There’s a tiny flurry in the press today as Ho ping-Ho, a professor at Tawian Ocean University, has announced the discovery of a new species of crab, the “strawberry crab,” from the coast of southern Taiwan.  Indeed, it does look like a strawberry.  However, it’s not clear whether this species is really new, since it resembles Neoliomera pubescens, a “strawberry crab” long known (since 1865) from islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans.  Ho says the new one is different since, as US News and World Report notes, “it has a distinctive clam-shaped shell about 1 inch (2.5 centimeters) wide”, which apparently differs in an unspecified way from N. pubescens. I’ll take his word for it.

The only photo I could find of the already-described species is indistinct, so I can’t verify this difference.  Nevertheless, Ho’s species is a cute little crab (about 1″ across), so here it is:

Figs. 1  The newly-discovered (?) strawberry crab.

Oh, and while investigating links to this beast, I found another one — an octopus (from the waters off southeast Asia) with the magnificent name of Wonderpus photogenicus.  Of course P.Z. described this a few years ago, but I don’t think he’s posted a movie:

Just a quick post on a  new paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Erica Bree Rosenblum and her colleagues.  It’s about the genetic basis of evolutionary convergence: the phenomenon in which different species, responding to the same environmental pressures, come to evolve similar traits. (I show examples of convergent marsupial and placental mammals in WEIT.)

In this case the trait is body color, and the species are three different lizards in three genera: the eastern fence lizard (Scleroporus undulatus), little striped whiptail (Aspidoscelis inornata) and lesser earless lizard (Holbrookia maculata).  Each lizard has independently evolved a white “race” on the white gypsum background at White Sands, in New Mexico (see below).  There’s little doubt that the white color is an adaptation to hide the lizards from predators; moreover, since the gypsum formation is no older than 6,000 years, this color change must have evolved fairly quickly.

Fig. 1 (from paper). “Fig. 1. Mutations associated with blanched coloration in White Sands lizards. (A) Blanched morphs from white sands on top and dark morphs in ancestral dark soil habitat on bottom. (B ) Amino acid schematic of the melanocortin-1receptor (Mc1r); replacements statistically associated with coloration in the focal taxa are shown in red.

Previous work has shown an association between color and amino-acid-replacement mutations in the same gene, Mc1r (Melanocortin 1 receptor).  Mc1r is a hormone receptor on the surface of melanocytes, and is involved in melanin synthesis.  In these species, the wild-type (active) form of Mc1r synthesizes mainly dark pigment, but its inactivation produces a lighter color, and not just in lizards.  Mc1r mutants, for example, produce coat-color changes in mice and horses, and produce red hair in humans.

The conclusion that convergence in the color of lizard skin is based on convergence at the genetic level — mutations in the same gene in three different species — is based on association studies based on wild-caught animals: when a lizard has the light color, it has a mutant form of Mc1r.  Formal genetics isn’t possible in these species, so a more rigorous conclusion was impossible.  In this study, however, functional assays of these mutants (and their wild-type alternatives) showed that, in two of the three species, the Mc1r protein had reduced activity.  In the third species (H. maculata), there was no difference in the biological activity of the mutant versus wild-type form of the protein.  This means that the “convergent” mutation they detected may be only a spurious association, not an amino-acid substitution affecting color, and so the genetic “convergence” involves two rather than three species.

Finally, genetic analysis of lizards of different colors showed that in the two species where Mc1r is involved in color changes, the mutant white-color alleles work in different ways.  In S. undulatus, heterozygotes are the same color as white individuals, so the white allele is dominant, while it’s recessive in A. inornanta.  The authors note that these dominance relationships make sense in light of the changes in the protein: the “dominant” mutant produces a protein that is able to prevent the wild-type form from integrating into membranes.  The different dominance relationships also lead to different geographic distributions of the alleles in the two species: there are a lot more copies of the “dark-color” allele in S. undulatus living on the white sands, because in that species the white allele is dominant, sheltering the alternative allele from selection in the white/nonwhite heterozygotes.  In A. inornata, on the other hand, you have to have two copies of the “white” allele to have a white color, so dark alleles are immediately removed by selection.

This is a nice example, in at least two species, of convergent mutations producing convergent phenotypes. (This is not completely novel: it’s been known for some time for insecticide resistance, where resistance to organophosphate insecticides involves changes at not only the same gene in different species, but identical amino acid changes). Moreover, functional tests tell us something about the biochemical/developmental basis for white color.  Finally, this is a case in which evolutionary change has occurred rapidly, and over a known stretch of time.

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Rosenblum, E. B. et al. 2010. Molecular and functional basis of phenotypic convergence in white lizards at White Sands.  Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA, early edition (www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.0911042107)



No contest.  As you may remember, a while back the “theologian” Karen Armstrong wrote an article in Foreign Policy defending God, or at least her apophatic, may-or-may-not-exist God.  She stopped along the way to take the obligatory swipe at “new atheists”:

So-called new atheists such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens have denounced religious belief as not only retrograde but evil; they regard themselves as the vanguard of a campaign to expunge it from human consciousness. Religion, they claim, creates divisions, strife, and warfare; it imprisons women and brainwashes children; its doctrines are primitive, unscientific, and irrational, essentially the preserve of the unsophisticated and gullible.

These writers are wrong — not only about religion, but also about politics — because they are wrong about human nature. Homo sapiens is also Homo religiosus. As soon as we became recognizably human, men and women started to create religions. We are meaning-seeking creatures. While dogs, as far as we know, do not worry about the canine condition or agonize about their mortality, humans fall very easily into despair if we don’t find some significance in our lives. Theological ideas come and go, but the quest for meaning continues. So God isn’t going anywhere. And when we treat religion as something to be derided, dismissed, or destroyed, we risk amplifying its worst faults. Whether we like it or not, God is here to stay, and it’s time we found a way to live with him in a balanced, compassionate manner.

In his inimitable style, Sam Harris responds today, also in Foreign Policy.  A sample:

I can’t quite remember how we got it into our heads that jihad was linked to violence. (Might it have had something to do with the actual history and teachings of Islam?) And how could we have been so foolish as to connect the apparently inexhaustible supply of martyrs in the Muslim world to the Islamic doctrine of martyrdom? In my own defense, let me say that I do get spooked whenever Western Muslims advocate the murder of apostates (as 36 percent of Muslim young adults do in Britain). But I now know that these freedom-loving people just “want to see God reflected more clearly in public life.”

I will call my friend Ayaan Hirsi Ali at once and encourage her to come out of hiding: Come on out, dear. Karen says the coast is clear. As it turns out, those people who have been calling for your murder don’t understand Islam any better than we do.

And how does Armstrong respond to the accusations that she’s put the kindest possible face on faith? What do apologists always do when backed into a corner? She plays the why-can’t-we-be-civil card! (Her response is on the same page):

It is clear that we need a debate about the role of religion in public life and the relationship between science and religion. I just wish this debate could be conducted in a more Socratic manner. Socrates, founder of the Western rationalist tradition, always insisted that any dialogue must be conducted with gentleness and courtesy, and without malice. In our highly polarized world, we really do not need yet another deliberately contentious and divisive discourse.

Armstrong goes on to deplore the “desecration” of religion represented by the Crusades, inquisitions, and persecutions conducted by the faithful, but asserts they are “distortions” of true faith.  But who is she to tell millions of Muslims that their understanding of the Qur’an is simply wrong? What she doesn’t see is that religion by its very nature  lends itself to this kind of persecution.  It’s an autocracy not amenable to reason — which is a sure recipe for immorality.

And that’s the point of the new atheists.  Most of us would be content to leave religion alone if it simply represented a private activity whose adherents left us alone.  But, for obvious reasons, many of them can’t, and that’s why a lot of us, including Harris, see the more moderate faithful as enablers of extremists.  Recently, a liberally religious friend told me that practitioners of all faiths were equally moral: he saw no difference between Muslims and Quakers.  Such blindness to the palpable facts of the world characterizes the enablers, leading directly to Robert Wright’s indictment of America for Major Hasan’s murder spree, to Nancy Graham Holme’s claim that the Danish cartoonists brought violence on themselves, and Karen Armstrong’s refusal to face the bad side of faith.   In the end, she holds us nasty atheists responsible for those “abuses of faith”:

In the past, theologians such as Rudolf Bultmann, Karl Rahner, and Paul Tillich enjoyed fruitful conversations with atheists and found their theology enriched by the encounters. We desperately need such interchange today. A truly Socratic dialogue with atheists could help to counter many of the abuses of faith that Harris so rightly deplores.

The Guardian has been a bastion of faitheism and mush-headed religous apologetics, the home of Madeleine Bunting, Andrew Brown, and now — the ultimate apologist — Nancy Graham Holm. In a piece published today, called “Prejudiced Danes provoke fanaticism,” Holm blames the recent Muslim attack on Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard on “prejudiced Danes” who “failed to respect religious belief.” (Westergaard is the cartoonist who depicted Muhamed wearing a bomb in his turban.)  The Danes shouldn’t have humiliated Muslims! The Danes brought this on themselves! If only they’d just shut up about religion!

Why did the editors of Jyllands-Posten want to mock Islam in this way? Some of us believed it was in bad taste and also cruel. Intentional humiliation is an aggressive act. As a journalist now living in the same town as Westergaard, I thought some at Jyllands-Posten had acted like petulant adolescents. Danes fail to perceive the fact that they have developed a society deeply suspicious of religion. This is the real issue between Denmark and Muslim extremists, not freedom of speech. The free society precept is merely an attempt to give the perpetrators the moral high ground when actually it is a smokescreen for a deeply rooted prejudice, not against Muslims, but against religion per se. Muslims are in love with their faith. And many Danes are suspicious of anyone who loves religion.

Rightly so!

Holm’s piece is contemptible nonsense, disgusting even by the low standards of religious writing in the Guardian.  What the cartoons expressed was not “intentional humiliation,” but criticism of a sexist, oppressive, and lethal form of Islam.  And by blaming Islamic reaction on the Danes themselves, Holm allies herself with those religious loons who find “offense” everywhere, and with the benighted Irish who passed the blasphemy law.

My online dictionary defines “prejudice” as “preconceived opinion that is not based on reason and actual experience.”  Where do the cartoonists’ sentiments about Islam come from, if not from experience?

Oy vey — I didn’t think it would be this easy.  The name of Pinker’s bear is

WILFRED.

I completely forgot that I gave this name during the last bear contest.  But SeanK didn’t forget, so he’s the winner.

What I hoped would happen is that some sleuthing would reveal that Pinker uses an image of Wilfred every year to demonstrate the “Magic Eye” phenomenon to Harvard undergraduates.  During the lecture, Pinker mentions that Wilfred does not find this display funny:

Fig. 1.  Wilfred. You can see him in 3-D!

Over at The Philosopher’s Magazine, Russell Blackford has a nice essay on the necessity for atheists to publicly criticize religion:

When religion claims authority in the political sphere, it is unsurprising – and totally justifiable – that atheists and sceptics question the source of this authority. If religious organisations or their leaders claim to speak on behalf of a god, it is fair to ask whether the god concerned really makes the claims that are communicated on its behalf. Does this god even exist? Where is the evidence? And even if this being does exist, why, exactly, should its wishes be translated into socially-accepted moral norms, let alone into laws enforced by the state’s coercive power? When these questions are asked publicly, even with a degree of aggression, that’s an entirely healthy thing. . .

It doesn’t help when opponents of the New Atheism attempt a silly and unfair tu quoque! riposte – or perhaps just try to wound feelings, express spite, or incite anger – by branding forthright critics of religion as “fundamentalist atheists”. This expression should be contested vigorously whenever it appears. A fundamentalist atheist would be one who believes in the inerrancy of an atheist text – perhaps one of the New Atheist books, such as The God Delusion – even in the face of results from rational inquiry. However, I have yet to encounter such a person, and in any event such a label has nothing to do with the writings of Dawkins, Hitchens and the other Horsemen. Let’s be clear that the word “fundamentalist” does not mean “forthright” or “outspoken”. To use the word so loosely involves overlooking what is wrong with fundamentalism in the first place, namely its dogmatic resistance to all the findings of science and reason (as when Young Earth Creationists insist, against all the evidence, that the Earth is only six to ten thousand years old).

Being too cheap to travel to the Galápagos on my own, I’ve wished for years for an invitation to go there as an “expert.” That’s about to come true, as I embark Thursday for a ten-day trip to the islands, courtesy of The Aspen Institute and the folks at Lindblad.  This is a “Darwin Year” voyage, complete with readings, discussions, and panels on evolution. (The other “experts” are Olivia Judson and Mark Plotkin). I’ll try to do some postings from the islands, though internet access is limited.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been rereading Darwin and others (especially Frank Sulloway) on the islands and their effect on Darwin’s formulation of 1859.  What is most striking from these readings is that the islands did not, as is often assumed, constitute a “eureka moment” for Darwin: he did not hit upon, nor even begin to formulate, his theory of “transmutation” until several years thereafter.

True, the Galápagos did constitute important evidence for the biogeographic chapters of The Origin, but this came as much from the plants (and Joseph Hooker’s analysis of them) as from the finches.  Indeed, “Darwin’s finches” are not even mentioned in The Origin!  This may be because Darwin botched his collections there, failing to put the island source on the collecting labels.  He was forced to reconstruct the biogeography of the finches (which at first he didn’t recognize as a group of close relatives) using specimens collected — and properly labelled — by Darwin’s manservant and by Captain Fitzroy himself.  Darwin’s failure to mention finches in The Origin may reflect his continuing uncertainty about the nature of the evidence.   He knew by 1859 that the 14 species were indeed closely related (ornithologist John Gould had determined that for him), but the uncertainty about their biogeography led to confusion about what role geographic isolation played in the origin of species.

Darwin’s plant collections, on the other hand, were properly labeled, for pressing plants on the spot is more conducive to accurate recording of localities.  And it was Joseph Hooker’s identification of the plants, their affinity, and especially the uniqueness of many species to specific islands, that helped convince Darwin he was on the right track.

Here, from Chapter 12, is the most famous mention of the Galápagos in The Origin.  Notice Darwin’s clever use of rhetorical questions to attack creationism.  How could a Victorian reader fail to be convinced by arguments like this?

The most striking and important fact for us in regard to the inhabitants of islands, is their affinity to those of the nearest mainland, without being actually the same species. Numerous instances could be given of this fact. I will give only one, that of the Galapagos Archipelago, situated under the equator, between 500 and 600 miles from the shores of South America. Here almost every product of the land and water bears the unmistakeable stamp of the American continent. There are twenty-six land birds, and twenty-five of those are ranked by Mr Gould as distinct species, supposed to have been created here; yet the close affinity of most of these birds to American species in every character, in their habits, gestures, and tones of voice, was manifest. So it is with the other animals, and with nearly all the plants, as shown by Dr. Hooker in his admirable memoir on the Flora of this archipelago. The naturalist, looking at the inhabitants of these volcanic islands in the Pacific, distant several hundred miles from the continent, yet feels that he is standing on American land. Why should this be so? why should the species which are supposed to have been created in the Galapagos Archipelago, and nowhere else, bear so plain a stamp of affinity to those created in America? There is nothing in the conditions of life, in the geological nature of the islands, in their height or climate, or in the proportions in which the several classes are associated together, which resembles closely the conditions of the South American coast: in fact there is a considerable dissimilarity in all these respects. On the other hand, there is a considerable degree of resemblance in the volcanic nature of the soil, in climate, height, and size of the islands, between the Galapagos and Cape de Verde Archipelagos: but what an entire and absolute difference in their inhabitants! The inhabitants of the Cape de Verde Islands are related to those of Africa, like those of the Galapagos to America. I believe this grand fact can receive no sort of explanation on the ordinary view of independent creation; whereas on the view here maintained, it is obvious that the Galapagos Islands would be likely to receive colonists, whether by occasional means of transport or by formerly continuous land, from America; and the Cape de Verde Islands from Africa; and that such colonists would be liable to modifications; the principle of inheritance still betraying their original birthplace.