Apropos Drs. Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini

h/t: Occam and, of course, xkcd

To quote Davy Crockett:  “Be always sure you’re right—then go ahead.”

Darwin Day in Wisconsin

by Greg Mayer

The Darwin bicentennial year ends this week, as Friday, February 12th, begins the 201st year. The last event in the University of Wisconsin-Parkside’s Darwin 1809-1859-2009 commemoration is this coming Wednesday, Feb. 10, at 7 PM in Greenquist Hall 103, where I will be speaking on “The Origin of The Origin“.

In the talk, I’ll take a look at the surprisingly dramatic circumstances of the publication of The Origin on November 24, 1859.  In the spring of 1858, while at work on his “species book”, Darwin received a manuscript from Alfred Russel Wallace, a correspondent of his working in the Malay Archipelago. In Wallace’s manuscript, Darwin saw his own theory in miniature, and despaired that his originality would be forestalled. Darwins’ friends Charles Lyell and J.D. Hooker arranged for a joint publication by Darwin and Wallace; Darwin, now spurred on, completed an “abstract” of his species book: the Origin, which, at 500 pages, was a rather substantial abstract. (Jerry was an earlier speaker in the series; video here.)

On Saturday, the 201st anniversary year gets off to a bang with the University of Wisconsin, Madison’s annual Darwin Day. There’ll be a full day of activities, headlined by my friend and colleague Jonathan Losos, who’ll speak on “Leaping Lizards!  Studies of Ecology and Evolution in the Caribbean”. Over the lunch break there’s a workshop for teachers on lizards and island biogeography, and I’ll be participating. In the afternoon, there’ll be a panel discussion on communicating science, which might be of some interest to WEIT blog readers.

Both events are intended for general audiences, and are free and open to the public. If you’re in the area, please come. Details of both events, including schedules and directions, are here for Parkside (in Kenosha, just north of Illinois) and here for Madison.

Amazing hunting behavior of killer whales

I’m reading a new book on biogeography, Here Be Dragons, by Dennis McCarthy.  It’s a popular-science introduction to the field, designed to show how evolution, along with plate tectonics and other changes in the configuration of land and sea, can explain the puzzling distributions of plants and animals on our planet. It’s worth a read, though a bit light on data and sometimes purplish in the prose.

Anyway, McCarthy mentions an amazing hunting behavior of orcas (Orcinus orca, also called killer whales), and gives a YouTube URL for the behavior.  I’ve put the video below.  Here you see a group of orcas pursuing a seal who’s taken refuge on an ice floe.  The whales band together and head toward the floe, creating a bow wave that washes the seal into the water, ready for consumption.  This video, however, has a happy ending:

Don’t pick on the moderates!

. . . say Jesus ‘n’ Mo.

Colored dinosaurs: Part II

I recently posted about the discovery of pigment granules in a fossil feathered theropod dinosaur—the same type of pigment granules found in fossil early birds as well as modern birds.  This similarity not only strengthened the evolutionary argument that birds are the modern descendants of theropods, but also enabled scientists to crudely reconstruct the feathered dino’s color.

A related paper has just been published in Science, showing even better fossilization of the melanosomes and thus giving a better idea of the color and pattern of those dinos. The animal is Anchiornis huxleyi, a small (woodpecker-sized) feathered dinosaur from the late Jurassic, about 150 million years ago.  This nonflying theropod was pretty highly feathered, and those fossil feathers also contained fossil melanosomes.  Comparing the size and shape of the fossil melanosomes with those of melanosomes in modern birds, the authors were able to make educated guesses about whether the  granules contained red, gray, or black pigments.

Here’s their conclusion:

In summary Anchiornis huxleyi was darkly colored with gray and black body plumage (Fig. 4). The head was gray and mottled with rufous and black. Elongate gray feathers on the front and sides of the crest appear to frame a longer rufous hindcrown. Gray marginal wing coverts formed a dark epaulet that contrasted strongly with the black/gray-span light primaries, secondaries, and greater coverts of the forelimb. The large black spangles of the primaries and secondaries created a dark outline to the trailing edge of forelimb plumage. The spangles of the outer-most primaries were black. The greater coverts of the upper wing were spangled with gray or black, creating an array (secondary coverts) or rows (primary coverts) of conspicuous dots. The contour feathers of legs were gray on the shank, and black on the foot. Like the forelimb, the elongate feathers of the lateroplantar surface of the hind limb were white at their bases with broad black distal spangles.

I have only one comment on the paper.  At the end, the authors say this: “Thus, the first evidence for plumage color patterns in a feathered non-avian dinosaur suggests selection for signaling function may be as important as aerodynamics in the early evolution of feathers.” (The National Geographic website—see below—makes a similar suggestion.)  It seems to me that neither signaling nor aerodynamics can explain the early origin of feathers, if for no other reason that you can’t select for colored feathers until you first have feathers, and because early feathers—the filamentous structures on some feathered dinos—could hardly have had an aerodynamic function.  What seems more likely is that the origin of feathers involved some other selection pressure—perhaps a thermoregulatory one—and then those early feathers gave rise to the possibility that they could, via pigmentation, be used for intraspecific signalling.  Then, later, they could be coopted for flight.  In other words, flying and signaling are exaptations of a feature that originated for some other reason.

Here’s an artist’s reconstruction of the beast:

Fig. 1.  (Fig. 4 from Science paper): Reconstruction of the plumage color of the Jurassic troodontid Anchiornis huxleyi.   Color plate by Michael A. Digiorgio.

Looks a bit like this, no?

Fig. 2.  The roadrunner, Geococcyx californianus

The National Geographic website has more detail on this discovery, along with an animated 3-D reconstruction of A. huxleyi.

Greg has jogged my memory by reminding me that Anchiornis is very important in showing that feathered dinos actually preceded Archaeopteryx (a transitional form that might have flown).  I posted about this issue a while back, and quote Greg’s email here:

The Science paper actually says a lot more about dinosaur color than the Nature paper, but it’s drawing less attention because it’s coming out a few weeks later (the Science people also did the original work on fossilized melanosomes). One really interesting bit about this is that Anchiornis is the first feathered dinosaur that is older than Archaeopteryx, thus solving the “temporal paradox” which was one of the chief arguments used against dino-bird ancestry. This has only been known for a few months, and I did not see much about it at the time, but i think it’s actually more important (as opposed to astonishingly mind-blowing) than the colors. See here and here.

________________

Li, Q. et al. 2009.  Plumage color paterns of an extinct dinosaur.  Science (Sciencexpress online).

h/t: Carl Zimmer, Greg Mayer

Freethought Radio podcast

A while back I was scheduled for an interview on Air America, the all-liberal network that, sadly, went belly-up.  The interview went on, but was broadcast as part of Freethought Radio out of Madison, Wisconsin.  My conversation was with Dan Barker, author of Godless (a book that all atheists should read) and his wife, Annie Laurie Gaylor, and you can find the podcast here.  My part starts about halfway in.

New Scientist blurbs dumb ideas about evolution

Ah, New Scientist always jumps gleefully on any idea that combines the words “Darwin” and “wrong.”  Remember their “Darwin was wrong” cover a year ago?  Well, they’ve befouled themselves again, this time by publishing, without any critical comment, a piece by Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini that is a precis of their upcoming book, What Darwin Got Wrong.  I’ve intimated before that this book is not exactly God’s gift to the scientific literature, and will save my comments for an upcoming review. But if you want to see the gist of their argument without having to waste $$ on their book, the New Scientist article is the place to go.  Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini’s beef: natural selection, which they find logically flawed and empirically unsupported.
Their conclusion:

However, the internal evidence to back this imperialistic selectionism strikes us as very thin. Its credibility depends largely on the reflected glamour of natural selection which biology proper is said to legitimise. Accordingly, if natural selection disappears from biology, its offshoots in other fields seem likely to disappear as well. This is an outcome much to be desired since, more often than not, these offshoots have proved to be not just post hoc but ad hoc, crude, reductionist, scientistic rather than scientific, shamelessly self-congratulatory, and so wanting in detail that they are bound to accommodate the data, however that data may turn out. So it really does matter whether natural selection is true.

Fodor, at least, has made a career out of this kind of rhetoric, but as you’ll see from my forthcoming review (and already saw from my critique of his ideas in The London Review of Books), this time his rhetoric is like that of the Wizard of Oz: he’s the little man behind the curtain with a big voice but not much insight.

Read the comments, too—there are lots of them, nearly all critical.  This is only the beginning of the drubbing that Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini should expect when their book is judged by scientists and philosophers.

Oh, and shame on New Scientist for printing such misguided puffery.  What’s next—articles by Ken Ham and Bill Dembski?

Richard Dawkins on Bill Hamilton

If you’re not an evolutionary biologist, or don’t know of Bill Hamilton, you can ignore this post, but if you recognize the name it’s worth listening to this 25-minute audio cliip from a recent BBC program.  In it, Richard Dawkins discusses and praises his late colleague, the brilliant and eccentric biologist William Hamilton. Mary Bliss, Hamilton’s sister, also chimes in.  I won’t describe Hamilton’s many achievements (and quirks) here, as Dawkins and Bliss do that very well.

h/t: Matthew Cobb

Caturday felids: sand cat

One of the world’s best-looking felids is the Arabian sand cat, Felis margarita. It’s endemic to parts of the Sahara Desert, the Arabian Peninsula, and Turkestan (it’s also called the “sand-dune cat”).  Individuals are eminently well adapted for desert life: their feet are thickly padded and furred for walking on loose (and hot) sand, they’re camouflaged, they’re crepuscular, and they have relatively big ears that act as heat radiators.

Sand cats dig shallow burrows in the sand or scrub to escape the daytime heat, and hunt jerboas, sand voles, and other rodents, as well as reptiles and even locusts.  Since some inhabit completely waterless areas, it’s thought that they can survive without drinking.

Here are two sand cat kittens, Nahah and (ugh) Faith, born in the Cincinnati Zoo on October 29, and first shown to the public on January 20. Mom is in the second picture.

VIDEO:  look at these adorable little guys in the fur:

Cryptozoology

by Greg Mayer

The spotted lion is a favorite topic within cryptozoology. Bernard Heuvelmans, the late Belgian zoologist known as the “father of cryptozoology”, defined cryptozoology as

The scientific study of hidden animals, i.e., of still unknown animal forms about which only testimonial and circumstantial evidence is available, or material evidence considered insufficient by some!

Although, not mentioned in the brief definition, Heuvelmans also included the study of known, but supposedly extinct, animals, that might still be extant, based on testimonial or circumstantial evidence. Animals that are of interest to cyptozoologists are known as cryptids.

The roster of cryptids includes such beasties as the Loch Ness monster, the abominable snowman, and bigfoot. This might suggest to some that cryptozoology is pretty out there, a pseudoscience. But, in fact, the question of what cryptozoology is turns out to be more interesting, as the spotted lion story itself indicates.

Many zoologists (especially systematic zoologists), like cryptozoologists, are interested in discovering and describing previously unknown species of animals (with my friend and colleague Skip Lazell, I’ve described one myself). For many zoologists, in fact, its their full time occupation. There are millions of undescribed species of animals awaiting scientific investigation.

So if cryptozoologists are looking for undescribed species, and zoologists are looking for undescribed species, what’s the difference? Well, one minor difference is that cryptozoologists tend to be interested in fairly large undiscovered species. Most newly described species are small (most are insects), although a few pretty big ones have been discovered in the recent past (e.g., giant muntjac, sao la, megamouth shark, and Chacoan peccary).

But size isn’t the key difference. The key difference is what sort of evidence is taken to be compelling evidence of the existence of an animal. For a zoologist, testimonial evidence, such as stories about spotted lions, might be a good reason to go looking for something, but you don’t have any real evidence until you actually get one of the animals. Having an actual specimen is the standard of evidence in systematic zoology. In cryptozoology, there is a wide range of practice in what kind of evidence is considered compelling. Heuvelmans himself leaned pretty strongly toward accepting testimony as fairly compelling (while strongly rejecting, however, attempts to make cryptozoology a form of mysticism or paranormal exploration, as was done in, for example, John Keel’s Strange Creatures From Time and Space). Other cryptozoologists, however, explicitly adopt the zoological standard of evidence. In their Cryptozoology A to Z, Loren Coleman and Jerome Clark write about some cryptids in the following way

Unfortunately, without a specimen, this can only be conjecture. [referring to the possible identity of a supposed giant bear of Kamchatka]

and

And it is from the Dani [a New Guinea tribe] that [Tim] Flannery received his first real evidence of the bondegezou, in the form of skins and associated trophies. [referring to a newly discovered species of tree kangaroo known as the bondegezou; emphases added in both quotes]

And, in writing about what cryptids are, they state

It is often impossible to tell which category an unknown animal actually inhabits until you catch it. [emphasis added]

In stressing the importance of obtaining a specimen(s) in figuring out what cryptids are, Coleman and Clark are doing just what a systematic zoologist would do. There is no difference in their standards of evidence, only in what catches their attention as being worthy of inquiry. The latter is a matter of personal interest and taste, not scientific method, so the Coleman & Clark practice of cryptozoology is not pseudoscience at all. (There are also a lot of crack pots and frauds out there too.)

Coleman, in addition to his own website, contributes to the website Cryptomundo. But my favorite website dealing with cryptozoology is Darren Naish’s Tetrapod Zoology. He’s a dinosaur paleontologist, and most of his posts are on more orthodox aspects of tetrapod zoology, but he posts occasionally on cryptozoological topics, often analyzing evidence, and sometimes resolving the issue. Here, for example, are his insightful explications of the Montauk Monster, a cryptid from my home island, which turned out to be a raccoon that had expired and gone to meet ‘is maker. Go to his site and look around for more fun posts like these.