At least it didn’t look like Jesus

April 14, 2011 • 1:14 pm

It’s Thursday afternoon, I’ve just taught a two-hour class, and it’s time for some Royal Wedding amusement.  According to the Telegraph, one Wesley Hosie of Taunton, Somerset is set to make some dosh on eBay.  Tucking into a 700g jar of jelly beans, Hosie found a mango-flavored bean resembling none other that Kate Middleton.

He’s trying to sell it on eBay for 500 pounds.  You be the judge.

The Torygraph also displays 29 other objects that look like people; go have a look (warning: nearly all of them look like Jesus or his mom).  Here’s one more: a stink bug that looks like Elvis.




The remarkable courtship of the world’s most beautiful spider

April 14, 2011 • 9:21 am

Courtesy of Jurgen Otto, we have some spectacular images and video of a the Australian peacock spider, Maratus volans.  At only 4 mm long (about one-sixth of an inch), it’s easy to overlook, but how much you would miss if you did!

(Photo by Jurgen Otto)

Otto’s movie of its courtship behavior is nothing short of stupendous. Be sure to watch the whole 6.5 minute clip:

I find it very sad when, at 4:48, the unsuccessful males have to furl their bellyflaps and slink off.

Vibration is clearly important in this courtship, and, as demonstrated by Berkeley researcher Damian Elias, in the courtship of another jumping spider, Habronattas dossenus, recorded by sensitive microphones as a male displays to a dead female. This male is the Gene Krupa of arachnids:

Go here for other amazing spider videos (including more drumming) from the Elias lab.

h/t: Matthew Cobb and Alex Wild

Did religion give us doubt? And a note on envy

April 14, 2011 • 5:48 am

Jacques Berlinerblau and R. Joseph Hoffman are back with their one-two sucker punch, still banging on about the perceived ignorance of New Atheists.  And they’ve found a new reason why atheists should be indebted to religion.

At the Chronicle of Higher Education (whose new motto seems to be “All the Gnus That Are Fit to Diss”), Berlinerblau makes what he sees as a telling point: there have been no atheist martyrs!

In any case, Hoffmann’s essay [see below] makes the point that it is tremendously difficult to identify an atheist who has been martyred for his or her non-belief. The author notes that such martyrdom operations have usually been reserved for heretics and apostates—yet the heretics and apostates, of course, were believers themselves.

I don’t get it.  Who among us has ever claimed that there were atheist martyrs? And so what if there weren’t? Would it give us more credibility if some of us had been burnt at the stake?

Berlinerblau then adds helpfully that in the olden days, “atheist” was a term not for a god-denier, but for someone whose faith was different from yours:

In this sense, countless “atheists” were imprisoned, tortured, and murdered in Europe of the 16th-18th centuries. This was a Europe, incidentally, were [sic] historians are very hard pressed to find unambiguous atheists as we know them today—that is to say, people who explicitly denied the existence of any God whatsoever.

This suggests a multitude of possibilities and future areas of research for non-Gnu Atheism. One which I have been exploring in the book that I am currently writing concerns the “genetic” affinity between atheists and heretics..

(Note the implication that Gnu Atheists aren’t interested in research.)

And if that isn’t enough, Berlinerblau gets in one last preen about his superior wisdom: unlike the rest of us, he recognizes that atheists truly owe a debt to religious discourse.  Why?  Not because, as you might think, religion gives us false ideas on which we can hone our brains, but because faith vouchsafed us the very notion of skepticism! Yes, it’s true:  we are deeply indebted to those Muslims who were skeptical about Jesus, and to those Christians who cast a cold eye on Mohamed:

Nonbelievers would gain much by seeing themselves as heirs of a skeptical tradition, one whose roots extend to religious forms of reasoning and dissent.

Berlinerblau was inspired by Hoffmann’s new piece, “Atheist Martyrs? Gnus to Me,” which makes the same point at much greater length.  I never cease to be amazed at the creativity of faitheists who, denying god themselves, come up with new explanations of why religion is really good.  In this case it’s because our  rejection of all gods is a direct inheritance from those who clung firmly to just one god.

When Professor Dawkins in his now famous remark says that “We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further,” he is right in one respect (as well as funny) but wrong in another. Because the process of rejecting 99% of the gods and most of what has  been believed about the remainder is not a conclusion that atheism has forced. Unbelief has been forced to the surface of our consciousness by critical processes that are rooted in religion: in the empiricism of Maimonides;  in Aquinas’s disputational method; in Luther’s critique of Catholicism and sacraments;  in Abelard’s stress on the subjectivity of ethics and Roger Bacon’s contributions to scientific thinking.  In so much more.  Perhaps to state what is too obvious to be obvious to many people: in the fact that the transmission of knowledge through books was the labour of clerics and monks. . .

. . . It is strange to me that men and women committed to the paradigm of evolution and historical change are often willing to postulate creation ex nihilo or spontaneous generation for their own ideas.

What Hoffman really means, of course, is that the Gnu Atheists ignore him.  Why can’t we see his superior knowledge about the history of unbelief? Why must Hoffmann fester in obscurity while Dawkins and Hitchens rake in the cash and encomiums?

It’s palpably clear that what Hoffmann and Berlinerblau really can’t stand is that their tedious screeds languish unread in university libraries while the Four Horsemen get all the attention—attention that translates into effectiveness. After all, how many converts from faith have Hoffmann and Berlinerblau made?

I’m not just guessing about this: Hoffman says it explicitly in a comment at Butterflies and Wheels:

Before anyone adds to the list of my “calumnies” that I am now being self-defensive, I am. Part of that has to do with (as I suggested) a record that goes back long before most Americans had heard of Richard Dawkins. Some of us older and old atheists remember what a lonely battle that was. Many who came to the movement since 2000 will not. And that is precisely the point. Without saying jealousy is involved, there are many (not just me) who know that the Dawkins revolution could not have taken place without the almost invisible work of many of my associates in and out of the academy over many many years. On the one hand, we need to be grateful that the New Atheists have been successful in garnering support; on the other hand, and I know this from experience, nothing ensured the death of a book in this country before 1995 like putting the word atheism or humanism in the title. So, there were laborers in the trenches.

So says the Rodney Dangerfield of atheism.  Wounded feelings lately abound among faitheists: for a particularly bizarre specimen, see Michael Ruse’s latest post at the Chronicle of Higher Ed:

On occasions I have been faced with a choice between the easy path and the more difficult.  For instance, should I publish with a commercial press that will take basically anything I offer because they know they will make money or should I go with a university press, even though it involves refereeing and possible rejection, something I hate and fear as much today as I did 40 years ago.  (“It’s easy for you, Mike. You’ve got a thick skin.” Nonsense! There is no such thing as a thick skin. It is just that some of us learn to live with our thin skins.)  I just don’t want to end up on my deathbed and feel that I could have done better. I coulda been a contender. (Of course whether or not I am going to end as a contender, whatever I do, is perhaps a moot point. But here I am blogging for the CHE. Who says that after four billion years of evolution there is no progress?)

Translation: I could have been as popular and rich as Dawkins, but I was too noble to sell out.

Statements like this make it clear that much of the criticism of Gnu Atheism by fellow atheists like Ruse, Hoffmann, and Berlinerblau stems from a universal but deplorable human emotion—jealousy.  Perhaps Hitchens should have added an eleventh commandment:  Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s books.

A feline memoir

April 14, 2011 • 5:10 am

Buried in yesterday’s New York Times Opinionator, but spotted by Greg Mayer, is a sad but beautiful piece by writer Anna Holmes about her life and the lives and deaths of her cats. Here’s an excerpt from “We were kittens once, and young.”

Unlike dogs, whose wagging tails, endearing clumsiness and panting smiles are evolutionarily manipulative and endlessly entertaining, interpreting the narratives of a cat’s inner life takes extraordinary concentration, which makes the relationship all the more poignant. Mindfulness, I like to say, is what separates true cat lovers from the unenlightened. Without it, a cat is just a sleeping, eating, potential killing machine. With it, a cat is the most amazing of mammalian creations: A balletic, apex predator; a perfect package of physical economy and exquisite Darwinian design. (When someone tells me she doesn’t like cats, I assume she isn’t trying hard enough.)

But the focus they require and their intrinsic self-sufficiency is also what makes watching them die especially devastating . .

I have a theory, which is mine, that atheists tend to own cats more often than theists.

Sax week: Getz and Trane

April 14, 2011 • 3:56 am

Stan Getz (1927-1991) was the inheritor of Lester Young’s saxophone mellowness. (Young is among my top five saxophonists, but so far I’ve been unable to find a good video of him on YouTube.) Getz was also Jewish, and much of his life was addicted to drugs—the occupational hazard of the jazz musician. I suspect that it was this addiction that led to his death from liver cancer, the same malady that killed John Coltrane.

Here are the two of them in a bouncing rendition of “Hackensack” performed live in Düsseldorf, Germany in 1960.  The other personnel are the wonderful Oscar Peterson on piano, Paul Chambers on bass, and Jimmy Cobb on drums.

Kitteh contest: Shirley

April 13, 2011 • 8:40 am

Reader Sastra entered her disgruntled cat Shirley:

Shirley was abandoned at birth by her mother and raised in a cage. My teenage daughter adopted her because she was very tiny and “cute.” She was not cute: she was evil. My daughter gratefully abandoned her when she went to college, leaving me with what had become a very disagreeable cat. I worked with the situation as well as I could, for now she was mine all mine. As you can see by her expression, she is much better today, though she still dislikes dogs, people, other cats, closed doors, small children, moving objects, stationary objects, things on the other side of the window, being teased, and being picked up. She likes to bite, sleep, stare disapprovingly, and hide in bags—the latter of which, for obvious reasons, is her best trait.

How important is lateral gene transfer?

April 13, 2011 • 6:57 am

Recent molecular work has revealed a spate of cases in which genes move between unrelated (often very unrelated) species.  One of the most striking examples, which I wrote about last May, was an aphid’s capture of genes from a fungus, a capture that led to an adaptive polymorphism in the aphid’s body color.

The growing list of such cases has led to realization that adaptive genetic variation needn’t just arise via mutation.  This doesn’t really overturn modern evolutionary theory, since lateral gene transfer (“LGT;” also called “horizontal” gene transfer) simply introduces into a species new genetic variation from a different species; that genetic variation still must be subject to the well known processes of natural selection and genetic drift.  But many critics of evolution do cite LGT as invalidating one of the tenets of modern evolutionary theory: the “tree of life.”  If genes can move widely between species, and do so frequently, you don’t get a tree of life so much as a network of life.

How often does LGT occur?  I’d recommend reading the nice five-page primer on horizontal gene transfer by Olga Zhaxybayeva  and W. Ford Doolittle in the latest issue of Current Biology (access is free; download pdf at link). It’s a pretty even-handed summary of the state of the art.  The authors discuss the history of work on the problem and how one detects LGT, how it occurs, and how important it’s been in evolution.  They give some cute examples, too, and highlight the many unknowns, like how LGT occurs in multicellular organisms.

Another mystery is how “adaptive” LGT is.  There are many cases, of course, in which genes captured by LGT have formed the basis of new adaptations (the colors of aphids described above is one example, antibiotic resistance in bacteria another).  But is the mechanism of LGT adaptive—that is, have organisms evolved mechanisms specifically for capturing genes from other species?  After reading the piece, I’d say the answer is is “it’s possible” for prokaryotes (bacteria), and “probably not” for eukaryotes.  Instances of adaptive LGT in the latter are rare (though of course more will be found), which makes it unlikely that we’d evolve mechanisms to capture genes from other species, especially when most such capture would be maladaptive.  Further, the fact that sperm and eggs are sequestered from the rest of the body in multicellular eukaryotes suggests that those species are largely impervious to infection by foreign genes.  Indeed that may be one reason why sperm and eggs are set off from the rest of the body.

You can also look as LGT as “adaptive” in another sense:  it’s adaptive for the genes themselves to spread between species.  Genes that did so would be represented in more groups, and so we’d expect some “selfish” transfer, even if it wasn’t adaptive but purely “neutral” in the recipient species.

Does LGT invalidate the tree of life?  Since the phenomenon is far more common in bacteria than in eukaryotes, we face more serious problems in reconstructing evolutionary “histories” in the former groups.  LGT makes the evolutionary history of species diverge somewhat from the evolutionary histories of their genes.

In eukaryotes, though, it’s unlikely that LGT is common enough to pose problems for making phylogenies.  In Drosophila, the group I work on, gene-based phylogenies are largely concurrent when one uses different genes, suggesting virtually no lateral transfer of genes from unrelated species.  And those gene histories are concordant with independent histories derived from chromosome banding patterns, so to a large extent gene histories do represent species histories. (There are of course exceptions based on long-standing polymorphisms:  some blood-group genes in humans, for instance, are more closely related to similar blood-group genes in chimps than to other blood-group genes in humans.)

The authors seem to agree that LGT isn’t much of a problem for eukaryotic “trees,” but can be so for prokaryotes. But they add this:

Keeling and Palmer (2008) suggest that, in spite of the growing list of eukaryotic LGT examples, “there is no reason to think that [LGT] is so prevalent as to undermine efforts to reconstruct a dichotomously branching tree of eukaryote phylogeny, much less call for the replacement of the tree metaphor with a ‘web of life’ metaphor, as some have controversially suggested for prokaryotes”. Indeed, but if, as most would agree, Life’s history is predominantly prokaryotic, what then of the combined ‘universal’ tree?

They also emphasize that LGT doesn’t overturn modern evolutionary theory by constituting some sort of brand-new evolutionary process:

LGT can introduce radically new phenotypes that mutation and selection might never achieve. Quantitative estimates of its frequency, even if accurate, may underestimate its importance in adaptation and speciation. Opponents of evolution have cheered its challenge to the ‘Tree of Life’, as if the literal truth of that simile (as Darwin called it) were essential for the modern theory of evolution. We, however, take this theory to be simply that understandable ecological and genetic processes, operating over evolutionary time, are adequate to explain existing biological adaptation and diversity. In fact, the ability of LGT to speed complex and radical adaptation makes it even easier to imagine how “from so simple a beginning, endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved”.

Sauropods!

April 13, 2011 • 5:19 am

If you think elephants are big, take a look at this graphic from yesterday’s New York Times comparing the size of the sauropod dinosaur Brachiosaurus with an elephant and a human (click to enlarge):

Sauropods were an infraorder of dinosaurs that included everybody’s second-favorite dinosaur,  Brontosaurus (unfortunately renamed Apatosaurus). The Times article on sauropods, by John Noble Wilford, is centered on a new book, Biology of the Sauropod Dinosaurs, on an exhibit on large dinos opening this Saturday at New York’s American Museum of Natural History, and on recent published research.  The interesting stuff involves their size and their diet.  First, look at another figure (from Wikipedia) showing how huge they were.  Wikipedia says this about the big guy in red below:

The holotype (and now lost) vertebra of Amphicoelias fragillimus may have come from an animal 58 metres (190 ft) long; its vertebral column would have been substantially longer than that of the blue whale. The longest terrestrial animal alive today, the reticulated python, only reaches lengths of 8.7 metres (29 ft).

Note that a Boeing 747 is only about 35 feet longer than this sauropod!

The main issues are two: what was the evolutionary advantage of getting so large, and how did they sustain such a big body?  The article doesn’t really answer the first question (avoidance of predation is one possibility), but there are hypotheses about the second.  These dinosaurs didn’t have molars, and basically couldn’t chew—they simply took big bites of the vegetation and swallowed it whole.  Since their food intake was enormous (the 60-foot Mamenchisaurus, not a particularly large sauropod, ate about 1,150 pounds of vegetation per day), they might have evolved those long necks to cover more grazing area without having to expend energy moving their bodies.  And since they didn’t chew, their heads could remain small.

The figure at the top shows how much grazing area a sauropod could reach if it had a neck of a given size.  Because the neck is in fact a radius of consumption, the area accessible to the beast goes up roughly as the square of the neck length.  Even given this efficiency, scientists estimate that it took about two weeks to digest one day’s food intake.

They also grew fast: one recent paper estimated that baby sauropods doubled their weight every five days.  Their hearts probably beat at a rate of about ten per minute, compared to 28 for an elephant.   One big mystery is how they got enough oxygen to fuel their metabolism: some scientists think that they had a respiratory system like birds. (Birds supplement their lungs with several air sacs producing gas exchange with the blood.)  But one of my Chicago colleagues is dubious:

Paul Sereno, a dinosaur fossil hunter at the University of Chicago, said the new research “is very valuable,” but he doubted there was enough hard evidence to support the bird-lung hypothesis. Still, he said, the sauropod “is an incredible animal, one of the best land animals that’s been invented.”