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.
Over at the website Pictoral Theology, reader Pliny the In Between offers one theological explanation for natural evils” (deaths not involving human “free will,” including natural disasters, childhood cancers, and so on):
A few days ago I put up a video by Keith “Mr. Deity” Dalton, decrying a really insane piece by Jewish apologist Dennis Prager explaining why the story of Noah’s Ark was “one of the most moral stories ever told.” (There was also a funny video of Bill Maher’s take on The Great Flood.)
Prager’s piece included this gem:
Q: Why did God destroy animals as well?
A: In the biblical worldview, the purpose of all creation is to benefit man. This anthropocentric view of nature, and indeed of the whole universe, is completely at odds with the current secular idealization of nature. This secular view posits that nature has its own intrinsic meaning and purpose, independent of man.
All of creation, in the biblical view, was to ultimately prepare the way for the creation of man. But one does not need the Bible alone to hold this view. A purely scientific reading of the universe is in keeping with this view. Everything — every natural and physical law — is exquisitely tuned to produce life, and ultimately man, on earth.
What struck me was the argument for “fine-tuning” has now been turned from the production of life to the production of “man.” Yet the physical constants supposedly necessary to produce life are sufficient to produce humans as well: God clearly required no additional “fine-tuning”—even if you accept that fallacious argument—to allow for humans than to allow for, say, fungi and squirrels.
Over at the creationist website Evolution News and Views (where they don’t allow any comments), the equally batty David Klinghoffer, another Jewish apologist, lauds Prager’s ridiculous piece, and denigrates me at the same time (that’s usual for Klinghoffer, who, bereft of arguments for Intelligent Design, spends his time obsessing over my character and my criticisms of ID). Here’s a screenshot of part of his comment:
Exactly right???? Really? Even if the universe were fine-tuned for life (and I don’t think for a minute it was), how, my dear Mr. Klinghoffer, can you distinguish God’s fine-tuning the universe for life versus fine-tuning it for human life? After all, the physical constants required for both kinds of tuning are identical!
The fact that he and others make this argument is a clear sign that their arguments are based not on science but on religion. For it is only scripture and not science that argues that humans are special creatures on this planet. The phrase “the fine-tuning of the cosmos specifically for human life” gives away the religious roots of intelligent design—roots that people like Klinghoffer repeatedly deny.
And, as I’ve argued before, you can’t sensibly make the argument that the evolution of humans or human-like creatures was inevitable. Even given determinism, if mutations are inherently nondeterministic phenomena, and evolution depends, as it does, on what mutations appear, then we can’t say that the appearance of any specific species or morphology was inevitable.
Have a look at the trailer given below for the upcoming creationist movie “Privileged Species” touted by Klinghoffer. Notice that there is not one bit of evidence in this goddamned trailer that humans, as opposed to any other oxygen-using species, are “privileged.” The trailer emphasizes oxygen, which is of course a requirement for animal life. But that oxygen was produced by the photosynthesis of plants, not by God. And since hummingbirds have a higher per gram requirement for oxygen than humans, I conclude that if the Earth was was fine-tuned for life, the ultimate aim of God’s machinations was hummingbirds, the apotheosis of creation.
The trailer is narrated by Michael Denton, described as “geneticist and senior fellow, Discovery Institute.”
On Tuesday I posted the sad story of Farzana Parveen, a 25-year old pregnant Pakistani woman who, contrary to her family’s wishes, married the man she loved, Mohammad Iqbal. For that crime, she was stoned to death by her relatives in front of the High Court building of Lahore.
This so-called “honour killing” involved the arrest of the father, and a still fruitless search for the other killers, but underscored the lack of autonomy of women that leads, in Pakistan and other countries, to marriages that are arranged—often involving much older men.
I now have the sad duty to supplement that story with some horrible news that just emerged. It turns out that, according to the Guardian, this is not a black-and-white tale of star-crossed lovers thwarted by a retrograde culture. For Iqbal himself has now admitted that he was already married when he met Parveen, and, to get her as his bride, he strangled his first wife to death:
Muhummad Iqbal, the 45-year-old husband of Farzana Parveen, who was beaten to death by 20 male relatives on Tuesday, said he strangled his first wife in order to marry Parveen. He avoided a prison sentence after his family used Islamic provisions of Pakistan’s legal system to forgive him, precisely those he has insisted should not be available to his wife’s killers. “I was in love with Farzana and killed my first wife because of this love,” he told Agence France-Presse. Police confirmed that the killing had happened six years ago and that he was released after a “compromise” with his family.
I have been excoriated by some readers for even mentioning Islam in connection with the stoning, but can you still excuse that religion now? Iqbal himself is a woman-killer, but didn’t serve a day in jail because of “Islamic provisions of Pakistan’s legal system.”
The story gets even worse:
Iqbal has also claimed that Parveen’s family killed another one of their daughters some years ago. Speaking to a researcher from the Aurat Foundation, a women’s rights organisation, he claimed that Parveen’s father, Muhammad Azeem, had poisoned the other woman after falling out with her husband-in-law.
This claim has not been substantiated. Finally, as if this weren’t sickening enough, the media and some educated people in Pakistan are excusing the stoning of Parveen. (I haven’t heard calls for prosecution of Iqbal: after all, he was exculpated). As I feared, but predicted, Pakistanis haven’t been rising up en masse to protest at this mistreatment of women (according to Pakistan’s Human Rights Commission, over 900 Pakistani women were murdered in “honour killings” in 2013).
Until Thursday there had been little comment on the case domestically, with newspapers and television stations focussing on other stories. One journalist, an editor of an Urdu national paper who did not want to be named, said the country’s media reflected its audience. “Although we have some educated people, most are still living in semi-tribal societies in far-flung rural areas,” he said. “In a country where people are being killed every day by miscreants and militants it is not so important when one woman is killed by one husband.” Some members of the public in Lahore clearly share the media’s ambivalence. Muhammad Yaqub, a student at a private university in the city, said he understood the loss of honour for the family but disliked the brutal way the woman had been killed. “He did some right and some wrong,” he said.
I wonder what the “right” is! And really, it is “not so important when one woman is killed by one husband”? What kind of brutish and callous mentality produces such stupidity? Can we consider 930 such killings “important”? Ask anyone whose friends, relatives, or loved ones have been slaughtered in this way if that one murder was “unimportant.”
Angiosperms, or flowering plants, first appear in the fossil record about 160 million years ago. A new paper in Biology Letters, by Gerald Mayr and Volker Wilde (reference below and—I think—a free download) shows that by about 50 million years ago, birds had already evolved to take advantage of this new food source.
Mayr and Wild report a new bird fossil from the famous Messel formation of Germany. The specimen, Pumiliornis tessellatus, is remarkably well preserved as a complete skeleton and is dated at roughly 47 million years, in the middle Eocene. It is not a member of any of the three modern groups of birds that independently evolved the ability to eat nectar and pollen: hummingbirds, lorikeets + hanging parrots, and some groups of the Passeriformes (“perching birds,” whose nectar-and-pollen eaters include sunbirds, honeycreepers, etc.).
The remarkable thing about this specimen, as shown in the photo below, is that there is a clump of pollen grains near the femur—right where the stomach would be in a living bird. Although there are also a few insect parts (perhaps accidentally ingested along with the pollen), the number of grains, their clumping, and their position suggests that this bird was in fact eating pollen. Notice the wonderful feather impressions in the fossil below:
Here are some scanning electron microscope (SEM) photos of the fossilized pollen:
The other clue that this bird didn’t accidentally eat pollen, and was adapted to a flower-feeding lifestyle, comes from its appearance. It has a long beak and enlarged nasal openings characteristic of modern birds that sip nectar, and it has “zygodactyl” feet, meaning that the fourth toe could be turned backwards—a trait of perching birds that climb branches and flower stems. The #1 toe is the one you should look at in the photo below:
Now it’s not clear if pollen was the primary object of this bird’s diet, was ingested accidentally while drinking nectar, or if the bird ate both pollen and nectar. What is pretty clear is that by the middle Eocene, when this bird lived, birds had already evolved to use as food flowering plants that had been around for over 100 million years.
Although the authors were unable to identify the plant that produced this pollen, they suggest that it was already itself evolutionarily adapted to pollination by animals rather than wind:
Although pollen size does not allow discrimination of insect and bird pollination, the large size of the grains and the fact that some are still clumping (figure 2c) indicate direct ingestion from a plant adapted for animal rather than wind pollination.
This pushes back the earliest known bird/nectar/pollen interaction by 17 million years, as heretofore the earliest such specimen dated at about 30 mya.
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Gerald Mayr and Volker Wilde. 2014. Eocene fossil is earliest evidence of flower-visiting by birds. Biol Lett 2014 10: 20140223
It’s Friday! We so excited! And the strife continues in Dobrzyn. . .
A: Hili, for goodness sake! You’re going to fall with that vase!Hili: That might scare Cyrus.
Ja: Hili, na litość boską, spadniesz razem z tym wazonem!
Hili: To może się Cyrus przestraszy.
by Greg Mayer
Close readers of WEIT will know that I rarely cite or link to Wikipedia (other than for images), and that I have occasionally promised to at some point say more about this. This won’t be a full account, but a recent spectacular example of Wikipedia’s ability to spread error has been reported by Eric Randall at The New Yorker, and deserves a mention: the coati has been widely cited as the “Brazilian **rdv*rk”! (See note below.)
Coatis are New World members of the order Carnivora, in the same family as raccoons. Indeed, they look very much like raccoons with long noses and skinny tails. They are not at all related closely to aardvarks, which are are of course African, and members of the very distinctive mammalian order Tubulidentata. (Their name means ‘earth pig’, from Dutch/Afrikaans). Here’s how the coatis’ new name got started and spread:
In July of 2008, Dylan Breves, then a seventeen-year-old student from New York City, made a mundane edit to a Wikipedia entry on the coati. The coati, a member of the raccoon family, is “also known as … a Brazilian **rdv*rk,” Breves wrote. He did not cite a source for this nickname, and with good reason: he had invented it….
Adding a private gag to a public Wikipedia page is the kind of minor vandalism that regularly takes place on the crowdsourced Web site. When Breves made the change, he assumed that someone would catch the lack of citation and flag his edit for removal.
Over time, though, something strange happened: the nickname caught on. About a year later, Breves searched online for the phrase “Brazilian **rdv*rk.” Not only was his edit still on Wikipedia, but his search brought up hundreds of other Web sites about coatis. References to the so-called “Brazilian **rdv*rk” have since appeared in the Independent, the Daily Mail, and even in a book published by the University of Chicago. Breves’s role in all this seems clear: a Google search for “Brazilian **rdv*rk” will return no mentions before Breves made the edit, in July, 2008. The claim that the coati is known as a Brazilian **rdv*rk still remains on its Wikipedia entry, only now it cites a 2010 article in the Telegraph as evidence.
This kind of feedback loop—wherein an error that appears on Wikipedia then trickles to sources that Wikipedia considers authoritative, which are in turn used as evidence for the original falsehood—is a documented phenomenon. There’s even a Wikipefeedback loopdia article describing it.
The erroneous name has now been removed from Wikipedia, and a note on its origin and fate, citing Randall’s piece, has been appended to the coati article.
This episode reminded me of one of my own earliest experiences as a Wikipedia editor: getting rid of an article about an “event” made up by another Wikipedia editor. Sometime about early 2006, I became aware of an article in Wikipedia on the “W*ll**ms R*v*l*t**n”. This was supposed to be a development in the history of evolutionary biology brought about by George C. Williams (who was indeed one of the 20th century’s great and influential evolutionary biologists). But I had never heard of such a thing– and I’m an at least reasonably well-read evolutionary biologist, plus I knew Williams at Stony Brook. I tried to find out if anyone else had ever heard of it. Here’s what I posted on Williams’ Wikipedia talk page:
I’ve already noted this on the talk page for “W*ll**ms R*v*l*t**n”, but this term seems to be a strictly Wikipedia term, invented for Wikipedia. All the references I can find to it online, including in chat groups, seem traceable to the Wikipedia entry. I’ve never encountered it in the literature of evolutionary biology, or anywhere else in print. It’s also not a terribly appropriate term. I have nothing but the greatest admiration and appreciation for Williams’ contributions, most notably his Adaptation and Natural Selection, but his critique of group selection and advocacy of gene-level selection were much more a “restoration” than a revolution (Darwin clearly rejected group selection, with the clear exception that he contemplated it as a possibility in social insects); furthermore, a number of others at about the same time (e.g. W.D. Hamilton) and slightly later (e.g. Richard Dawkins) had as much or more to do with the elaboration of a strictly gene-centered view (especially as opposed to an individual selection view) as did Williams, so it doesn’t seem as if it should bear his name, or at least not his alone.But, regardless, Wikipedia should not be in the business of inventing terms. 08:34, 8 January 2006 (UTC)
Some Wikipedia editors were sure they had heard the term, but on checking their supposed sources, none could find any uses of the term that had not originated in Wikipedia. Another, more experienced Wikipedia editor, Samsara (at the time an evolutionary genetics grad student at Edinburgh), joined me in the attempt to verify the term, but there turned out to be no non-Wikipedia uses of the term that did not trace back to Wikipedia. The article was deleted. (Most of the discussion of this was on the now deleted talk page of the now deleted article.)
When Wikipedia is used as a source, errors can spread rapidly, because it’s not just used by lazy students in term papers, but also by legitimate newspapers and publishers, and especially because there are whole websites that just copy from Wikipedia, and thus seem to form independent confirmations of the errors. Of course, errors in the old, print Encyclopedia Britannica could be perpetuated and recycled too, but the internet allows errors to spread faster and further, and the Encyclopedia Britannica would never have let a a not particularly knowledgeable 17 year old to author an article.
Note: in order to prevent Google searches turning up yet more usages of the spurious terms (and thus testaments to their use and verifiability), I have not used either neologism in this post, replacing vowels with ‘*’s.
h/t Tracy Walsh at The Dish