Uncle Karl on the warpath

September 16, 2010 • 4:03 pm

Oh dear Lord (that’s metaphorical, of course)!  Over at BioLogos, Karl Giberson is beginning a multi-part series of posts meant to expose my philosophical naiveté, my poor understanding of science, and my pathetic grasp of theology.  His first part continues Mooney’s metaphors of belligerence with the title, “Doing battle with Jerry Coyne’s army of straw men.”

I’m flattered that Giberson sees me as important enough to haul out the big BioLogos guns, but I’m not going to engage in further discussion about this piece—or about any of the parts to come.  For one thing, I have science to do, even though I have a “simplistic view” of how that science is done.  More important, in the end Giberson has not a shred of evidence supporting his religious beliefs, and even a swarming army of sophisticated theologians can’t change that yawning fact.


How important is hybridization?

September 16, 2010 • 7:36 am

Because I work on speciation, I’ve been inundated with emails this week (okay, really just one email) asking about Sean B. Carroll’s New York Times piece on hybrid speciation, “Hybrids may thrive where parent species fear to tread.”  I won’t summarize it here because it’s short and you can read it yourself, but the upshot is that “hybrid speciation” may be much more important than evolutionists believe.  I think Carroll’s probably wrong, and wanted to say why.

The topic of hybrid speciation comes up surprisingly often. Indeed, when I talked to a group of high school kids in Houston via Skype this Monday, one of them asked if a new species could arise from mating between two other species.  There are two ways this could happen.  The first is simple fusion: members of two different species hybridize, and their gene pools fuse back into a “new” species, supplanting the parents.  This probably happens pretty often in evolution, since geographically isolated populations that are at least on their way to becoming different species might lose their geographic isolation in the fullness of time.  This may be what is happening now with polar bears and grizzly bears.  Their ranges are changing, probably due to global warming, and they’re coming into contact.  Although they’re considered different species (they were previously limited to different areas because of their differing ecologies), hybrids—called “pizzly bears“—have been found in the wild.  Here’s one:

Fig. 1.  A slaughtered pizzly bear with patches of brown on its fur.  Its hybrid status was confirmed by DNA testing (from National Geographic.)

We’re not sure whether polars and grizzlys will fuse into one species in the next few centuries, or whether hybrids will remain only a sporadic occurrence.  But certainly fusions like this have occurred over evolutionary history.

But there’s another way a new species can form by hybridization.  Two species can hybridize, and a few individual hybrids can give rise to a third species that is distinct from the two parents and can coexist with it.  This depends on hybridization being more than a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence, and the hybrids sorting out the two parents’ genomes into a new, genetically different population that can’t reproduce well with its two parental ancestors.

This seems to occur fairly often in plants through a process called polyploidy, where an inter-species hybrid doubles its chromosome number.  I describe this in WEIT, and won’t repeat it all here.  This form of hybrid speciation may be responsible for as many as 4% of new plant species.

But the form of speciation Carroll discusses is called diploid hybrid speciation, which doesn’t involve doubling of chromosome number.  Two species simply hybridize, and the semisterile hybrid then sorts out the parental genes and chromosomes into a new genome that is reproductively isolated—and ecologically different—from those of its two parents.  Carroll describes a few cases, mostly in plants, and concludes:

The discovery of hybrid species and the detection of past hybridizations are forcing biologists to reshape their picture of species as independent units. The barriers between species are not necessarily vast, unbridgeable chasms; sometimes they get crossed with marvelous results.

I work on speciation, and although we’ve known about these cases for a while, I haven’t reshaped my picture of species—nor have many others.  The problem is that Carroll’s few examples—three sunflowers and a fly—pretty much exhaust the known cases of diploid hybrid species (there’s a North American butterfly, too, but he didn’t cite that one).  And it’s not that biologist haven’t looked for hybrid species: in many groups we have, and simply haven’t found them.  There are several thousand species of the fruit fly Drosophila, for example—it’s probably the most heavily-studied group of animals on Earth, at least from a genetic point of view.  And not a single species is a hybrid between two others.  Indeed, we have only a half-dozen or so cases of any interspecific hybrids at all being seen in the wild, and almost all of those are not only one-offs, but the animals are completely sterile (and hence evolutionary dead ends that cannot produce new species).

Ditto for birds. It’s been estimated that 10% of bird species are known to hybridize, but this should not be taken as showing that hybrid speciation is important.  For one thing, most of those hybrids are one-offs, very rare occurrences that don’t lead to anything.  And not only are they rare, but they are probably either physiologically sterile or unable to find mates.  Finally, we know of not a single bird species that is a diploid hybrid between two others.  Diploid hybrid speciation in animals is likely to be quite rare, and certainly not something that’s going to “reshape our picture of species.”  That’s not to say it’s not interesting, but just that it’s probably not very common—and hence not world-shaking.

My friend Loren Rieseberg and his colleagues discovered the three diploid species of sunflowers, and that work is deservedly famous.  But even he admits that hybridization between plant species in nature is rarer than most people suppose, and that diploid hybrid species of plants are quite uncommon (although polyploid hybrid species are not).

Fig. 2.  The diploid hybrid species Helianthus anomalus studied by Rieseberg and his colleagues.  The species derives from hybridization between H. annuus and H. petiolaris. Its novel combination of genes enabled it to colonize sand dunes where the parental species can’t live.

At the end of his piece Carroll cites the recent discovery that the genome of modern humans carries a small amount of DNA from Neanderthals.  This suggests (although there is dissent) that humans coming out of Africa in our most recent migration, about 60,000 years ago, hybridized with Neanderthal populations that derived from an earlier migration.  But this says little about diploid hybrid species, for it’s merely hybridization between different human populations. (Recall that both Neanderthals and the ancestors of modern humans are both considered members of the species Homo sapiens.)

The entire recent history of our species involves hybridization between previously isolated populations.  Those populations may have been on the way to becoming different species, but they never got there because they weren’t isolated long enough to become reproductively incompatible, and our species also devised means of transportation that linked the populations together, causing interbreeding.  Bit by bit, the human gene pool is melding.  About 20% of the genes in African-Americans, for example, came from matings with whites after they were brought from Africa as slaves.  This is precisely the same phenomenon observed in Neanderthals/modern humans, except that those populations had been isolated a bit longer.  It’s still “hybridization”, but it’s of no relevance to speciation.

Hybrids continue to fascinate both biologists and laymen alike. I’m not sure why—perhaps because they’re seen as a violation of the “natural order.”  And they are certainly interesting, and of some evolutionary importance.  But for the nonce I think biologists go overboard when claiming that hybridization will completely revise our view of nature, or of evolution.

Cat travel week: Miscellany

September 16, 2010 • 6:20 am

Here’s a collection of various cat-related pictures I’ve taken on my travels.  First up is Ottawa, Canada, home of the cat condos.  If you look at a map of Ottawa—mine is below—you may see a strange landmark.  Check out the lower middle of this photo.  Cat condos!  Right next to Canada’s Parliament building.  What are they?  (Click to enlarge all photos.)


The original Parliament cats were mousers in the government building.  They no longer have this job, but, thanks to lots of volunteers and Canadian good humor, a bunch of cat condominiums were built for strays, just a kibble’s throw from Parliament. When I visited a friend in Ottawa, I of course demanded to be taken there.  Here’s a view; you can read more about the cats and their condos on the semiofficial blog.

Now across the pond to Dorset.  I spent a week in a rented cottage, roaming the countryside and soaking up history.  Dorset is of course Thomas Hardy country: his “Wessex.” There you can visit the beautiful cottage in which he was born, as well as Max Gate, the large Victorian house he built after he was famous.

Hardy loved cats.  Alma Evers describes his penchant for felids:

Hardy was, however, like so many artists and intellectuals, above all a cat-lover. In the late nineteenth century, at least eight cats were living at Max Gate; in the afternoon saucers of milk were placed on the lawn for others who just came to tea. These animals were adored equally by Hardy and his first wife, Emma; this passion was shared by many of his friends. When W.B. Yeats came to give Hardy a literary gold medal, Emma talked to him throughout the whole of lunch about cats. In the last few years of her life, when relations between Emma and her husband had become very strained, their devotion to the cats remained one topic on which they could communicate with enthusiasm. His letters to her include reports of his having reimbursed a maid whose hat one of the cats had ruined and of a servant being instructed to cuddle a cat deprived of her kittens. The most attractive pictures of Hardy show him with cats. One in particular reveals him as an authentic cat-lover: an aged Hardy sits on a hard upright chair, lightly supporting himself against a comfortable armchair where a cat rests. Like Queen Victoria, the Hardys had a pets graveyard, complete with headstones, in the garden.

And indeed, you can still see the cats’ gravestones in the garden, though you have to hunt to find them.  Here are the headstones of two of Hardy’s favorites: Kitsey and Snowdove.  It’s said that Hardy, having stonemason skills, carved these headstones himself:

I found a copy of Tess, written in Hardy’s own hand, at the Dorset County Museum in Dorchester:

Last year I did a lot of good traveling, including a visit to Guatemala to speak at the Universidad de Francisco Marroquin.  I was also hosted at the Finca de Los Andes, a coffee farm/nature reserve owned by one of the University officials.  Here, after a hard day of observing quetzals, I’m relaxing with a drink and the resident cat Oreo.  Life doesn’t get any better than this.

I also spoke at Groningen, in the Netherlands.  It was my first trip to that country, so of course I took some time off to visit Amsterdam.  And here, in the best beer bar I’ve ever visited—Gollum—I quaffed fine Belgian ale and petted the resident cat Sloopy.  The bar was closed, but I looked so pathetic peering through the window that they let me in an hour before opening. Sloopy and I had the bar to ourselves.

I collaborate with and visit colleagues at the University of Vigo in Spain.  On one of my trips I made a nonreligious pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela.  There I found an exhibit about a Spanish writer. I don’t read Spanish well, but was fascinated by the photographs.  This writer obviously loved cats, and I took a picture of a picture.  This is one of my favorite photos of human + cat.  Sadly, I’ve forgotten who this writer was, and I can’t find him by Google-imaging, but I’m sure one of you will inform us.

UPDATE: Alert reader Luis (see comments) has identified this as Julio Cortázar, born in Argentina.

Finally, just because I came across this while searching for cat photos, here’s my father, Floyd P. Coyne, with Sophia Loren on the Acropolis in Athens, 1956.  She was 22 at the time.  That’s dad to Sophia’s right.  Check out the kitteh at lower right.  If you’re good, some day I’ll tell you the story behind this.

Okay, I had the kitteh Photoshopped, but the rest of the story, and the photo, is real.


Cat travel week: To Denali in a Beaver

September 15, 2010 • 9:50 am

Kittehs are a bit tangential here, but so be it.  A while back I was invited to Anchorage to address, strangely enough, the Alaska Bar Association.  They were interested in the evolution/intelligent design “controversy,” and brought me up north to talk and debate the notorious creationist Hugh Ross.  Alaska was one of the two remaining states I hadn’t visited (North Dakota’s the other, still unsullied by my footsteps), and I eagerly accepted.

Besides footing the expenses, they paid me something like a thousand bucks, which I vowed to apply toward seeing as much of the state as I could in five or six days after the conference.  One thing I was determined to do was fly to Mount McKinley, also called “Denali.” It’s the highest mountain in North America, rising 20,320 feet (6,194 m) above sea level.  I love mountains and never miss a chance to see the biggest ones. (I’ve hiked to Mount Everest twice and the Annapurnas once).

Seeing McKinley is best done by flying over it in a very small bush plane; these run out of the tiny town of Talkeetna. Many climbers take the planes to base camp, while tourists like me simply want to fly over the mountain.  It’s dicey, since the weather doesn’t always cooperate, but I was in luck. The weather was perfect and—double luck—some climbers were going to the mountain, and had to be dropped off on a glacier.  I gladly plonked down some bucks to go on that flight, as landing on a glacier is a rare experience.

Before the flight, I checked out the airport.  And I found the airport mascot, a small fluffy tabby whose name I’ve forgotten (click to enlarge all photos):

UPDATE: An alert reader informs me that his name is Beaver, and his official title is “Hangar Cat.” He’s still on the job.

We made friends (I didn’t have any cat food).  I was told that this kitteh was known to sneak into bush planes before takeoff, hitching rides over and to the mountains.

The plane was small (the legendary de Havilland Canada DHC-2 Beaver, from whence the cat got his name), the pilot—a woman—was amiable but all business.  They’re brave, these bush pilots, but not foolish.  She took a long time loading the plane, making sure the weight was distributed correctly.

The flight, sans cat, was stupendous.  There’s a certain feeling of insecurity flying in those tiny, bumpy planes, as if the only thing between you and death is a half inch of metal under your feet, but the views more than compensate. I rode shotgun to the pilot, and this is what you see approaching McKinley (it’s the biggest peak in the photo):

This is the glacier on which we landed:

After depositing our climbers, we found that the snow was too deep to take off.  This, of course, caused a moment of panic. But no problem for the pilot: she simply plowed a runway by driving back and forth several times across the glacier:

Made it, thanks to good luck kitteh!

Why does God hide?

September 15, 2010 • 5:32 am

Accommodationists are always telling us that we need to better understand the minds and motivations of the faithful, for only this will enable us to reach them.  (Never mind that, as Richard Dawkins points out, we’re usually trying to reach not those whose arguments we address, but the interested bystanders.)  Well, I read a fair amount of writings by religious folks, ranging from fundamentalists to sophisticated believers, and so far I can characterize the religious mind in two words.

Delusional and evasive.

Already this week we’ve had a minister come to this website and patiently explain that, yes, religion is predicated on real truths like the divinity and resurrection of Jesus, but, you know, these aren’t really the kind of truths that are true, at least not in the way that scientists and nonreligious folks think of truth, but truths that meet the religious community’s understanding of truth.

The proper response to this kind of argument is derisive laughter.  You can get more of it—and another revealing take on the “liberal” religious mind—at HuffPo, where Rabbi/real estate broker Alan Lurie answers the burning question, “Why does God hide?” Now I know that Pharyngula has sworn not to link to HuffPo, and I think I’ve said the same, but it’s hard not to because its pieces on religion are so unintentionally funny.

A normal response to a question like “why don’t we see that invisible, pink six-foot tall rabbit?” is “because it doesn’t exist”.  But when the rabbit is God, that answer is just far too simple.  Witness the tortuous logic of the sophisticated religious mind as the good Rabbi Lurie gives not one but four reasons why we can’t see God.  Here’s the first:

1) A Misunderstanding of the Nature of God

The notion that God can “appear” as a visible entity demonstrates a belief in the nature of God as a being, separate from ourselves, and living somewhere “out there”: a person, perhaps like ourselves, only much, much bigger, smarter, etc. If this is our vision of God, then we will certainly be frustrated at “his” hiding. This image of God, though, is frankly a childish one that we must all agree does not exist. The great theologians, mystics, and spiritual guides have all recognized that what we call “God” is not a limited being. What, then, is God? Well, not to be evasive, but this is not a simple answer that can be written in a short blog, and whatever I write will be inaccurate, misunderstood, and radically incomplete. I can say this, though: God’s presence is experienced, not quantified, measured, or recorded. The first step, then, is to let go of a literal vision of God, and to begin to know that the search for God is more akin to the search for love and connection than the search for a graviton or Big Foot.

He’s pulling a Fermat!  I have a marvelous explanation for why we can’t see God, but it’s too big to be contained on this website.  And what about those ancient and wonderful times when God did appear—sending his son to Earth to perform miracles, and supposedly performing miracles and interceding on Earth ever since?  Why did he withdraw, like a snail into its shell, when science came on the scene?

If you can swallow this kind of stuff with laughter instead of nausea, have a look at the rabbi’s three other explanations.  They give a really good look at how evasive the faithful can be when confronted with data—or, in this case, the absence of data.

Spirituality: the Great Communicator fails again

September 14, 2010 • 10:51 am

Regular readers of this website know that for a long time Chris Mooney has argued for the compatibility of science and faith, based largely on the observation that some scientists are religious.  He now seems to have realized that this method for rapprochement hasn’t worked very well.  The divide seems as wide as ever.  But Mooney has done his homework as a Templeton Fellow, and has a new Big Idea.  In a new editorial in USA Today, “Spirituality can bridge science-religion divide,” he takes a different tack.

His idea rests on spirituality. He notes that “spirituality is something everyone can have—even atheists.” And because we’re all brothers and sister in spirituality, presto!:  we can heal the science/religion gap.  More about that in a second, but first I want to highlight how often Mooney uses military language when describing the religion-science debate (my emphases):

We hear a lot these days about the “conflict” between science and religion — the atheists and the fundamentalists, it seems, are constantly blasting one another. But what’s rarely noted is that even as science-religion warriors clash by night, in the morning they’ll see the battlefield has shifted beneath them.

The old science-religion story goes like this: The so-called New Atheists, such as Richard Dawkins, uncompromisingly blast faith, even as religiously driven “intelligent design” proponents repeatedly undermine science. And while most of us don’t fit into either of these camps, the extremes also target those in the middle. The New Atheists aim considerable fire toward moderate religious believers who are also top scientists, such as National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins. Meanwhile, people like Collins get regular flack from the “intelligent design” crowd as well.

In this schematic, the battle lines may appear drawn, the conflict inescapable. But once spirituality enters the picture, there seems to be common ground after all.

I’m not sure what this language is about. I myself have used terms like this, but never so profusely!  Is this a way of “framing” the discussion, paving the way for Mooney to be the Jimmy Carter of accommodationism?

But never mind.  Mooney goes on to say that many scientists have spiritual experiences, or derive spiritual satisfaction, from their science. He quotes Dan Dennett, Sam Harris, and Richard Dawkins as either experiencing or approving of secular spirituality.

We can all find our own sacred things — and we can all have our own life-altering spiritual experiences. These are not necessarily tied to any creed, doctrine, or belief; they grip us on an emotional level, rather than a cognitive or rational one. That feeling of awe and wonder, that sense of a deep unity with the universe or cosmos — such intuitions might lead to a traditional religious outlook on the world, or they might not. . .

Spirituality in the sense described above does not run afoul of any of Dawkins’ atheistic values or arguments. It does not require science and faith to be logically compatible, for instance. Nor does it require that we believe in anything we cannot prove. Spirituality simply doesn’t operate on that level. It’s about emotions and experiences, not premises or postulates. . .

A focus on spirituality, then, might be the route to finally healing one of the most divisive rifts in Western society — over the relationship between science and religion. We’ll still have our evolution battles, to be sure; and the Catholic Church won’t soon give up on its wrongheaded resistance to contraception. The problems won’t immediately vanish. But each time they emerge, more and more of us will scratch our heads, wondering why.

This all sounds well and good, but in the end it’s just soothing words that don’t offer any solution to the problem.

“Spirituality” covers a variety of notions, which I think Mooney recognizes. (“Religion,” of course, also has diverse meanings, but since at least 70% of Americans believe in a personal God who interacts with the world, let’s take it as that.)  A scientist can be spiritual in many ways.  She can do science as a way to glorify or understand God, as the British natural philosophers did.  She can feel a oneness with the universe as a result of doing science, something that Carl Sagan touted. (I myself haven’t experienced that from science, though I did from various pharmaceuticals in my youth.)  She can feel wonder and amazement at how intricate nature is and how we’ve been able to understand so much of it.  She can marvel at the intricate products devised by such a simple process as natural selection.  She can be elated at finding something that nobody in the history of the world has ever known before.  And she can simply get pleasure and satisfaction from her job.

Scientists are not automatons.  Just like other people, we have emotions and feelings, and sometimes these are connected with our work.  If you want to call that “spirituality,” so be it.  But I don’t see how recognizing that both scientists and religious people feel emotions about their work or faith can heal the breach between them.  That breach is irreparable: it comes from the very different and irreconcilable methods that science and faith use to find truth—combined with the fact that science hasn’t buttressed the “truths” of faith nor has faith produced truths convergent with those of science.  Science is at war with faith because it shows that religious “truths” are bunk, and the faithful realize this.

Telling the faithful that scientists are “spiritual” won’t achieve an iota of reconciliation.  Evidence: as Mooney notes at The Intersection, Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist theological seminary, doesn’t agree.

The real question posed by Mooney’s USA Today column is whether Christians possess the discernment to recognize this postmodern mode of spirituality for what it is — unbelief wearing the language of a bland faith.

Chris Mooney might be on to something here. The American public just might be confused enough to fall for this spirituality ploy. Will Christians do the same?

Mohler may be a Baptist, but he’s not a moron.  He knows that Mooney’s “spirituality” is just science dressed in faith’s clothing, and is still a threat. Mohler isn’t buying it, and neither will other religious people who oppose science.

My online dictionary defines “spirituality” as follows:

1) of, or relating to, or affecting the human spirit or soul as opposed to material or physical things: I am responsible for his spiritual welfare

  • (of a person): not concerned with material values or pursuits

2) of or relating to religion or religious belief: Iran’s spiritual leader.

People like Mooney, Krista Tippett, and all the other spirituality mongers are counting on people conflating definition 1 with definition 2.  That’s the “reconciliation” they’re hoping for.  And it’s one that the Templeton Foundation is spending millions of dollars to promote.  But it won’t work.  We “spiritual” atheist-scientists are having none of religion, and religious people are smart enough to see that spirituality is not a form of religion.