Bring out your kittehs

November 23, 2010 • 6:26 pm

They tell me I’ll need a week of recuperation, i.e. no going in to work, but that’s simply not on.  Ideally I’d walk straight from the recovery room to my office (it’s only a five-minute walk). However, I will try to stay home for a day.  In the meantime, this seems like a good time to start the cat contest.

The rules are simple.  Send in one photo of your cat (or cats, if you’ve more than one), along with a paragraph of no more than 250 words giving a backstory.  This could be either a description of how you acquired the beast, some of his winsome habits, or anything else to show the awesomeness of your kitteh.  There will be three prizes.  “Win” gets an autographed hardback edition of WEIT, while “place” and “show” get autographed paperbacks.  And of course the winners (and probably others) will be featured here as well.

Even if you don’t think your cat will win, send it anyway.  They will be great material for future posts on readers’ cats. (Be aware that submission entails my right to post your photo/entry).

Judging:  There will be three celebrity judges (chosen for their atheism and love of cats): Ophelia Benson, Russell Blackford, and Miranda Hale.  They will rank the entries, and the winner will be the cat with the highest overall ranking. The decision of the judges is final.

Deadline: Because it may take time to photograph your beast and write a paragraph, I’m closing the contest in one week: 5 p.m., December 1.

Where to send your entries: if you google “Jerry Coyne University of Chicago,” it will take you to my University web page with my email address. Send stuff there.

To show what you’re up against, I present a formidable contender. Kink—named for his malformed tail—is the beloved cat of “Doc Bill,” who posts here frequently.  Doc Bill sent me this message and photo some time ago:

Just send me the prize and retire it.  Kink’s a winner in all respects.  Social, vocal, smart (vocab of 12+ words) and laid back.  Srsly, is anybody going to beat this?

Fig. 1.  The haughty Kink

Islam in the UK: Jews are pigs and monkeys, gays should be killed

November 23, 2010 • 9:24 am

According to John F. Burns in today’s New York Times, a group of Islamic schools and clubs in the UK are purveying not only vile anti-Semitic views, but recommending horrible punishments based on sharia law.   This information came from a half-hour BBC video (see below).

Burns reports:

A British network of more than 40 part-time Islamic schools and clubs with 5,000 students has been teaching from a Saudi Arabian government curriculum that contains anti-Semitic and homophobic views, including a textbook that asks children to list the “reprehensible” qualities of Jews, according to a BBC documentary broadcast on Monday.

The 30-minute “Panorama” program quoted the Saudi government-supplied textbook as saying that Jews “looked like monkeys and pigs,” and that Zionists set out to achieve “world domination.” The program quoted a separate part of the curriculum — for children as young as 6 — saying that someone who is not a believer in Islam at death would be condemned to “hellfire.” . . .

One of the textbooks, according to the BBC program, prescribed execution as the penalty for gay sex, and outlined differing viewpoints as to whether death should be by stoning, immolation by fire or throwing offenders off a cliff. Another set out the punishments prescribed by Shariah law for theft, including amputation of hands and feet. A BBC video accompanying an article on the program’s Web site showed a textbook illustration of a hand and a foot marked to show where amputations should be made.

Note that these schools and clubs are under the direction of the cultural ministry of the Saudi embassy in the UK, and so are the responsibility of the Saudi government.  The anti-Semitic characterization of Jews as swine and apes comes, of course, straight from the Qur’an, while the homophobia and punishments come from both the Qur’an and the hadith.

Remember, this is not the Middle East, but the United Kingdom. Those who so fervently assert that Islam is a “religion of peace,” and who claim that such vile hatred is not part of “mainstream Islam,” might pay some attention.  Before asserting that these views are purely extremist and not “normal” Islamic belief, let’s have some data, not just assertions based on wishful thinking.  How many Islamic anti-Semites and homophobes will it take before we retract the ridiculous characterization of Islam as a “religion of peace”?  10%? 30%?

I’d be delighted if the Muslim community of Britain, and all of its imams, would immediately denounce this practice. I’m not holding my breath; judicious silence is what you see in these situations.

Isn’t it ironic that the religious commentators on yesterday’s Guardian/Observer discussion so quickly denounced Richard Dawkins as “militant” for simply expressing his atheism, while not mentioning the many Muslims who want Jews and gays tortured and killed?  Do these people know what “militant” means?

Here is the entire BBC program from YouTube.

Part 1:

Part 2:

h/t: John Brockman

Tuataras in the news

November 23, 2010 • 1:17 am

by Greg Mayer

Tuataras are in the news today, although there really isn’t that much new about them. In fact, as Natalie Angier points out in the New York Times, they are transparently Triassic in aspect, as the following picture, of a tuatara named Henry, will attest.

Henry the tuatara, from Wikimedia.

Angier provides a review of various interesting aspects of tuatara biology– they live a long time, reproduce slowly, eat giant orthopterans, are nearly extinct, etc. What’s most interesting about them is that they are the sole living members of one of the four major groups of extant reptiles, the Sphenodontida (an order in the Linnaean hierarchy of ranks, the other reptile orders being turtles, crocodiles, and snakes+lizards); and they are found only in New Zealand, where they are restricted to a few offshore islands.  (They have recently been transplanted back to the mainland of New Zealand, whence they were extirpated centuries ago by introduced rats.)

Though they look much like lizards (iguanas or agamids in particular), and were thought to be lizards when first discovered, they are in fact not lizards, as anatomical examination reveals. They have a primitive type of skull, termed fully diapsid, which means the cheek region of the skull has two complete openings surrounded by bone, and they have at most a rudimentary hemipenis (the distinctive double copulatory organ that characterizes snakes and lizards).

Tuataras are a good example of an older group surviving on an isolated land mass, something typical of old islands like New Zealand, which separated from other parts of the former southern supercontinent of Gondwana around 80 million years ago. Tuataras had been spread about the globe during the Mesozoic (Age of Reptiles), but survived only on New Zealand.

It is distressingly common to see tuataras described as “dinosaurs”, but they are no such thing. They lived during the time of the dinosaurs (and have changed relatively little since, earning them the sobriquet “living fossils”), but their closest relatives are the lizards and snakes, together with which they form the larger reptilian group known as lepidosaurs. Dinosaurs closest living relatives are birds, which, indeed, are perhaps best thought of as actual dinosaurs themselves.

Why is sex good?

November 22, 2010 • 5:57 pm

by Greg Mayer

And by sex, I mean, of course, “… the union (SYNGAMY) of two genomes, usually carried by gametes, followed some time later by REDUCTION, ordinarily by the process of meiosis and gametogenesis” (Futuyma, 2009:388). Most of the organisms we know and love– oak trees, lobsters, goldfish, cats–  reproduce sexually. But a few of our favorite organisms– whiptail lizards prominent among them– reproduce asexually.

Cnemidophorus inornatus (sexual ancestor), C. neomexicanus (unisexual daughter species) , C. tigris (sexual ancestor). c Alistair J. Cullum. Used with permission.

At first glance, what the asexual whiptails are doing makes complete evolutionary sense: why bother producing unproductive males, when you can double your reproductive output by having nothing but daughters?  If we start a sexual population with one male and one female, and suppose that females on average have four surviving offspring, two of whom will be female, then the population increases from 2 to 4 to 8 to 16 to… etc. If we start with two asexual females, who also average four surviving offspring, all of whom are female, the population increases from 2 to 8 to 32 to 128 to… etc. You can see that asexuals reproduce a lot faster than sexuals. And it wouldn’t matter if the population wasn’t increasing– the asexuals would come to constitute a higher and higher proportion of the total population. This reproductive advantage of asexuality is called the cost of sex (google image that term for an interesting mix of scientific and non-scientific illustrations!).

So if sex has such a high reproductive cost, why are so many organisms sexual?  This is where the whiptails are revealing. Tod Reeder,  C.J. Cole, and Herb Dessauer, in their 2002 review of Cnemidophorus evolution, found that

the capability of instantly producing parthenogenetic clones through one generation of hybridization has existed for approximately 200 million years, yet the extant unisexual taxa are of very recent origins. Consequently, these lineages must be ephemeral compared to those of bisexual taxa.

Indeed, the asexual whiptails have evolved so recently that the ancestral sexual forms can in most cases be readily identified (see figure 6 in Reeder et. al). That asexual taxa are of recent origin appears to be true for animals in general (with some notable exceptions):  asexuality appears to be an evolutionary dead end. This implies that there is some long term advantage to sexuality, so that asexual species do not prosper and diversify, but rather are extinguished. The paucity of asexuals, despite their large reproductive advantage, argues for a short term advantage to sex as well. There have been a number of suggestions, most supposing that sex is advantageous in fluctuating or changing environments, so that sexual lineages would have higher fitness than asexual lineages within a population.

An essay by Matt Ridley posted at the PBS website for their Evolution series of a few years ago considers some of these issues, as does this page by someone at Brown University, and Nature has an open article collection on the subject. Two of the classic introductions to the subject are Sex and Evolution by George C. Williams, and The Evolution of Sex by John Maynard Smith.

Guardian podcast: is religion a force for good?

November 22, 2010 • 3:16 pm

The Observer/Guardian has a 55-minute podcast in which five thinkers debate the topic “Is religion a force for good in the world?”

In anticipation of the coming debate between Christopher Hitchens and Tony Blair on the value of religion, we gathered a selection of thinkers on the subject to discuss the topic.

AC Grayling is professor of philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London.

Evan Harris is a former MP and Liberal Democrat science spokesman.

Cristina Odone was editor of the Catholic Herald and deputy editor of the New Statesman.

Jon Cruddas is Labour MP for Dagenham. He’s also a Roman Catholic.

Samia Rahman is a freelance journalist living in London and a muslim.

The panel debates the value of religion to society, its impact on policymaking, its contribution to culture and what a world without religion would be like.

The atheists are awesome and calm, but the religious folk get quite exercised! Check out the accusations of atheist “intolerance and fundamentalism” (and “metropolitanism”—what’s that?) starting at  28:00, and the vigorous pushback by Grayling.  Other Grayling highlights (the man is eloquent!):  at 34:34 he outlines humanistic ethics and why it has nothing to do with religion, and at 36:12 he dilates on why the overall effect of religion is negative.

The final summary of the participants’ positions begins at 48:22.

At the very end, everyone debates whether the Gnus—and Dawkins in particular—are “militant and fundamentalist.”  Grayling pwns them all.

Curiously, there is NO discussion of whether there’s any basis for the epistemic underpinnings of religion.  It’s amazing that one can discuss whether or not something is a force for good without even alluding to whether it’s true.  But what’s good is that this debate is being held in a popular venue. That’s the success of Gnu Atheism.

FiveBooks.com: natural history recommendations

November 22, 2010 • 10:19 am

I’ve previously recommended the Five Books site as a good place to go if you’re looking for expert-recommended books on a given topic.  The site used to be weak on biology, but it’s remedied that with a new Natural History Museum Collection site, where they ask UK museum scientists to each recommend five books and discuss them.  It’s not just a list, but includes a long interview with each scientist. I’m scheduled to contribute one on evolution sometime soon.

The latest lists/interviews include:

Phil Richardson on bats,

Jonathan Elphick on birds (note that he recommends a book I hadn’t known about, The Hill of Summer, by J. A. Baker, author of the classic The Peregrine),

Paul Barrett on dinosaurs,

Richard Fortey on paleontology (note his comments on Steve Gould’s Wonderful Life.  He recommends a book on trilobites, but I think Fortey’s own book on trilobites is fantastic),

Johnathan Silvertown on plants,

and Caroline Smith on meteorites.

Also see Tom Clarke’s selections in “Being Inspired by Science“. (I recommend Steinbeck’s The Log from the Sea of Cortez.)

h/t: Matthew Cobb

Weekday update

November 22, 2010 • 9:32 am

I’ve finally returned from the steamy tropics to drippy Chicago, but there are at least two more posts I’d like to make on Colombia: the frogs + birds, and the fruits.  Stay tuned.

News for this week is that I have my first surgery—ever.  It’s completely minor: correcting a sinus condition that’s troubled me for a year.  And it’s a new procedure: balloon sinuplasty (video here).  Instead of the old-fashioned reaming out of your sinuses with knives and other bad stuff, they stick balloons up there and inflate them, pushing the bones into the right places. It’s like an angioplasty in the face.  It’s no big deal—perhaps, like Ashley Tisdale, I should have them lop off a bit of my proboscis on the side.  But I may be out of action for a few days.  I’ll be very curious to see what it’s like to lose consciousness, as I’ve never been under before. (By the way, the fact that you can lose consciousness by the administration of chemicals, and then restore it by their withdrawal, proves that consciousness is a chemical/neurological phenomenon.)

Second, yesterday the website passed four million views, which is cool.  Since this site started in February of last year (you’ll never hear me call it a “blog,” since I find that word grating) , it’s obviously undergone a metamorphosis.  It was designed as a supplement for my book, and I originally intended to publish only new evidence for evolution—and that only sporadically.  This intent has clearly changed (credit it to narcissism), and now I deal with food, literature, kittehs, and even cowboy boots.  I now think of it more as an extension of me rather than an extension of science, and if I don’t publish enough evolution for some readers, well, that’s what I do all day, and have other interests that I’d like to talk about here.  For those who come here expecting only science, I’d urge you to check the many sites (like The Loom, Panda’s Thumb, and Not Exactly Rocket Science), that deal mainly with evolution.  But I’ll never abandon that original intent.

I also suffered from some hubris when I started writing here.  I thought that my job was to dispense professorial wisdom to eager and untutored recipients, hungry to learn about evolution.  Oy, was I wrong!  I had no idea that among the readers would be many scientists and professional evolutionists, many of whom know a lot more than I do about topics I cover.  And not only that, but philosophers, musicians, literature addicts, and even a Nobel laureate or two. I can hardly make a post in which I don’t learn more than I teach. And I don’t think I’ve ever written a single post in which I didn’t say something wrong.  I appreciate the corrections, but it is humbling. (And, as the accommodationists tell us, we all need humility.)

I’d like, then, to thank the many readers who, with their thoughtful comments and regular attendance, have made this website enormously rewarding for me, and, I hope, a source of information and fun for others.

In honor of the 4,000,000 mark, I’m going to institute a contest, involving cats of course. If you have one, start photographing it now (or gathering photos) and writing a paragraph about your felid.  There will be prizes and celebrity judges, and details will be announced later.

And with that, I’ll go under the knife—or rather, the balloon.