Paleontology and the media

May 19, 2009 • 12:15 am

by Greg Mayer

The New York Times is reporting some major media event at the American Museum of Natural History on Tuesday concerning a 47 million year old primate fossil from Germany.  There’re reports of secrecy, exclusivity, and high priced documentaries. It seems a tad curious, since by available reports, the American Museum has nothing to do with the research or the fossil, which is in the collection of the Natural History Museum in Oslo, and the fossil was already reported on by the Times a few days ago and by the Daily Mail over a week ago. The fossil is from the Messel shale an important lagerstatte. Keep an eye out for the reports later today.

(PS The American Museum has what seems to be a really neat new mammal exhibit, reviewed here.  If you’re in New York, go see it.)

Update. The press conference has been held. The BBC has a few videos here. The specimen is a very well preserved, nearly complete, articulated skeleton, with remnants of fur and stomach contents (as is often the case in specimens from the Messel Lagerstatte), of a basal higher primate (i.e. near the ancestry of monkeys, apes, and man). The authors of the paper made a taxonomic faux pas in allowing the name of the new creature, along with a description, to be published prior to the appearance of their paper. The authorship of the name, and its date of publication, are now murky.

Update 2. As I feared, a big media roll out is not always conducive to getting the story right.  Just now on the Rachel Maddow Show, the features reporter said that the new primate might be the missing link between man and ape. It is of course nothing of the sort, and the authors never said it was, but using the term “missing link” as the key descriptor of the find (see the Daily Mail link above for an example) was bound to lead to some such misunderstanding. He also stressed that it could be “upright”, which many may take to mean bipedal, but, of course, it wasn’t. Laelaps and PZ concur about the doleful effects of the media hype. More from Laelaps here. The hype is even more overheated than I realized: from the promoters: “WORLD RENOWNED SCIENTISTS REVEAL A REVOLUTIONARY SCIENTIFIC FIND THAT WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING | Ground-Breaking Global Announcement”. Money quote from Laelaps:

I have the feeling that this fossil, while spectacular, is being oversold. This raises an important question about the way scientific discoveries, particularly fossil finds, are being popularized. Darwinius is just the latest is a string of significant fossils to be hyped in the media before being scientifically described (or at least before that information is released to the public). Other recent examples include “Dakota” the Edmontosaurus, the pliosaur “Predator X“, and “Lyuba” the baby mammoth. I am glad that these finds are stirring excitement, but I am a bit put off by the way they are presented.

Update 3 (May 20). Carl Zimmer and Ed Yong add to the critical pile on. A sample of Ed Yong’s wonderful satirical evisceration:

Around the world, signs that everything has changed have already begun to appear. Jeanette Gould from Stoke-on-Trent was shocked to discover the outline of Darwinius emblazoned on her morning toast. “Well, it ruined breakfast,” said Ms Gould, failing to appreciate the detail of the creature’s stomach contents outlined in bread crumbs. “I couldn’t very well spread raspberry jam over the direct ancestor of my children, could I?”

There is a wonderful accompanying illustration of the piece of toast.

Can the supernatural be studied? Kiri-kin-tha’s first law of metaphysics

May 18, 2009 • 9:37 pm

by Greg Mayer

A tactic pursued vigorously by cdesign proponentsists is to claim that scientists assume that God (and other supernatural beings) doesn’t exist, and that this assumption is just that: an assumption, with no empirical basis. Roger Pennock has responded to this claim, most notably in his book Tower of Babel, noting that it confuses metaphysical naturalism (claims about the existence of entities) with methodological naturalism (forgoing explanatory appeals to the supernatural, because such appeals squelch further inquiry), and that all science must adopt the latter, lest it give up investigation whenever a problem proves recalcitrant. Its converse, “methodological supernaturalism”, is essentially a God of the gaps argument: what we do not understand, we attribute to the supernatural.  The fallacy of this argument has been known for millenia, and it has perhaps never been better said than by Hippocrates:

Men think epilepsy divine, merely because they do not understand it. But if they called everything divine which they do not understand, why, there would be no end to divine things.

It’s also always seemed to me a rather parlous position for a religious person to adopt, because by identifying the works of God with ignorance, the realm of the divine is on a continual retreat before expanding knowledge. A weaker but related claim made by some accommodationists is that science must be silent about existential claims about God(s), because it cannot contemplate supernatural entities, being bound to consider only natural explanations.

I think Pennock’s response is compelling, but I’ve always thought more could be said.  Is it really true that science cannot investigate the supernatural?

If the goal of science is identified, as it sometimes is, as the explanation of phenomena by recourse to general laws (or some such formulation) then it would appear that supernatural events or entities, being unbound by such laws, could not be scientifically investigated. While this characterization of science is not without merit, it ignores a large part of science– much of astronomy, geology, and biology, for starters– which is concerned with history: what has happened.  They are, as R.J. O’Hara has put it, “those sciences which have as their object the reconstruction of the past based on the evidence of the present.”

For these sciences, supernatural events are not beyond their ken. For if supernatural entities have interacted with the world in a way to produce observable effects (and if they have not, then to posit their existence is vain), then we can surely know of them by the methods of the historical sciences.

In light of the latest box office smash, an example from Star Trek is enlightening.  In the Next Generation and some later series, the crew of the Enterprise periodically encountered a being called Q. Q is immortal and apparently omnipotent: he can do anything. The source and nature of his power is unknown to the Federation or any other galactic civilization.  But was he supernatural? Well maybe in some sense he was, but in another sense he wasn’t: he could be observed, studied, and recorded by all the normal biological senses and scientific instruments.  His actions were known, recorded, and part of documented history. His activities were never explained by general laws, but that his activities took place was well attested.  So although he was not (at least yet) a subject of the sciences of general laws, he was certainly a subject of the historical sciences.

That the supernatural, as exemplified in my example by Q, is not unstudiable, has been proposed in a piece by Russell Blackford and in one of Jerry’s pieces in The New Republic.

But if any supernatural entity in observable contact with the world (i.e. a contact that has consequences) can be studied by the methods of the historical sciences, even if the effects of its contact cannot be subsumed under general laws, is it still supernatural? I would say no. To back me up on this I call on the great Vulcan philosopher, Kiri-kin-tha, and his first law of metaphysics:

Nothing unreal exists.

Or, as I would rephrase his law, anything which exists is natural.

How the giraffe got its long neck

May 17, 2009 • 9:32 pm

by Greg Mayer

Matthew Cobb has kindly called my attention to this piece from the BBC about this soon to be published paper (pdf) in the Journal of Zoology by Graham Mitchell, S.J. van Sittert, and John Skinner on the neck of the giraffe. How giraffes got their long necks is a venerable question in biology, having been discussed by, among others, Lamarck , Wallace, and Darwin. The paper by Mitchell and colleagues deals with an hypothesis proposed in 1996 by Robert E. Simmons and Lue Scheepers: that the long neck of giraffes results from sexual selection by male-male competition (see chap. 6 of WEIT for a general discussion of sexual selection).  At first it may seem obvious that long necks are for reaching leaves and shoots way up in the trees, and, indeed, this is the most popular idea.  But before dismissing sexual selection, consider the behavior called ‘necking’, displayed by two male giraffes in the following clip.

It is evident that serious, and violent, combat occurs between males, and Simmons and Scheepers record several accounts of serious injury and death resulting from necking. Mitchell and colleagues, nonetheless, conclude that sexual selection is not the cause of long necks:

Support for this theory [the sexual selection hypothesis] would be that males invest more in neck and head growth than do females. We have investigated this hypothesis in 17 male and 21 female giraffes with body masses ranging from juvenile to mature animals, by measuring head mass, neck mass, neck and leg length and the neck length to leg length ratio. We found no significant differences in any of these dimensions between males and females of the same mass, although mature males, whose body mass is significantly (50%) greater than that of mature females, do have significantly heavier (but not longer) necks and heavier heads than mature females. We conclude that morphological differences between males and females are minimal, that differences that do exist can be accounted for by the larger final mass of males and that sexual selection is not the origin of a long neck in giraffes.

Mitchell et al. also dispute the importance of predation on giraffes, which Simmons and Scheepers thought was higher on males as a consequence of the physiological and anatomical costs of such an outsized structure.  Many people might think, What could catch and kill a giraffe? The answer: lions. In the following clip, an adult giraffe is killed by a group of lions.

Child doomed by religious faith: update

May 17, 2009 • 2:11 pm

by Greg Mayer

Jerry sent me this update on the situation of Daniel Hauser, the 13 year old Minnesota boy whose parents had stopped his treatment for Hodgkin’s lymphoma (a very treatable form of cancer) because of their adherence to some obscure religious group that claims “our religion is our medicine.” The judge, ruling that his parents had “medically neglected” Daniel, has ordered that he be evaluated by physicians to determine if it is not too late to resume treatment. Daniel had supported his parents’ failure to get treatment for him, but the judge noted that the boy had a “rudimentary understanding at best” of the issues involved in his treatment, and that Daniel’s belief that he was not ill was flatly false: “The fact is that he is very ill currently.”  Courts in the U.S. have long held that religious freedom is a freedom of belief, not action, and the free exercise clause, while providing significant protection for religiously motivated activities, does not provide carte blanche.  As well, courts have long held that certain things that may be permissible for a competent adult to choose (e.g., the witholding of medical care), may not be chosen by a child, or parents acting for a child.

Caturday Felid: Anoles vs. Predators

May 16, 2009 • 10:31 am

by Greg Mayer

The terrifyingly threatening predator on the left (which closely resembles my first cat, Kitty Cat) appears ready to enjoy a quick snack at the expense of the anole on the right (which closely resembles my first lizards, Gilbert and Ignatius). What’s that, you say? An anole? Not a gecko?KittehGeico

(via icanhascheezburger.com)

Our endangered friend is not a gecko, a type of lizard that has been popularized by commercial ventures ranging from Hawaiian tourism to insurance, but rather an anole, a member of a quite distinct family of lizards. In particular, it is Anolis carolinensis, the green or Carolina anole. They are native to the southeastern United States, and have long been popular in the pet trade. Jamaican acquaintances have told me of how the arrival of a house cat can clear out the anoles in their garden, but I don’t greatly fear for our friend here: I’ve seen an anole on Grand Cayman, faced in a similar manner by a predatory bird, dash between the bird’s legs and make good its escape.Lizards in an Evolutionary Tree, by Jon Losos

Anoles are the neatest of all lizards, with about 300 species ranging from the US to South America and all over the West Indies, and showing a great diversity of morphology, ecology, and behavior.  One of the neat things about anoles is that they are great natural colonizers.  The species group to which Anolis carolinensis belongs originated on Cuba, and has colonized the southern US, the Bahamas, Little Cayman, Navassa, and Half Moon Cay and the Bay Islands off the coast of Central America. Through human introduction, Anolis carolinensis is now widespread on islands in the Pacific, including Hawaii.  The populations on the West Indian islands are variously considered endemic species or subspecies, and are a good example of geographic speciation, discussed by Jerry in chapter 7 of WEIT.

Studies of the colonizing abilities of anoles, and many other neat things about them, were pioneered by E.E. Williams. Anole studies have been carried to new levels by my friend and colleague Jonathan Losos, and he has a book on anoles coming out this summer, which everyone should read to find out more about their evolution, ecology, and biogeography.

Steps toward the origin of life

May 15, 2009 • 6:45 pm

by Greg Mayer

A paper in this week’s Nature (abstract only; here’s a NY Times piece on it) reports fascinating and important work on prebiotic synthesis of the building blocks of RNA by Matthew Powner and colleagues at the University of Manchester.

Building on an idea that can be traced back to Darwin’s notion of a “warm little pond“, chemists have sought for the origins of life in the chemistry of simple molecules– water, ammonia, methane, etc.– in an early Earth environment. Much progress has been made. It was found that lipids spontaneously aggregate into cell-like bilayers, that organic compounds are found in meteorites left over from the early history of the solar system, and, in a type of now classic experiment first conducted by Stanley Miller and Harold Urey, that quite a variety of organic compounds, including a number of biologically important ones, could be generated from these simple molecules under hypothesized early Earth conditions.  Despite this progress, much remained to be understood.  In particular, most life worked with DNA as the information-containing molecule, proteins as the work-horse molecules catalyzing chemical reactions, and RNA as a medium for transferring the information from the DNA to the proteins. But DNA needed proteins for its information to be expressed, and proteins needed the information from DNA to be produced– which came first?

In the 1980s, Thomas Cech and Sidney Altman indpendently discovered what seems to be the answer (or at least part of it): RNA cannot only carry information, it can also catalyze chemical reactions: it can perform the job of both DNA and proteins!  Prior to the modern DNA-RNA-protein scheme, there was a living world of RNA alone, the so-called (by Wally Gilbert) “RNA World”.  This was a major observational and conceptual step in our understanding.  The prebiotic origin of RNA thus became a major problem.  That’s where Powner et al. come in.

RNA, like DNA, is composed of many repeating units which come in four varieties (the sequence of the four types is how the information is stored), and in RNA these units are called ribonucleotides. Each of the repeating units is composed of a sugar, a nitrogenous base, and a phosphate group. For many years, attempts to find a synthetic pathway to ribonucleotides from simpler precursors were, at best, incomplete.  These attempts tried to assemble the three components, but could not join the sugar with the base.  What Powner et al. have done is cut this Gordian knot, and arrived at a synthesis from simpler precursors that proceeds via intermediate molecules which are neither sugars nor bases (2-amino-oxazole, then arabinose amino-oxazoline, to be precise).  Under plausible conditions of pH, temperature, etc., a high yield of ribonucleotides can be had.

There are still many steps in the origin of life that need to be understood– polymerizing the ribonucleotides into a proper RNA molecule, for starters– but this is undeniably a key finding.  Some hypothesize that even simpler information/catalytic molecules– the “Pre-RNA World”– preceded RNA; only future work will tell. John Sutherland, one of Powner’s coauthors, and in whose lab the work was done, worked on the problem for twelve years before he found the solution.  What if he had given up after ten? Could we have concluded that no synthesis was possible? No. This work demonstrates the futility of all the various sorts of arguments– the argument from design, the God of the gaps, the argument from personal incredulity– that rely on ignorance as their chief premise.

Darwin in Cambridge (and Richard Dawkins too!)

May 14, 2009 • 1:04 pm

by Greg Mayer

John van Wyhe, of Christ’s College, Cambridge, director of the absolutely fabulous website The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online (which I have had occasion to notice previously), has recently published a terrific short book entitled Darwin in Cambridge (Christ’s College, Cambridge).  Darwin in Cambridge, by John van Wyhe It’s not available yet on Amazon UK or Amazon, but you can order it direct from Christ’s. It provides a wealth of detail on Darwin’s life and studies in Cambridge, and is especially useful to someone (like me) less familiar with the organization of English universities. It is also beautifully illustrated, and my one complaint would be that the small octavo size does not do full justice to some of the illustrations.

Included in the book are several photographs of university and college ledgers which record Darwin’s various activities at Cambridge (see John’s analysis of Darwin’s student bills here, which have been widely misinterpreted by the media to say that Darwin spent more on shoes than books!). What struck me immediately was the figure on page 22, showing part of the ‘Books of subscriptions for degrees’ recording Darwin’s formal matriculation on February 20, 1828. It wasn’t just that the name of Adam Sedgwick, Darwin’s geological mentor, appears in the registry as having presided over the ceremony.  It was the name of the student who signed the book just below Darwin: Richard Dawkins!

Five students from Christ’s College have signed the register, Darwin being the last, having signed “Charles Robert Darwin”.  Below the Christ’s students, two students from Catharine Hall (now St. Catharine’s College) have signed the register, and immediately below Darwin’s signature appears the signature of the second Catharine’s student, “Richard Dawkins”.

The 20th and 21st centuries’ Richard Dawkins is, of course, an Oxonian; I don’t know if he’s any relation to the 19th century Cantabrigian who, for at least a little while on the afternoon of 20 February 1828, stood next to Charles Darwin.

Meet your guest blogger (again)

May 14, 2009 • 8:07 am

by Greg Mayer

Jerry is off gallivanting again, so I’ll be filling in for a few days till his return next week. Jerry’s main motivation when he visits me is food, especially kringle and Kewpee burgers, so I thought I’d introduce myself by posting a picture taken by Jerry of me cutting a kringle we are about to share.

Racine kringle
Me cutting a kringle in my office (photo by Jerry).

A kringle is a Danish pastry introduced to Racine, Wisconsin, by Danish immigrants (of which there were a lot), and made by a handful of bakeries.  Cognoscenti argue over whether the best kringle is O&H, Larsen’s, Bendtsen’s, or Lehmann’s. You can’t get genuine kringle in many places outside Racine: as close as Madison all you’ll find is some ersatz thing resembling bread with icing on it. Next time Jerry visits, I’ve promised him a Ron’s burger too. If you didn’t catch Jerry’s introduction of me last time, it’s here.