And here, with their sources, are 53 similar apparitions (Ray Comfort would like the banana).

O noes!  But it seems true, and you can read about this new finding, published in PLoS Biology, over at Matthew Cobb’s Z-letter.

Fig. 1. A newly-described Cretaceous snake, Sanajeh indicus, about to gobble a hatchling sauropod dinosaur. Reconstruction from a “news and views” piece by Michael Benton.

h/t: Matthew Cobb

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Wilson, J. A., D. M. Mohabey, S. E. Peters, and J. J.  Head., 2010. Predation upon hatchling dinosaurs by a new snake from the late Cretaceous of India. PLoS Biol 8(3): e1000322. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1000322

I used to think that the Vancouver Sun was a reputable newspaper.  It has the largest staff of any paper in that city, and is the province’s second most widely-read paper (after The Province).  And, indeed, this column by Douglas Todd starts off by properly decrying the low acceptance of evolution in Canada:

An Angus Reid poll recently showed only 58 per cent of Canadians (compared to 42 per cent of Americans) accept the fundamental teaching of evolution; that “human beings evolved from less advanced life forms over millions of years.”

It’s disturbing that 24 per cent of Canadians (39 per cent of Americans) told Angus Reid pollsters they embrace Biblical Creationism , or the belief that “God created human beings in their present form within the last 10,000 years.” Another 20 per cent of Canadians said they weren’t sure.

Todd’s diagnosis of the problem? Canadian schools don’t give the kids a proper education in evolution.

Most Canadian public school students are also not taught evolutionary theory in mandatory science classes. Retired B.C. high-school teacher Scott Goodman and others justifiably worry only a small sliver of Canadian students – typically those who choose elective biology classes in Grades 11 or 12 – ever focus on it.

The education systems’ inadequate handling of evolutionary theory is partly based on political correctness. Many governments and teachers are afraid of offending conservative Christians, Mormons and Jehova’s Witnesseses (often not recognizing mainstream Protestants and Catholics, as well as Buddhists and Hindus, generally accept evolution).

In addition to the piecemeal teaching of evolution in Canadian public schools. which are a provincial jurisdiction, most university science classes offer students virtually no sense of the wide array of evolutionary theories in existence.

So far so good, I think, though what does he mean by “the wide array of evolutionary theories”?  Then it becomes clear: Todd thinks that the modern theory of evolution, often described as “neo-Darwinism,” is really only one of a dozen competing theories of evolution, some of which he says are “more complete” than neo-Darwinism:

Most media outlets also fall short on enlightening the public on this wide-ranging theory about the origins of life. These media contribute to a false-choice debate about evolution; acting as if there only two polarized camps – neo-Darwinism and Biblical Creationism.

There is actually a much richer discussion about evolution occurring behind the scenes. It involves 12 current theories.

Only one of these evolutionary theories is neo-Darwinism, the school based on genetic mutation and random selection that is dominant in most universities.

Neo-Darwinism is advanced by high-profile, anti-religious biologists such as Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion.

But to my mind, some of the other 11 theories of evolution are more complete than neo-Darwinism.

Uh oh.  Eleven other theories?  What are they? Todd describes some of them, taken from an article by Carter Phipps in Enlightenment Magazine, which seems to be a New Age-y rag.

1.  “Cooperation,” which Todd imputes to Lynn Margulis.  And of course students should be taught Margulis’s confirmed ideas that mitochondria and chloroplasts had their origins as bacterial endosymbionts.  But Margulis’s view that symbiosis and its attendant cooperation are responsible for nearly every aspect of evolution, including speciation (my own field) is bizarre and certainly not part of mainstream evolutionary theory.

2.  Complexity theory. Whatever this is, it’s certainly not an alternative to neo-Darwinism, but a tool for studying the behavior of complex systems. It may help us understand evolution, but it’s not a theory of evolution itself.

3.  Directionality, which he ascribes to Robert Wright and others:

A group of evolutionary psychologists also strongly oppose Dawkin’s view that selfish genes can explain everything. These social scientists, such as Robert Wright, ar e known as “directionalists” because they see elements of purpose in life.

I’m pretty sure that even Wright, who does descry some signs of purpose in both evolution and the development of human society, wouldn’t describe his views as an alternative to neo-Darwinism.  And, at any rate, absent any good evidence for such purpose in biological evolution, it’s not a theory with any credibility—certainly not one that should be taught to biology students.

4.  Intelligent design. WTF???

5. The evolutionary views of Madame Blavatsky.  Well-known mystic and founder of the Theosophical Society, Helena Blavatsky promulgated a number of bizarre “evolutionary” views, including that of a multi-racial origin of humans, with Aryans of course being superior.  It’s the usual mystical pap that has excited people from time to time. Here’s some Theosophical garbage about evolution, which Todd apparently wants Canadian children to learn:

Evolution is the emergence of the possibilities inherent in Nature from latency into active expression. The word means, literally, unfolding, and it implies the prior process of involution by which the potentialities of spirit are communicated to matter.

Esoteric Science affirms the universality of the evolutionary process:

The whole order of nature evinces a progressive march towards a higher life. There is design in the action of the seemingly blindest forces. The whole process of evolution with its endless adaptations is a proof of this. (10)

Here we must return to the Hierarchies of Sections 4 and 5, for the evolutionary process is not a mechanical one but “is guided, controlled, and animated by almost endless series of Hierarchies of sentient Beings.”

6.  Conscious evolution, as described by the priest-mystic Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.  I can do nothing better here than refer you to Sir Peter Medawar’s review of Teilhard’s The Phenomenon of Man, one of the funniest (and most scathing) book reviews ever written.

Todd then degenerates into complete madness:

7.  Process philosophy.  I’m not an expert here, but this is philosophy, not evolution—unless you subscribe to Todd’s characterization of it as a philosophy that “blend[s] science and spirituality. Biologists such as Charles Birch and progressive Christian theologians such as John Cobb maintain the divine is ‘the creative advance into novelty,’ the source of the universe’s process of change.”

There are others, but I can’t go on. I have a stomach ache.  The sick part is that Todd apparently wants all of these “theories” taught to young Canadians, and bemoans the fact that they’re not:

It’s my hope this fascinating array of evolutionary theories will soon receive more media attention. But when will they be widely taught in Canadian or American public schools and universities? Not likely soon.

I don’t need to fulminate about the educational outcome if this panoply of gobbledygook is funneled into the heads of Canadian children.  You’d get a group of kids who wouldn’t have the slightest idea what evolution was about; they’d put Darwin on a par with that old charlatan Teilhard de Chardin—or Madame Blavatsky.  Of course Canada won’t, I trust, take Todd’s advice. But by writing this column, he’s undoubtedly confused a lot of people about what the theory of evolution really is, and how well it’s stood up.

By now you might be asking: who is this guy Douglas Todd, and why did the Vancouver Sun give him a forum to spout this kind of garbage (and probably pay him for it)? Is there anyone at that paper who knows anything about evolution, and could have deep-sixed this piece before it went into print?  How could Todd have any credibility as a journalist if he writes stuff like this?

Well, it turns out that Todd is not only credible, but has a good reputation among some folks; and he has won prizes for his writings on faith.  Maybe he writes good stuff on religion, but how on earth did he get into biology, which he seems to be conflating with spirituality?

Ah, there’s  a clue.  Look at what Todd has won (emphasis mine):

Although he was raised in a family of staunch atheists, Douglas Todd has gone on to become one of the most decorated spirituality and ethics writers in North America. He has received more than 50 journalism honours for his features, analyses, news stories and commentaries. Vancouver Magazine recently referred to him as “arguably Vancouver’s most thoughtful journalist.” He is the author of two successful books and has been awarded with several major fellowships.

Internationally, Todd has won numerous writing prizes. He has twice taken first place in the Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year Award, which goes to the top religion reporter in the secular media in North America. Todd is the only Canadian to have received the Templeton.

The John Templeton Foundation is so good at recognizing this kind of talent.

Fig. 1. I can haz theory of evolushun.  Madame Blavatsky.

h/t: Frank Sellout

. . . and falter at pronouncing “multifarious.” When I visited Oxford University Press a few weeks ago, they asked me to make a video for Amazon flogging the UK edition of WEIT.  I wasn’t prepared, and had to speak off the cuff.  The results are here.  It’s standard stuff, but you’ll get to see a striking visual demonstration of the vestigial ear muscles—more evidence for evolution!

A new paper in The American Naturalist, by Jonathan Storm and Steven Lima, shows that pregnant female crickets exposed to predatory wolf spiders can somehow “warn” the eggs they carry about the presence of those spiders, so that the offspring of those spider-exposed crickets show antipredator behavior.  This sort of looks like a case of “Lamarckian” inheritance—that is, the inheritance of an acquired trait—but it’s almost certainly not.

The authors used field crickets (Gryllus pennsylvanicus) bred in the laboratory, testing them with the wolf spider Hogna helluo.  To prevent the spiders from actually eating the crickets, they were fed to satiation before the trials, and their fangs were covered with wax.   Pregnant female crickets were placed in a terrarium with the spiders; the terrarium had also been “conditioned” by allowing the spider to inhabit it for two days before the trials, allowing the beast to leave scent and silk deposits in the arena.  The crickets remained exposed for ten days, while a control group was unexposed.  The offspring of both groups were then tested for “predator wariness”: the proportion of time that the crickets spent mobile or immobile in the presence of a spider.  Storm and Lima also measured the offspring’s chances of actually being eaten by a hungry spider.

Surprisingly, they found a difference—a difference in the adaptive direction.  The crickets whose moms had been exposed to spiders spent significantly more time being immobile than did control crickets.  This difference translated into survival: “exposed” crickets were eaten at a significantly lower rate than “unexposed” ones, though in this case the differences were small. (The difference apparently resulted from “exposed” crickets spending more time in refuges in the terrarium, making them less visible to the spider.)

Exposing the laid eggs and nymphs to the spider and spider-cues themselves showed no effect, suggesting that the mother actually does something to the eggs that changes the behavior of the crickets who hatch from them.

Finally, the authors wanted to see if this effect might apply not just in the laboratory, but in the field.  They collected pregnant female crickets from three sites in Indiana that had wolf spiders, and three nearby sites that had no wolf spiders.  Again, offspring of mothers from the “spider sites” showed significantly higher immobility in the presence of spiders (in the lab) than did offspring from “nonspider sites.”   This latter result may, however, simply reflect local natural selection: that is, the mothers in this case aren’t really “warning” their eggs about spiders, but the localities may simply show differential adaptation, so that “spider site” crickets have been selected to be more wary of predators.  There might be no warning needed: all crickets from spider sites could simply have evolved wariness. (The authors do note this possibility.)

What does this mean? Well, it’s one of a few studies in which there are facultative, adaptive “maternal effects” allowing an adaptation to be activated before it’s “needed.”  A similar result has been found in Daphnia cucullata: mother Daphnia exposed to predatory midges produce offspring having a “helmet” morphology that makes them more resistant to being eaten than are offspring of nonexposed Daphnia.

The study raises four questions:

Exactly how do mother crickets warn their eggs? Answer: we don’t yet know.  The authors suggest that exposed crickets might affect their eggs by releasing hormones that induce the antipredator behavior.  As their experiments show, though, it’s clearly something that the mother does, since exposing eggs or young nymphs to the crickets themselves shows no effect.

How could this result from natural selection? That is, how can an adaptation start to arise before it’s “needed”?  Well, this isn’t really a problem for natural selection, at least conceptually.  If there is a reliable environmental cue that persists between parent and offspring generations, any gene that permits a mother to induce her offspring to behave adaptively will be favored. There are lots of traits for which the expression begins before the relevant selection pressure appears.  Birds begin to fly south before the winter comes.  Plants use daylight cues to prepare for winter.  It’s easy to see how natural selection could favor using reliable environmental cues to trigger an adaptive behavior so it’s in place when it’s needed. What is cute about Storm and Lima’s study is that the parents actually provide the cues for their young.

Could this be Lamarckian? That is, perhaps the adaptive behavior is simply an acquired trait passed from parents to offspring,a trait that somehow got embedded into the genes—as if parents who worked out in a gym would produce more muscular babies.  Some evolutionists, like Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb, have suggested that a form of Lamarckian inheritance could be important in evolution.  I don’t think they’re right, simply because we have little evidence that acquired traits can be inherited, and for many adaptations it’s even hard to envision how their initial appearance could be induced by the environment.

But here’s a way to test this in the spider case: use a form of “family selection,” something common in animal breeding. Simply take a bunch of cricket families, and expose one member of each family to a spider.  For the individuals who are more wary, breed the next generation from their unexposed brothers and sisters.  Then again construct a bunch of family groups from those individuals, test one individual from each new family, breed from the nonexposed relatives of the warier crickets, and so on.

After a few generations, see if this form of family selection has produced increased wariness of spiders. If it has, it shows that you can accumulate hereditary factors promoting resistance to predation without ever having being exposed to spiders. That is, while spiders are the selective factor promoting predator resistance in crickets, you can build up that resistance without ever having seen a cricket.  In other words, the trait is not Lamarckian.

This is the kind of experiment that was done, half a century ago, to show that mutations conferring antibiotic resistance in bacteria were not actually induced by the antibiotic, but were there to begin with in unexposed populations. (You may have heard of “replica plating,” devised by Joshua and Esther Lederberg in the 1950s.)

Is it epigenetic? The idea of “epigenetic inheritance”—inheritance based on things other than change in the base sequences of genes—is also a popular criticism of the neo-Darwinian “paradigm”.  (Jablonka and Lamb have been especially vocal proponents of this view.)  Things like DNA methylation, for instance, can be transmitted from parents to offspring (that’s how “imprinting” of genes occurs), and there’s some evidence that such effects can persist for more than one generation.

Well, some of this epigenetic inheritance almost certainly reflects evolution based on real DNA changes. For example if it’s adaptive to mark parental versus maternal chromosomes differentially, as David Haig at Harvard suggests, then that differential marking itself is probably coded by the DNA.

Regardless, though, we can test whether this “adaptive maternal effect” in crickets is purely epigenetic or DNA-based.  Simply take those two populations of crickets from Indiana that show differential response to spiders, and hold them in the laboratory for about three generations without exposure to spiders.  Since non-DNA-based epigenetic differences are known to disappear after one or two generations, the populations should quickly lose not only their difference in adaptive “imprinting,” but the phenomenon of adaptive maternally-based wariness itself.   If, on the other hand, the population difference (or the trait itself) is based on changes in the DNA, the behavior will decay much more slowly (if at all) when selection maintaining the trait is relaxed.

Storm and Lima’s study has been reported widely in the press and, to their credit,  journalists have avoided touting their results as somehow disproving Darwinism or DNA-based adaptation.  Lamarckism and epigenetic inheritance remain formal possibilities here, but in the absence of any evidence that they’ve been important in the evolution of adaptations, it’s hardly worth looking for them.

Fig. 1.  Wolf spider, Hogna helluo

________

Storm, J. J. and S. L. Lima. 2010.  Mothers forewarn offspring about predators: a transgenerational maternal effect on behavior. Amer. Natur. DOI: 10.1086/650443

Well, Sam Harris is now on Twitter, and his latest “tweets” (God, I hate that word) mention two upcoming books

1. His own, called The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values.  Sam says this will be out “10/5”, which seems to mean October 5. Here’s a description of its thesis,  guaranteed to spark huge controversy:

In his forthcoming book, Harris proposes that answers to questions of human value can be visualized on a “moral landscape”—a space of real and potential outcomes whose peaks and valleys correspond to states of greater or lesser well being in conscious creatures like ourselves. Different ways of thinking and behaving—different cultural practices, ethical codes, modes of government, etc.—translate into movements across this landscape. Such changes can be analyzed objectively on many levels—ranging from biochemistry to economics—but they have their crucial realization as states and capacities of the human brain.

2. Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Nomad, described by Amazon as a “philosophical memoir,” out May 18.

So you’re an organization whose mission is to blur the lines between faith and science, and you have huge wads of cash to do this.  What’s the best strategy?

Well, if you’re smart, you find a bunch of journalists who are not averse to being bribed to write articles consonant with your mission, give them a lot of money to attend “seminars” on reconciling faith and science (you also give a nice emolument to the speakers), enlist a spiffy British university to house these journalists, on whom you bestow the fancy title of “fellows,” cover all their expenses (including housing) to go to the UK for a couple of months, and even give them a “book allowance.”  What could be more congenial to an overworked journalist than a chance to play British scholar, punting along the lovely Cam or enjoying a nice pint in a quant pub, all the while chewing over the wisdom of luminaries like John Polkinghorne and  John Haught, and pondering the mysteries of a fine-tuned universe and the inevitable evolution of humans?

And the best part is this: forever after, those journalists are in your camp.  Not only can you use their names in your advertising, but you’ve conditioned them, in Pavlovian fashion, to think that great rewards come to those who favor the accommodation of science and faith. They’ll do your job for you!

The John Templeton Foundation may be misguided, but it’s not stupid.  The Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowships in Science and Religion pay senior and mid-career journalists $15,000 (plus all the perks above) to come to Cambridge University for two months, listen to other people talk about science and religion, study a religion/science topic of their own devising, and then write a nifty paper that they can publish, so getting even more money. What a perk! Imagine sitting in a medieval library, pondering the Great Questions. And you get to be called a fellow! And write a term paper! Isn’t that better than cranking out hack pieces for people who’d rather be watching American Idol?  Sure, you have to apply, and write an application essay stating how you intend to relate science and religion, but, hey, it’s only 1500 words, and once you’re in, you’re golden.  You may even get to be on the advisory board, and have a chance to come back to the trough.

As I said, The Templeton Foundation is smart—or rather wily.  They realize that few people, especially underpaid journalists and overworked academics, are immune to the temptation of dosh, and once those people get hooked on the promise of money and prestige, they forever have a stall in the Templeton stable. And, in the hopes of future Templeton funding,  perhaps they’ll continue to write pieces congenial to the Foundation’s mission.

The Temple Foundation is wily, but they’re not exactly honest.  Look at this:

After decades during which leading voices from science and religion viewed each other with suspicion and little sense of how the two areas might relate, recent years have brought an active pursuit of understanding how science may deepen theological awareness, for example, or how religious traditions might illuminate the scientific realm.  Fellowship organizers note that rigorous journalistic examination of the region where science and theology overlap – as well as understanding the reasoning of many who assert the two disciplines are without common ground – can effectively promote a deeper understanding of the emerging dialogue.

Now if you’re interested in seeing how science and religion “illuminate” one another, what’s the first thing you think of?  How about this:  is there any empirical truth in the claims of faith? After all, if you’re trying to “reconcile” two areas of thought, and look at their interactions, surely you’d be interested if there’s any empirical truth in them.  After all, why “reconcile” two areas if one of them might be only baseless superstition?  Is the evidence for God as strong as it is for evolution? Does the “fine-tuning” of physical constants prove Jesus?  Was the evolution of humans inevitable, thereby showing that we were part of God’s plan?

It’s not that there’s nothing to say about this.  After all, one of the speakers in the Fellows’ symposia is Simon Conway Morris, who has written a popular-science book claiming that biology proves that the evolution of human-like creatures was inevitable.  It’s just that the Templeton Foundation doesn’t want to promote, or have its Fellows write about, the other side, the Dark Side that feels that no reconciliation is possible between science and faith.  John Horgan, who was once a Journalism Fellow, talks about his experience:

My ambivalence about the foundation came to a head during my fellowship in Cambridge last summer. The British biologist Richard Dawkins, whose participation in the meeting helped convince me and other fellows of its legitimacy, was the only speaker who denounced religious beliefs as incompatible with science, irrational, and harmful. The other speakers — three agnostics, one Jew, a deist, and 12 Christians (a Muslim philosopher canceled at the last minute) — offered a perspective clearly skewed in favor of religion and Christianity.

Some of the Christian speakers’ views struck me as inconsistent, to say the least. None of them supported intelligent design, the notion that life is in certain respects irreducibly complex and hence must have a divine origin, and several of them denounced it. Simon Conway Morris, a biologist at Cambridge and an adviser to the Templeton Foundation, ridiculed intelligent design as nonsense that no respectable biologist could accept. That stance echoes the view of the foundation, which over the last year has taken pains to distance itself from the American intelligent-design movement.

And yet Morris, a Catholic, revealed in response to questions that he believes Christ was a supernatural figure who performed miracles and was resurrected after his death. Other Templeton speakers also rejected intelligent design while espousing beliefs at least as lacking in scientific substance.

The Templeton prize-winners John Polkinghorne and John Barrow argued that the laws of physics seem fine-tuned to allow for the existence of human beings, which is the physics version of intelligent design. The physicist F. Russell Stannard, a member of the Templeton Foundation Board of Trustees, contended that prayers can heal the sick — not through the placebo effect, which is an established fact, but through the intercession of God. In fact the foundation has supported studies of the effectiveness of so-called intercessory prayer, which have been inconclusive.

One Templeton official made what I felt were inappropriate remarks about the foundation’s expectations of us fellows. She told us that the meeting cost more than $1-million, and in return the foundation wanted us to publish articles touching on science and religion. But when I told her one evening at dinner that — given all the problems caused by religion throughout human history — I didn’t want science and religion to be reconciled, and that I hoped humanity would eventually outgrow religion, she replied that she didn’t think someone with those opinions should have accepted a fellowship. So much for an open exchange of views.

So, the Foundation doesn’t really want the hard light of science cast upon faith.  It wants its journalists (and nearly everyone it funds) to show how faith and science are compatible.  Those who feel otherwise, like Victor Stenger, Richard Dawkins, Anthony Grayling, Steven Weinberg, well, those people don’t have a say.  (In fact, the Foundation’s history of intellectual dishonesty has made many of them unwilling to be part of its endeavors.) If a miscreant sneaks in by accident, as did John Horgan, he’s told that he doesn’t belong.  The Foundation may pay lip service to dissenters, as in this statement (my emphasis),

Fellowship organizers note that rigorous journalistic examination of the region where science and theology overlap – as well as understanding the reasoning of many who assert the two disciplines are without common ground – can effectively promote a deeper understanding of the emerging dialogue.

but you won’t see Templeton giving Journalism Fellowships to people who have a track record of such views.  Instead, the Fellows spend their time pondering, “Now how on earth could those poor people think that science and faith are incompatible?”

These journalism fellowships are nothing more than a bribe—a bribe to get journalists to favor a certain point of view.  The Foundation’s success at recruiting reputable candidates proves one thing: it doesn’t cost much to buy a journalist’s integrity.  Fifteen thousand bucks, a “book allowance,” and a fancy title will do it.

Could this explain why those journalists who trumpet every other achievement on their websites keep quiet when they get a Templeton Fellowship?

[viddler id=adadc646&w=437&h=333]

This video shows a highly adaptive cat behavior: never move when your prey is watching:

BONUS:  Laws of physics broken!  Sean Carroll shows that cats can change their mass when forced to do walkies.