative revelation of how God made the universe. Evidently, he believes that the Bible is not making a claim to historical truth when it tells of the creation and function of Adam and Eve. “We now know that the human race began millions of years ago in Africa — not thousands of years ago in the Middle East, as the story in Genesis suggests,” Giberson insists.

In making his case, Giberson uses the old argument that God has given humanity two books of revelation — the Bible and the created order. This is one of Giberson’s most frequently offered arguments. It is a theologically disastrous argument in his hands, for he allows modern naturalistic science to silence the Bible, God’s written revelation. In another article published last year, Giberson said, “I am happy to concede that science does indeed trump religious truth about the natural world.”

Finally, Mohler makes this statement, one diametrically opposed to the assertions of “sophisticated” theologian David Bentley Hart that we discussed yesterday:

Giberson and Collins reveal their true understanding of biblical inspiration when they locate it, not in the authorship of the text at all, but in the modern act of reading the text.

This “true understanding” is, of course, completely bogus to Mohler.

I just love it when Christians fight about which parts of the Bible to take literally and which are metaphorical—as, I suppose, Christians enjoy it when atheists squabble. The difference is that atheists fight about tactics, not whether there is any evidence for the verities of scripture.  The claims of one group of Christians that the others are practicing “bad faith” will make no friends—and shows why the mission of BioLogos is ultimately futile.

And my fondest hope is that people on the fence, seeing Christians fighting about how literal the Bible really is, will realize that the whole exercise is doomed, for the Bible comes not from God but from man.  That’s a good first step on the road to unbelief.



Taxonomists: an endangered species

May 8, 2011 • 5:21 am

This piece from Wired Science, “The mass extinction of scientists who study species.” came out a while back, but I was thinking about this problem last night.  The genus Drosophila (“fruit flies” or “vinegar flies”), on which I work, has been the most important group of organisms for the study of evolutionary genetics.  Indeed, much of the early advances in genetics proper, like the finding of genes on sex chromosomes, or the discovery of the linear order of genes on chromosomes, was made in Drosophila.

But all the work on evolutionary genetics of Drosophila—work on speciation, on patterns of evolution, on ecological genetics, on evolutionary biogeography, and even on molecular evolution—depends on an accurate classification of species in the group.  How can you study how speciation works if you don’t know which species are the most closely related?  How can you study the rates of molecular evolution unless you know how species fit into a family tree?  Taxonomy—the science of classifying organisms and arranging them in their proper evolutionary relationships—is fundamental in nearly all areas of evolutionary biology.  My most cited paper, published in 1989 with my student Allen Orr, critically depended on knowing the correct “family tree” of many Drosophila species.

And yet, as the Wired article shows, taxonomy is a dying field—not just for Drosophila but for all species.  There is no glory, fame, or even employment for those who want to labor away at the microscope, meticulously dissecting insect genitalia or flower structure.  Part of this is due to the rise of molecular systematics—the use of DNA or molecular information to reconstruct family trees—which can derive evolutionary relationships rather quickly.  But before you can sequence different species, you have to identify them as different, and that relies largely on those taxonomists with microscopes and infinite patience.

When I was in college, there were many people working on Drosophila taxonomy: a group in Texas, people here at Chicago, and workers in France.  Even some of the greats, like my academic grandfather Theodosius Dobzhansky, occasionally described new species.  And many famous evolutionists, like Dobzhansky and Ernst Mayr, began their careers in systematics, and were driven into evolution by the need to understand the patterns they described.  Now, as far as I know, there’s only one Drosophila taxonomist left: David Grimaldi at the American Museum of Natural History. He’s a superb evolutionist and taxonomist, but he’s only one person—one person to describe a luxuriant evolutionary group that may include five thousand species.  And Grimaldi studies many groups, not just Drosophila.

As the Wired piece shows, what is true for fly taxonomy is true for everything.  This problem becomes more critical when we try to catalog biodiversity, for such catalogs depend not just on grinding up and sequencing a lot of individuals captured willy-nilly in nature, but the painstaking labors of those traditional taxonomists who identify the groups that need grinding.  From Wired:

Many biology departments within universities no longer employ a taxonomist. The remaining positions are relegated to museums.

Why? As Sørensen [Martin Sørensen, a Danish taxonomist] explains, “The declining number of taxonomists and systematists is at least to some extent linked to the fact that your scientific production today should be measurable.” And the units of measurement are collected grant money or the impact factor of a journal paper. Taxonomy has never been considered hot, and pure taxonomic studies are rarely funded, he wrote. Departments need grant money to operate.

Science as an institution may also be partly responsible for undercutting taxonomic work. Although a crude metric fraught with several issues, we measure the impact of a scientific paper by how many times other scientific papers have cited it. Similarly, we measure the impact of scientists by counting their cumulative citations. Unfortunately, taxonomic work is rarely cited, even when it should be.

On the other hand, the brilliant biodiversity databases we have created lead to a plethora of scientific papers. The Paleobiology Database, a comprehensive online catalog of fossil species, has already generated more than 100 publications. But the requirement for using this database, like most others, is citation of the database itself, not the nearly 35,000 papers generating the original data.

The decline in taxonomists means that at some point in the future we will be unable to train new generations of taxonomists. This problem is recognized by the National Science Foundation, which in 1994 created a program to enhance taxonomic research. But while this initiative provides training, it does not create job opportunities.

All the species in the world are out there.  There may be as many as fifty million of them, or even more, and that’s not counting bacteria.  How many species have been identified and given scientific names?  Only 1.9 million—perhaps 4% of Earth’s diversity.  Among the unrecognized remainder lie millions of fascinating evolutionary tales, strange adaptations, occasions for wonder—and even cures for diseases.  It’s been estimated that 70% of the new drugs introduced in America in the last 25 years derive from plants. But how do you know which plants to test if you don’t know which species are out there?

Mourning the loss of taxonomy is a useless endeavor, like writing posts on the demise of the glass Coke bottle.  Taxonomy will wane, even with the stimulus of molecular data, and few people will go into biology with the aim of identifying and classifying the diversity of life.  In the long run, that will severely hurt not just evolutionary biology, but biology as a whole.  For just as nothing makes sense except in the light of evolution, so nothing in evolution makes sense except in the light of taxonomy.

I’ve been doing science for nigh on forty years, and won’t be around, thank Ceiling Cat, when my field transforms itself into molecular biology and DNA sequencing.  But while I’m here, and mourning the demise of taxonomy, let me also thank the many taxonomists whose earlier work enabled me to do what I love: studying the origin of species in fruit flies.