Duck penises are long and corkscrew-shaped.  This has been known for a while, but a new report in Proc. Roy. Soc. imputes the evolution of this bizarre structure — and the matching long oviduct in females — to sexual selection: specifically, sexual conflict.   The male’s apparatus twists clockwise, the female’s counterclockwise, and so she has some control over the act . . . .

Anyway read about this result at Carl Zimmer’s Loom and Ed Yong’s Not Exactly Rocket Science. BE SURE to watch the videos (not for the squeamish!). They involve duck farms, sexual frustration, and kinky artificial oviducts. This kind of story is made for science journalists.

You’ll never look at a duck the same way again.

Fig. 1.  The iconic image, reproduced endlessly.  Sad to think that this guy died just so his dangling member could be shown to the world.

______________

Brenna, P. L. R., C. J. Clark and R. O. Prum.  2009.  “Explosive eversion and functional morphology of the duck penis supports sexual conflict in waterfowl genitalia,” Proc. Roy. Soc. London doi: 10.1098/rspb.2009.2139.  (You’ll need a site license for access.)

A paper soon to appear in PNAS (and not yet online) suggests that some dinosaurs might have been venomous.  The title, however, leaves no wiggle room: “The birdlike raptor Sinornithosaurus was venomous.”

A team of scientists from China and Kansas noticed that a fossil specimen of the feathered theropod dinosaur Sinornithosaurus millenii (see pp. 40-44 of WEIT) had long maxillary teeth that were grooved (see Fig. 1 below).  Such grooved teeth are often seen in venomous animals:   glands secrete the venom into channels in the jaw, which deliver it to the base of the teeth. It then mixes with saliva and the toxic cocktail is drawn into the tooth grooves by capillary action.  In venomous reptiles like the gila monster, these teeth deliver a poisoned bite that doesn’t kill the prey but puts it into a state of shock.

S. millennii also had a space on the jaw (“maxillary fossa”) that could have housed a venom gland, and jaw channels that might have collected the secretions.  The authors also note that the morphology of the skull is also consistent with a venomous predator: the snout is narrow and the skull has a “tall later profile with a large gape,” suggesting that the dino had a relatively weak bite and therefore needed help from venom to incapacitate its prey.

They conclude that “Sinornithosaurus was a venomous predator that fed on birds by using its long fants to penetrate through the plumage and into the skin, and the toxins would induce shock and permit the victim to be subndued rapidly.”  [Note: some have suggested that S. millenii might have been an ancestor of modern birds, but Gong et al. clearly disagree, since they envision birds as being its prey.]

The reason this paper was PNAS-worthy is because if the report is true, this would make S. millenii the first known venomous dinosaur, and of course dinosaurs are the ultimate charismatic macrofauna.  Anything new about them is sure to get wide attention.

Ed Yong has a more detailed report at  on Not Exactly Rocket Science , including statements from dissenters who argue that the evidence for venom use is less than airtight. Perhaps the authors should have been a bit more cautious in their title!

Fig. 1. Photograph of the holotype of S. millenii (IVPP V12811) showing dentition with venom grooves (vg). mxf, maxillary fang (from the paper).

Fig. 2. Sinornithosauris millenii. Illustration by Mick Ellison (from WEIT).

h/t: Ed Yong for the pdf.

_________

Gong, E., L. D. Martin, D. A. Burnham, and A. R. Falk. 2009. The birdlike raptor Sinornithosauris was venomous. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A early edition

(If you’re interested in punctuated equilibrium and cryptic species in marine microfossils, see also Hull, P. M., and R. D. Norris. 2009. Evidence for abrupt speciation in a classic case of gradual evolution. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 106:21224-21229.)

Yes, I swiped this from Richard Dawkins’s website (thanks, RD!), but I had to pass it along to those readers who missed it.  This is a collection of ten articles about atheism by Greta Christina, who has previously been below my radar.  Christina is a free-lance writer, an atheist, and a lesbian who writes a lot about sex and sex workers. (Her blog is here.)  And she’s an eloquent voice for reason.  I spent a lovely two hours last night reading these pieces, which are clear, witty, and trenchant — nourishing fodder for atheists.  Print them out and enjoy.

_________

Correction:  some readers have pointed out that Ms. Christina is not lesbian but bisexual (I’d assumed the former since she’s married to another woman.) My bad.

The Lewontin interview (very short) is now up at the Chicago Evolution website.   I’ll get to interview him at greater length on Dec. 31 for Current Biology.  If you have questions you’d like posed to the Great Man, post them here (no guarantees they’ll be asked!).

Well, we don’t really need any more evidence for evolution, do we?  But it keeps pouring in, the latest in a paper from the Journal of Evolutionary Biology (link is to the abstract, and if you have journal access you’ll find the paper in the online “early edition”).

In WEIT I talk about olfactory receptor (“OR”) genes as evidence for evolution: these are genes that encode receptor proteins involved in smell, with each OR gene encoding a different protein.  These genes provide evidence for evolution because, as I describe on pp. 69-71 of my book, in terrestrial mammals most OR genes are intact and functional, but in their aquatic mammalian relatives, like dolphins, whales, and sea lions, many of the OR genes are inactivated by mutations (80% of them in dolphins!). (These inactive genes are called pseudogenes.)  Nevertheless, the DNA sequences of those dead genes clearly show their affinity to the active genes of terrestrial relatives.  OR genes are probably useless underwater  because they detect airborne and not waterborne odors.  Moreover, marine mammals that spend some time on land, like sea lions, have fewer OR pseudogenes than do more-aquatic species like whales and dolphins, presumably because sea lions need to smell things when they’re on land.

The new paper, by T. Kishida and T. Hikida from Kyoto University, offers a remarkable parallel to the mammal results, but from snakes.  To make a longish story short, the authors sequenced OR genes in two groups of sea snakes, those that give birth in the water, and hence never leave it, and those that are “oviparous”, and must leave the sea to lay eggs on land.  They also looked at OR genes from the snakes’ fully terrestrial relatives. (We know from other data that sea snakes evolved from land-dwelling ancestors.)

The results: just like in mammals.  In viviparous (live-bearing) sea snakes, about 30% of their OR genes had become nonfunctional pseudogenes, compared to only about 7% in their terrestrial relatives (elapids). That in itself is evidence for evolution, for what else could explain the presence of nonfunctional genes that are similar in DNA sequence — but broken by mutations — to active genes in relatives?  And the inactivation of OR genes in aquatic snakes makes real evolutionary sense; genes that are unnecessary — indeed, that are a metabolic burden since unneeded — get zapped by mutation.  The other cute result is that oviparous snakes that occasionally come ashore showed a lower proportion of OR pseudogenes genes (about 12%) than their viviparous cousins,  precisely as expected if they, like sea lions, must retain some sniffing ability on land.

I love pseudogenes, for they constitute some of the most irrefutable evidence for evolution–and not just microevolution, either. The transition from terrestrial to aquatic mammals, or terrestrial to aquatic snakes, surely represents macroevolution.  It’s hard to explain patterns like those of the OR genes by any form of creationism, unless you think the creator designed species to fool us into thinking they evolved!

Fig. 1.  An oviparous sea snake, the highly venomous banded sea krait, Laticauda colubrina.

h/t: Matthew Cobb

___________

Kishida, T., and T. Hikida. 2010. Degeneration patterns of the olfactory receptor genes in sea snakes. J. Evol. Biol. early view

Bloggingheads.tv has put up the second part of the 77-minute dialogue between Christopher Hitchens and Robert Wright; the link is here.

The whole dialogue turns on Wright’s objection to Hitchens’s book subtitle: “Religion poisions everything.”  There’s no discussion, or virtually none, about whether or not the claims of religion are true; rather, H&W argue about whether faith is on balance a good or bad thing.   Here are some highlights (because I’m much more familiar with Hitchens’s than with Wright’s public assertions about faith, I’m concentrating on Wright’s points. Nor can I claim to be unbiased!):

__________

13:20.  Wright admits that religion is man-made.  H&W then discuss whether religion played a salutary role in the abolition of slavery and the attainment of civil rights in the ’60s.

22:40.  Wright seems to argue that because everyone has some irrational or unjustifiable beliefs, such as those involved in a secular system of morality, then religion’s irrational beliefs are o.k.

28:00 Wright seems to deny that religion intensifies the tribalism of humanity.

30:51:  Wright argues that religion doesn’t really exacerbate bad human actions:  “ I just think that people create whatever ideological justification they need — ‘ideology ‘defined broadly to include religion — for what they’re motivated to do by material, political, economic, or self-interested factors.”

32:00:  The big Stalin/Mao “atheists-are-just-as-bad-as-the-faithful” debate begins!  The fur flies thick and fast over the next few minutes.

42:11: Hitchens denies that religion really does make people behave better, asserting that they’d do so even without faith.  He reiterates his famous challenge about whether there are bad actions that only a believer could perform, and whether any good action performed by a believer could equally well have been done by an atheist.

51:45:  Wright waffles about whether or not the increase in morality over time gives evidence for God, asserting ” . . a. There is a moral direction in history, . . . and b. it has some of the hallmarks of purpose in a way that doesn’t necessarily imply the existence of an intelligent designer, conscious being, God.”  He has never specified, or even speculated, however, about where that “purpose” comes from if not from a supernatural being.

56:00:  H&W argue about whether religion plays a role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over land.

66:15:   More fur flies over Wright’s assertion that the terrible actions performed by religious fundamentalists, like Major Hasan’s murder spree at Fort Hood, are actually caused by American foreign policy and the disrespect felt by the faithful.  Wright claims that such actions are “invariably in response to some grievance that’s been inflicted on them [the faithful].”  Wright further asserts that he’s really not trying to assign blame here, but it’s palpably clear from his previous writings that he really has done so.

72:15:  Wright plays the elitism card, accusing Hitch of claiming that he’s smarter than the religious people he’s criticizing, and associating H’s atheism with “elitism”.  Hitchens responds eloquently, claiming that if religious people would stop trying to impose their views on the rest of society, he’d leave them alone.

__________

Is arguing that “your faith is damaging society” really being elitist? No more so than telling climate-change denialists that their stance will ruin the world.  The charge of “elitism” is simply another tactic in the religious/faitheist playbook (along with the “you’re mean and militant” trope) designed to make atheists shut up.

In the main, Wright ardently defends what Dan Dennett calls “belief in belief,” even though Wright himself doesn’t believe in God (at least, I don’t think he does, but he’s awfully eager to assure the faithful that the history of society instantiates a “higher purpose”).  Once again, I find this position both indefensible and condescending.  How can one deny the underlying factual basis for faith — the existence of a supernatural being, who for many people intercedes directly in the world — and yet still maintain that that faith in a nonexistent deity is a good thing?  For it is certain that if people really thought that there were no God, the practice of religion, beneficial or not, would vanish.

All the supposed benefits of faith rest on a bedrock assurance that the tenets of one’s faith are correct.  Who would pray if they knew that there was no one up there to hear their bootless cries? Surely the first requirement of living as a person in a difficult world is to distinguish what is true from what is fiction, whether or not that fiction be consoling.  We are not children.

Bob Richards has put up a few dozen photos from our Darwin conference in October. If you enjoy seeing evolutionary biologists and philosophers in flagrante delicto, go here.  We’ll have an interview up shortly with Richard Lewontin (my Ph.D. advisor), and the videos of the talks themselves are on the way.

Fig. 1.  The Boss (aka Dick Lewontin)

This week’s Science reports that the main science funding agency in Italy — their equivalent of the NIH or NSF — has not only funded but promoted a creationist book.  (There’s more on this debacle at the Dec. 9 Science Insider.)

Evolutionism: the decline of an hypothesis was assembled by Roberto de Mattei, a historian of Christianity at the European University of Rome, from proceedings of a February meeting he organized at CNR, at which several scientists and philosophers explained why evolution is unscientific. The book, published last month, includes claims that conventional dating methods are wrong, that fossil strata resulted from the Deluge, and that dinosaurs died 40,000 years ago.

The book states that CNR contributed money for its publication (9000, according to the newspaper La Repubblica). CNR President Luciano Maiani has acknowledged that CNR contributed to expenses but said the agency has not endorsed the book. In an e-mail to Science, however, he said, “I’d like to stress the fact that intellectual research is an open enterprise as well as my [opposition to] any form of censorship.”

Maiani’s explanation is lame. Sure, intellectual research is open to zealots and crackpots, but did the CNR have to fund it? And would their refusal to do so be exercising “censorship”? I wouldn’t have thought this possible in Italy, or anywhere in western Europe.

If you’d like to express your feeling about this, as I just have, Maiani’s email at the CNR is presidenza@cnr.it

Here’s what I sent; if you’re too busy to compose an email, you can cut and paste this one, but unless you’re an obstreperous evolutionary biologist, edit the penultimate sentence:

Dear Dr. Maiani,

I read with dismay in this week’s Science that your organization has not only funded but promoted a creationist book edited by Roberto de Mattei.  Your remarks on this book indicate that you think the CNR’s financial and intellectual support was justified because you consider intellectual research an “open enterprise” and are “opposed to any form of censorship.”

Certainly intellectual research is “open” to anyone, but do you really think it’s at all useful for a respected body of scientists to promote and support blatant lies like those promulgated in this book? (I need hardly tell you that dinosaurs did not die out 40,000 years ago, nor that the geological strata are not the product of a sudden, worldwide flood!)  Really, it’s like the CNR supporting flat-earth theory, or the view that diseases are produced by evil spirits.

And do you really think that the CNR’s refusal to publish these lies would be considered censorship? I call such a refusal “good science”.  Would it be “censorship” for your organization to refuse to publish a book proving that the earth is flat? For that is what creationism is equivalent to.

We have our own problems with creationism in the United States, but I never thought that that problem would crop up in Italy, particularly in an organization as respected as the CNR.   As an evolutionary biologist who has long fought against creationism, I urge you to condemn this ludicrous volume rather than supporting it. It’s an embarrassment to Italian science — indeed, to all of science.

Cordially,