Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
There are two juvenile squirrels, but I haven’t been able to photograph them together. Here’s Tufty E enjoying a repast of sunflower seeds. Check out his magnificent tuft! It’s interesting to see that the pattern of ticking in the fur gives their tails a stripey appearance. If it has an adaptive significance, I don’t know what it is.
It’s Friday already! Which seat can you take? Hili has to sit high up for fear of the d*g.
A: Hili, what are you doing up there?
Hili: I’m observing the groundcrew.
Ja: Hili, co ty tam robisz?
Hili: Obserwuję personel naziemny.
It’s been a long day, but I’m two days from the end of a good first draft of The Albatross. So here:
I have gotten by far more email on the Lebanon, Missouri issue than on anything else I’ve ever written about. And nearly all of it, save letters from Lebanon High School students who want to complain privately about the relentless Christian proselytizing of their school, is negative or hateful.
This, for example, comes from one Tom Chiusano:
I’ve been following your shtick against Lebanon and its citizens throughout the week. Apart of me wants to dust it off as summer boredom for a professor, but knowing and communicating with my fellow atheist colleagues, I assume otherwise. Like yourself, I am a Harvard educated college professor (at a local community college. Received my BA from BYU and MBA from Harvard Business School). Yourself and those who comment on your blog have painted quite an unfair strawman of our quiet and friendly hometown. You continuously claim that your issue with the entire ordeal is a defiance of the United States Constitution. We both know this is completely and utterly false. Your issue is with those who have faith, and have the cajones to express that. You are the vocal minority, and with that precious title comes unnecessary responsibilities I suppose. I can only imagine how admirable you feel that your superior intellect has prevailed over a town of God fearing citizens. Even after an apology was issued (which was hardly necessary), you continue to stick your nose in the air.
I know you’ve gotten numerous emails, and will most likely continue to get them. Some more eloquent than others. With that said, I pray that you understand our side in this issue. A town of 15,000 people and you have made it a priority to make this story breaking news. So much good comes out of our community, and all I’ve heard is the Chicago professor who had an issue with a moment of silence during a graduation that had no relevance to him. For somebody who believes everything came from nothing, I’m hardly surprised. It reminds me of a question a friend of mine asked a high school science teacher my junior year here at Lebanon. “Because termites cannot digest food, they have little critters in their stomach called the flagella that help them do so. The termites cannot function without the flagella, and the flagella cannot survive without the termite. Which evolved first?”
Yours in Christ,
Tom.
Here’s my response (to which I’ll alert Mr. Chiusano):
Dear Mr. Chiusano,
Our academic credentials, and the fact that we both went to Harvard, are of course completely irrelevant in this matter, which involves a clear violation of the Constitution. You claim that such a violation is “completely and utterly false,” but give not a shred of evidence that Principal Lowery’s prayers at graduation were Constitutionally allowable.
And my issue is not, in fact, with those who have faith, but with those who have faith and try to impose it on others. As you may know from reading the three letters from Lebanon High students who wrote to me and Hemant Mehta (I now have a fourth), all is not well in your community. The reason you don’t know that is because the relentless proselytizing for Christianity by Principal Lowery and many of your neighbors has cowed those with opposing views into silence. While you see your hometown as “quiet and friendly,” that’s simply a facade. The minute someone disagrees with your religious beliefs, or tries to stand up for the U.S. Constitution, that facade crumbles into anger, aggression, and sheer hatred. I should know, because I’ve received a lot of emails full of vitriol from your “quiet and friendly” neighbors! If you really were that friendly, three of the four students who dissented wouldn’t be afraid to make their names public. But they know that if they did, Christians like yourself would harass and terrify them, as they have done all over America. That kind of behavior is shameful, and something I wouldn’t expect from people who call themselves Christians.
It is in fact that tyranny of the religious majority that mandated the writing of the First Amendment, which was designed to protect all people, believers and nonbelievers alike, from having different religious views forced upon them by the organs of government. You don’t seem to understand that, nor the fact that the courts have repeatedly ruled that acts like Principal Lowery’s prayers do in fact violate the First Amendment.
What I fail to understand is why people like you must force your religion on captive audiences like those at the Lebanon High School graduation. Is it not sufficient for you to pray at home, in church, or even in school (silently and to yourself)? Why must you proclaim your belief in God and Jesus in public to an audience that may not all share your views?
As for myself, yes, I’m a nonbeliever, but in my official capacity as a teacher at the University of Chicago, or when I talk in public schools, I never proselytize for atheism. I could never get up at a high school graduation and tell the students that I didn’t believe in God, and that they shouldn’t either. That, too, is against the law, and I would obey it.
Finally, let me correct you on your statements about evolution, for you appear to be just as ignorant about that science as about the Constitution. First, the “critters” in termite guts that help them digest cellulose are not flagella, but flagellated protists. “Flagella” are the whiplike organs that help them move, but the protists themselves are called “flagellates.” You apparently are arguing that evolution cannot explain the strong mutual dependence of the termites and flagellates, which form what we in biology call a “mutualism”: each species benefits from its association with the other.
But that mutualism, like all mutualisms, can be easily explained by evolution. First, not all termites harbor flagellates: only what they call the “lower” termites. Other termites have bacteria that help them digest cellulose. Second, those bacteria and flagellates are not absolutely required for termites to digest cellulose, for all termites retain some ability to digest it without their symbiotic microorganisms. So here’s one evolutionary explanation. Assume that the ancestral termite had a poor ability to digest cellulose, and ate other things as well. It was then invaded by a protist that had the ability to digest cellulose, and to excrete some of those digestive products. In such a case, the termite and its little passenger would both benefit. And, over time, each of them would evolve adaptations that, by helping itself, would also help its partner. The termite would become more hospitable to the flagellate (or bacteria), for that organism helps the termite immensely; and the flagellate (or bacterium) would become more useful to the termite, for a healthy termite is something that the flagellate needs. (The termite, is, after all, its home and protector.)
Over a period of time, this could result in a very strong dependence of the two species on each other—to the point that neither could live without the other. This has also happened in lichens, which are a mutualistic association of a fungus and an alga, neither of which can live apart. But in both cases it is no problem for us to envision how such a codependency can evolve in a step-by-step way through natural selection.
So there is a biology lesson for you, Mr. Chiusano. I hope you learn it better than you learned your civics lesson. And, if you really don’t accept evolution, which appears to be the case, you might benefit from reading my book Why Evolution is True. It’s a pity that there’s no book called Why the Constitution is Law.
Yours in Darwin,
Jerry Coyne
The atheist-bashing continues, and since there aren’t many new ways to attack nonbelievers, the critiques take the form of very slightly altered but still-familiar arguments. The latest is an essay in the Spectator penned bty the conservative and religion-friendly philosopher Roger Scruton, who specializes in aesthetics. But his piece, “Humans hunger for the sacred, why can’t the new atheists understand that?“, suggests that he also specializes in anaesthetics.
I don’t want to waste a lot of time on this, for the whole tenor of the piece is ludicrous: all humans hunger for the “sacred”; religion gives it to them but atheism denies it to its adherents. But his whole thesis depends on a semantic trick: conflating “sacredness” with “that which we value in our lives.” Using the word “sacred” to refer to things that we crave and respect, like love, books, children, or art, is a deliberate co-option of the term “sacred” as it’s used in religion—as something connected with the divine. Surely a philosopher like Scruton is trained to pay attention to words, and so must have performed this conflation deliberately, as a way to bash atheism.
I give some excerpts from Scruton’s article:
Hence there is another question, that seems to be much nearer to the heart of what we, in the western world, are now going through: what is the sacred, and why do people cling to it? Sacred things, Émile Durkheim once wrote, are ‘set aside and forbidden’. To touch them with profane hands is to wipe away their aura, so that they flutter to earth and die. To those who respect them, however, sacred things are the ‘real presence’ of the supernatural, illuminated by a light that shines from the edge of the world.
How do we understand this experience, and what does it tell us? It is tempting to look for an evolutionary explanation. After all, sacred things seem to include all those events that really matter to our genes — falling in love, marriage, childbirth, death. The sacred place is the place where vows are made and renewed, where suffering is embraced and accepted, and where the life of the tribe is endowed with an eternal significance.
He then has the temerity to suggest—nay, to assert—that love of the “sacred” must have been favored by natural selection in our ancestors:
Humans with the benefit of this resource must surely withstand the storms of misfortune rather better than the plain-thinking individualists who compete with them. Look at the facts in the round and it seems likely that humans without a sense of the sacred would have died out long ago. For that same reason, the hope of the new atheists for a world without religion is probably as vain as the hope for a society without aggression or a world without death.
Here Scruton defines “sacred” as “those beliefs which enhanced the reproduction of our ancestors, or the evolutionary remnants of those beliefs.” That, of course, opens the door for a whole host of other things, including taboos of all sorts.
Atheists, of course, lack this affinity for the sacred:
A person with a sense of the sacred can lead a consecrated life, which is to say a life that is received and offered as a gift. An intimation of this is contained in our relations with those who are dear to us. . . [JAC: Note the co-option again of the religious word “consecrated,” as if someone who loves others and feels connected to them is “consecrated.”]
. . . Atheists dismiss that kind of argument. They tell us that the ‘self’ is an illusion, and that the human person is ‘nothing but’ the human animal, just as law is ‘nothing but’ relations of social power, sexual love ‘nothing but’ the procreative urge and the Mona Lisa ‘nothing but’ a spread of pigments on a canvas. Getting rid of what Mary Midgley calls ‘nothing buttery’ is, to my mind, the true goal of philosophy. And if we get rid of it when dealing with the small things — sex, pictures, people — we might get rid of it when dealing with the large things too: notably, when dealing with the world as a whole. And then we might conclude that it is just as absurd to say that the world is nothing but the order of nature, as physics describes it, as to say that the Mona Lisa is nothing but a smear of pigments. Drawing that conclusion is the first step towards understanding why and how we live in a world of sacred things.
Actually, the phrase “nothing buttery” came, I think, from Peter Medawar, who used it in his fantastic takedown of Teilhard de Chardin’s dreadful book The Phenomenon of Man (1961), which both Richard Dawkins and I think is the best review of a science book ever written.
Show me a single scientist who says that the Mona Lisa is “nothing but a smear of pigments”! That’s just a base canard written by a philosopher with an agenda. We are indeed made of molecules that obey the laws of physics, as is the Mona Lisa, but we’re also evolved collections of molecules whose evolution occurred in small groups of hominins; and we also have emotions and the ability to learn, themselves products of evolution that can be affected by our environments. These notions fully explain our strong emotional responses to some—but not all—stimuli. (Actually, I find Guernica and The Isenheim Altarpiece far more moving than the Mona Lisa.) And those responses, like love, may be physical phenomena that are partly evolved but still meaningful to us. Does Scruton really think that atheists don’t experience the wonder of love or the beauty of art? If he does, he doesn’t know many atheists. I’m tempted to say that the man is either ignorant of the world, possessed by some hidden agenda against atheism, or simply a fool.
Finally, Scruton’s proof that atheism rejects the “sacred” is—wait for it—the soullessness of Communist regimes! Yes, Stalin and Mao, not Denmark or Sweden, represent the apotheosis of godlessness and rejection of the sacred.
Nothing brought this home to me more vividly than the experience of communism, in places where there was no other recourse against the surrounding inhumanity than the life of prayer. Communism made the scientific worldview into the foundation of social order: people were regarded as ‘nothing but’ the assembled mass of their instincts and needs. Its aim was to replace social life with a cold calculation for survival, so that people would live as competing atoms, in a condition of absolute enmity and distrust. Anything else would jeopardise the party’s control. In such circumstances people lived in a world of secrets, where it was dangerous to reveal things, and where every secret that was peeled away from the other person revealed another secret beneath it.
Nevertheless the victims of communism tried to hold on to the things that were sacred to them, and which spoke to them of the free and responsible life. The family was sacred; so too was religion, whether Christian or Jewish. So too was the underground store of knowledge — the forbidden knowledge of the nation’s history and its claim to their loyalty. Those were the things that people would not exchange or relinquish even when required by the party to betray them. They were the consecrated treasures, hidden below the desecrated cities, where they glowed more brightly in the dark. Thus there grew an underground world of freedom and truth, where it was no longer necessary, as Havel put it, ‘to live within the lie’.
First of all, Communism, though a social experiment, wasn’t an instantiation of pure science, for there were no controls, and it rested on verbal theory that hadn’t been tested. It was an ideology—based on a dislike of the supposed evils of capitalism— that was put into practice but then corrupted by powermongers who used it to control their people through cults of the individual.
Those motivated by godlessness don’t seek to set up regimes like those of Stalin or Mao, nor did the vast bulk of persecution under those regimes take place against the faithful. And, I should note, even under religiously ideological regimes people treasure and secretly preserve “the sacred” against the ministrations of oppressive dogma. Do you think that in rigidly Catholic countries people give up the “sacredness” of nonmarital sex? It was, after all, the Catholic Church that set up the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, which from 1559 to 1966 told Catholics that they couldn’t read works by Gide, Milton, Voltaire, Galileo, and Victor Hugo. Do you think Catholics refrained from reading them, or refrain to this day from using birth control, denying themselves the “sacred” pleasure of sex?
And, of course, Islamic society also represses the “sacred”: in many places the only book people ever read is the Qur’an, and they can’t exercise either freedom of dress (which women often deal with by wearing nice clothes under their burqas) or freedom of love and sex (what’s worse than not being able to marry someone whom you love?). It’s not atheism that denies the “sacred”, but totalitarian ideology: the desire to withhold what people want as a form of control.
If Scruton wants to see how much a truly secular society devalues the sacred, I suggest that he get himself to Sweden or Denmark. Do the Danes and Swedes abjure what Scruton calls the “sacred”? Do they not value life and love and art? Not that I’ve seen! Do they not appreciate knowledge and literature? Who, after all, gives out the Nobel Prizes?
Maybe I’m just grumpy today, but Scruton’s article seems completely dumb to me—just a tricked-out way to bash atheists from someone who doesn’t like them. And in his post hoc justification for something that Scruton believes a priori on purely personal and emotional grounds, he’s behaving exactly like a theologian.
Philosophers, clean up your field. It’s people like Scruton who give you a bad name.
In the video below, you can see Anthony Grayling and, especially, Christopher Hitchens, defend atheists’ adoption of what Scruton calls “the sacred.” Scruton himself is there and speaks for the last minute, conflating a feeling of transcendence with the existence of the transcendent.
h/t: Ian
Readers know by now that I love mimicry. This is for many reasons, but I suppose foremost among them is that it shows the power of natural selection to “mold” an animal to closely resemble something else. (That’s a metaphor, of course, for natural selection is not something “outside” that “molds” an animal or plant, but simply a process of the accumulation of genes that, in this case, help keep their carrier from being killed.)
A common “something else” is bird droppings, which of course are unpalatable to predators like birds and wasps. Ergo, many insects and spiders, as well as vertebrates like frogs, have evolved to resemble bird droppings, hiding themselves from predators. This would of course be favored by selection, for any resemblance to a dropping reduces your chance of being nommed, and increases the chances of passing on your genes. Over time, genes would accumulate that would make you look, within developmental and ecological constraints, as close to a bird dropping as possible.
According to a paper in Nature’s Scientific Reports by Min-Hui Liu et al. (reference below; free access), this has happened in the spider Cyclosa ginnaga from East Asia.
It’s long been known that this spider weaves decorations into its web that look like droppings, but some spiders of this genus have also evolved to look like droppings. When a spider sits in its decoration, the combination looks remarkably like a bird dropping, thereby avoiding attention from predators. Here’s a photo from the paper showing the spider sitting in the decoration it’s woven in its web (a), along with a normal bird dropping (b). The scale bar is 5 mm. (about 1/5 inch). Note that the spider’s abdomen, and perhaps the rest of it, resembles bird droppings as well.
Here’s another photo, from a Smithsonian article about the paper, showing the similarity between bird droppings alone (first and third rows) and spiders on their webs (second and fourth rows). The spiders are oriented on a vertical web, just as many bird droppings are on vertical surfaces:
The authors wanted to test the hypothesis that the mimicry was not only something that deceived the eyes of wasp predators, but also reduced predation on the spiders. To do this, they first did a spectral analysis of the spiders on their decorations and compared their “colors” to a computer model of the sensitivity of the hymenopteran eye (wasps, along with bees, are hymenopterans). They found that the spiders were indistinguishable in this spectrum from both their web decorations and from real bird droppings—again using the model of what a wasp eye could see.
The authors then changed the colors of spiders and their webs using a black marking pen to darken the spiders’ bodies, and black carbon powder to darken the web decorations. There were three treatments: darkened spider on darkened decoration; unmarked, light spider on darkened decoration; darkened spider on unchanged light decoration, and the control: unmarked spider on normal, undarkened decoration. They then used video cameras to record incidents of wasp attacks.
Only one of the treatments significantly increased the predation rate on spiders: the normal, light spider sitting on a decoration that had been blackened with carbon powder. None of the other treatments affected predation. Here’s a graph from the paper showing the elevated predation in the normal spider/blackened decoration treatment (fourth bar to the right) compared to the control and the other two treatments. Predation was increased more than fourfold, a significant selective force:
It’s not hard to understand why a black spider on a blackened decoration (first bar to the left on graph above) isn’t spotted by predators so easily, because it’s camouflaged. But it’s more puzzling why the blacked spider on an unblackened decoration (third bar from the left) didn’t experience higher predation. Nor do the authors (or the Smithsonian piece) discuss this anomaly. Perhaps the spider is sufficiently hidden by being on a larger spot that looks like a bird dropping, or perhaps the blackness of the spider simply looks like a bird dropping, too, for droppings contain black bits. But that doesn’t explain why the spider itself would evolve body markings resembling bird droppings. Why would that happen if its body color was unimportant compared to the color and design of the web decoration it makes?
There are possible answers, including the presence of other predators (like birds) that weren’t detected. And the effect of hiding yourself from your prey wasn’t considered. What the paper does show is that the color of the spider’s decoration helps hide it. What it doesn’t show is that the spider itself, sitting in that decoration, is part of the mimicry. The authors’ conclusion that “C. ginnaga‘s decoration and body coloration forms a bird dropping masquerade”, then, seems a bit dubious to me.
Perhaps readers have other explanations.
h/t: Jim
Reference: Liu, M.-H., S. J. Blamires, C.-P. Liao, and I.-M. Tso. 2014. Evidence of bird dropping masquerading by a spider to avoid predators. Scientific Reports 4:10.1038/srep05058.
Every year, at least one brood of mallards hatches in the pond outside my building. And nearly every year, the ducklings disappear by slow attrition: male mallards kill them, feral cats nom them, and Ceiling Cat knows what else happens to them. Here’s the mom and her latest brood, photographed by Giselle Garcia. I’m told that several ducklings have already disappeared.
It breaks my heart, even though it’s nature, but about two years ago they all fledged. I’m hoping at least a few will survive this year. Make way for ducklings!
And a photo of the city last evening, with the clouds and rain closing in:
