Giant squid!! (Sort of!!)

February 1, 2010 • 11:25 pm

by Greg Mayer

A real giant squid, Architeuthis (from the Tree of Life).

According to the AP, giant squid have invaded California! Except that, according to the article, they’re not actually giant squid, but Humboldt squid, which don’t get nearly as large (up to about 2 meters) as real giant squid (up to about 14 meters). Fishermen in California have been reeling in the large Humboldt squid by the hundreds. Historically, their distribution was centered on the equator in the eastern Pacific, but recently they have been moving both north into California and as far as British Columbia, and south to central Chile. Despite being on the equator, the waters in their range are actually ordinarily quite cool.

We don’t normally do squid here at WEIT, but PZ occasionally does a cat, so we occasionally do a cephalopod, just to keep him on his toes. And besides, he’s in Ireland, and might miss this one.

Dosidicus gigas
Humboldt squid (Dosidicus gigas), base of arm (from the Tree of Life)

The NY Times on the Iraqi dowsing rods

February 1, 2010 • 8:36 pm

by Greg Mayer

The totally bogus dowsing rods sold to Iraqi security forces by an unscrupulous (and now arrested) British manufacturer (noted at WEIT here, here, and recently here) were the subject of an editorial, “Shock, Awe and Abracadabra“, in today’s New York Times. Money quote:

The junk science should have been obvious: the slender wand is topped by what looks like a radio antenna on a swivel that the manufacturer guaranteed to point to weapons or bombs hidden up to a half-mile away, underwater or in planes three miles high. “We are working on a new model that has flashing lights,” the manufacturer told The Times of London last year, when first challenged about ADE 651.

Any satisfaction that United States forces avoided this particular sting should be tempered by the fact that American blood and treasure have underpinned the Iraq government across the war’s many expensive follies.

The reason I post occasionally here on these high-profile pseudoscience cases is that being alert to the tactics and activities of pseudoscientists of all stripes is useful, even if particular schools of pseudoscience are an area of focus. I teach a popular general education course at my university entitled “Science and Pseudoscience”, in which we discuss things such as Velikovskianism, UFOs, alien abductions, astrology, palm reading, and many, many other things; and of course, creationism. There is an old saying that a language is a dialect with an army. Creationism is pseudoscience with a powerful political lobby.

Update (Feb. 5): Here’s Randi’s take on the recent developments.

Caturday felid: the Spotted Lion

January 30, 2010 • 1:22 pm

by Greg Mayer

One of the most enigmatic of the felids is the spotted lion. Indeed, it’s so enigmatic that it might, in some senses, be said to not even exist.

As you may recall from Jerry’s earlier posting of a video of lion cubs, lions are born with spots, which disappear as they mature. Jerry and I disputed whether such patterns in young animals are atavistic or adaptive, but my concern today is not with whether spots are adaptive, but whether there are spotted lions at all.

The photograph above is the best evidence we have for the existence of spotted lions. (The skin’s total length is 8 ft. 8 in., so it’s not a cub!). I’ve previously noted that photographs are not the best evidence for documenting the existence of a previously unknown species of animal, but in this case we have the benefit of the fact that the specimen in the photograph was examined by Reginald Pocock of the British Museum (Natural History) in the 1930s. Here is some of what Pocock, a world authority on cats, had to say, about the specimen loaned to him by Kenneth Gandar Dower (subscription required):

…it is a remarkable specimen owing to the distinctness of the spots in a beast of its size.

It is a male. … From it’s size I guessed it to be about three years old, a year or more short of full size.

…the peculiarity of the skin lies in the distinctness of its pattern of spots, consisting of large “jaguarine” rosettes arranged in obliquely vertical lines and extending over the flanks, shoulders and thighs up to the darker spinal area where they disappear.

As is well known, lion-cubs at birth generally, but not always, show a pattern of spots or stripes supposed, probably correctly, to be the remnants of an ancestral pattern transmitted from the time when lions were denizens of forests or jungles. In nearly all cases this juvenile pattern vanishes at three or four months on the body, but persists longer on the belly and legs and may sometimes be visible on those parts at maturity, especially apparently in sone lionesses from East Africa. Mr. Gandar Dower’s lion-skin is quite exceptional in this respect.

Pocock went on to indicate the absence of this pattern in a large series of adult specimens at the British Museum and the United States National Museum, but noted one account and one photograph that indicated at least an approach to being spotted. He also examined a skull provided by Gandar Dower, which may have come from this specimen, or from a female shot at the same time; the skulls were not kept when the animals were skinned, but one was retrieved later. Pocock concluded

…it is clear that no precise conclusion can be formed regarding this interesting beast until skins and skulls of adults have been collected.

As noted above, the skin was brought to Pocock by Kenneth Gandar Dower. Gandar Dower had read accounts of the spotted lion and mounted an expedition to East Africa to try to find one, but was unsuccessful, save for the skin and skull which he obtained from Michael Trent, a farmer in the Aberdare Mountains of Kenya, who had shot a pair of spotted lions a few years earlier. Gandar Dower recounted his expedition in a book, The Spotted Lion. Bernard Heuvelmans summarized Gandar Dower’s investigations, and recounted later stories of the spotted lion in his On the Track of Unknown Animals.

So what is the spotted lion? There are several possibilities. First, it might represent a distinct population that lives in the Aberdare Mountains of Kenya. In this case, it might be a species distinct from other lions, or it could be a geographical race or subspecies of the familiar lion. Second, it could just be a rare individual variation, in the same way that populations of house cats have spotted, striped, particolored, solid, etc. patterns occurring in individuals that are part of the same breeding population (and, indeed, part of the same litter). Finally, it could be a hybrid, perhaps between a lion and a leopard. Pocock, however, was well familiar with interspecific hybrids in large cats, and did not mention this possibility; also, interspecific hybridization in large cats is known (almost?) exclusively among captive animals. So, a hybrid origin does not seem likely to me.

If the first possibility is true, then there would indeed be something we can rightfully call the spotted lion. If the second is true, while there would then be known to exist lions with spots, there would not be a distinct natural population. And if the third is true, then there aren’t spotted lions at all– only lion-leopard hybrids that have spots. Further study of the skin or supposed skull, especially using modern techniques, might have allowed at least some of the possibilities to be eliminated, but unfortunately, Pocock apparently did not retain them at the British Museum, and I am unaware of their current whereabouts.  (I had thought they were at the British Museum until reading Pocock’s full account, in which he notes the specimens were left for him to examine, but makes no mention of them being donated to the collection.) To solve this problem, we thus must, as Pocock did over 70 years ago, await the collection of more specimens.

___________________________________

Gandar Dower, K. 1937. The Spotted Lion. Little Brown, Boston.

Heuvelmans, B. 1959. On the Track of Unknown Animals. Hill and Wang, New York.

Pocock, R.I. 1937. Note on the spotted lion of the Aberdares. pp. 317-321 in Gandar Dower, 1937.

WEIT a top tenner in China

January 29, 2010 • 4:00 pm

I am reliably informed by one of my Chinese colleagues that WEIT was chosen by China Reading Weekly (said to be the Chinese equivalent of The New York Review of Books), as one of the top ten books published in China in 2009. It’s #8, and the only science book on the list.  You can see the list here, and the announcement (upper left) here.

Now I know there’s a Chinese-speaking reader who will point out that the title of the book is actually “Why We Should Believe Darwin,” and not “Why Evolution is True.”  That was done, I am told, because of the immense authority Darwin commands in China.

One other interesting point: my Chicago colleague Dr. Manyuan Long, who kindly helped shepherd the book into print in China, and who contributed a foreword, says that he fought to have the word “evolution” translated into the Chinese word (roughly “yanhua”) that means “descent with modification” rather than what the publishers wanted, which is a word equivalent to “progress” (roughly “jinghua”).  (Apparently the “progress” word is more politically congenial.)   Curiously, he won the battle not on the grounds that evolution doesn’t produce what humans think of progress, but on the grounds that the distinguished Professor Jerry Coyne might someday visit China and find out that his words had been distorted!

h/t: Manyuan Long, for all his help, and for calling this to my attention

Peregrinations

January 29, 2010 • 9:29 am

I’m off to the UK this evening to deliver a humorous/salacious/laudatory “vote of thanks” (that’s what they call it)—an introduction to the talk of a colleague who has been promoted to full professor.  I’ll be back in a week, but may post a thing or two when I get the chance. In the meantime, Greg and Matthew will handle the website.  I am told that there’s a special kitteh for tomorrow. . .

An attack on evolution, from our side

January 29, 2010 • 7:02 am

A little over two years ago, Jerry Fodor, a well-known and respected philosopher of mind, wrote an article in the London Review of Books, “Why Pigs Don’t Have Wings,” criticizing the concept of natural selection because it was both philosophically incoherent and empirically untenable.

The high tide of adaptationism floated a motley navy, but it may now be on the ebb. If it does turn out that natural selection isn’t what drives evolution, a lot of loose speculations will be stranded high, dry and looking a little foolish. Induction over the history of science suggests that the best theories we have today will prove more or less untrue at the latest by tomorrow afternoon. In science, as elsewhere, ‘hedge your bets’ is generally good advice.

Many of us, philosophers and scientists alike, responded by writing letters to the LRB pointing out Fodor’s empirical and philosophical errors (scroll down below his article to see all the exchanges).  Fodor was intransigent, refusing to give quarter and continuing to maintain that natural selection is erroneous and outmoded.

Now he and a colleague, Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, a cognitive scientist with some biology training, have expanded the attack on natural selection into a whole book: What Darwin Got Wrong, a book highlighted in today’s Independent. Fortunately (unlike the BBC), they’ve chosen somebody smart and critical—science writer Peter Forbes—to write the appraisal, which is not pretty:

Fodor is a philosophical flâneur: he loves cheap jokes and affects a kind of provocative insouciance. His 2003 book on Hume states at the outset that he “could even write a book on Hume without actually knowing anything about him,” and then claims to have done so. Philosophers and scientists could not be further apart. For geneticist and science writer Professor Steve Jones, “philosophy is to science what pornography is to sex” . . .

Unlike physics, biology is the science of exceptions. Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini come to the same conclusion but mostly for the wrong reasons.

Given the provocative title, it’s important to stress what Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini’s polemic is not. From the outset, they assert that they have no quarrel with the course of evolution and its timescale, only its mechanism. Furthermore, they affirm that they are “outright, card-carrying, signed-up, dyed-in-the-wool, no-holds-barred atheists.” For that small relief, much thanks.

I do, however, disagree with one of Forbes’s criticisms:

Secondly, they attack the logic of Neo-Darwinism. In their philosophical assault, Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini pursue several lines, one of which boils down to the old conundrum: natural selection demonstrates the survival of the fittest. What are the fittest? Those that survive. Scientists know that this is a trivial linguistic trick but Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini pursue this wrangling for 68 pages.

This seems to me a mischaracterization of Fodor and Piattelli-Palmerini’s argument, which is more complex than simply pointing out a tautology. (“Survival of the fittest” is not, by the way, a tautology.)

I’ll be reviewing this book elsewhere, so it would be inappropriate for me to do so here (link will be forthcoming).  Let me just say that virtually every biologist and philosopher who has followed Fodor’s arguments over the past two years has taken issue with his views on natural selection and with his philosophical arguments.  The book will, I predict, give enormous comfort to creationists, but will receive almost no praise from philosophers and scientists.  Fodor, who as far as I can tell has never admitted an error, will then claim that biologists and academic philosophers  have an entrenched interest in the truth of natural selection, and that he and Piattelli-Palmerini are, like Galileo, being reviled for criticizing erroneous dogma.

To this I respond:  for every Galileo there are a thousand crackpots who also question received wisdom—but are wrong.  In their misguided attacks on natural selection, Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini are straying dangerously close to crackpot-dom.

Accommodationists vs. creationists: we all lose.

January 28, 2010 • 2:15 pm

I have no truck with the accommodationist, Templeton-funded website BioLogos, but at least they have the decency to point out the errors in Stephen Meyer’s new creationist book, Signature in the Cell (see Darryl Falk’s review here), which maintains that cells must have been designed by God because they’re too complex to have evolved.   Falk, who is president of BioLogos, also solicited comments from biologists Francisco Ayala (critical), Gerald Joyce (critical but doesn’t want to waste his time on a creationist), and Nobel Laureate Jack Szostak. Szostak is also critical but, in response to Falk (a professor at the religious Point Loma Nazarene University), also takes a swipe at Falks’s accommodationism:

However, I suspect I must part company with you in that I believe that science and religion actually are irreconcilable. In my view a scientific world view is one based on continuous questioning and therefore a search for more and better evidence and theories; faith in the unknowable plays no role. I think that belief systems based on faith are inherently dangerous, as they leave the believer susceptible to manipulation when skepticism and inquiry are discouraged.

Falk is “saddened” by Szostak’s faith-bashing:

I am especially interested in Dr. Szostak’s final paragraph. He is correct that we part company at this point, which saddens me deeply. I have written before, and I will write again: there are very sound reasons for entering the life of faith. I embarked upon a search for a source of ultimate reality and my personal search was based on evidence, too. The journey of faith is by no means blind, and there many fine scientists who—guided by faith, evidence, and reason—choose to follow the same journey I am on. Scientific pathways and faith journeys need not lead to different locations in life. In fact, I am convinced they point in the very same direction and lead to the very same place.

Falk doesn’t tell us what “evidence” shows that faith and science both point in the same direction (presumably toward Jesus).  And of course Falk was “convinced” a priori:  virtually all religious accommodationists start with the premise that science and faith produce the same conclusions (indeed, that’s the mission of BioLogos), and then seek support for this notion.  This shows, more than anything, why there is a disconnect between science and faith: good scientists don’t start with conclusions and then discard any data that don’t support those conclusions.  (What “evidence,” by the way, would show that “scientific pathways” and “faith journeys” actually do lead to different conclusions?)  In responding to Szostak, Falk unwittingly demonstrates why science and faith aren’t compatible.

Meyer published his tedious response here; it’s more of the same ID pap clothed in science language. Note that although Falk offered Meyer “an opportunity to post a 1000 word response to all of this on our site,” he actually published Meyer’s entire 2700-word response.  Maybe that’s because Falk is kindly disposed toward Meyer:  as Falk noted offering Meyer his rebuttal, “He is a Christian brother. I know he means well.”

No, Dr. Falk, Meyer does not mean well.  He is spreading lies and confusing people by distorting real science.  Is that the unfortunate result of “meaning well”?  Do you think that because somebody is a “Christian brother,” he’s incapable of lying for Jesus?

I swear, I do appreciate people like Falk, who are religious, coming out against the lies of the Discovery Institute.  But BioLogos, in its shameful pandering to religion, is simply an embarrassment to the community of biologists.  In their insistence that faith and science are mutually reinforcing, and their unwillingness to entertain any evidence to the contrary, people like Falk are impediments to the advance of rationality.  As Szostak says, “belief systems based on faith are inherently dangerous, as they leave the believer susceptible to manipulation when skepticism and inquiry are discouraged.”

Indeed.