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.
Well, my prediction was off by a day, but over at EagleCam the first egg has hatched–only two minutes ago, according to eagle-eyed correspondent Jack. I haven’t yet seen the chick, which is being kept warm under the mother, but I did see the eggshell.
A YouTube video has just been posted showing the first view of the bobblehead. Look!:
And here’s a photo of the fluffball from a series highlighted by Diane G.:
And don’t forget to tune into HummingbirdCam, where two babies are already on view.
Friday’s New York Times reports on a new publishing phenomenon: a book about heaven written by a young boy who had a near-death experience, and co-written by his father, his mother, and contributor Lynn Vincent, who also helped Sarah Palin with Going Rogue. Heaven is for Real currently stands at #3 on the Amazon ranking, and has sold over 1.5 million copies.
Seven years ago Colton Burpo, nearly four years old, was hospitalized with a burst appendix (an unfortunate malady resulting from a huge design mistake by the omnibenevolent Creator). The rest of the story is familiar:
He had died and gone to heaven, where he met his great-grandfather; the biblical figure Samson; John the Baptist; and Jesus, who had eyes that “were just sort of a sea-blue and they seemed to sparkle,” Colton, now 11 years old, recalled. . .
. . . At first, [Colton’s father Todd] and his wife, Sonja, were not sure if they could believe their son’s story, which came out slowly, months and years after his sudden illness and operation in 2003. The details persuaded them, Mr. Burpo said. Colton told his parents that he had met his younger sister in heaven, describing her as a dark-haired girl who resembled his older sister, Cassie. When the Burpos questioned him, he asked his mother, “You had a baby die in your tummy, didn’t you?” While his wife had suffered a miscarriage years before, Mr. Burpo said, they had not told Colton about it. “There’s just no way he could have known,” Mr. Burpo said.
And the Burpos said that Colton painstakingly described images that he said he saw in heaven — like the bloody wounds on Jesus’ palms — that he had not been shown before.
Nope, there’s simply no way that eleven year old Colton could ever have seen Jesus’s bloody wounds, or other images of heaven, even though his father Todd is an evangelical pastor in Nebraska. And of course it defies belief to think that Colton could simply make up that his miscarried sister, whom he had never seen, had hair similar in color to that of his older sister. Ergo Jesus! Colton could, of course, heard someone else mention the miscarriage, or it could simply have been a lucky guess. How many other things did Colton say that weren’t credible?
And—doubly amazing—there’s even more stuff that Colton could not have known about without a visit to heaven, like Armageddon, God’s throne (look out, liberal theologians: god really does sit in a chair!) and the HUGE horse that Jesus rides. From the Amazon description:
Colton said he met his miscarried sister, whom no one had told him about, and his great grandfather who died 30 years before Colton was born, then shared impossible-to-know details about each. He describes the horse that only Jesus could ride, about how “reaaally big” God and his chair are, and how the Holy Spirit “shoots down power” from heaven to help us.
Told by the father, but often in Colton’s own words, the disarmingly simple message is heaven is a real place, Jesus really loves children, and be ready, there is a coming last battle.
It bears mentioning that this was not a death experience, but a near-death experience. Colton did not actually go to heaven; he was merely anesthetized. And, as we know, the sleep of reason brings forth monsters—and apparently a lot of money. Add this to the gazillion near-death experiences that have failed to produce convincing evidence that there’s a life beyond death. But the credulous and fearful don’t need convincing. One of those, apparently, is Matt Baugher, vice-president of the company that published this book:
“We all are perhaps desperate to know what is on the other side of the veil after we die,” Mr. Baugher said, adding that his initial skepticism about the Burpo family’s story was short-lived. “This was a very down-to-earth, conservative, quote-unquote normal Midwestern family. We became fully convinced that this story was valid. And also that it was a great story that would just take off.”
Of course! Had the family been liberals from New York, the story would not be nearly so convincing.
If you can bear it, watch Colton and his dad describe the stuff that could only be known from a near-visit to heaven. Colton says he saw that Jesus was REALLY BIG: “He can actually fit the entire world into his hands. ” And Jesus had a “rough but kind face, sea-blue eyes, and a smile that lit up the heavens.” Colton also learned that there are no old people in heaven, either—it’s all “young adults.” That’s great news for those of us who feared being at God’s big chair with our walkers, artificial knees, and Depends diapers.
Website posting will be a bit light until Thursday, as I have three visitors to entertain. But one of the advantages of having visitors is showing off Chicago—especially its cuisine.
I’ve eaten all over the U.S., and I have to say that the two greatest American towns for eating are (in decreasing order) New Orleans and Chicago. The ethnic diversity of this town means we have a tremendous diversity of cuisine. I can’t think of a single nationality of food that we can’t get here. We even have a Georgian restaurant! And while New York City probably has an equal diversity, it doesn’t have the same quality in every area.
That disparity between the Big Apple and Chitown is most evident in Indian food. The “Indian” section of NYC is small, and the food barely okay. In Chicago, on the other hand, we have a huge Indian area, centered on Devon Avenue on the far north side. It goes for several miles, and is full of Indian clothing and DVD stores, Indian groceries, and, of course, Indian restaurants. I believe I’ve said before that I think the three greatest cuisines of the world are French, Indian, and Chinese—especially from Hunan and Szechuan—and that’s not a ranking. In Chicago one can get Indian food equal in quality and authenticity to the stuff I’ve eaten all over India.
So when my friend and editor from Oxford University Press, Latha Menon, came to visit (she’s helping me design another book proposal), it was natural that we go to Indiatown, especially because Latha comes from Kerala, though she’s spent most of her life in the UK. She’s also, as are many south Indians, vegetarian. But that’s not limiting, as there are many great vegetarian Indian restaurants in Chicago. I took her to one of our best veg Indian restaurants, the Udupi Palace.
As is her wont, Latha had a paper dosa, which the equivalent of an Indian crepe. This is the paradigmatic south Indian dish, made from lentil and rice flour formed into a batter, poured into a great thin circle like a pancake, and quickly cooked on a big griddle. It’s savory and crispy and a fantastic meal or snack. And it’s always served with sambar, a spicy vegetable soup, and nariyal chutney, a wonderful coconut chutney. (You always eat with your hands, of course, using only the right one.)
Here’s Latha, ready to dig in. True dosa connoisseurs eschew dosas that are filled, like the tyro’s masala dosa that contains spiced potatoes. What you want is simply the crisp crepe itself, torn into pieces and dipped into the chutney. In between bites you sup a bit of sambar, and wash it all down with a mango lassi. (Click on all photos to enlarge.)
I love dosas too, but I love another south Indian dish—the uttapam—even more. It’s a thicker cake made with the same batter used for dosas—the pancake to the dosa’s crepe. And it’s usually cooked with various vegetables mixed in. I had a wonderful chili and onion uttapam:
After lunch we repaired to the local Indian sweet shop, Sukhadia, for rasmalai (Indian cheese patties soaked in sweet, cardamom-flavored cream). Along with baklava from Turkey, this is my favorite of all desserts. Sukhadia has a wide range of Indian sweets and snacks. Here is their selection of barfi (the unfortunate name for delicious “fudge” made from boiled-down milk):
And chaat, or savory snacks:
After a filling Indian meal what you want is a paan, a betel leaf wrapped around various substances that you specify. The classic paan has lime paste and betel nut inside, but after meals I prefer a meetha paan (sweet pan), which contains date paste, coconut, cardamom, fennel seeds, and a variety of sweet spices. You chew it, swallow the juices, and spit out the remainder. I’ve dissected a meetha pan for you here:
I love a good paan, but nearly every visitor I take to Indiatown eschews it. It’s a wonderful digestif. Down the hatch!
Then for a wander. Here’s a typical block of Indiatown:
I invariably make my way to Patel Brothers grocery store, which you can see above. It’s a huge Indian food emporium, and, as usual, among the crowds inside I was the only non-Indian or non-Pakistani person. I love to wander the aisles inhaling the different fragrances, picking up some chutneys and my favorite Mysore sandalwood soap..
I could spend hours looking at everything. Here’s just a small part of the chutney and pickle section:
The daals (lentils):
Nice vegetables, many not familiar to us:
And all the wonderfully-labeled boxes and bags:
I can’t go back soon enough. But my next visitor gets taken to Chinatown, where there’s an awesome Yunnanese restaurant. . .
Okay, we don’t want to divide our attention among too many animals (or do we?), but reader “rcs” has called our attention to an awesome HummingbirdCam. It’s in southern California, and is trained on the nest of an Allen’s hummingbird (Selasphorus sasin) who produced two chicks today.
You’ll have to watch a short commercial, but it’s well worth it. Go to the site facts to see how remarkably small the nest is, and where they’ve placed the camera. I’ve just watched the mother feeding her brood.
The babies are sort of bloblike at this early stage.
Noms!
The nest is in a rosebush, low to the ground. Danger of predators!
Maybe it’s not too onerous to watch both eagles and hummingbirds. . .
by Greg Mayer
Among the first phenomena to be interpreted in a Darwinian manner after the publication of the Origin of Species was adaptive coloration, most famously Batesian mimicry (wherein a palatable organism mimics a noxious organism); Jerry has recently posted on mimicry in insects and in birds. Matthew has brought to our attention a paper by J.M. Kamila and B.J. Bradley, in press in the Journal of Zoology, on another aspect of adaptive coloration: obliterative, or countershading, and in particular how it applies to primates. The Capuchin below is not countershaded.
Countershading, which is familiar to fishermen and military planespotters, consists of having the illuminated surface of an object darkened, and the unilluminated surface lightened, so as to “counteract the effect of shade and light”, producing “upon a rounded surface the illusionary appearance of flatness” (Cott, 1957:36). As such, it is one of the chief methods by which animals (as well as war planes, at least old ones) achieve concealment, and is very common. Kamila and Bradley, in their paper, ask: If primates spend a lot of time standing up on two legs (like we do), are they less likely to exhibit dorso-ventral countershading? Intuitively, it seems entirely plausible, and, after measuring the reflectance of the front and back of skins of 113 species of primates, they find that, indeed, the more bipedal a primate is, the less strongly it is countershaded. So now we know why our backs and chests/bellies are about the same color– we’re too bipedal!
My experience is that monkeys in trees are hard to see, regardless of whether they are countershaded. The three common Costa Rican species shown in the pictures here, all of which I know in the wild, are hard to spot, even though they are not countershaded. The large white scrotum of the male mantled howler, below, known as “huevos”, do make the males somewhat more conspicuous, but this is almost certainly a sexually selected feature.
The fourth Costa Rican monkey species (not pictured here), the squirrel monkey, is countershaded.
[Jerry’s note: I’ve added the picture below, which shows the countershading of a squirrel monkey: it’s darker on the illuminated dorsal (back) side and lighter on the ventral (belly) side:]
Of about 30 species of monkeys in the Guianas, Venezuela, and Colombia, many of which are very strikingly patterned, only a handful might be considered countershaded (Eisenberg, 1989). Perhaps not surprisingly, Kamila and Bradley found that the effect of bipedal tendencies, while significant, was small. They did find that body size made a difference (bigger, less predation-prone primates are less countershaded), but that group size does not (although it was almost significant). Overall, the factors they considered explained only 14% of the variation in countershading in primates.
Somewhat surprisingly, adaptive coloration was very controversial (critics considering resemblances of mimics and models, and the concealing effects of color patterns, to be coincidental) in Darwin’s time, and continued to be so for decades afterwards. It was not until 1940, that Hugh Cott, one of the 20th century’s most influential herpetologists, put the controversy to rest in his classic Adaptive Coloration in Animals. We’ll conclude with some video, taken by my wife, of monkeys leaping from tree to tree near Tortuguero, Costa Rica. It was a typical lowland Costa Rican day, quite warm, which enables me to label this video as “hot monkey action” (let’s see how many hits that phrase brings in!)
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Cott, H.B. 1940. Adaptive Coloration in Animals. Methuen, London.
Eisenberg, J.F. 1989. Mammals of the Neotropics. Vol. 1. The Northern Neotropics. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Kamilar, J.M. and B.J. Bradley. 2011. Countershading is related to positional behavior in primates. Journal of Zoology 283:227-233.
It’s about time for the bald eagle eggs to hatch at the live EagleCam in Virginia: over four weeks have passed since the first egg was laid, and the mother eagle is showing unusual restlessness and attentiveness to the eggs this morning. There was a report the other day that one of the eggs wobbled by itself in the nest.
I have a feeling that we’ll see an eagle hatch today. Keep your eye peeled here.
It was only a matter of time before somebody decided to cash in on Oscar. Oscar the death cat, whom Greg wrote about here, lives in a Rhode Island nursing home. His skill is a reported ability to sense when a resident is about to die. As the shade looms, Oscar hies to the patient’s room and lies on the beds until death comes.
David Dosa, a doctor at the nursing home, wrote a touching but funny article about Oscar, “A day in the life of Oscar the cat,” which you can—and should—access free from the New England Journal of Medicine. It’s short but intriguing.
Here are some pictures of Oscar at work:
Dosa’s article describes how Oscar works:
Making his way back up the hallway, Oscar arrives at Room 313. The door is open, and he proceeds inside. Mrs. K. is resting peacefully in her bed, her breathing steady but shallow. She is surrounded by photographs of her grandchildren and one from her wedding day. Despite these keepsakes, she is alone. Oscar jumps onto her bed and again sniffs the air. He pauses to consider the situation, and then turns around twice before curling up beside Mrs. K.
One hour passes. Oscar waits. A nurse walks into the room to check on her patient. She pauses to note Oscar’s presence. Concerned, she hurriedly leaves the room and returns to her desk. She grabs Mrs. K.’s chart off the medical-records rack and begins to make phone calls.
Within a half hour the family starts to arrive. Chairs are brought into the room, where the relatives begin their vigil. The priest is called to deliver last rites. And still, Oscar has not budged, instead purring and gently nuzzling Mrs. K. A young grandson asks his mother, “What is the cat doing here?” The mother, fighting back tears, tells him, “He is here to help Grandma get to heaven.” Thirty minutes later, Mrs. K. takes her last earthly breath. With this, Oscar sits up, looks around, then departs the room so quietly that the grieving family barely notices.
Now as skeptics we should be deeply suspicious. How can a cat know when one sick person is not going to die, but another will? And there alternative theories: my own was that Oscar was somehow actually killing the patients. Don’t ask me how, for we mere hoomans can’t possibly comprehend the mind of a cat.
The point was that this was never tested scientifically, which would involve statistical analysis of those who lived and died, whether Oscar was present or not, whether there were “clever Hans” behaviors of the nursing-home staff, and so on.
But today I just want to report that Dosa has written a book about Oscar. As reported by The Sun, it’s called Making the Rounds with Oscar: the Extraordinary Gifts of an Ordinary Cat (link is to the Amazon site). Note how, in the book’s description, Oscar’s horrific behavior is turned into something warm and fuzzy—how comforting his presence is. If Oscar walked into my room or my relative’s room, I’d be freaked out.
Here’s Dosa blurbing the book on Fox News:
There’s going to be a movie, of course; I suggest that Oscar be played by Maru, who bears a striking resemblance.
And, finally, a cartoon showing why all doctors should be cats:
As I noted at the end of February, Uncle Karl Giberson and Francis Collins have issued a new book, The Language of Science and Faith: Straight Answers to Genuine Questions, that seems to comprise material mainly lifted from the “questions” sections of the BioLogos website.
This, of course, is a challenge for bloodhound Jason Rosenhouse, who keeps a sharp nose for all things creationist. He must be something of a masochist, because he regularly plows through creationist and accommodationist tomes, but in so doing he saves us the trouble of reading them. Over at EvolutionBlog, Jason’s just reviewed the Giberson and Collins book. As usual, he produces a long and thoughtful review, and without rancor—though he’s quite strong in his judgment. The book is a defense of theistic evolution, and Jason gives it two thumbs down.
Here’s a snippet in which Jason discusses G&C’s pathetic attempts to show why it was of course much better for god to create through evolution than by merely poofing stuff into existence (theology is the art of making religious virtues out of scientific necessities):
Eventually we come to the two most serious issues, the problem of evil and the problem of human significance, and it is here that I believe Collins and Giberson really have not thought things through. Their basic replies are familiar: Evolution ameliorates the problem of evil by distancing God from the rottenness of nature, and evolutionary convergence shows that humans were inevitable.
Of course, there is an obvious reply to that first point. If you set in motion a process that you know will lead to a horrifying end, then you are as morally responsible as if you caused that horrifying end directly. If you drop an anvil onto someone’s head, you cannot absolve yourself by saying, “It wasn’t me! It was gravity!” We must explain, then, why God set in motion a process that he knew would lead to massive pain and suffering. Here is their answer:
“That nature has freedom is highly provocative and theologically suggestive. God created the world with an inbuilt capacity to explore novelty and try new things, but within a framework of overall regularity. … The key point here is that the gift of creativity that God bestowed on the creation is theologically analogous to the gift of freedom God bestowed on us. Both humans and all creation have freedom. Our freedom comes with a moral responsibility to use it properly. But that does not prevent us from doing terrible things. The freedom God gave humans was exercised in the construction of gas chambers at Auschwitz and Dachau, and in the destruction of the World Trade Center on 9/11. But because humans have freedom, we do not say that God created those gas chambers. God is, so to speak, off the hook for that evil.
In exactly the same way, outside of the moral dimension, when nature’s freedom leads to the evolution of a pernicious killing machine like the black plague, God is off the hook. Unless God micromanages nature so as to destroy its autonomy, such things are going to occur. (p. 136-137).”
This, I’m afraid, makes little sense. Their proviso “outside of the moral dimension” effectively kills their argument. As is clear from the discussion leading up to these paragraphs, nature is “free” only in the sense that it lacks causal determinism. That is not at all the sense in which humans can be said to be free. (Of course, there are thorny issues about the meaning of free will, but I think we can leave those aside for now.)
. . . There is plenty more that is wrong with this book, but I think you get the idea. In the end there is not a single thought or example here that is original, and Collins and Giberson repeatedly fail to grapple with the real concerns people have about evolution. All is standard boilerplate, about how to read the Bible, or resolve the problem of evil, or preserve notions of human specialness, or to protect any meaningful role for religion in modern life. They will need to do better if they really want to persuade sincere Christians that their worries about evolution are unfounded.
Inevitably, Josh Rosenau appears in the comments, defending G&C’s efforts to reconcile theology and science, and helpfully suggesting other ways that theology could rationalize god’s creation through natural selection:
There are several possibilities. One is that the prospect of creating through the unwinding of natural processes held some inherent intellectual interest to the creator. Another is that creating through natural law would not inevitably lead to evil, or at least to any particular evil. By the Doctrine of Double Effect, one could argue that the good aimed at is all that matters, and that accidental ill effects are not relevant.
It’s a sad situation when an atheist tries to help people like Giberson and Collins peddle their specious version of evolution. Rather than envision the creator using natural selection as a form of mental masturbation, why can’t we just short-circuit the whole exercise and admit that there’s not a smidgen of evidence for god?
This book is an embarrassment for its authors, particularly Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health. The spectacle of the country’s most powerful scientist explaining why a nonexistent sky father allows cats to torture mice, or bubonic plague to kill millions of people, is beyond belief. But he and Giberson will be excused because their brand of delusion is socially sanctioned. Imagined if they explained natural selection as the product of loose thetans set free by Xenu!
