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.
by Greg Mayer
I haven’t listened to the interview yet, but I just have to note here that the story of Jerry’s encounter with a botfly larva is lovingly detailed in Tropical Nature by my friends and colleagues Adrian Forsyth and Ken Miyata (in Ken’s case, sadly, a late friend and colleague). It’s in the chapter with the wonderful title “Jerry’s Maggot”. I’ve made it required reading for my Costa Rica field courses.
Richard Dawkins’s webmaster has dug up a link to an show I did last December on NPR with Robert Krulwich. It tells the story of how I got a botfly larva in my head when I was a grad student visiting Costa Rica, and how I reared it out. (And yes, I know that a botfly isn’t a true bug!)
The direct link is here. There’s an interview with Cornell entomologist Tom Eisner in the last five minutes. He talks about dreaming of being an insect.
I promised to put a full review of Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum’s Unscientific America on this website, and what I will do is steer you toward my review of the book that just appeared in Science. You can find it here.
NOTE: With the permission of the folks at Science, I can now post the links to the summary and full article here for those of you who don’t have online access to the journal:
Summary here.
Full Text here.
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Coyne J. A. 2009. Selling science. Science 325(5941):678-679.
by Greg Mayer
Although far from the longest chapter in WEIT, I find the chapter on biogeography the single most persuasive one for showing why evolution is true. I think Jerry finds it compelling as well. This might seem surprising since he’s a geneticist: one might think he would find some of the genetic evidence most compelling. But I don’t think it is surprising, given that it was the biogeographic evidence, that, as the great zoogeographer P.J. Darlington put it, showed Darwin evolution.
Tapirs provide a nice example of the use of multiple lines of evidence in solving a biogeographic puzzle (a puzzle noted by an alert reader in the comments on my first tapir post). Tapirs are usually thought of as South American (where they are most widespread and species rich), with one species in Malaya.
The first thing you might think needs explication is the disjunct distribution. But before tackling this, a mis-impression must be corrected: although we tend to think of tapirs as typically South American, from a historical perspective, they are recent interlopers. Along with many other animals we consider typically South American (jaguars, llamas, peccaries), they entered South America from the north about 3 million years ago when the Panamanian portal became the Panamanian isthmus during the Great American Interchange.
What, then about the disjunction: how did they get from Central America to Malaya? They didn’t. Tapirs are a northern group. They and their relatives date back to the lower Eocene (ca. 50 mya). The modern genus, Tapirus, dates back to the Oligocene (ca. 30 mya), and was found in Europe, Asia, and North America. They have gone extinct in Europe, most of Asia, and most of North America. Tapirs thus have a relict distribution, being still found at two endpoints of their historical distribution. Geology, paleontology, and systematics thus combine to give a most satisfying account.
Over at The Reason Project, Sam Harris has continued his engagement with the Francis Collins NIH appointment by producing a sizeable critique of Collins’s views and an explanation of why some of us are worried about them.
NOTE: There was some problem with the article’s website, but it appears to be fixed.
by Greg Mayer
There’s a very disturbing article by Natasha Singer in today’s New York Times. In it, she outlines how a pharmaceutical company paid to have a review article written by a consulting company, got a well placed physician to agree to sign on as the “author” (with minimal input as to its content), and then submitted the article to a medical journal as though it had been written by the physician (without disclosing the true authors or their connection to the pharmaceutical company). The paper highlighted in the article was one of 26 similarly created papers which
emphasized the benefits and de-emphasized the risks of taking hormones
which redounded to the benefit of the company, which made the hormone drugs. Later studies showed, however, that the hormones increased the risk of cancer, stroke, heart disease, and dementia.
The paper trail laying out how this shocking scenario played out, all of which is available on the Times’ website, was released as part of a court case. It is a staggering breach of professional norms to act in the ways described. If a student did this, they would probably be brought up for academic discipline.
by Greg Mayer
I promised baby tapirs, so here are baby tapirs! (From Zooborns.)
Adult Malay tapirs, as you’ll recall, are particolored:
The three other species of tapir, all from the Americas, also have spotted/striped young. Here’s a lowland tapir, found throughout much of cis-Andean tropical South America; the others are very similar in appearance.
We can thus see that all baby tapirs look much alike, and quite different from adults. Adults are either self-colored (the American species) or particolored (the Malay tapir). (It’s interesting that both young and adults have white edges to their ears.) The question is, is this coloration of the juveniles an adaptation? Or is it an ancestral feature of no current utility, which makes a brief appearance in the young, but is then lost (like the coat of hair that human babies have in utero)?
A new book on why America is so art-illiterate: it’s all the artists’ fault!