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.
If you’re not an evolutionary biologist, or don’t know of Bill Hamilton, you can ignore this post, but if you recognize the name it’s worth listening to this 25-minute audio cliip from a recent BBC program. In it, Richard Dawkins discusses and praises his late colleague, the brilliant and eccentric biologist William Hamilton. Mary Bliss, Hamilton’s sister, also chimes in. I won’t describe Hamilton’s many achievements (and quirks) here, as Dawkins and Bliss do that very well.
h/t: Matthew Cobb
One of the world’s best-looking felids is the Arabian sand cat, Felis margarita. It’s endemic to parts of the Sahara Desert, the Arabian Peninsula, and Turkestan (it’s also called the “sand-dune cat”). Individuals are eminently well adapted for desert life: their feet are thickly padded and furred for walking on loose (and hot) sand, they’re camouflaged, they’re crepuscular, and they have relatively big ears that act as heat radiators.
Sand cats dig shallow burrows in the sand or scrub to escape the daytime heat, and hunt jerboas, sand voles, and other rodents, as well as reptiles and even locusts. Since some inhabit completely waterless areas, it’s thought that they can survive without drinking.
Here are two sand cat kittens, Nahah and (ugh) Faith, born in the Cincinnati Zoo on October 29, and first shown to the public on January 20. Mom is in the second picture.
VIDEO: look at these adorable little guys in the fur:
by Greg Mayer
The spotted lion is a favorite topic within cryptozoology. Bernard Heuvelmans, the late Belgian zoologist known as the “father of cryptozoology”, defined cryptozoology as
The scientific study of hidden animals, i.e., of still unknown animal forms about which only testimonial and circumstantial evidence is available, or material evidence considered insufficient by some!
Although, not mentioned in the brief definition, Heuvelmans also included the study of known, but supposedly extinct, animals, that might still be extant, based on testimonial or circumstantial evidence. Animals that are of interest to cyptozoologists are known as cryptids.
The roster of cryptids includes such beasties as the Loch Ness monster, the abominable snowman, and bigfoot. This might suggest to some that cryptozoology is pretty out there, a pseudoscience. But, in fact, the question of what cryptozoology is turns out to be more interesting, as the spotted lion story itself indicates.
Many zoologists (especially systematic zoologists), like cryptozoologists, are interested in discovering and describing previously unknown species of animals (with my friend and colleague Skip Lazell, I’ve described one myself). For many zoologists, in fact, its their full time occupation. There are millions of undescribed species of animals awaiting scientific investigation.
So if cryptozoologists are looking for undescribed species, and zoologists are looking for undescribed species, what’s the difference? Well, one minor difference is that cryptozoologists tend to be interested in fairly large undiscovered species. Most newly described species are small (most are insects), although a few pretty big ones have been discovered in the recent past (e.g., giant muntjac, sao la, megamouth shark, and Chacoan peccary).
But size isn’t the key difference. The key difference is what sort of evidence is taken to be compelling evidence of the existence of an animal. For a zoologist, 
testimonial evidence, such as stories about spotted lions, might be a good reason to go looking for something, but you don’t have any real evidence until you actually get one of the animals. Having an actual specimen is the standard of evidence in systematic zoology. In cryptozoology, there is a wide range of practice in what kind of evidence is considered compelling. Heuvelmans himself leaned pretty strongly toward accepting testimony as fairly compelling (while strongly rejecting, however, attempts to make cryptozoology a form of mysticism or paranormal exploration, as was done in, for example, John Keel’s Strange Creatures From Time and Space). Other cryptozoologists, however, explicitly adopt the zoological standard of evidence. In their Cryptozoology A to Z, Loren Coleman and Jerome Clark write about some cryptids in the following way
Unfortunately, without a specimen, this can only be conjecture. [referring to the possible identity of a supposed giant bear of Kamchatka]
and
And it is from the Dani [a New Guinea tribe] that [Tim] Flannery received his first real evidence of the bondegezou, in the form of skins and associated trophies. [referring to a newly discovered species of tree kangaroo known as the bondegezou; emphases added in both quotes]
And, in writing about what cryptids are, they state
It is often impossible to tell which category an unknown animal actually inhabits until you catch it. [emphasis added]
In stressing the importance of obtaining a specimen(s) in figuring out what cryptids are, Coleman and Clark are doing just what a systematic zoologist would do. There is no difference in their standards of evidence, only in what catches their attention as being worthy of inquiry. The latter is a matter of personal interest and taste, not scientific method, so the Coleman & Clark practice of cryptozoology is not pseudoscience at all. (There are also a lot of crack pots and frauds out there too.)
Coleman, in addition to his own website, contributes to the website Cryptomundo. But my favorite website dealing with cryptozoology is Darren Naish’s Tetrapod Zoology. He’s a dinosaur paleontologist, and most of his posts are on more orthodox aspects of tetrapod zoology, but he posts occasionally on cryptozoological topics, often analyzing evidence, and sometimes resolving the issue. Here, for example, are his insightful explications of the Montauk Monster, a cryptid from my home island, which turned out to be a raccoon that had expired and gone to meet ‘is maker. Go to his site and look around for more fun posts like these.
In one way, the anti-vax movement is like creationism: it’s built on preconceived notions, personal bias, and scientific ignorance. But it’s much worse than creationism, for while nobody ever died from rejecting evolution, misguided opposition to vaccination actually kills people.
Over at Science Progress, Chris Mooney has the solution: it’s partly the fault of a “remote and haughty” medical establishment that simply needs to be more conciliatory:
Instead, I believe we need some real attempts at bridge-building between medical institutions—which, let’s admit it, can often seem remote and haughty—and the leaders of the anti-vaccination movement. We need to get people in a room and try to get them to agree about something—anything. We need to encourage moderation, and break down a polarized situation in which the anti-vaccine crowd essentially rejects modern medical research based on the equivalent of conspiracy theory thinking, even as mainstream doctors just shake their heads at these advocates’ scientific cluelessness. Vaccine skepticism is turning into one of the largest and most threatening anti-science movements of modern times. Watching it grow, we should be very, very worried—and should not assume for a moment that the voice of scientific reason, in the form of new studies or the debunking of old, misleading ones, will make it go away.
Sound familiar? Good luck with getting those people in a room and forcing them to agree!
Over at Respectful Insolence (and also in comment #3 after Mooney’s piece), Orac dismantles this why-can’t-we-all-love-each-other attitude:
Chris is profoundly misguided in his apparent belief that any amount of “bridge building” will bring anti-vaccine activists around. Their beliefs are as ingrained as those of any fundamentalist religion and just as resistant to bridge-building over the core belief around which they revolve. Indeed, trying to reach out to leaders of the anti-vaccine movement is pointless. It is, as AutismNewsBeat so pithily characterizes it, akin to “bridge-building efforts by evolutionary biologists toward creationists. Or by B’nai Brith to mend fences with the Nazis. I’m sure those meetings went well.” I agree fully. Thinking that “building bridges” to the leaders of the anti-vaccine movement will achieve anything except giving them more opportunity to sabotage public health by giving them an unearned feeling of power and legitimacy is likely to be as productive as evolutionary biologists engaging with Ken Ham, Casey Luskin, or Dr. Michael Egnor or for Deborah Lipstadt to engage with David Irving. As they say, you can’t use reason to lead someone away from views that they didn’t reach using reason.
All this warm and fuzzy sentiment about making nice to the benighted may sound good, and may appeal to middle-of-the-roaders who think that there can be a compromise between scientific fact and willful ignorance, but it won’t solve the problem of anti-vaxers, just as it hasn’t solved the problem of creationism.
Extremism in the defense of vaccination is no vice.
Rebecca Skloot, a science writer, assistant professor of English at the University of Memphis, and author of the blog The Culture Dish, has written a terrific new book: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. The reviews have been uniformly positive, and I’ve just swelled the chorus with my own review over at Barnes and Noble. An excerpt from what I wrote:
Henrietta Lacks lives a shadowy life as a footnote in biology textbooks. I first encountered her when taking a college course in cell biology: the cells used in a particular experiment, we learned, were “HeLa cells,” which, though human, can grow independently outside the body in specially created laboratory conditions. They were named for the woman, Helen Lane, from whom they were originally derived. And that was all; having explained this, my professor returned to discussing the experiment and its significance. Like a drowned corpse bobbing up from the dark depths of footnote-dom, Helen Lane had surfaced briefly, only to descend again into obscurity. I didn’t give her a second thought.
In contrast, science writer Rebecca Skloot also had a Helen Lane footnote moment in high school, but saw in that footnote the nucleus of a story about science and society. After ten years of HeLa sleuthing, Skloot’s hunch has paid off handsomely: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is a modern classic of science writing.
Let me qualify that. This isn’t science writing in the sense of Stephen Jay Gould or Richard Dawkins: Skloot doesn’t spend a lot of time describing or extolling scientific discoveries. For her, the science is a bit player — though an important one — in a complex and fascinating drama about how medical research intersected the lives of a poor black family in America. Her mixture of science and biography is sui generis, and its themes profound: racism, ethics, and scientific illiteracy.
Do read this book. If you’ve had any acquaintance with cell biology, you’ve heard of HeLa cells—cells derived from a cervical tumor and now widely used to study all manner of things. “HeLa” turns out to be short not for “Helen Lane” (a journalist’s pseudonym), but for Henrietta Lacks, a black, working-class woman from whom the cells were derived (and who died a terrible death from her cancer). Skloot spent a decade tracking down the story, overcoming the resistance of Lacks’s family, and, ultimately, becoming part of the story herself as she befriended Lacks’s daughter Deborah and helped her learn about and come to terms with her mother’s story. It’s an engrossing read: one of those rare science-related books that is hard to put down.
by Greg Mayer
Following up on a comment by Glen Davidson to my latest dowsing post, in which he noted that the UK’s General Medical Council had ruled against anti-vaccination activist Dr. Andrew Wakefield, finding him callous, unethical and dishonest, I note that The Lancet (registration required) has retracted Wakefield and coauthors’ 1998 paper that set off the autism/vaccination controversy. The editors of The Lancet now accept that not only should the paper not have been published, but that its conclusions are false.
The NY Times also covered the story, in a manner I found refreshing. Too often, perhaps due to some distorted sense of objectivity, news reporting consists of a “he said, she said” style, in which opposing viewpoints are given equal status, regardless of the plausibility or support for the claims made. You’ve all read the kind of story that will have a line like, “Dr. Smith, a paleontologist at the natural history museum, said Triceratops had been extinct for more than 60 million years before the origin of man, while Dr. Jones from the institute said Triceratops had been ridden by men like horses until the recent worldwide flood drowned them all”. The Times reporter, Gardiner Harris, however is familiar with the evidence.
After Dr. Wakefield’s study, vaccination rates plunged in Britain and the number of measles cases soared.
In the United States, anti-vaccine groups have advanced other theories since then to explain why they think vaccines cause autism. For years, they blamed thimerosal, a vaccine preservative containing mercury. Because of concerns over the preservative, vaccine makers in 2001 largely eliminated thimerosal from routinely administered childhood vaccines.
But this change has had no apparent impact on childhood autism rates. Anti-vaccine groups now suggest that a significant number of children have a cellular disorder whose effects are set off by vaccinations.
With each new theory, parents’ groups have called for research to explore possible links between vaccination and autism. Study after study has failed to show any link, and prominent scientific agencies have concluded that scarce research dollars should be spent investigating other possible causes of autism.
(I’ll add parenthetically that I find the notion of “retracting” a paper silly. Once it’s published, it can’t be unpublished. But it is proper for editors and/or authors to later publish to say that a paper’s data or conclusions were flawed, unwarranted, or false.)
by Matthew Cobb
Over at the Times Literary Supplement, Stephen Fletcher comes back on the debate over Meyer’s Signature in the Cell, focusing on the question of the ancient “RNA world” which Meyer has argued is implausible. A fine letter! For previous installments see here, here and here. Good to see that the TLS is not a victim of “the two cultures” (UK novelist C.P. Snow’s description of the science/arts divide within the upper echelons of UK society).
Sir, – Stephen C. Meyer and Thomas Nagel are both sceptical of the chemical theory of evolution (Letters, January 15). Nagel suggests no alternative, but Meyer advocates a theory known as Intelligent Design, which proposes that certain features of living things were introduced by a supernatural being at various times in the past. He has also written a book about it. Nagel initially puffed the book using quasi-scientific quotations, but now confesses that he took “the presentation of the data largely on trust”.
The theory of Intelligent Design makes some outlandish claims about DNA and proteins. Concerning DNA, the theory makes the following assertions (despite much evidence to the contrary). (1) ancient molecules of DNA were introduced on to the Earth by a supernatural being (not necessarily God); (2) all of the chemical components of the modern cell evolved uniquely from this original DNA; and (3) modern DNA sequences are, in the main, too complicated to have arisen by natural selection.
Concerning proteins, the assertions are even stranger. In contrast to the Bible, which tells us that God has intervened on Earth on very few occasions, Meyer’s book tells us that the Intelligent Designer intervened every time a new gene or a new protein appeared. Well, human beings have 23,000 protein-coding genes. That is a very large number of supernatural interventions. Among bacteria, which live in soil and which outnumber human beings by trillions to one, it follows that the Intelligent Designer is actively intervening every few seconds. It seems there really are fairies at the bottom of Meyer’s garden.
In the prologue to his book Signature in the Cell, Stephen Meyer states that it is an attempt to make a comprehensive, interdisciplinary argument for the Intelligent Design view of the origin of life. But as the author himself concedes (in an appendix on page 496), the discovery of a precursor to DNA (such as RNA) would demolish the whole edifice. A “key prediction” is that “Future experiments will continue to show that RNA catalysts lack the capacities necessary to render the RNA world scenario plausible”. It is Stephen Meyer’s bad luck to have published his book in 2009, the very year that the RNA world scenario became eminently plausible. In February of that year came the discovery of the self-sustained replication of an RNA enzyme, by Lincoln and Joyce (Science, Vol 323, pp1,229–32). In March came the identification of the prebiotic translation apparatus (a dimer of self-folding RNA units) within the contemporary ribosome, by Yonath et al (Nature Proceedings, Posted March 4, 2009). Finally, in May came the discovery of the synthesis of activated pyrimidine ribonucleotides in prebiotically plausible conditions, by Powner et al (Nature, Vol 459, pp239–42). I am afraid that reality has overtaken Meyer’s book and its flawed reasoning.
Scientists do not yet have a detailed model of how primeval RNA came into being, or how it evolved. They are, after all, trying to reconstruct molecules that disappeared from the face of the Earth about 4 billion years ago. Nevertheless, they have already shown that one tiny part of the ancient “RNA world” didn’t actually disappear. It survived and evolved into our own human protein-making factory, and continues to make our fingers and toes. Think about that the next time you bounce a baby on your knee. Genuine science makes discoveries that fake science can only dream of.
STEPHEN FLETCHER
Department of Chemistry, Loughborough University, Ashby Road, Loughborough.
by Greg Mayer
A few days ago The New Republic posted a review of books on miscegenation laws and eugenics by Richard Posner. Posner is a judge of the US Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago, and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School. Unusually for a sitting judge, he is a prolific author who writes on a wide range of subjects. Although usually considered a conservative, he has taken some rather non-conservative positions, and is not an “originalist” (the favored judicial theory of full-blown conservatives such as Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia). In his review (from which I learned a lot about miscegenation laws), he writes:
The novelty of Darwinism, so far as its social and political impact was concerned, was its depiction of a struggle for survival between different species, with the ones well adapted to their environment surviving and the others becoming extinct.
Well, no, actually, that’s not the novelty of Darwinism at all. The struggle between different species (e.g., between predators and prey) was long and well known before Darwin. Natural extinction had been a more recently controversial matter, but was resolved early in the 19th century (see the excellent account in David Young’s The Discovery of Evolution). So although negative interactions between species, and natural extinction, formed important parts of Darwin’s account in the Origin, they were not novel. And even evolution as such (i.e. that organisms changed over time) was not novel with Darwin (although he was the one that convinced the world at large of its truth). Darwin’s greatest novelty was the variational mechanism of change within species, natural selection.
Posner does go on to say some fairly sensible things about what a species is, and does in fact dwell on within species matters (since there is only one extant species of Homo), and I don’t want to pick on him, but he’s a bright, well educated, and thoughtful guy, a member of the nation’s educational and political elite who writes about Darwinism, and he has at best an incomplete notion of the most important and novel aspects of evolutionary theory. This may seem like inside baseball (“Among species, within species– who cares?”), but it really is crucial: Darwin did more than elaborate a theory of historical community ecology (others had done that as well), but also a theory for the transformation of lineages by mechanisms which account for both adaptation and unity of type. I’m reminded of H.J. Muller’s famous statement at the time of the Darwin centennial in 1959, “One hundred years without Darwin are enough”, bemoaning that while evolution as such was known and accepted, few understood evolution by natural selection, Darwin’s most original contribution. It’s the same today: one hundred fiftyone years without Darwin are enough! (Francisco Ayala took care of one hundred fifty years.)