Category: evolution

Donating to the Jerry Coyne/Honey the Duck Evolutionary Biology Research Fund

April 15, 2025 • 8:45 am

A few readers have asked how they can donate to the Jerry Coyne/Honey the Duck Evolutionary Biology Research Fund, which I wrote about yesterday. It is to fund the research of University of Chicago biology students working on some aspect of organismal evolution (more described at link above).  If you wish to make a donation, no matter how small, please email me and I will send you instructions.  I assure you that any donations will be used nearly in full to fund research.

I thank you, and Honey thanks you!

Yes, that’s Honey and one of her broods above.

A new graduate fellowship in evolutionary biology at Chicago (named partly after a duck)

April 14, 2025 • 10:30 am

I revised my will about three weeks ago, as I realized that two of my impecunious friends to whom I was leaving money were dead. (Don’t worry–I’m fine!) Plus some of the charities to which I’d pledged money were no longer appealing to me (that means you, Doctors Without Borders), so I found a passel of other charities, vetted by Peter Singer’s “The Life You Can Save” site and Charity Navigator, to replace them. I won’t go into details save to say that what I leave will go in general to four causes:  helping the poor in third-world countries, especially with sanitation and medical care for children, ensuring education for women in poor countries, conservation effected through buying up habitat for wildlife and plants, and conservation effected by helping animals (this does of course include big cats!).

When I made my list and handed it to the lawyer, I discovered I still had a chunk o’ cash left, and pondered what I should do with it.  I’ve lived pretty penuriously and don’t have any luxuries, and the last thing I’d need would be something pricey like a luxury car. My only indulgences are travel and wine.

And then I had an idea: create a graduate fellowship for Ph.D. students who need research money in evolutionary biology. If I started that while I was still alive, I could actually see the results as they played out in real time: research would be done and truth found.  Then I had an even better idea: if the fellowship were named after me, I could add the name of my favorite mallard: Honey the Duck.  After checking with the University, I found out that I not only had enough to endow a decent fellowship in perpetuity, but also they would also allow me to add Honey’s name!

And that is how the Jerry Coyne/Honey the Duck Evolutionary Biology Research Fund came to be. To wit (this is part of a three-page agreement). Click to enlarge:

For Chicago grad students who would like to tap into this dosh, I’ll say a few words. The money will increase over time from $5000 the first year to around $25,000 per year in perpetuity after 2030.  I intend it to go, as the note says above, for research expenses in evolutionary biology studies that involve whole organisms. This reflects my own interests when I was active and is aimed at keeping organismal evolutionary biology (which can of course also involve behavior, molecular work, and so on) alive in the department.  But whole organisms have to be involved in some way. These details may be refined when I make up the application for the money, as it’s a competitive process.

More than one student may be funded per year, and once the money is allotted, it will be there until the student gets their Ph.D. Leftover cash will be returned to the fund.  Only students who have passed their prelims, and are thus official candidates for the doctorate, can apply, and I hope the first applications will be handed out in the early fall.

One other thing: once the money is in the hands of the Division (only students in the Division of Biological Science [BSD] can apply), my role ends, as it should. I will have no hand in choosing students who get funded: that will be done by a committee appointed by our chairman. That’s appropriate because the field changes over time and I am retired.

I’m giving these details just so students know that next fall there will be a new pot of money to fund research. I also love the fact that I can name the fund after both myself and Honey the Duck: faithful companions for several years. There is too little humor in science, and I wonder if this is the first graduate fellowship in history to be named after a duck.

Here are two pictures: my favorite one of Honey, and the second of me feeding Honey by hand during the pandemic (I was outside and the campus was empty, ergo the pulled-down mask).  I will try to put these photos on the application. Evolutionary biology students in the BSD should watch for an announcement by the Higher Ups.

One of the best parts of it all is that Honey and I will be immortalized together–or at least linked together until there is no more evolutionary biology at the University of Chicago.

Quack!

Honey as a soccer ball

 

Me with my favorite hen of all time

Addendum: from reader Bill with the help of Grok 3

Misleading letter from three scientific societies, arguing that sex is a spectrum in all species, remains online

March 21, 2025 • 11:10 am

As I wrote on February 13:

. . . . the Presidents of three organismal-biology societies, the Society for the Study of Evolution (SSE), the American Society of Naturalists (ASN) and the Society of Systematic Biologists (SSB) sent a declaration addressed to President Trump and all the members of Congress. (declaration archived here)  Implicitly claiming that its sentiments were endorsed by the 3500 members of the societies, the declaration also claimed that there is a scientific consensus on the definition of sex, and that is that sex is NOT binary but rather some unspecified but multivariate combination of different traits, a definition that makes sex a continuum or spectrum—and in all species!

You can see the tri-Societies’ announcement, published on February 5 on the SSE’s website, by clicking on the headline below:

On Feb. 13,, 23 biologists wrote to the Presidents of the three societies (our letter is at the link above), correcting their view that sex is a “construct” and is multidimensional. (Our response was largely confected by Luana Maroja of Williams College.) We emphasized that biological sex in humans (and in other animals and vascular plants) is as close to a binary as you can get (exceptions in humans range from 0.005% to .018%). We noted as well that biological sex is defined by the nature of the two observed reproductive systems in nature: one designed to produce large, immobile gametes (females) or small, mobile gametes (males). In some species of plants there are individuals of both sexes (“hermaphrodites”), but there are only two separate sexes, and each species has only two types of gametes.

We later got more people to sign the letter to the societies, ending up with 125 signatures of people willing to reveal their names.

The Presidents of the three Societies did not answer us at first, though eventually they did respond, though we cannot publicize their private email.  I’ve outlined the tenor of their response here, saying that they largely conceded our points:

 I will say that [the Society Presidents] admitted that they think they’re in close agreement with us (I am not so sure!), that their letter wasn’t properly phrased, that some of our differences come from different semantic interpretations of words like “binary” and “continuum”(nope), and that they didn’t send the letter anyway because a federal judge changed the Executive Order on sex (this didn’t affect our criticisms). At any rate, the tri-Societies letter is on hold because the organizations are now concerned with more serious threats from the Trump Administration, like science funding.

So the letter was never sent, and is still sitting on the SSE website, an embarrassing and biologically misleading example of virtue signaling. Nor did they answer Luana Maroja’s subsequent email asking whether they would remove the announcement from the SSE website and inform the Societies’ members of the change.  They have been notably unresponsive, and, although admitting problems with their announcement about sex, they have neither changed the letter nor explained how it is misleading.

You can see all my posts about this kerfuffle here. Besides our weighing in, Richard Dawkins put up two relevant posts on his website, one mentioning the kerfuffle and explaining very clearly why there are only two sexes, and the other showing that even the three Presidents who wrote the declarations implicitly accepted the binary nature of sex in their own published research.

Given that the three Society Presidents who wrote the letter never sent it, and have backed off on its assertions, I call on them to either retract the letter or clarify and qualify it. Right now it stands as an embarrassment to not just the Societies, but to biologists in general—people who are supposed to be wedded to the truth and not to woke ideology. It goes without saying that the claim that sex is nonbinary is made simply to make people who feel that they’re neither male nor female feel better about themselves. But someone’s self-image should not depend on biological definitions and realities. It does not “erase” non-binary people, nor diminish their worth, to note that biological sex is binary.

I will echo Ronald Reagan, “Please, Society Presidents, tear down that announcement.”

***********

Finally, in a new post called “Debunking Mainstream Media Lies about Biological Sex,” Colin Wright shows that this kind of distortion is widespread in the media. Here’s how he begins his defense of the sex binary—by showing  misleading articles in the media (he mentions the SSE statement):

On January 20, 2025, President Trump signed an executive order affirming the binary nature of sex in federal law, a move that was solidified a month later by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) with a scientifically robust definition of sex and the sexes: male and female. This reaffirmation of biological reality sent left-wing media into a frenzy, unleashing a flood of articles attempting to deconstruct and redefine sex through the lens of progressive queer ideology.

The Society for the Study of Evolution quickly issued a statement, purportedly on behalf of all 3,500 of its members, claiming that the executive order’s recognition of the sex binary “is contradicted by extensive scientific evidence,” and, remarkably, even invoked the subjective “lived experience of people” as part of their counterargument. The Washington Post followed suit on February 19 with an article titled, “Trump says there are ‘two sexes.’ Experts and science say it’s not binary.” A piece in The Hill this week accused the executive order and HHS guidelines of containing “profound scientific inaccuracies,” while Science News proclaimed that “sex is messy” and that “choosing any single definer of sex is bound to sow confusion.” Similar articles challenging the definitions outlined in Trump’s executive order and the HHS guidance have also appeared in Time Magazine, The Boston Globe, Scientific American, The Guardian, and numerous other outlets.

These responses have come in waves, with new attempts to muddy the waters appearing weekly. But one recent article from NPR—“How is sex determined? Scientists say it’s complicated”—encapsulates virtually every fallacious argument and pseudoscientific distortion used in the others. As such, it serves as the ideal target to be used for a collective rebuttal.

He then proceeds with the debunking and ends with this:

The left’s assault on the binary reality of sex is not about science—it is about politics. The goal is to deconstruct and redefine fundamental biological truths to serve ideological ends, whether that be justifying the inclusion of males in female sports, allowing men into women’s prisons, or pushing irreversible medical interventions on children under the guise of “gender-affirming care.”

Dawkins and Pinker discuss evolution

March 13, 2025 • 11:15 am

Here’s Richard Dawkins ostensibly discussing his new book (The Genetic Book of the Dead) with Steve Pinker, but of course you can’t confine a discussion between these two to a single book. Even from the beginning it ranges widely, in which Pinker discusses not only the epiphany that The Selfish Gene gave him, but levels some trenchant criticisms at Lewontin and Gould’s attacks on adaptationism, and (to my delight) at Gould’s theory of punctuated equilibrium, which never held any water save (perhaps) as the notion that fossil evolution proceeds at varying rates. (People often forget that the novel parts that Gould saw about punc. eq. was its mechanism not its speed: a mechanism that involved questionable propositions like leaping adaptive valleys, macromutations, and species selection (see here for a summary of my beefs with punc. eq., along with scientific references). I myself crossed swords with Gould about these issues, and have concluded that his greatest contribution to science was not any novel paleontological discoveries, but his popularization of evolution in his Natural History essays. (Even those were misleading when they discussed adaptation and punctuated equilibrium.)

Other things discussed: the ubiquity of selection, the nature and importance of epigenetics, the motivation for Richard writing several of his many books, and even “the meaning of life.”  I’ve listened to about 40 minutes of this discussion, but my tolerance for any podcast, even one with these big brains, is limited.  At 1:05:15 begins a Q&A session in which Steve reads audience questions written on cards.

Notice Steve’s cowboy boots, custom made by Lee Miller in Austin.

Still collecting signatures on the tri-societies letter

February 24, 2025 • 8:48 am

If you’re following this site, you’ll know that 22 biologists (including me) sent a letter to three ecology and evolution societies who had issued a statement directed at the President and Congress that biological sex was a spectrum and a continuum in all species. The statement claimed without support that it expressed a consensus view of biologists, although the members of the societies were not polled.

Of course this behavior could not stand, and so Luana Maroja cobbled together a letter to those societies noting that the biological definition of sex was based on the development of the apparatus evolved to produce gametes, and that this showed that all animals and plants had only two sexes: male and female. As Richard Dawkins pointed out, even the three Society Presidents used the sex binary in their own biological work.

The letter has now accumulated more than a hundred signatures.  If you are an anisogamite and want to sign the letter, this is a reminder that the deadline for signatures is in about a week: 5 p.m. Monday, March 3. You can sign it this way (from Luana’s post on Heterodox STEM);

The societies for the Study of Evolution (SSE), the American Society of Naturalists (ASN) and the Society for Systematic Biologists (SSB) issued a declaration addressed to President Trump and all the members of Congress (declaration also archived here), proffering a confusing definition of sex, implying that sex is not binary.

We wrote a short letter explaining that sex is indeed defined by gamete type.

We are now collecting more signatures from biologists who agree to have their name publicly posted. If you are a biologist (or in a field related to biology) want to add your name, just fill in the bottom of this form (it contains the full text of our letter and a link to the tri-societies’ letter).

Please fill in all the blanks, including your name, position, and email, and we ask that you have something to do with biology. Also, we will most likely post the letter with names, so if you want to remain publicly anonymous but agree with our sentiments, just write your own personal email to the Society presidents (two of them have emails in the original letter). Nobody’s email will become public if I decide to post the final letter and signers on this site.

It takes about one minute to fill in the form, so if you want to send a message to these three societies, you know what to do.

Apparent independent and multiple evolution of binary sex

February 14, 2025 • 9:35 am

My friend Phil Ward at UC Davis found this reference and called it to my attention. It’s from the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (B), and access is free (click on title below).  The pdf with the numbered references is here.

The paper is about how the evolution of two different types of gametes (“anisogamy”: a requirement for the origin of biological sexes) can originate from isogamy (same-sized gametes) under certain conditions. It is a theoretical paper, and I haven’t read it closely as I’m math-averse. However, what’s of interest is the first paragraph of the paper, which reviews the literature on anisogamy.  That paragraph states that anisogamy (ergo biological sex) has originated independently in many groups of eukaryotes (organisms with true cells).  I’ve put that first paragraph below and have bolded the relevant part. I’ve also linked to each group so you can see what they are.  The numbers lead to the references, which I have not checked.

Multicellular organisms typically produce gametes of two distinct size classes: larger eggs and smaller sperm. This dimorphism—known as ‘anisogamy’—is a remarkable case of convergent evolution. It has arisen independently in multiple distantly related eukaryotic lineages, including in animals [1]; dikaryotic fungi [2]; various groups of green algae, including the ancestors of land plants [3,4]; red algae [5]; brown algae [6,7]; yellow-green algae (Xanthophyceae: Vaucheria) [8]; diatoms [9]; oomycetes [10]; dinoflagellates [11]; apicomplexans [12]; and parabasalids (Trichonympha) [13]. By contrast, the gametes of most unicellular and some multicellular eukaryotes are isogamous, with a unimodal distribution of gamete sizes. Anisogamy is often taken as the defining difference between ‘male’ and ‘female’ sexual strategies: males produce only sperm; females produce only eggs; and hermaphrodites have the potential to produce both gamete types, either simultaneously or at different life stages. Isogamous species lack sexes by this definition. However, their gametes can often be classified into two, or occasionally more, ‘mating types’, such that fertilization only occurs between gametes of unlike types [2,14–16].

If you add up these groups, you get at least 11 evolutionarily independent origins of anisogamy: the production of “larger eggs and smaller sperm.”  The independence is probably inferred via a “cladistic” method by looking at the family trees of these groups, seeing that the ancestors were either asexual or isogamous, and noting that anisogamy appeared on a later-appearing derived branch.

If the authors are indeed correct, then what we have here is a remarkable example of evolutionary convergence: eleven separate groups independently evolving binary sex with large eggs and small sperm.  There are of course evolutionary theories showing why an ancestral condition of sex with equal-size gametes would split into a derived condition with two sizes of gametes, but that is a theoretical result.  Here we see that this has actually happened in nature nearly a dozen times, so the theories may hold some water.

I’ll add one thing. Not only has anisogamous sex apparently evolved eleven times independently, but, even in the one group of animals the determinants of sex—the features that trigger the development of two types of animals producing different-sized gametes—have also evolved independently. Luana and I pointed this out in our paper, “The ideological subversion of biology” (bolding is mine):

We can see the stability of the two-sex condition by realizing that what triggers the development of males versus females varies widely across species (Bachtrog et al. 2014). Different sexes can be based on different chromosomes and their genes (e.g., XX vs. XY in humans, ZW vs. ZZ in birds, individuals with like chromosomes being female in mammals and male in birds); different rearing temperatures (crocodiles and turtles); whether you have a full or half set of chromosomes (bees); whether you encounter a female (marine worms); and a host of other social, genetic, and environmental factors. Natural selection has independently produced diverse pathways to generate the sexes, but at the end there are just two destinations: males and females. And so we have an evolved and objectively recognized dichotomy—not an arbitrary spectrum of sexes.

Now I’m not smart or diligent enough to figure out why once there are two sexes—which is the case in animals, and must thus have been true in our common ancestor)—how you can evolutionarily traverse from one determinant of sex (say a gene on a chromosome) to something like temperature-dependent sex determination or social sex determination (e.g. the famous clownfish, used by miscreants to claim that there are more than two sexes).  It’s a mystery waiting to be solved.  But so even here, in one group, we have convergent evolution—of the factors that cause the two sexes to diverge.

I find all this fascinating, and it shows the power of Orgel’s Second Rule: “evolution is cleverer than you are.”

More on the “three-societies letter” about sex

February 10, 2025 • 11:00 am

Here’s a quick update on my critique of a letter issued by three organismal-biology-society Presidents claiming that sex isn’t binary—not in humans and, indeed, not in any species. The signers were the Presidents of the Society for the Study of Evolution (SSE), the American Society of Naturalists (ASN), and the Society of Systematic Biologists (SSB), and the letter is archived here.

That letter implicitly claimed to represent the opinion of all 3500 members of these societies, even though they were never polled about their opinions.  I know many members, and I also also know that a lot of them do NOT agree with the letter and its misguided contentions.  While I am no longer a member of the SSE, I of course disagree with the letter: that’s why I wrote a long critique.

The three-society letter gives the email addresses of two Presidents, and I expect that disaffected members may make their dissent known, for I’ve been contacted by several of them. But, as always, I urge readers to make known their feelings whatever they are.

Just two comments.

First, three past Presidents of the SSE have already publicly disagreed with the letter and its claims. One of them was me, but here are comments on my post made by two others:

I would think this would give the three officers who signed that letter some pause, as Presidents are elected by a poll of all SSE members. And I would suggest that the three societies backtrack and poll their members to say, anonymously, if they agree with the letter. It’s not right that they claim to represent the consensus view of their membership, much less a majority view.

Second, how do the Presidents regard sex in their own research? Before I give some information on that, I wanted to relate the issue to something I discussed in my first book, Speciation, co-written with Allen Orr. In the first chapter and Appendix, we describe the many competing definitions of species, and suggested that the best one for motivating research on the problem of speciation—why nature comes in discrete groups rather than existing as a continuum—is the Biological Species Concept (BSC), which regards species as groups of organisms that have reproductive barriers preventing or impeding gene exchange with other groups.

The interesting thing to me was that although people have argued fiercely in the literature about what a “species” is, when it comes to speciation, the process whereby species are formed in nature, virtually every paper equates speciation with “the origin of reproductive barriers.”  That is an implicit admission that yes, species are groups separated by genetically-based reproductive barriers (these barriers need not be absolutely complete). To me, this validates the BSC, for when people actually do research on the origin of species, they research the origin of reproductive isolation. Your research is where the rubber meets the road, and says a lot about how you regard definitions and concepts.

That prompted me and one other person to look up whether the authors of the “sex isn’t binary” letter regard sex as binary in their own research.  The answer is “yes.”

I didn’t have to look hard before I found this feature on the website of the ASN President, whose lab sells stickleback fish to other researchers. They sell two types: males and females. What about the other sexes? After all, there should be more, right?

But if you go back through President Bolnick’s own research papers, you will see clearly that he mentions just two sexes, males and females. Here’s one of his research papers (from Nature Communications), but I can’t be arsed to look at them all. Click on the title below to go the paper, which mentions “male” or “female” 171 times.

The abstract and a table: the sexes were studied in two species of fish as well as in mice and HUMANS. And—you guessed it—in all these species only two sexes are mentioned in humans! Curious, no? Red lines in the articles below are mine:

From a table in the paper. Men and women in humans, fish and mice? Is that all they used? Why did they divide up the species that way?

 

And Emma Hilton at the University of Manchester saved me the trouble of having to investigate the work of the SSE President.

Finally, again you don’t have to look hard to see that the SSB President also divides species into males and females in her research. Here’s one paper that mentions males or females 40 times.  I again put an extract below (click on title to go to text):

You can amuse yourselves, if you wish, by doing similar searches, but you will find the same thing: when the three Presidents are considering sex in their own research, there are always two, males and females.  Are you going to tell me that doesn’t say anything about a sex binary?