Posting has been slow lately as I’m writing reviews of several books for magazines, one of which is a fantastic, must-read science book.  More about that when the review goes up. In the meantime, a bit of self-aggrandizement. An alert reader informs me that WEIT has been selected by the Sunday Times (of London) as one of the seven best science books of 2009.  Checking it out, I find that I’m in amiable company: two other Darwin books are by my friends Steve Jones (Darwin’s Island) and Richard Dawkins (The Greatest Show on Earth).

The other Darwin-related book is Desmond and Moore’s Darwin’s Sacred Cause, which I’ve not yet read.  There are two books about the ill-fated Gaia hypothesis: James Lovelock’s The Vanishing Face of Gaia, and a biography of Lovelock by John and Mary Gribbins with the intriguing title He Knew He Was Right.

Last is a book that’s been showing up on many of the “year’s best” lists, Graham Farmelo’s biography of Paul Dirac, The Strangest Man.  Dirac was indeed a bizarre and reclusive character, whose contributions to quantum physics, well known to scientists, remain largely unrecognized by the general public.  This is a timely book that I can’t wait to read.

Finally, I want to call attention to a book I received yesterday, one that should be on the shelves of all evolutionists and Darwin lovers.  It’s The Annotated Origin: A Facsimile of the First Edition of On the Origin of Species, by biologist James Costa.  Each page consists of one column of prose from the original book, with explanations, clarifications, and annotations by Costa in an adjacent column. There are handy arrows pointing to the explicated parts of Darwin.  Costa has unearthed a tremendous amount of historical and biological information that makes reading The Origin a much richer experience.  If you teach Darwin’s book, I’d definitely recommend using this edition.

Over at Foreign Policy, Robert Wright repeats his usual spiel against the “new atheists,” but this time he’s turned up the invective:

The accusations:

1. We want to spawn a generation of venom-spewers.

But the New Atheists’ main short-term goal wasn’t to turn believers into atheists, it was to turn atheists into New Atheists — fellow fire-breathing preachers of the anti-gospel. The point was to make it not just uncool to believe, but cool to ridicule believers.

Umm. . . that isn’t my goal.  I’ve had some conversations with these NA’s, and never have I sensed that their goal was to ridicule believers.  Sometimes they ridicule belief, of course, but more often they’re involved in serious discourse about ideas.  Given the choice between turning believers into atheists or turning atheists into New Atheists,  there’s not one of us who would opt for the latter.

2.  We’re hurting the acceptance of evolution.

If you’re a Midwestern American, fighting to keep Darwin in the public schools and intelligent design out, the case you make to conservative Christians is that teaching evolution won’t turn their children into atheists. So the last thing you need is for the world’s most famous teacher of evolution, Richard Dawkins, to be among the world’s most zealously proselytizing atheists. These atmospherics only empower your enemies,

No evidence for this assertion, of course.  I still haven’t encountered a believer who says, “You know, if Dawkins would just stop dissing God, I’d embrace evolution!” And does Wright really want us to lie here?  After all, teaching evolution, like teaching other forms science — indeed, like teaching any sort of critical thinking and rationality — will help turn some children into atheists.  Are we supposed to say, “No — not a chance in hell of that happening”?

3.  We’re reactionaries and hurting the cause of world peace.

Dawkins, for example, has written that if there were no religion then there would be “no Israeli/Palestinian wars.” This view is wrong — the conflict started as an essentially secular argument over land — but it’s popular among parts of the U.S. and Israeli right. The reason is its suggestion that there’s no point in, say, removing Israeli settlements so long as the toxin of religion is in the air.

I don’t recall Dawkins saying anything about settlements; that’s Wright’s ridiculous mischaracterization.

4.   We’re intolerant and uncivil.

All the great religions have shown time and again that they’re capable of tolerance and civility when their adherents don’t feel threatened or disrespected. At the same time, as some New Atheists have now shown, you don’t have to believe in God to exhibit intolerance and incivility.

Yeah, right.  Clearly it is the atheists who are responsible for making the faithful intolerant — we haven’t respected them enough!  That, of course, is why the Catholic church prefers death by AIDS to the use of condoms, and why it frowns on homosexuals and women priests.  Catholics wouldn’t do that if the atheists hadn’t backed them into a corner!

And that’s why Islam keeps suppressing women, preventing them from getting a decent education (and dousing them with acid if they try), swathing them in burqas, bumping them off in honor killings, and making them second class citizens (a woman’s testimony counts only half as much as a man’s in a sharia court).  Clearly, Muslims do this only because they feel threatened. It would all stop if we’d just give them a little more respect!

Shame on Wright for implying that Islam’s brutally oppressing half of its adherents stems from a lack of respect for Muslims, and for laying at the door of atheism the blame for acid-dousings, suicide bombings, persecution of gays, and the spread of AIDS. These phenomena are, pure and simple, the products of religious scripture and dogma.  In what world can a man like Wright be seen as a serious thinker?

— A world in which the Templeton Foundation laps up this brand of piffle like a cat after cream.  And so I proffer a prediction:  Wright will win the Templeton Prize within two years.

Thanks to Otter and Greg Mayer for alerting me to a BBC report on a dividing gene pool in blackcap warblers, which led me to the original paper in Current Biology.

What the authors have demonstrated is that within the last thirty years, the blackcaps (Sylvia atricapilla), which formerly overwintered in Spain and returned to central Europe in spring for breeding, have now divided into two groups that use different overwintering sites.  One group continues its winter journey to Spain, but the other now overwinters in England.  The authors speculate,  probably correctly, that a few decades ago some blackcaps found a rich feeding site in the UK, where the bird-loving populace puts out plenty of food for the native species.

Since then, blackcaps in Europe go to either Spain or to England.  Back at the breeding grounds, you can identify which bird went where by looking at the ratio of deuterium isotopes in a small snip of the bird’s claws. (These isotope ratios identify what a bird has been eating: those overwintering in Spain eat mostly fruit, while the UK migrants live on seeds and other tasty comestibles provided by aviphilic Brits.)

The authors examined both genetic markers and morphology of these two groups of migrants when they co-mingled on their common breeding grounds in Germany. There are two main findings:

1,  There was a very slight but significant difference between the groups in their genetic markers, showing that they were not completely mixing their DNA on the breeding grounds each year. In other words, the two groups showed genetic evidence for weak reproductive isolation, which is the stuff of speciation. (Two groups attain species status when they diverge so much that there is no mixing of genes between them. )  This isolation probably stems from assortative mating of the two types:   birds returning to Germany from the UK have to travel less distance, and show up on the breeding grounds earlier than their Spanish counterparts. That means that individuals who migrate to a given locality tend to pair up with others from that locality, simply because that’s who is around at mating time.

2.  The two groups also differed in five morphological traits:  wing shape, head color, body color, bill color, and beak shape.  These differences may reflect strong natural selection that differentiated the birds since they began overwintering at different sites. (Selection for beak shape differences, for example, may reflect the different types of foods that each group has to handle in winter.)  If these differences are genetic (and we don’t know for sure), then this also confirms some reproductive isolation between the two groups of birds.

So what does it mean?  Well, it seems to show that in a very short period — only a few dozen blackcap generations — the gene pool of the birds has undergone some sundering, although that splittting is by no means complete.  Moreover, this division has happened without any geographic barriers keeping the two types apart.  Both overwintering groups breed in the same place, and the “barrier” leading to genetic difference was caused by a behavioral change in the birds themselves, a change that may be genetic. (The authors’ other papers, which I haven’t yet read, suggest that the two groups differ by a single gene affecting the direction of migration. I have trouble believing this!)  This is a very interesting result, and was well worth publishing in Current Biology.

What it does not mean is that speciation in this group is underway, despite one author’s suggestion to that end in the BBC piece.  Speciation may be starting, but it seems likely that, given the degree of interbreeding that does occur in central Europe, the differentiation between the groups will reach some kind of equilibrium, with the two types remaining as races (morphologically differentiated groups) rather than full species (groups that have no gene flow between them).   In other words, they may wind up like human races — populations that differ in some of their traits but which can and do interbreed, so that selection driving them apart is balanced by interbreeding pulling them together.

This should not detract from the work or the phenomenon, which is really interesting.  In this spirit I offer three more caveats:

a.  British bird lovers may not have caused this phenomenon. Although the BBC article touts the phenomenon as showing that “feeding birds changes evolution,” we’re not sure if the largesse of seeds and suet is what really prompted the new population of overwinterers. In the BBC article, Oxford biologist Joseph Tobias speculates that the main drive may have been increasingly warmer winters in the UK.  However, without food I’m not sure the birds would have survived well enough to return.

b.  The morphological differences may not be genetic.  A genetic basis seems likely, but to ensure that those five traits were really due to evolutionary change and not simply to effects of the environment itself (e.g., diet), it would be good to rear the offspring of these birds under constant conditions in the lab, seeing if they retain their parental traits. My bet is that they will.

c.   If the morphological differences are genetic, they (and the DNA differences) might reflect a sampling artifact in the original UK migrants rather than post-migration differentiation/selection. Again, I don’t think this is likely, but if those birds who migrated to the UK were a nonrandom sample of the original population, the differences between them and the others might reflect a sampling event rather than differences that evolved after the split in wintering grounds.

The main fault of the BBC article, as opposed to the paper, was its failure to point out that the situation may reflect stable genetic differentiation rather than incipient speciation.  After all, the vast majority of populations that differentiate fail to become full species.  What is clear, though, is that these two populations of blackcaps have attained some level of reproductive isolation, which is the stuff of speciation.

If the blackcap populations do become full species, this would not, however, demonstrate reflect sympatric speciation, for the division did not initially occur in the presence of free gene flow between the speciating populations. (The initial tendency to go to different overwintering grounds  immediately reduces gene flow between the two types of birds because it yields, as a byproduct, assortative mating based on different arrival times at the breeding grounds.)

Fig. 1.  A cute blackcap. Photograph by Will Forrest from the Yorkshire Birders website.

Rolshausen, G., G. Segelbacher, K. A. Hobson, and H. M. Schaefer. 2009. Contemporary evolution of reproductive isolation and phenotypic divergence in sympatry along a migratory divide. Current Biology 19:1-5.

Today’s Guardian has a list of the 50 books that “defined” the past decade. It’s a mixed bag, and of course some of the “defining” books are pretty dreadful (e.g., The Da Vinci Code), but there are some good ones too (my favorites include Home, Atonement, and The Year of Magical Thinking).  And one, The God Delusion, is the subject of a mini-essay by Christopher Hitchens.

Apparent criteria:

Your Books of the Decade

What we were reading The world was rocked by terrorism, climate change became an emergency, celebrity culture moved from our TVs to our bookshelves, and a boy wizard held millions spellbound. Love them or hate them, these are the 50 books that defined the decade

What Hitchens says about TGD:

2006:

There are numberless reasons for regarding The God Delusion as a modern classic and one of these reasons, I would propose, is its relative superfluity. Richard Dawkins has already introduced millions of people to the rigour and beauty of the scientific worldview and shown in exquisite detail the ways in which we, like all our fellow creatures, have evolved and were in no meaningful sense “created”.

Before the arid term “scientist” was coined in the last century, men such as Newton and Darwin were reckoned as “natural philosophers”: a term that suits Dawkins very well. Another scholar deserving of the same title of honour was the late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, and The God Delusion can be read as a response to Gould’s conciliatory and wishful proposition that “science” and “faith” (or religion) occupy “non-overlapping magisteria”.

Dawkins’s energy, industry and wit, in disputing this idle view and in showing the hard, historic incompatibilities between the two, have led to his being caricatured as a dogmatist in his own right, even as a “fundamentalist”. What empty piffle this is. A senior teacher in the vital field of biology finds his discipline under the crudest form of attack, and sees government money being squandered on the teaching of drivel in schools. What sort of tutor would he be if he did not rise to the defence of his own profession? Thus the appearance of a secondary work that ought not to have been needed at all, but is in fact required now more than ever.

The God Delusion is, like Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell, quite respectful of the human origins of religion and of the ways in which it may have assisted people in spiritual and even material ways. We are pattern-seeking primates, and religion was our first attempt to make sense of nature and the cosmos. This does not give us permission, however, to go on pretending that religion is other than man-made. And the worst excuse ever invented for the exertion of power by one primate over another is the claim that certain primates have God on their side. It is not only justifiable to be impatient and contemptuous when such tyrannies are proposed; it’s more like a duty.

The atheist does not say and cannot prove that there is no deity. He or she says that no persuasive evidence or argument has ever been adduced for the notion. Surely this should place the burden on the faithful, who do after all make very large claims for themselves and their religions. But not a bit of it: we are somehow supposed to regard the profession of “faith” as if it were a good thing in itself. This is too much to ask, and it was high time to say so.

I regret to say that I have just noticed a tiny mistake on page 177. It is not true to say that the Virgin Mary “ascended” into heaven. She was “assumed” into that place, by a ruling of the Roman Catholic church that dates back all the way to the mid-19th century. Dawkins really must be more careful, but he may have been busy, as in the chapter of Climbing Mount Improbable in which he described the 20 or so separate evolutions of the eye. Readers of The God Delusion ought to press on and buy all the other Dawkins volumes too.

Given the joint and salutary effect of all the “new atheist” books, it’s hard to choose just one that defined the decade, although “new atheism” itself is certainly a major movement of the noughties.  I would have lumped TGD with The End of Faith, Breaking the Spell, and God is Not Great in a quartet of apostasy.

Hitchens’s blurb reminded me of two things.  The first is all the criticism of Dawkins, much of it unfair, for being “dogmatic and militant”.  He’s simply forthright.  If Dawkins took after, say, Republicans using the same tone with which he goes after religion, nobody would call him a dogmatic, militant, anti-Republican. (Do you hear anybody criticizing the “militant fundamentalist Democrats” who mock Sarah Palin?) It is only critiques of religion that elicit such epithets.  For reasons that still elude me, it’s perfectly fine to use frank, strong language when criticizing someone’s politics, but not someone’s religion.  I have yet to understand the difference. After all, political opinions are often held with the same tenacity as religious ones.  At any rate, it’s time to stop exempting religion from the same sort of criticism that we level at other beliefs and opinions.

Dawkins also took some flak in The Greatest Show on Earth for bashing creationism. (I remember a particularly grumpy review in The Financial Times.)  That criticism was unfair. I’ve read TGSOE twice now, and the creation-bashing is limited, measured, and entirely appropriate. For god’s sake, how can you avoid bringing up creationism when proffering a book that gives evidence for something scientists and the educated public have accepted for decades? What other reason is there to produce such a book?  As Richard said, “This book is necessary.”  (Whether it — and my own effort — will be effective is another issue.)

The second point is that it’s time for the faitheists and the faithful to stop instructing us that “we can’t prove that there is no God.” (This is usually conveyed, in pompous tones, as “You can’t prove a negative.”)  No atheist that I know — and certainly none of the published “new atheists” — claims that we can absolutely disprove the existence of God. Nor can anyone absolutely disprove the existence of fairies, leprechauns, or an invisible elephant in the trunk of your car.  The next time a religious person says something like this, just respond, “Yes, and you also can’t prove that there isn’t a Zeus.”

h/t: John Brockman

Nice news:  WEIT has not only been put on the list of Amazon’s ten best science books of 2009 (note the good company of Dawkins’s The Greatest Show on Earth, and the unwelcome company of The Evolution of God — not a science book! — and Stephen Meyer’s S____ in the C____), but was also  chosen as a finalist in Borders’ Original Voices awards for books by a first-time author (note: finalists for 2009 are not yet listed on the website).

The book has done much better, and gotten much more approbation, than I ever imagined.  Thanks to all of you who supported it.

The ultimate crazy cat owner:

At the Guardian‘s “comment is free” section, Ben Goldacre (author of the great Bad Science blog) shows that this so-called communication lacks all credibility.

I’ve watched at least five or six network news shows featuring this unfortunate patient tapping out messages with the help of a friendly guiding hand.  Have any of the mainstream media raised doubts about this form of “communication?”  Not that I’m aware of.   The networks like feel-good news, not somebody throwing cold water on a doubtful story.

Here’s another essay that references studies of the phenomenon.