Krugman on Republican obstructionism

September 24, 2010 • 12:59 pm

The Republican platform comprises four words: get rid of Obama.  The party has no constructive suggestions for anything, only the destructive goals of ending “socialist” programs like Medicare and dismantling Obama’s health-care reforms.  Today’s NYT has a great column, “Downhill with the G.O.P.,” by Nobelist Paul Krugman, who describes the pathetic “plans”  Republicans have for the budget.  He concludes:

Realistically, though, Republicans aren’t going to have the power to enact their true agenda any time soon — if ever. Remember, the Bush administration’s attack on Social Security was a fiasco, despite its large majority in Congress — and it actually increased Medicare spending.

So the clear and present danger isn’t that the G.O.P. will be able to achieve its long-run goals. It is, rather, that Republicans will gain just enough power to make the country ungovernable, unable to address its fiscal problems or anything else in a serious way. As I said, banana republic, here we come.

Naturally, this straight-shooting smart guy has cats.  He and his wife Robin Wells serve two of them, Doris Lessing and Albert Einstein. Here’s Krugman with Doris:

And the Krugman family:

Adult fly mimics ant larva

September 24, 2010 • 8:30 am

This is the kind of stuff I love to find in my inbox in the morning.  I work on flies, and I’ve never seen or heard of these ones until Matthew Cobb posted about them in his email Z-letter this morning. Look at the creature in the top photo.  Looks like a larva, right? In the bottom photo you can see the same beast with some larvae of the army ant Aenictus.

It’s not a larva at all: it’s an adult fly that mimics ant larvae.  To be precise, it’s a phorid fly, Vestigipoda longiseta, from southeast Asia. (“Vestigipoda” means “vestigial legs,” which these guys have.  That, of course, is  evidence that these things evolved rather than being created.)

The long “grubworm” part of the body is simply the enormously elongated and unpigmented abdomen of the adult.  The head and thorax are the dwarf structures at the left-hand side of the top photo.  This has all evolved from an ancestor that looks pretty much like the flies you know.

You can imagine why natural selection would favor this resemblance: the ants tend and feed the larvae, and mistake the flies for their own brood.  It’s a lifetime of free lunches!  The ants also protect the flies and carry them (like they carry their own larvae) when a colony is on the move.  Here’s an adult of V. longiseta being carefully carried by an Aenictus ant:

Why can’t the ants detect these intruders?  Well, they’re not terribly harmful, getting just a bit of food from the colony, so there’s probably not strong selection to weed them out.  Ants, of course, have pretty bad vision, so they probably can’t see the intruders as different from their own brood. Matthew Cobb hypothesizes, and I agree, that there’s probably chemical mimicry going on here as well: the hydrocarbon molecules on the fly’s cuticule may well resemble the compounds on ant larvae, so that the ants, who “taste” these hydrocarbons, are fooled by chemical mimicry. This could easily be settled with a bit of gas chromatography.

There are several species of Vestigipoda in southeast Asia.  Here’s a shot of the head (right), thorax and first abdominal segment of another species, a Vestigipoda maschwitzi female (from Disney et al, 1998).  You can clearly see the features of a fly.

This is not, as Christopher Taylor at Catalogue of Organisms points out, a case of neoteny—that is, of juvenile flies becoming sexually mature. (An example of that is the axolotl salamander, Ambystoma mexicanum, in which gilled juveniles are able to reproduce.)  No, these phorids have the regular larval stages of flies, but then go through normal metamorphosis, winding up as an adult with ant-larval features.

Curiously, all known larval mimics of Vestigipoda are females.  Where are the males?  Taylor suggests that they may be “normal” flying flies, in which case they’d have to somehow sneak into the ant colonies to mate.

Phorids are just plain weird: they’re among the smallest flies, many are wingless, and there are some vicious parasites among them.  Have a look at this one, which is about the most gruesome fly I know of.  Its larvae live inside ants, crawl into their heads, decapitate them, and then use the empty head for protection during pupation:

There’s simply no end to the wonderful stuff evolution comes up with.  There are tons of weird flies out there; I’m planning “Fly Week” when I return.

h/t:  Catalogue of Organisms

___________

Disney, R. H. L., A. Weissflog & U. Maschwitz. 1998. A second species of legless scuttle fly (Diptera: Phoridae) associated with ants (Hymenoptera: Formicidae). Journal of Zoology 246 (3): 269-274.

Maruyama, M., R. H. L. Disney & R. Hashim. 2008. Three new species of legless, wingless scuttle flies (Diptera: Phoridae) associated with army ants (Hymenoptera: Formicidae) in Malaysia. Sociobiology 52 (3): 485-496.

Peregrinations

September 24, 2010 • 5:36 am

Starting tomorrow I’ll be travelling until October 5: the Grand East Coast Tour from Washington D.C. to Boston.  I’ll be writing as often as the muses and my online access allow, but my trusty pinch-bloggers Greg Mayer and Matthew Cobb will also be posting.  And yes, the Caturday Felids will still appear.

UPDATE:  This isn’t an academic trip: I’ve been stuck in Chicago all summer, so I’m going to visit folks and have some good noms.

Nobel Laureate retracts two papers

September 24, 2010 • 5:17 am

The latest issue of Science contains a strange “letter”: a retraction by Linda B. Buck of a 2006 paper in the journal.  In case you don’t know her, Buck won the Medicine/Physiology Nobel Prize in 2004 for absolutely stunning work on olfaction revealing how odors are detected as different by the odor-receptor genes.  (I discuss this work in Chapter 3 of WEIT.)

The retraction is behind a paywall, so I’ve reproduced the entire short letter here:

Retraction

In the Report “Combinatorial Effects of Odorant Mixes in Olfactory Cortex” (1), we described subcellular patterns of Arc (arg3.1) mRNA expression in anterior piriform cortex neurons after mice had been exposed to odorants. We reported that some cortical neurons express Arc in response to a mix of two odorants but not either odorant alone. My laboratory has been unable to reproduce this finding. I am therefore retracting the Report. I sincerely apologize for any confusion that its publication may have caused. Zhihua Zou declined to sign this Retraction.

Linda B. Buck

As reported by The Scientist, she’s also retracted a 2008 paper in Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. based on an earlier paper that was also retracted (go to the report for much more information):

These retractions, a 2006 Science paper and a 2005 Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences (PNAS) paper, are tied to a 2001 Nature paper that she retracted in 2008, due to the inability “to reproduce the reported findings” and “inconsistencies between some of the figures and data published in the paper and the original data,” according to the retraction. Zou was the first author on all three papers and responsible for conducting the experiments.

The FHCRC [The Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, where the work was done] is currently conducting an investigation into the issue, said Kristen Woodward, senior media relations manager, but no findings of misconduct have been made. John Dahlberg of the Office of Research Integrity declined to comment on the matter.

Curiously, although Buck’s letter mentions that “Zhihua Zou declined to sign this Retraction,” The Scientist reports that “the current location of Zou is unknown.” (He doesn’t appear to have an academic or research job.)

Also according to The Scientist, these retractions won’t have a huge impact on the field, and aren’t related to the work for which Buck won her Nobel.

Buck has of course done the right thing, especially by trying to reproduce the results in her own lab.  If this is a case of fraud that Buck wasn’t aware of (and I suspect it is), it shows that senior investigators who employ and nominally supervise a researcher can be duped.  After all, the “boss” doesn’t hang over the minions’ shoulders as they work in the lab.  But investigations may reveal if she should have known at the time about problems with Zou’s work.

h/t: Mr. Moto

Another one bites the dust

September 23, 2010 • 11:14 am

Oh dear, oh dear. Many of our erstwhile allies are defecting to the ranks of accommodationists where, embraced by the warm hugs of the faithful, they give raspberries to the Gnu Atheists.  The most disappointing of these is Caspar Melville, editor of the very good British magazine New Humanist.  I read it all the time.  Two days ago, confessing himself “bored” by the GA, he wrote an article for the Guardian, “Beyond New Atheism,” that explains his defection.

I would have thought that Melville, in his wisdom, could at least present some good arguments for his change of position.  But no, he recycles the same tired and fallacious tropes we’ve heard for a while:

1.  The Gnu Atheists ignore theology:

Perhaps the classic New Atheist quote is Dawkins’s response to those who accuse him of dismissing theology from a position of ignorance: “Look,” he told Laurie Taylor, “somebody who thinks the way I do doesn’t think theology is a subject at all. So to me it is like someone saying they don’t believe in fairies and then being asked how they know if they haven’t studied fairy-ology.”

For someone to say this, and not qualify it, is completely bizarre, because it’s not accurate.  Melville has certainly read The God Delusion and knows that, despite this quote, the book does address—and refute—all of the most important theological arguments for the existence of God.  Yes, of course others like Karen Armstrong, Terry Eagleton and John Haught have suggested new and different views of God, but is it Dawkins’s business to address every argument ever made for God? Had he done that, the book would have been five times as long and less influential.  More important, the “new” arguments for God are supported by exactly as much evidence as the old ones: none.  It’s curious that people like Melville who make the Courtier’s Reply almost never suggest which important arguments for God are being neglected by the Gnus. Perhaps Melville can direct us to some of the other good evidence for God, Jesus, and Mohamed that Dawkins and Company have overlooked?

In the end, even the most sophisticated theology comes down to word-parsing, adducing no convincing evidence for God. Nor do the sophisticated theologians explain how they know their interpretation is correct, while all the different and conflicting things said by other theologians, and those of other faiths, are wrong.

When judging theology, I adhere to Hitchens’s Dictum:  “What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof.”  Without proof, we needn’t take it seriously.  And besides, the Gnu Atheists have certainly not ignored theology.  All of them—Hitchens, Harris, Dawkins, and even small fry like me—dismiss religious arguments after due consideration.

As for the rest of theology—whether Jebus turns into a cracker, whether Mary was transported bodily to heaven (and whether Mohamed got a ride up there on his horse)—well, what’s the point of discussing these if there’s no evidence for God in the first place?  It’s like debating whether the Flying Spaghetti Monster is made of vermicelli, bucatini, or capellini.

2.  The “religion” discussed by Gnu Atheists is crude and simplistic.

If, as Norman also argues, New Atheism can be over-generalising and crude in its response to religion, this is because it is a response to crude and nonspecific articulations of religiosity – what could be less specific than bombing a skyscraper, or cruder than Biblical creationism? . .

But in another interview, this time with a fierce critic of New Atheism, Terry Eagleton says: “Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.” Put this way, Eagleton seems right. I agree with him, too.

The picture of religion that emerges from New Atheism is a caricature and both misrepresents and underestimates its real character. “Religion,” Richard Norman writes “is a human creation … a mirror which humanity holds up to itself and in which it sees itself reflected. Human beings attribute to their gods all their own human qualities – cruelty revenge and hatred, but also love and compassion and mercy. That’s why you can find a justification for anything, good or bad, in religion.”

Here Melville makes the familiar argument that beliefs in personal gods, Heaven, Hell, the Resurrection, and so on are “caricatures”.  Presumably real religion is that represented by Eagleton, Armstrong, and their like: faith involving an apophatic deity or a god who doesn’t really do anything in the world, much less sending us to Heaven or Hell.

Let me enlighten Mr. Melville, at least about my country.  According to a 2004 Gallup poll, 81% of Americans believe in Heaven, 70% in Hell, 78% in angels, and 70% in the devil.  A Pew survey in 2008 showed that 60% of Americans believe in a personal god (with 71% “absolutely certain” of his existence) and 63% see their preferred religious texts as “the word of God.”

Want more?  74% of Americans believe in life after death, as do 61% of American Hindus.  62% of American Buddhists believe in Nirvana.

Now you could claim that all these people really believe in a metaphorical Hell, a metaphorical life after death (whatever that is), a metaphorical devil, and so on—but you know that’s not true. And I doubt that all those Muslims really believe in a metaphorical Paradise.  I keep quoting these statistics, and accommodationists, whose ranks now include Melville, keep ignoring them.  They pretend that everyone‘s faith is just like that of Terry Eagleton or Karen Armstrong.  Pardon my French, but that’s a crock!  I can’t take anyone seriously who asserts that Gnu Atheists address a form of faith that nobody holds.

Why Melville’s apostasy?  Well, besides the fact that he’s bored—an admission that’s insulting to all of those who’ve worked so hard fighting for reason and against faith—he thinks that allying himself with the faithful will help us have newer and subtler debates on God.  I have no idea what he’s talking about.

So the purpose of this evening’s event [a New Humanist discussion at the Royal Society of the Arts] is to see if we can find a mode of inquiry into religion, faith, belief and non-belief, more consistent with William than with Jesse James.

It might be that we will map out a new, specific, patient and subtle future for the God debate.

Good luck with that.  Melville has faith that an alliance with the faithful will, by circumventing the “strident” new atheists, create productive “alliances with moderate religionists on specific topics – faith schools, fundamentalism, terrorism.”  I see this as wishful thinking, for I doubt that an alliance between atheists and moderate religionists can do much about terrorism or fundamentalism.  And do they really think that an alliance between atheists, Anglicans, Catholics, and liberal Jews will rid Old Blighty of faith schools? Don’t make me laugh.

h/t:  Butterflies and Wheels

Parting the Red Sea

September 23, 2010 • 6:27 am

PLoS ONE (Public Library of Science) is an open-access journal with an unusual mission:

Too often a journal’s decision to publish a paper is dominated by what the Editor/s think is interesting and will gain greater readership — both of which are subjective judgments and lead to decisions which are frustrating and delay the publication of your work. PLoS ONE will rigorously peer-review your submissions and publish all papers that are judged to be technically sound.

In practice, what this means is that if the reviewers or editors can’t find anything technically wrong with the paper, they’ll publish it, even if the results are completely trivial or irrelevant to what’s going on in the rest of science.  And, it seems, even the “rigorous peer review” sometimes fails, as in the case of the putative “missing link” Darwinius, which was rushed to print, apparently without much rigor on the part of reviewers.  It proved to be controversial and almost certainly not a link between the two major branches of primates.

I go back and forth on whether this journal is needed, or useful.  Sometimes data that are good but not earthshaking need a home.  On the other hand, there are plenty of second- to fifth-rate journals that will publish nearly anything, including the kind of paper that PLoS ONE handles, so why do we need another one?  Many scientists, I think, regard PLoS ONE as a place to give extra cachet to those almost-unpublishable papers.  Rather than putting them in Nutting’s Bird Journal, we can put them in PLoS ONE and hope that some of the glitter of the other PLoS journals, which publish much better stuff, rubs off.

PLoS ONE’s reputation was, however, tarnished by its publication of the Darwinius paper, implying that even its vaunted “rigor” was negotiable if the discovery was sufficiently buzz-worthy.  And now that reputation has slipped a huge notch.  For, as many of you know (see the post at Pharyngula), the journal has just published a paper modeling how the Red Sea might have parted to allow the Jews to leave Egypt.

The paper, “Dynamics of wind setdown at Suez and the eastern Nile Delta” is by Carl Drews and Weiquing Han from the University of Colorado at Boulder.   It’s long, technical, and boring, but the upshot is that high winds, blowing for a sufficiently long period, could have driven shallow waters in the Nile delta back, exposing a reef that was about 2 meters underwater.  The exposure could have lasted long enough to permit a “mixed group of people” (aka Israelites) to cross a temporary land bridge.  Then, when the winds abated, the waters would rejoin, presumably drowning anyone in pursuit.  The paper uses mathematical modeling, hydrology and satellite mapping to show that the exposure of mud flats could have occurred in two locations with 100 km/hr winds.

This is a not-so-transparent attempt to give plausibility to the story from Exodus 14 of Moses parting the waters.  But why on earth would two scientists want to show that one part of a fictitious story is plausible?  Well, check out author Carl Drews’s website,  Christianity and Evolution. Although Drews is a theistic evolutionist who doesn’t like intelligent design, he’s also a devout Christian who spends a lot of time trying to reconcile science with the Bible.  He even has a credo, “What I believe“, which includes this:

I believe that the Holy Bible is the true word of God. I believe everything that the Bible says about itself. The Bible is divinely inspired and divinely passed through history over thousands of years. The witness of the Bible is essential for understanding our faith, and for living out our lives in service to Jesus Christ. The Word of God is our Rock, the foundation upon which our Christian faith is based.

I believe that the Bible never requires me to bear false witness about God’s creation. [Drews’s emphasis]

I reject the idea that evolution and Christianity are always and must be in opposition to each other. I reject the notion that if the scientific theory of evolution is true, then Christianity must be false. I reject the idea that people who accept evolution must be atheists. I reject the idea that the scientific theory of evolution fundamentally denies the idea of God the Creator. I reject the idea that evolution and Christian faith are inevitably in conflict with each other and cannot be reconciled.

Next to these great beliefs, a biological theory seems pretty unimportant. That impression is correct. Do I “Believe in Evolution” like I believe in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ? Absolutely not! I accept the Theory of Evolution like I use the Quadratic Formula; they are both useful for a certain class of problems that I sometimes have to solve. I certainly do not place my eternal life and soul in the care of a scientific theory or a mathematical formula. I am no atheist. I place my entire being in the hands of God Almighty through his Son, Jesus Christ.

Do you sense here a motivation for the paper? Anyway, it’s a ludicrous endeavor, and shame on PLoS ONE for publishing it.  If that journal is in the business of publishing scientific tests of fictitious Bible stories, let’s see some papers like these:

  • An investigation of whether any natural force could make the wheels simultaneously fall off the chariots of an entire army. After all, Exodus 14 says, “And it came to pass, that in the morning watch the LORD looked unto the host of the Egyptians through the pillar of fire and of the cloud, and troubled the host of the Egyptians,  and took off their chariot wheels, that they drave them heavily. . “
  • A refutation of the idea that the wind posited by Drews and Han could have produced the scenario given in the Bible, which calls for waters rising above the reef on both sides: “. . and the waters were a wall unto them on their right hand, and on their left.”  After all, the diagram of Drews and Han shows no “wall” of water on either side, but waters lower than the “crossing” reef on both sides, but which gradually rise up with distance on one side and not the other—the scenario a strong wind would produce.
  • A scientific study of whether there is historical evidence for a mass exodus of Jews from Egypt to the Sinai around 1200 BC.  Oh, wait—that’s already been done.  There isn‘t any evidence.

Given the lack of historical evidence for an Exodus, why is PLoS ONE in the business of publishing papers supporting its likelihood, especially when the scenario of Drews and Han doesn’t correspond at all to the scenario described in the Old Testament?  After all, if you’re going to support a story, how can you justify picking those parts of the story that could have happened, and ignoring those that couldn’t? What about those walls of water on either side of the Israelites?

This is a huge embarrassment for the journal.  But I predict that, rather than apologizing for their bad judgment, the editors will—as they did for Darwinius—defend their actions.  And that will open the floodgates for a whole host of Jebus-scientists to publish “technically sound” defenses of the Bible.

Don’t miss Exodus 14 in The LOLcat Bible.