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.
Hili: This fresh laundry smells of Spring already.
A: Yes, we too like this new fabric softener.
Hili: Taka świeżo wyprana pościel pachnie wiosną.
Ja: Tak, my też lubimy ten nowy środek do płukania bielizny.
Well, we’ve seen Jerry grow up from a suckling to an 11-week-old adolescent, we’ve been with him when he lost his testicles, and today he was formally adopted.
Yesterday Jerry Coyne the Cat flew to the south island of New Zealand, and this morning was transferred to his new home. Gayle Ferguson, his Rescuer (and Rescuer of Four Other Kittens), drugged the little guy before his flight to calm him down, flew with him to Christchurch, where her parents live, and spent one afternoon cuddling and saying goodbye to the little guy before handing him off.
This morning Jerry went to his Forever Home to join the family of a colleague of Gayle who also has another cat. Gayle documented the whole process with both photos and videos (below). The indented words are hers.
Getting ready to leave for the airport
Hoover taunts the captive
About to go…
Checking in. Finally, after ten minutes heated argument with Air New Zealand. Top Tip: if you ever take a pet on the plane, print out a copy of Air NZ’s cage requirements and bring it along to the airport to show the desk wench when you check in…
Arriving in Christchurch (no, they didn’t actually send him out on the conveyor belt…)
Hello Jerry!
Arriving at the half-way house:
Jerry, relaxing at the half-way-house in Christchurch
And I got these items this morning:
My last cuddly afternoon with little Jerry.
A video called “Last purrs with Jerry”, before he was taken to his new home:
Jerry’s new step-brother, Luka
Luka doesn’t look overly friendly!!
And here’s a video of Jerry exploring his new home. There are chickens, and of course Gayle worried—you can hear it on the video—that Jerry will get pecked. But it sounds as if his new owners will at least call him “Jerry,” if not “Jerry Coyne.”
Hiding!
Still hiding!
I asked Gayle if Jerry was hiding in his new home. Her response:
He’s just a bit overwhelmed with all the new people and places in the last day and a half, so he tends to hide under couches and other furniture where he feels safe. Yes, that’s his new home. He didn’t hide the whole time I was there; he did some exploring and even a little bit of playing. His new brother hissed at him and was then put outside. Luka is apparently a laid-back cat and so they will probably eventually be fine together. I have a video of him at his new home but haven’t uploaded it yet. He spent a lot of time sleeping on top of me today and purring. I miss him terribly.
Good luck, my little namesake. Have a wonderful life—onward and upward! And watch out for those chickens!
And of course many kudos to Gayle for the enormous effort of saving Jerry and his Four Sisters, as well as for keeping us up to date on their fates (two females have yet to be adopted).
Today’s Fun Biology Facts come from PuffHo, which gives a list (it’s been replicated elsewhere) of the world’s oldest individual organisms (or, in some cases, clones). These come from a book by artist Rachel Sussman to be published by the University of Chicago Press on April 14: The Oldest Living Things in the World. (the spruce in the fourth picture below graces the cover).
Sussman notes that it took her five years to travel the world and photograph these amazing organisms. The book’s foreword is by Carl Zimmer.
Here are five examples and one eucalyptus that isn’t pictured because it’s too rare.
I can understand the omission of the eucalyptus. When I visited the bristlecone pine forest in the White Mountains of California, which are said to include the oldest single individuals of any species, I inquired about the oldest pine—”Pine alpha”—and was told that it was a secret. Wikipedia gives its age:
A specimen of Pinus longaeva located in the White Mountains of California is 5,063 years old, from measurements by Tom Harlan.The identity of the specimen is being kept secret by Harlan. This is the oldest known tree in North America, and the oldest known individual tree in the world, although a clonal individual, nicknamed “Old Tjikko”, a Norway spruce in Sweden is 9,550 years old.
You really must make the drive up to the bristlecone forest if you’re anywhere near Death Valley or the Owens Valley in California. It’s fantastic. The trees are old and gnarled, fighting for life in a dry, cold environment. And of course Pine Alpha will remain a secret, because if people knew where it was, they’d take bark samples, carve their names into it, and god knows what else.
But I digress: here’s a sample of old organisms (plants and one bacterial colony) from Sussman’s book. The captions are from PuffHo, probably written by Sussman:
La Llareta: 2,000+ years old (Atacama Desert, Chile)
“”What looks like moss covering rocks is actually a very dense, flowering shrub that happens to be a relative of parsley, living in the extremely high elevations of the Atacama Desert.”
Stromatolites: 2,000-3,000 years old (Carbla Station, Western Australia)
“Straddling the biologic and the geologic, stromatolites are organisms that are tied to the oxygenation of the planet 3.5 billion years ago, and the beginnings of all life on Earth.”
These colonies are the oldest known fossil life on Earth—about 3.5 billion years old—and they are cyanobacteria, formerly known as blue-green algae, that form the stromatolite mats. It’s amazing that these mats still exist in a few places on earth as living organisms.
Welwitschia Mirabilis: 2,000 years old (Namib-Naukluft Desert, Namibia)
“The Welwitschia is primitive conifer living only in parts of coastal Namibia and Angola where moisture from the sea meets the desert. Despite appearances, it only has two single leaves, which it never sheds. National plant of Namibia.”
This spruce (clearly “Old Tikko”), is almost twice the age of Pine Alpha, but it’s said to be clonal (see above):
Spruce Gran Picea: 9,550 years old (Fulufjället, Sweden)
“This 9,950-year-old tree is like a portrait of climate change. The mass of branches near the ground grew the same way for roughly 9,500 years, but the new, spindly trunk in the center is only 50 or so years old, caused by warming at the top of this mountain plateau in Western Sweden.”
Pafuri Baobab: Up to 2,000 years old (Kruger National Park, South Africa)
“”This baobab lives in the Kruger Game Preserve in South Africa and requires an armed escort to visit. Baobabs get pulpy at their centers and tend to hollow out as they grow older. These hollows can serve as natural shelters for animals, but have also been appropriated for some less scrupulous human uses: for instance, as a toilet, a prison, and a bar.”
Here’s one I’d like to see, but understand why it’s not pictured. I wonder if it’s clonal, for it’s older than Pine Alpha by a long shot.
Rare Eucalyptus (species redacted for protection): 13,000 years old (New South Wales, Australia)
“This critically endangered eucalyptus is around 13,000 years old, and one of fewer than five individuals of its kind left on the planet. The species name might hint too heavily at its location, so it has been redacted.”
You can see Rachel Sussman’s TED talk on the world’s oldest organisms here, her website is here, and her portfolio that has many other pictures of old organisms is here.
I only wish she hadn’t tried to explicate her work in a rather pompous way. The biology stories and pictures are wondrous enough without this leaden prose:
My practice is contextualized by the multidisciplinary inquiries of Matthew Ritchie and the new conceptualism of Taryn Simon and Trevor Paglen, who likewise gain physical access to restricted subjects and illustrate complex concepts with photographs supported by text. The work spans disciplines, continents, and millennia: it’s part art and part science, has an innate environmentalism, and is underscored by an existential incursion into Deep Time. I begin at ‘year zero,’ and look back from there, exploring the living past in the fleeting present. This original index of millennia-old organisms has never before been created in the arts or sciences.
I approach my subjects as individuals of whom I’m making portraits in order to facilitate an anthropomorphic connection to a deep timescale otherwise too physiologically challenging for our brain to internalize. . . .
etc.
h/t: Su
A. O. Scott’s review of “Noah” in the New York Times starts with a nice headline:
And, contrary to what I expected of the movie (I should have known better given that the director was Darren Aronofsky), Scott gives the movie a thumbs-up:
But Darren Aronofsky, in his ambitious fusion of Old Testament awe with modern blockbuster spectacle, dwells on the dark and troubling implications of Noah’s experience. “Noah,” Mr. Aronofsky’s earnest, uneven, intermittently powerful film, is both a psychological case study and a parable of hubris and humility. At its best, it shares some its namesake’s ferocious conviction, and not a little of his madness.
. . . “Noah” is less an epic than a horror movie. There are some big, noisy battle scenes and some whiz-bang computer-generated images, but the dominant moods are claustrophobia and incipient panic. The most potent special effects are Mr. Crowe’s eyes and the swelling, discordant strains of Clint Mansell’s score. Once the waters have covered the earth and the ark is afloat, a clammy fear sets in, for both the audience and the members of Noah’s family: We’re stuck on a boat full of snakes, rats and insects, and Dad’s gone crazy.
Noah’s instability — he walks up to the boundary that separates faith from fanaticism, and then leaps across it — is not, strictly speaking, in the source material, and I will hardly be the first or last to note that Mr. Aronofsky, who wrote the screenplay with Ari Handel, has taken some liberties with the text.
Scott especially praises the acting of Russell Crowe and Jennifer Connelly, and concludes with this:
“Noah” is occasionally clumsy, ridiculous and unconvincing, but it is almost never dull, and very little of it has the careful, by-the-numbers quality that characterizes big-studio action-fantasy entertainment. The riskiest thing about this movie is its sincerity: Mr. Aronofsky, while not exactly pious, takes the narrative and its implications seriously. He tries not only to explore what the story of the flood might mean in the present age of environmental anxiety and apocalyptic religion, but also, more radically, to imagine what it might have felt like to live in a newly created, already-ruined world, and to scan the skies for clues about what its creator might be thinking.
On March 16, megachurch pastor Rick Warren tweeted this message to his 1.3 million Twitter followers:
Director of new “Noah” movie calls it “The LEAST biblical film ever made” then uses F word referring to those wanting Bible-based [films]
. . . Count conservative broadcaster Glenn Beck among the unimpressed.
Before he even saw the movie, Beck, who is Mormon, called “Noah” a “slap in the face” to religious people.
“It’s dangerous disinformation,” he told his 10 million radio listeners.
After Paramount screened “Noah” for Beck last weekend, he acknowledged that blasting the film sight unseen was “kind of a dirtball” move.
Then he blasted the movie again, calling it a “$100 million disaster.”
Beck’s biggest problem with “Noah” was Noah himself, whom Mormons believe is the angel Gabriel in human form.
“I always thought of Noah as more of a nice, gentle guy, prophet of God,” Beck said, “and not the raving lunatic Paramount found in the Bible.”
I’m glad Beck is so sure about what Noah was like. But the God who drowned everyone but Noah and his family surely wasn’t a nice, gentle guy (or “ground of being’); he was a murderous bully. And there’s one more objection:
Jerry Johnson, president of the National Religious Broadcasters, said he has the same problem with Aronofsky’s depiction of Noah.
The Bible calls Noah a “righteous man,” Johnson said. In the movie, his character is much more complex.
Noah begins the film as a rugged environmentalist who teaches his family to respect the Creator and all of creation. As he becomes increasingly zealous, Noah seems bent on destroying life rather than saving it.
“I understand that the writers want to create tension and resolve it, but they push it to a spot where if you haven’t read Genesis, you wouldn’t know whether Noah is really a man of faith or not.”
You know, in the face of this kind of stuff I’d have a lot of sympathy for the director, who was forced to add a disclaimer to the movie stating that “the film is ‘inspired’ by the Bible and true to its values but takes certain liberties with the story.”
But Aronofsky lost me at this:
Ultimately, though, the director has little patience with literalists on either side of the believer-atheist divide.
It’s ungenerous to insist, as some Christians do, that there is only one way to interpret Genesis, according to Aronofsky. But it’s also ridiculous to argue, as some atheists have, that no ark could possibly hold all the animals.
Really? Does Aronofsky think that the Ark held every species (about 7+ million), in pair or sevens, or only the “kinds,” whose number, of course, is unclear. But even the kinds would have to include elephants, whales (who couldn’t survive in hot, silty water), and predators and their prey, much less parasites and insects. All that on a wooden boat that was 450 feet long 75 feet wide, and 45 feet high, with just a few windows at the top?! Does Aronofsky also know that no wooden boat that large could possibly survive in a normal sea, much less a turbulent one. No, the atheists are right here: no matter how you construe the word “kinds”, or the number of species put on the ark, the idea won’t float. And that neglects the formidable problem of getting the penguins to Antarctica from Mount Ararat, or the marsupials and giant earthworms to Australia.
For a secular Jew to give this story any credibility at all, except as a kind of horror movie, is reprehensible.
Here’s a Paramount clip about the making of “Noah.” That Ark is ludicrous; it is a fricking box in the movie, and could never have been seaworthy.
Nothing surprises me any more when it involves Republicans and evolution (or science, or abortion, or immigration, or health care—the list is a long one). Yet this story, bizarre as it is, shows how truly benighted the members of that party are when it comes to science—and pandering to creationists.
From Americans Against the Tea Party comes a sad report: sad because it involves a little girl’s attempt to put some science into the state of South Carolina—an attempt stymied by two damn Republican politicians. The report:
Earlier this year eight-year-old Olivia McConnell wrote her state representatives to suggest that since South Carolina doesn’t currently have a state fossil, it should be given one! Olivia decided that she needed a legitimate reason to suggest this besides liking fossils, so she came up with three:
1. One of the first discoveries of a vertebrae [sic] fossil in North America was on an S.C. plantation when slaves dug up wooly mammoth teeth from a swamp in 1725.
2. All but seven states have an official state fossil.
3. “Fossils tell us about our past.”She sent the letter to Representative Robert Ridgeway (D) and Sen. Kevin Johnson (D), asking them to sponsor a bill officially making the woolly mammoth the official state fossil.
“We can’t just say we need a state fossil because I like fossils,” the third grader told The State. “That wouldn’t make sense.” She ended the letter “Please work on this for me” before signing, “Your friend, Olivia.”
Both Ridgeway and Johnson—note that they’re Democrats—agreed to sponsor two bills that made the mammoth the state fossil. As Ridgeway noted, “Why not? It can’t hurt anything. But the benefit to this is to the children and young people of South Carolina, letting them realize that they do have a say-so in what happens in South Carolina and, No. 2, it gives them experience and information about the governmental process and legislative process in South Carolina.”
Well said! And here’s Ridgeway and Johnson’s bill, an amendment to the existing law about the state emblems of South Carolina:
Whereas, giant mammoths used to roam South Carolina; and
Whereas, scientists have identified the fossils of about six hundred and fifty species of vertebrates in South Carolina to date; and
Whereas, it has been recognized that fossilized mammoth teeth were discovered in a swamp in South Carolina in 1725; and
Whereas, this discovery has been credited as the first scientific identification of a North American vertebrate fossil. Now, therefore,
Be it enacted by the General Assembly of the State of South Carolina:
SECTION 1. Article 9, Chapter 1, Title 1 of the 1976 Code is amended by adding:
“Section 1-1-712A. The Columbian Mammoth is designated as the official State Fossil of South Carolina.”
SECTION 2. This act takes effect upon approval by the Governor.
The consequences were predictable. While the bill passed the state House with overwhelming support, the damn Republicans then got into the act, led by state Senator Mike Fair (my emphasis):
Fair, who has compared the President to Osama Bin Laden, helped to block funding for a rape crisis center, called climate change a hoax, and blocked evolution from the state’s science standards, saying “I don’t have a problem with teaching theories. I don’t think it should be taught as fact,” stood up for Biblical representation in the state fossil–after all, what’s science without Jesus?
Bryant proposed an amendment to the bill to include a passage from Genesis explaining the Biblical creation of life–because why not?
“I think it’s a good idea to designate the mammoth as the state fossil, I don’t have a problem with that. I just felt like it’d be a good thing to acknowledge the creator of the fossils,” Bryant told the Daily Beast.
That of course would kill the bill because mentioning Genesis would violate the American Constitution.
Then the Lieutenant Governor, also a Republican, derailed the amendment by also injecting some religion:
Lt. Gov. Glenn McConnell [JAC: I presume he’s no relation to Olivia] blocked the proposed amendment because it introduced a new subject. He has since amended the amendment to describe the Columbian Mammoth as “created on the Sixth Day with the beasts of the field.”
The article ends on a down note:
In response to the Lt. Governor’s ruling Senator Mike Fair placed an objection to the bill, which has been put on hold until they can take what was a simple thing that would benefit children across South Carolina and make one little girl very happy–and figure out how to please the Creationists.
I predict that the mammoth is dead in the water, not only physically extinct, but symbolically extinct as well. Boo to South Carolina, its creationists and their political flacks!
A side note: a week ago McConnell was named President of the College of Charleston, where I spoke on evolution a while back and encountered some pushback from creationists (and from biologists like Rob Dillon who were pro-religion). To be fair, the College students had some objections to McConnell’s appointment. McConnell is also infamous for supporting the flying of the Confederate flag, which you can read about on his Wikipedia page.
Wikipedia gives a list of U.S. state fossils (do you know yours?), and here’s a map showing the 8 states that lack them. Surprisingly, they’re not all in the South, but of course Indiana (which is rapidly becoming the Alabama of the North) doesn’t have one, either. And Hawaii needs one; perhaps they could get a honeycreeper subfossil. Oddly, Vermont has the beluga whale, something that’s not even extinct (and I doubt is present there as a fossil)!
Here’s the stymied Olivia,with the photograph courtesy of her family and published by Fox Carolina:
And Olivia has learned her lesson:
CORRECTION: Reader John M. noted that the Americans against the Tea Party article, which I quoted above, was wrong on one quote. As John noted (my emphasis),
In [this] article, you quote the aattp article saying that “He [meaning McConnell] has since amended the amendment to describe the Columbian Mammoth as “created on the Sixth Day with the beasts of the field.”
The Daily Beast article, which seems to be the source of the aattp article, claims to have spoken to Bryant and suggests that Bryant and not McConnell made the amendment including “as created on the Sixth Day with the beasts of the field.”. This also makes more sense in the context of the aattp article as that article only criticises the two pictured Senators (Bryant and Fair) and does not criticise McConnell. If the DB is accurate, McConnell actually objected to the religious nonsense (one can at least hope).
The reader is right, and I stand corrected.
h/t: Don B.
Here’s a tw*** from Conrad Hackett via Omid Ashtari and then Matthew Cobb. Why is one country not like the others?
Hili: About today’s dialogue. Can we talk a moment?
A: What about?
Hili: This and that.
Hili: Ja w sprawie dzisiejszego dialogu. Czy możemy porozmawiać?
Ja: O czym?
Hili: Tak w ogóle.
_______