My world is turned upside down.  Shepard Smith rips BP a new one—at Fox News! And this comment by BP CEO Tony Hayward will go down in history along with “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job” and “Mission accomplished”:

“The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume.”

Let’s see.  The volume of the Gulf of Mexico is 642 trillion gallons.  I guess we shouldn’t get seriously worried unless the volume of oil leaking from Deepwater Horizon is, say, 0.1% of that every year.  That’s 40 million barrels of oil per day.  NO WORRIES—we’re nowhere near that!

Yes, it’s at HuffPo, but it’s still true.  The giant oarfish, also known as “the king of herrings” (Regalecus glesne), is the world’s largest bony fish (“teleost”), and  can grow up to 11 meters (36 feet) long!  It’s rarely photographed because it lives in the deep sea, but one just washed up on the coast of Sweden, where it hasn’t been seen for 150 years.  They eat plankton. Until today I didn’t know these creatures existed.

Here’s one about to become an ex-oarfish:

Here’s what appears to be the only existing film of non-dying oarfish, filmed at 1500 feet by an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico.  Look at that crazy headcomb and undulating dorsal fin!

Several people on this website have raised the question of group selection, and asked me what I thought of it.  The idea that selection operates on entire groups rather than individuals, and can lead to the evolution of group-level traits (altruism is supposed to be one of these), has been revived by several people. Among them are E. O. Wilson, but especially David Sloan Wilson, who has defended his notion of group selection in a fifteen-part (!) series on HuffPo, infelicitiously called “Truth and Reconciliation for Group Selection.”

I’ve avoided discussing this topic because it’s not my own area of research and it’s a thicket of contentious claims and counterclaims that often seem more semantic than biological.  And I don’t have the mathematical expertise to appraise all the models.  Nevertheless, the field seems to be converging on a solution (which is not without dissent!).

Fortunately, you can get an excellent summary of the state of the field in a little over an hour, thanks to the London Evolutionary Research Network, a consortium of researchers who hold regular meetings and debates. Last July, they held a very nice debate, “Is natural selection at the group level an important evolutionary force?” which is now available at Vimeo.

There were four speakers, each talking for around 20 minutes, and there’s a 70 minute question-and-comment session at the end.  Here are the links to the separate videos.

Herbert Gintis (professor of economics, Santa Fe Institute, University of Siena, and Central European University)

Mark Pagel (professor of Biology, University of Reading)

Samir Okasha (professor of philosophy of science, University of Bristol)

Stuart West (professor of evolutionary biology, University of Oxford)

question-and-answer and discussion session

If you don’t have time for all of these, by all means watch Stuart West.  I don’t know how he did it, but in 20 minutes he managed to sum up the whole debate, beginning with Darwin, moving through the group selection arguments of Wynne Edwards, and assessing modern D.S.-Wilsonian views of group selection.  It’s a masterful performance.

And, as far as I can judge these things, West’s assessment is correct, and, I think, the one most smart people in that area are beginning to share:

1.  The old idea of selection among groups leading to the evolution of group-level traits works only under very special circumstances.

2. The “new” view of group selection (NGS)—the one espoused by D. S. Wilson et al.—gives results that are either wrong or, when they’re right, essentially equivalent to those derived from the simpler and less confusing inclusive-fitness theory (IFT), pioneered by Price and Hamilton and developed in the 1980s.  I’ll show Stuart’s slides:

3.  NGS has not stimulated a productive research program. Virtually every advance in understanding the effects of group-level dynamics on the evolution of social behavior has come from IFT instead. Here West checks off which of the two theories has better helped us understand various biological phenomena (in the slide below, “GS” is group selection and “IF” is inclusive fitness theory).  It’s a slam dunk for IF.

West concludes that while NGS is not usually wrong, it’s not useful, and, anyway, it’s not really new, since its mathematics were already worked out several decades ago.  While advocates of NGS claim that they’re ignored (and, at worst, persecuted), West implies that the theory is simply irrelevant.  His conclusion:

Watch all the speakers if you can, for the 80-minute debate is a painless way to educate yourself on the issues.  And kudos to the London Evolutionary Research Network for holding this and selecting a great panel of speakers.  Let’s see more of these—I’d like one on species concepts and speciation!

. . . because I already know what it says:  Evolution is true. . .creationism is simply bad theology. . .  but science doesn’t tell us everything. . . two magisteria. . .scientism rampant and horrible. . . isn’t it marvelous that God chose evolution as His way of creating life, and, after all, doesn’t that make perfect sense?. . .and it’s such a terribly dramatic, story too. . . God just loves a good story. . . . . blah blah blah

The worst part is that Haught apparently tries to rehabilitate that pompous Jesuit fraud, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who believed in directed evolution (read Peter Medawar’s wonderful deflation of Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man).

Or so says the Guinness Book of World Records. It’s the honey badger, and it’s mean! These beasts (Mellivora capensis), who live in Africa and Asia, are in the family Mustelidae along with skunks, weasels, and otters.

You can find YouTube videos of honey badgers killing or standing up to lions, leopards, and monitor lizards, and they raid African honey bee nests with impunity.

Here’s one chowing down on a puff adder.  The badger gets bitten, is incapacitated for two hours, and then recovers to finish its meal.  Somehow this species has evolved immunity to the bites of these snakes, which are often deadly to humans.

There are persistent reports that, when attacking large mammals, the badgers go for the naughty bits.  These are as yet unconfirmed by biologists:

Do badgers emasculate their prey?

Honey badgers are reputed to go for the scrotum when attacking large animals. The first published record of this behaviour was a circumstantial account by Stevenson- Hamilton (1947) where a badger reportedly castrated an adult Buffalo. Other animals alleged to have been emasculated by honey badgers include wildebeest, waterbuck, kudu, zebra and man [JAC note: I doubt it!]. This has also been reported by other African tribes, but no direct evidence exists to support this behaviour.

The good:

At New Humanist, Anthony Grayling skewers Terry Eagleton’s latest lucubrations on evil:

No one not brought up a Catholic or a Calvinist would even remember the concept of Original Sin, let alone bring it into a discussion of evil. But Eagleton does, and at length. For those not subjugated to the outlook only within whose terms can the doctrine appear to make any sense, Original Sin seems a doozy of an idea. Compare: a pharmaceutical company tells us that we are all born with a disease that requires that we buy their product all our lives long, and that if we do it will cure us after death. This reminds me of the joke about Bernie Madoff, that his big mistake was promising returns in this life; he should have taken his cue from the religions.

At Evolution: Education and Outreach, Carl Zimmer discusses the benefits, and problems associated with how the media teaches the public about evolution.  Surprise—he doesn’t lament a dearth of popular-science reporting, nor does he blame the scientists!  Indeed, Zimmer sees a glut of popular writing about evolution and, when that writing is misleading, as in the case of the primate fossil Darwinius, Zimmer blames a collusion between an uncritical media and scientists who are overeager to sell their work to the public.

At Greta Christina’s Blog, she demolishes the Argument from Fine Tuning.

The bad:

In  Tuesday’s New York Times, Robert Wright, who previously blamed the murderous rampage of Major Hasan not on Islamic doctrine, but on America’s war on terrorism, manages to reach an identical conclusion when analyzing the recent terrorist episode in Times Square.  It’s social difficulties, mental illness, financial problems, and American depredations in the Middle East—anything but religion.  Wright continues to earn the sobriquet bestowed by Christopher Hitchens, “the leading liberal apologist for the faith-based.”

In his syndicated column of last Thursday, the vile and and anti-Semitic Pat Buchanan complains that the Supreme Court has too many Jews:

Not since Thurgood Marshall, 43 years ago, has a Democratic president chosen an African-American. The lone sitting black justice is Clarence Thomas, nominated by George H. W. Bush. And Thomas was made to run a gauntlet by Senate liberals.

Indeed, of the last seven justices nominated by Democrats JFK, LBJ, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, one was black, Marshall; one was Puerto Rican, Sonia Sotomayor. The other five were Jews: Arthur Goldberg, Abe Fortas, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan.

If Kagan is confirmed, Jews, who represent less than 2 percent of the U.S. population, will have 33 percent of the Supreme Court seats.

Is this the Democrats’ idea of diversity?

At The Chronicle of Higher Education, Michael Ruse laments the fact that nobody is buying and reading his newest book, Science and Spirituality.  And he complains about a bad review—on Amazon!

And the cute:

More interspecific love.  Mother Chihuahua brings up abandoned kitten.

If you’ve been reading the evolution websites, you’ll know about the very nice paper in this week’s Nature by Douglas Theobald. (You may remember Theobald as the author of one of the greatest creationism-refuting websites of all: 29+ Evidences for Macroevolution: The Scientific Case for Common Descent. If you haven’t seen it, you should.) In the new paper, Theobald makes a few conservative assumptions to show that the probability that all living species descend from a universal common ancestor is infinitely higher than any other hypothesis, including those of multiple origins of the kingdoms (Bacteria, Eukarya, and Archaea) or of rampant horizontal gene transfer betweeen species that would, by mixing genomes, make life look as though it had a single origin when it didn’t.

Fortunately, I delayed posting on this long enough so that others did the job for me: these include  Nick Matzke at Panda’s Thumb, P. Z. Myers at Pharyngula, and Ker Than at National Geographic.  It’s pretty airtight evidence for evolution, since the hypothesis that trumped all others is that of a single origin of life, with the proteins of existing species showing a pattern of similarity and divergence reflecting the branching bush of evolution.

I’m not sure how creationists will respond to this, but I suppose they could maintain that the data show only that God created life in this way because he needed to give similar proteins to similar species.  That, of course, would require one to believe that those similarities just happen to mimic the similarities expected under evolution.  Proteins group not by lifestyle, but by ancestry. Bats have proteins that resemble those of rats more than those of birds, and whales have mammal-like rather than fish-like proteins.  A marsupial mole has virtually the same niche, and looks almost the same as, a placental mole, but its proteins are more similar to those of a kangaroo.

As P. Z. (and Theobald) point out, the advantage of this new study is that it gives us a number—a probability—with which to gauge the likelihood of modern life descending from multiple origins.

But let us remember (and Theobald mentions this) that we already had incontrovertible evidence for a single origin of all species: the near-universality of the genetic code.

If you’ve studied biology at all, you’ll know that the genetic code—the triplet sequence of DNA (and RNA) that codes for the amino acids of proteins—is virtually identical across all species.  There are 64 triplet codons coding for around 20 amino acids (as well as protein-terminating “stop positions”), and the correspondence between the code and the amino acid is nearly identical across animals, plants, and bacteria.  There are a few exceptions to this, but they are minor: no species deviates from the code by more than a few amino acids, though some mitochondrial DNA deviates by as many as 8 codons.  You can find a list of these deviations (last updated in 2008) at the National Center for Biotechnology Information at the NIH.

Although we can’t attach numbers to the likelihood that the “universal code” reflects a single rather than a multiple origin of life (that would require a model of how the code might have evolved), only a moron or a creationist would deny that this similarity reflects a single origin. There are simply too many genes involved in producing the code and turning it into proteins to think that the code’s universality merely reflects evolutionary convergence in lineages that originated independently. The universality results from ancestry, not coincidence.

In the end, I expect that creationists will find a way around Theobald’s arguments, just as they have around the universal genetic code (Nick Matzke mentions that creationist Paul Nelson has long battled the universal-code argument), but they do so at the expense of their own credibility.

Fig. 1.  The “universal” genetic code (read the triplet code starting with the letter on the left, then the top, and then the right).  Courtesy of Harvard’s Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology.

________

Theobald, D. L.  2010.  A formal test of the theory of universal common ancestry.  Nature 465:219-223.

“You know what really bothers me? It’s those people who write in and say, ‘Andy, I love your website, but isn’t it supposed to be about evolution? What’s with all the other stuff—the cats and the atheism?’

Well, to those people I say this: If you don’t like the place, there are plenty of other websites around, and many of them never mention Jesus or kittehs.  This is America, you know, and you can not only vote, but you can vote with your feet.  If you don’t like Cheerios, there’s a box of Raisin Bran nearby.

After all, I never told Don Hewitt how to run 60 Minutes.

And another thing.  I’ve learned that there are people out there who run blogs but do it anonymously.  Anonymously—get it? That means that they hide their identity from readers.   Now when I first heard this I was astounded.  After all, I’ve been a journalist for nearly seven decades, and the first thing you learn is that you stand behind your work—you take responsibility for what you say.   And I’ve done that all my life, starting with my pieces in Stars and Stripes.  I wasn’t ‘G.I. Joe,’ or ‘Writer X’—I was Andy Rooney.

Now you may not like what I say, but at least you know who to complain about when you don’t.  As far as I can see, there’s only one reason for people to hide themselves like this.  Fear.  They’re afraid of what might happen to them if people knew who they were.  It might hurt their chances of getting grants, or respect from their colleagues, or—that great sinecure of academics—tenure.

Here at CBS we have a word for people like this:  cowards.  Grow a backbone, for crying out loud! If you want to mouth off day after day, but do it while hiding behind a pseudonym, fine.  But don’t expect me to mention your site, and don’t reference it in your comments.  Okay?

Now who is this Lady Gaga, anyway?”