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.
There’s now a video of this incident. I can’t embed it here, but I can give you the YouTube link, which shows a southern right whale (Eubalaena australis) breaching off South Africa and crashing into a boat. It’s from CBS News; you’ll have to endure a short commercial but it’s worth it.
A CBS interview with the couple on the boat is here.
h/t: AJ
Rod Dreher, director of publications for the John Templeton Foundation, has stopped posting at Beliefnet to edit Templeton’s new online magazine, Big Questions, which has absorbed the older magazine In Character: A Journal of Everyday Virtues. The first issue features pieces by many of the usual suspects, including Simon Conway Morris, David Sloan Wilson, Heather Wax, and, of course, Robert Wright. Several of the authors have their research or their projects funded by Templeton.
You may be surprised to see Susan Jacoby among the authors. If you don’t know her, she wrote two books that were highly regarded by militant fundamentalist atheists (and many others): Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism and The Age of American Unreason. Don’t be surprised if in future months you see others like her writing for Big Questions. Why? Well, as Rod Dreher pointed out when soliciting pieces for the site:
The future is not good. Word of warning to you aspiring freelance writers: don’t quit your day job. I’m very serious.
Happily for writers, the Web publication the John Templeton Foundation will soon launch, Big Questions Online, will be paying good money for essays. We’re interested in smart, insightful pieces on science, religion, markets, morals, and any combination of the four.
The more people like Jacoby publish on Templeton’s website, the more respectability accretes to their mission of reconciling science and superstition. This is the big megaphone that Templeton hands to journalists, who get paid handsomely to shout. Templeton is perfectly within its rights to do this, of course. And—given the American notion that money talks—most wouldn’t even find it unfair. But I can say that it’s disgusting.
A while back I wrote about Francis Collins’s new edited collection, Belief: Reading on the Reason for Faith, and, deciding he had crossed the line between science and woo, recommended that he step down as director of the National Institutes of Health. He won’t do that, of course. But it’s not just the militant fundamentalist atheists who worry about this. Prompted by Collins’s book, the editors of Nature Immunology recently published an editorial called “Of Faith and Reason” with the subheader, “The openly religious stance of the NIH director could have undesirable effects on science education in the United States.” Decrying the low acceptance of evolution in the U.S. compared to Europe and Japan, they indict Collins for contributing to our climate of ignorance:
The publication of the book has great potential to reignite some nagging doubts over the election of Francis Collins as director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Many hoped that after his nomination he would refrain from publicly discussing his religious convictions and step down from projects such as Biologos, which attempts to reconcile evolution with the idea of God. This, however, has not been the case, and although most agree that Francis Collins is a skilled administrator, there are justified concerns that such public embrace of religion from an influential scientist may have negative consequences on science education.
A correction: Collins did indeed step down from BioLogos when he went to NIH. (The editorial makes one other error: it was a U.S. District Court, not the U.S. Supreme Court, that decided Kitzmiller et al. vs. Dover Area School District et al. in 2005.)
. . . Given that US culture has a tendency to blur the distinction between man and office, the nomination of someone with strong evangelical convictions as the director of the NIH can further muddle the creationist versus- evolutionist debate in science education. Although written before his nomination, the new book is being promoted using the author’s credentials as director of the NIH. In the introduction and in interviews surrounding the book release, he describes his belief in a non-natural, non-measurable, improvable deity that created the universe and its laws with humans as the ultimate aim of its creation. Some might worry that describing scientists as workers toiling to understand the laws and intricacies of this divine creation will create opportunities for creationism adepts.
While its parent journal, Nature, continues to osculate the rump of faith, Nature Immunology takes a firm stance against woo. It’s ironic that while accommodationists of all stripes chastise atheists, claiming that our hard-line distinction between science and faith drives people back to creationism, it takes a European journal to see Collins for what he is: a peddler of superstition.
Just a note: if you haven’t posted here before, there might be a slight delay before your initial post shows up. I have to approve all first-timers, which I’ll do unless you’re a creationist, an annoying troll, or a bull-goose loony. Since I’m not monitoring email 24/7, you might see some time elapse before your post appears.
Over at the BioLogos home page you’ll see an ad at the top (patience: it’s one of the ads that changes as you watch) for a series of symposia called—I can hardly bear to type this— “The Vibrant Dance of Faith and Science.” The topic of first the meeting, to be held in Austin, Texas in October, is “How Science Supports Christianity and How Christianity Explains Science.” You’d think that, given the title and the fact that BioLogos (itself sponsored by the Templeton Foundation) is one of the groups paying for the meeting, the conference would be accommodationist, showing the faithful how they could harmonize their faith with the facts of science.
No chance. Two of the other sponsors of this symposium are the Discovery Institute and Hugh Ross’s Reasons to Believe. The Discovery Institute, of course, is the nerve center for Intelligent Design in America, and Hugh Ross is an young old-earth creationist. The speakers in the symposium include, besides BioLogos president Darrel Falk, Hugh Ross, Stephen Meyer of the Discovery Institute, Dinesh D’Souza, and several other people who look suspiciously like creationists.
Now as far as I know BioLogos professes to be anti-creationist and anti-ID. They claim to fully accept the findings of science, which, last time I looked, supported evolution. Why the bloody hell are they sponsoring a meeting that includes creationist speakers yet tries show the mutually supportive interactions between science and faith?
The paper I want to write about today, by Thomas Deméré and his colleagues, is two years old, but deserves wider circulation than it’s gotten. I came across it as a citation in a new Evolution paper by Douglas Futuyma on evolutionary constraints (reference below; do read Doug’s paper if you’re in the field, as it’s one of the few sensible articles on the topic). Deméré et al. is one of the best papers I’ve seen about a transitional form.
The transition is between modern baleen whales and their toothed ancestors. Baleen whales are in the suborder Mysticeti of cetaceans; all of the species are toothless. (The other order, the toothed whales, is Odontoceti.) Instead of teeth, mysticetes have baleen, a basketlike substance in the upper jaw which is used in filter feeding. Baleen is not bone: it’s made from keratin that’s secreted from the whale’s palate. The secreted substance is abraded by the whale’s tongue, producing a filamentous, fringe-like structure :
Fig. 1. Slaughtered whale showing baleen in the upper jaw.
The baleen basket is used in feeding, and acts like a sieve. The whale gapes its mouth, gulping in a huge volume of water containing small fish, zooplankton, and invertebrates. It then closes its jaws a bit and, using its tongue, squeezes out the water, trapping the prey against the baleen. They then go down the hatch. Deméré et al. describe a baleen whale’s feeding gulp as “the world’s largest biomechanical event,” since it can take in, and expel, some 70 tons of water at one time.
Although their prey are small, baleen whales can get very big. They include the largest animal that ever lived, the blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus), which eats as much as 1640 kg (1.8 tons) of food per day.
Baleen had a lot of uses during the days of whaling; one was to make the supporting struts in “whalebone” corsets. It doesn’t fossilize well, so the ancestry of baleen whales is deduced from other skeletal features and from DNA. From these we know that the earliest baleen whales actually had teeth. The paper by Deméré is about this transition.
Before I mention their results, I want to show one photo from their paper that supports this evolutionary scenario. Baleen whales, though toothless, develop tooth buds when they’re embryos. In toothed whales these buds go on to become the adult teeth, but in baleen whales they degrade and disappear. I mention this in WEIT as evidence for evolution—creationists can’t explain why teeth begin to form and then disappear—but Deméré show a nice photo of these tooth buds that I hadn’t previously seen:
Fig. 2 (from Démeré et al.). An embryonic fin whale (Balaenoptera physalus), a mysticete, dissected to show tooth buds in upper jaw.
Deméré et al.’s main result is this: they document the existence of a transitional form between baleen whales and their toothed ancestors. This form apparently had both teeth and a small fringe of baleen from the upper jaw. It could thus not only chomp its prey, but strain it. This was a step on the way to the fully-sieving lifestyle of modern baleen whales.
The paper includes two kinds of evidence for a tooth-baleen transition. The first is paleontological, based on a fossil whale, Aetiocetus weltoni, found in Oregon. It dates from 24-28 mya, close to the time when we see the first truly toothless mysticetes. The whale is clearly on the mysticete side of the toothed/toothless branching based on several skeletal features, but has teeth; it’s an early toothed mysticete. But when the authors reexamined they jaw they found previously overlooked grooves (“nutrient foramina”) in the lateral parts of the palate. In modern baleen whales, these slits allow passage of both nerves and blood vessels that feed the baleen-forming parts of the epithelium. (Baleen grows continuously throughout the whale’s life.)
These slits aren’t found in modern toothed whales. Here they are in the mysticete fossil:
Fig. 3. (From Démeré et al.) Upper jaw of the Aetiocetus weltoni. fossil. Left: Teeth. Right: Enlargement of section in the rectangle. Arrows show the depressions (sulci) and nutrient holes (foramina) that, in modern baleen whales, allow passage of nerves and arteries to baleen-forming epithelium.
They also found these slits in two other species of fossil mysticetes. It seems likely, then, that these fossils, which occur at just the right time in the fossil record, had both teeth and some rudimentary baleen. They are transitional forms because of both their morphology and the time when we see them.
The second line of evidence is genetic—DNA sequences. The temporary “teeth” in fetal mysticetes have dentin (the calcified tissue that makes up much of the teeth), but lack enamel. Working under the hypothesis that baleen whales evolved from toothed whales that had both dentin and enamel, the authors made the following prediction:
Given that edentulous [toothless] mysticetes recently descended from ancestors with fully mineralized dentitions, we predicted that enamel-specific SCPP [secretory calcium-binding phosprotein] genes would be present, but not functional, in modern baleen whales.
That is, the baleen whale genome should contain “dead genes” that made tooth enamel in their ancestors. (As I explain in WEIT, when evolution eliminates a structure, it does so not by excising the DNA for the structure from the genome, but by silencing the genes.)
And, by doing DNA sequencing of three enamel-specific genes from 12 species of mysticete, 4 species of odontocete, and some related terrestrial mammals, their prediction was confirmed. Two of these genes were completely dead: they had experienced “frame-shift” mutations that throw the DNA code completely out of whack, as well as mutations to “stop codons” that prematurely terminate the production of a protein. The other gene had a large section missing.
What better evidence for a toothed-whale ancestry for mysticetes? Together with the existence of transitory teeth in embryonic baleen whales, and now the fossil evidence, it’s dead certain that modern baleen whales weren’t created, but evolved from toothed whales about 30 million years ago.
Why did it happen? The best guess is that some individuals among toothed whales had genes for secreting a substance from their palate that could act as a sieve, allowing them to eat not only large prey, but smaller ones at the same time. By being better fed, the genes of these individuals would stand a better chance of being passed on to future generations. Presumably there was a reproductive advantage to further specialization, so that this lineage completely lost its teeth and relied entirely on sieving. Here’s what Aetiocetus weltoni probably looked like:
Fig. 4 (from Démeré et al.). Artist Carl Buell’s reconstruction of Aetiocetus weltoni showing the simultaneous presence of teeth and baleen.
The authors say their results are important because they overturn an earlier view of a near-instantaneous origin of baleen whale feeding:
However, most recent phylogenetic analyses of Mysticeti instead imply a direct saltatory transition from an ancestral form with tooth-lined jaws to the modern condition where the jaws are toothless with right and left racks of baleen suspended from the palate.
But that is weird. No evolutionist would say that baleen-feeding arose from tooth feeding in a single sudden leap. There are many modifications of the skull and palate required to go from one lifestyle to the other, and that would take time. And it’s highly unlikely that a single mutation got rid of teeth and produced the full baleen basket in a single step. The “sudden origin theory” is a straw man. But that doesn’t matter. The authors have shown the one thing that counts: that there was a transitional form—one that was a plausible improvement over the ancestral condition—between toothed and toothless whales. Further, the genetic evidence shows that evolutionary biology is not just in the business of concocting stories: it can make predictions, test them, and verify them. Yay us!
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Deméré, T. A., M. R. McGowen, A. Berta, and J. Gatesy. 2008. Morphological and molecular evidence for a stepwise evolutionary transition from teeth to baleen in mysticete whales. Systematic Biology 57:15-37.
Futuyma, D. J. 2010. Evolutionary constraint and ecological consequences. Evolution 64:1865-1884.
ABC news reports that a southern right whale (Eubalaena australis) landed on and crushed a boat near Robben Island, South Africa (you’ll remember the island as the place where Nelson Mandela was jailed for nearly two decades). Here are a couple of photos, and there are more at the site. The whale apparently hit the boat by accident while breaching, and swam off seemingly unharmed—but missing a few chunks of blubber.
The southern right whale is a baleen whale, and we’ll have a nice story tomorrow on their evolution.
I’ve always tried to avoid thinking about free will, realizing that that way lies madness. As a materialist, I can’t see any way that our thoughts and behavior, which come from our neurons and muscles, which themselves result from the interaction between our genes and our environment, could truly be influenced by our “will.” Yes, there may be quantum uncertainties, but I don’t see how those can be influenced by our minds, or play any role in the notion that our decisions are freely taken. But if you don’t believe in free will, you might be tempted to stop thinking so hard about what you do, or start questioning the idea of moral responsibility. The end result is nihilism.
Nevertheless, like all humans I prefer to think that I can make my own decisions. I decided to adopt an uneasy compromise, believing that there’s no such thing as free will but acting as if there were. And I decided to stop thinking about the issue, deliberately avoiding the huge philosophical literature on free will.
I was forced to revisit the topic, however, by an environmental incursion: a new “inaugural article” in PNAS by biologist Anthony Cashmore (reference below; online access is free). Cashmore argues persuasively that free will is an illusion and “a belief in free will is akin to religious beliefs”:
The reality is, not only do we have no more free will than a fly or a bacterium, in actuality we have no more free will than a bowl of sugar. The laws of nature are uniform throughout, and these laws do not accommodate the concept of free will. Some will argue that once we understand better the mechanistic details that underlie consciousness, then we will understand free will. Whatever the complexities of the molecular details of consciousness are, they are unlikely to involve any new law in physics that would break the causal laws of nature in a nonstochastic way. . . The irony here is that in reality, a belief in free will is nothing less than a continuing belief in vitalism—a concept that we like to think we discarded well over 100 years ago!
It’s a nice article, touching on things like the evolutionary advantage of consciousness, and the idea of thinking we have free will, and though I don’t agree with all of it, it’s well worth worth a read. Cashmore winds up arguing that in light of the absence of free will, we should reform the judicial system. Since we partially exculpate mentally disturbed criminals on the grounds they are not “free” to refrain from crime, so we should reconsider our ideas of punishment for “regular” criminals, whose acts are equally determined. As Cashmore argues:
First, the legal system assumes a capacity for individuals not only to distinguish between right and wrong, but to act according to those distinctions—that is, an integral component of the legal system is a belief in free will. Furthermore, the legal system assumes that it is possible to distinguish those individuals who have this capacity of free will from those who lack it (32).
Cashmore ponders the implications of this view for the legal and judicial systems: should we, and how should we, punish people whose crimes don’t reflect free will? Many others, of course, have trod this ground, but the question is still worth considering. Two followup letters in PNAS, from Henrik Ancksäter (a forensic psychiatrist) and James McEvoy (a chemist), take issue with Cashmore’s ideas, but he gets the better of his interlocutors in his responses. (Links to the letters are below.)
Stimulated by Cashmore’s article, I asked a philosopher friend to recommend some readings on free will. He sent me a long list of books and articles, at the top of which—as I mentioned last week—stood Thomas Pink’s Free Will: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2004). I found it a pretty dire book. Although Pink gives a useful summary of the history of philosophical arguments about free will, he completely neglects science, eventually claiming that free will is a reality largely because we feel that we have it. Pink’s neglect of physics, chemistry, and biology—that is, the whole area of naturalism and determinism—is inexcusable. I’ll pursue some of the other books on my reading list, but I’m not going to pay serious attention to any philosopher who neglects the advances of science. For the nonce, I’ll view free will through a scientific ocular, adhering to Cashmore’s definition:
I believe that free will is better defined as a belief that there is a component to biological behavior that is something more than the unavoidable consequences of the genetic and environmental history of the individual and the possible stochastic laws of nature.
And if you accept this definition, there’s no way to respond to the question of “Do we have free will?” except with a vigorous “No!” If you answer, “yes,” then you’re tacitly accepting a mind/body duality and a species of vitalism that has no part in science or naturalism. As I see it, you can no more be consistently scientific and believe in free will than you can be consistently scientific and believe in a theistic God.
But of course all of this, including Cashmore’s arguments that are intended to persuade, are predicated on the pretense that we really do have free will. Maybe all these articles and letters are determined, as is our openness to accepting their arguments. This way, of course, lies madness—or Camus.
“There is but one truly philosophical problem, and that is suicide.” —Albert Camus
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Cashmore, A. R. 2010. The Luretian swerve: The biological basis of human behavior and the criminal justice system. Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA 107:4499-4504.
Anckarsärter, H. 2010. Has biology disproved free will and moral responsibility? Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA 107: USA E114.
McEvoy, J. P. 2010. A justice system that denies free will is not based on justice. Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA 107:E81
Cashmore, A. R. 2010. Reply to Anckarsärter: A belief in free will is based on faith. Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA 107: USA E115.
Cashmore, A. R. 2010. Reply to McEvoy: The judicial system is based on a false understanding of human behavior. 107: Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA 107: USA E82.