Dr. Karl still on rampage, claims that theology advances

Giberson is now up to part five of his critique of Gnu Atheism, and shows no signs of slowing down. Doesn’t the man have any science to do?

Any any rate, Dr. Karl’s now accusing us of having a double standard when we discuss science and religion: we laugh at religion because it doesn’t progress, or, when it does, it progresses reluctantly, kicked in the tuchus by science.  But we don’t seem to recognize that science moves forward by kicking itself in the tuchus.  Newton himself got dethroned, so why must we make fun of religion for dethroning Yahweh (in whom Giberson no longer believes) in favor of an apophatic do-nothing God?  Don’t we see that theology progresses just like science?  As Giberson says, “Is there not a strange double standard here?”

Well, no.  First of all, the changes in theology are not driven by an increasingly better knowledge of the nature of God.  It’s not like we’ve acquired faith-based evidence that Yahweh is out and Apophatic Jebus is in.  The rejection of an angry god in favor of a loving one does not come from any objective method of ascertaining the truth about divinity.  Rather, it comes from two things.

1.  Improvements in morality that came from secular thought.  These “improvements”, although embodied in theological change, do not derive from religious “ways of knowing” or an increasingly sophisticated scrutiny of ancient texts by theologians.  They come from our slow but inexorable realization that some things are simply wrong.  (As to why this happens, I tend to agree with Peter Singer’s thesis as described in The Expanding Circle.)

Why do we no longer stone adulterers, condone slavery, or kill children who disobey their parents?  Not because Jesus changed those laws (he came to uphold the Old Testament law), or because theologians wrested some new insights from scripture revealing that these were bad things to do.  Rather, as societies interacted and pondered the issues, we realized that it was simply not on to treat people this way.  Yes, these moral changes may have been butressed by speeches from the pulpit, and yes, religious organizations have been involved in social advances, but that’s because those advances were already part of the zeitgeist.  The idea that blacks should be treated as equals, for instance, did not derive from a new understanding of scripture, regardless of the importance of black churches in the civil rights movement.

2.   Improvements in understanding the world that came from science.  Some of the “advances”  in theology, like the assertion that the Bible isn’t a science textbook, come, pure and simple, from science showing that that the old Biblical textbook of science was simply wrong.  We’re not 6,000 years old, the earth is not flat, and we don’t all descend from a single pair of humans.  These discoveries have prompted a whole new wave of theological revisionism, attempting to show that this stuff doesn’t matter after all.

Why do we criticize theological “evolution” while applauding the advance of science?  Because as science advances it gets closer and closer to the truth, and we know this because it works better and better at explaining the universe.  In contrast, the advance of religion doesn’t bring it any closer to the truth. It can’t, because all of religious belief is based on lies.  Theology simply gets better and better at rationalizing those lies. And religion’s other “advances” are prompted by either secular morality or science, so theology gets no credit there.  Absent science and secular morality, faith would still be mired in the Middle Ages.

So many books, so little time

My pile of unread books is growing much faster than I can read them.  Thanks to the kindness of friends, the largesse of my editor and agent, and the well-stocked U of C library, I have these.  Only the top two, which portend future travel, were paid for.

More on cat genetics

From the readers’ comments on yesterday’s cat-coat post, there’s clearly some interest in the genetics and evolution of house cats (Felis catus).  This is a huge topic, too large to cover here (in my younger and impecunious days, I thought of writing a popular book on the topic).  I just want to make two points:

1. We know an enormous amount about the genetics of cat coat color and pattern. Wikipedia, for instance, has a good summary, and if you want a dose of photos with your genetics go here.  Note that much of what was written about the genetics of ticking and tabby patterns before this year is likely to be wrong: a recent paper by Eizikir et al. (2010) shows that there are at least three loci responsible for the variation (everybody used to think that there was one), and probably at least two developmental pathways involved in producing the familiar patterns of spots, stripes, and swirls.

Here’s a nice photo from their paper showing a cross between two parents (“P”), their offspring (F1), and the backcrosses, obtained by crossing F1 individuals to one of the parents.  Note the re-establishment of the striped “mackerel” pattern in the backcross offspring.  These crosses helped Eizikir et al. disentangle the genetic interactions involved in coat pattern.

2.  Why is there such variety in the coats of domestic (and stray) cats? Surely because people have bred for those colors and patterns, and most feral cats are recent descendants of pets.

It’s my theory that all feral cat populations will eventually revert to the tabby pattern; this comes from observing long-time populations of strays, and seeing the pattern of the “Scottish wildcat”, which I firmly believe is not a native species but a descendant of feral domestic cats.  (Populations of feral dogs seem to revert to a yellowish, dingo-like color.)  Why this reversion, if it’s indeed the case?  Perhaps selection for camouflage, although I’m not sure what preys on feral cats, and whether those cats live in habitats where a tabby pattern would camouflage them to both predators and prey.  Another explanation is that the tabby pattern is linked to genes that help domestic cats survive when forced to live ferally.

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Eizirik, E., V. A. David, V. Buckley-Beason, M. E. Roelke, A. A. Schaffer, S. S. Hannah, K. Narfstrom, S. J. O’Brien, and M. Menotti-Raymond. 2010. Defining and mapping mammalian coat pattern genes: Multiple genomic regions implicated in domestic cat stripes and spots. Genetics 184:267-275.

Culinary delights of the Lower East Side: Russ & Daughters

I can’t believe that there was a time when the thought of smoked fish disgusted me.  It was fish—and raw!  Fortunately, as I grew up, so did my palate, and now I consume smoked fish with relish—or, preferably, cream cheese.  And so I join the ranks of my ancestors who knew the delights of lox.

There is one and only one source for smoked fish on the Lower East Side: Russ & Daughters, founded in 1914 by Joel Russ, who began by selling herring from a pushcart. The store has been at its present location—179 East Houston Street—for 90 years.  Besides over a dozen varieties of lox, it sells whitefish, sturgeon, herring, gefilte fish, and other essential accoutrements of the Sunday New York Times.

Here’s their selection of lox—be sure to click the picture twice in succession to make it real big.

When I lived in New York in the 70s, we all followed writer Calvin Trillin’s advice for assembling the perfect Sunday trifecta:  get an onion bagel at Moshe’s bakery nearby, pick up some cream cheese at Ben’s Dairy, next door, and then to Russ & Daughters for the lox.  Oy, what a treat that was!  Tragically, Moshe’s and Ben’s are no longer with us, but Russ & Daughters now sells bagels and cream cheese.  Food writer Adam Roberts describes the store-made product (it’s his photo, too):

I meant business, both in a speed sense and a hunger sense, and I asked a man behind the counter for an onion bagel with smoked salmon and tomato. This is the traditional Sunday bagel combo (maybe throw in some raw onions too, if stinky breath’s your game) and I awaited it greedily. Time passed and I kept looking at my watch but the man making my bagel wasn’t dawdling. He was sharpening his knife, then he was choosing the fish, and then he was cutting thick slices, and then he found a fresh tomato and cut slices from that, and then he slowly spread cream cheese on a soft looking onion bagel. He did everythign with great care and focus and that was great. I grabbed a fresh squeezed orange juice and the grand total was $10.25. That’s almost the same as it would be at Murray’s where I go all the time.

Here’s the bagel as it appeared on my lap as I sat on a bench outside, ready to scarf it down:

Now let me tell you something. That bagel? It was pretty good. Soft, oniony, very nice. And the cream cheese? Creamy and fresh, just right. But that fish? Oh, that fish.

I’ve never had fresher smoked fish in my life. It really seemed like a salmon had crawled out of the sea, walked through a smoker like a car might go through a car wash, and then laid itself down on Russ’s slicing board ready for my guy to slice big thick slices. If the bagel in my lap were a Broadway show, that fish was Ethel Merman. It was fantastic.

This video shows the inside of the store and the variety of fish. I’ve never had the pastrami-cured salmon—why mess with perfection?

[vodpod id=ExternalVideo.973532&w=425&h=350&fv=]

And I couldn’t resist adding this comedy ad for whitefish.  Remember the old Budweiser “wazzup?” commercials? Here’s the Jewish equivalent, written by David Berenbaum as an entry for the HBO comedy film contest in 2001:

Halloween is coming

We’ll have a special Halloween Caturday post in a few days, but it’s not too early to start thinking about how you’ll dress your kitteh.  We’re all strapped for cash these days, so here’s a simple outfit that takes only a few minutes to make and requires only a stick and two pieces of paper. Think of the candy this dude will bring in!

h/t:  Three Ninjas

We had a storm

View from my window about 6:30 last night.  There were high winds and tornadoes throughout the Midwest; it was said to have been the second lowest barometric pressure ever recorded.

The evolution of cat coat patterns

Why are some species of kittehs plain, while others have spots, stripes, or more elaborate patterns? A provisional answer comes from a new paper by William Allen et al., “Why the leopard got his spots: relating pattern development to ecology in felids”, in the Proceedings of the Royal Society.  The paper’s title, of course, comes from Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories.  And the short answer is this: the coats of wild cats help camouflage them, and what pattern evolves depends on where the species lives.

The simple answer comes from a rather elaborate analysis.  The authors set up the paper with what I think is a good specimen of clear scientific writing.  It’s not Joyce, of course, but these guys know how to write. I love the alliteration of “flanks of felids” and the breeziness of “pounce or quick rush.”

The patterns displayed on the flanks of felids are intriguing in their variety. Previous studies of the adaptive function of cat coat patterns have indicated that they are likely to be for camouflage rather than communication or physiological reasons [1,2]. The primary hunting strategy of felids is to stalk prey until they are close enough to capture them with a pounce or quick rush [3,4]. As hunts are more successful when an attack is initiated from shorter distances [5,6], cats benefit from remaining undetected for as long as possible and camouflage helps achieve this. Many smaller cats are also likely to be camouflaged for protection from predation [7].

The authors first note that others before them have suggested—and supported with some data—the idea that spotted or stripey cats live in forested habitats, and plain cats in open habitats.  But they quantify this “complexity” by doing a developmental analysis of coat patterns on pictures taken from the internet.  I won’t go into the details, but they match the photographs with patterns generated from a mathematical model in which pattern results from the interaction of two diffusible chemicals along gradients of the body.  Given a model that matches an existing pattern (they used 35 species of felids), they could then encompass “pattern” in the mathematical constants involved in generating it.  They could then correlate these constants with various aspect of cat ecology: where they live, preferred times of activity, how big they are, what they eat, and how social they are.

Here’s an example of a cat that came out “plain” in their analysis: the caracal (Caracal caracal), from Africa and the Middle East:

Nine of the 35 species were considered “plain.” Here’s a cat considered “patterned and complex”: the gorgeous clouded leopard (Neofelis nebulosa), from southeast Asia:

Sixteen species were considered patterned, with four of these, including the clouded leopard, as “always complex.”  The other ten were considered “variable”,” since there was polymorphism: individuals within a species can look quite different.

The results?

• Pattern itself, whether complex or not, was significantly associated with habitat, with more patterned cats in more “closed” habitats (forest, jungle, etc.).  Plain cats are found in open habitats like grasslands, deserts, and mountains.
• More irregular patterns, like the cloud leopard, are significantly associated with tropical forests and other “closed” environments.
• “The more time cats spent in trees, the more likely they were to be patterned.”
• Pattern polymorphism, as in the melanism of “black panthers,” was significantly associated with living in temperate forests that vary seasonally and also with habitat generalism. This supports the idea that “disruptive selection,” that is, selection for different patterns in different places, maintains the intra-specific variation in coat color.
• There were a few “outliers,” or exceptions—cats that had patterns not fitting into the habitat correlations given above.  One is the very rare bay cat (Catopuma badia; I’ve posted on it before), which is plain though it lives in tropical rainforest:

And another outlier is the black footed cat of Africa (Felis nigripes), which is patterned though it lives in open habitat (savannah, grassland, and semi-desert):

The authors note that the tiger is the only wild cat with vertical stripes, and the common notion that this camouflages them in grassland is unfounded: tigers don’t live in grasslands.

The conclusion, then, is that the patterns of cat coats reflect, in large degree, selection for camouflage in their natural habitats. This camouflage almost certainly evolved to hide them from prey, and, in smaller cats, predators as well.

I love the inclusion of a Kipling quote in their conclusion (reference “45” is to the Just So Stories):

These findings support the hypothesis that felid flank patterns function as background matching camouflage. Evolution has generally paired plain cats with relatively uniformly coloured, textured and illuminated environments, and patterned cats with environments ‘full of trees and bushes and stripy, speckly, patchy-blatchy shadows’ [45].

Now the sample size—35 species—is not large, and some of the associations were barely significant from a statistical standpoint.  This could reflect the low power of tests in small samples. Nevertheless, the study offers a good working hypothesis for the evolution of pattern not just in cats, but other species that “need” to be cryptic.  What remains to understand are those outliers like the bay cat, and also the existence of developmental change of pattern, in which some species are patterned when young and lose the patterns when they get older.  Lions, which are spotted as cubs, are a good example of this:

This change might not be adaptive per se, but simply be an atavism: a holdover from an ancestral spotted pattern that still persists in the young.

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Allen, W. L., I. C. Cuthill, N. E. Scott-Samuel and R. Baddeley. 2010.  Why the leopard got his spots: relating pattern development to ecology in felids.  Proc. Roy. Soc. B online: doi: 10.1098/rspb.2010.1734

Culinary delights of the Lower East Side: Economy Candy

I’ve been a candy maven as long as I can remember. Ironically, it was Grandpa David, immigrant to the Lower East Side, who got me hooked.  When I was wee, about five or six, I used to work in his auto parts store in Uniontown, Pennsylvania—”work” consisting of putting purchases in paper bags. (He once yelled at me for wasting a bag on a single screwdriver.) At the end of the day, he’d give me a quarter, which I’d take to the penny candy emporium right next door.

If you’re not of a certain age you won’t remember how far a quarter could go in the 1950s, particularly when candy was one cent per piece—or even less.  For twenty-five cents you could get a sizable bag of the stuff.  But oy, the choices! Would it be a tiny wax bottle filled with fluorescent, saccharine fluid, or maybe a paper strip speckled with dots of sugar, or a licorice whip, or a few chocolate babies, or jawbreakers, or orange marshmallow “circus peanuts”?  And you had to make twenty-five choices.  It took a long time, and of course the woman behind the counter would get impatient with the grubby urchin determined to get both full value and full variety for his quarter.

Since my childhood, I’ve sampled sweets throughout the world, from the tamarind candies of Mexico to the pista barfi of India, and I haven’t found any that I didn’t like (save, perhaps, the salted, sugared and licorice-flavored preserved plums of China).  But there’s nothing like the penny candy stores of my youth.  You can find a few places that cater to boomer nostalgia by selling individual candies from bins, but they’re overpriced and phony.

But there’s this:

Economy Candy, on Rivington Street, is just a few short blocks from Katz’s Delicatessen.  Opened in 1937, it’s been in the hands of the Cohen family ever since.  It’s large, and it sells nothing but candy. Walking in is like taking a big bite of that madeleine.  And you won’t find any kids in there: just adults reliving their youth.

Economy does make a half-hearted nod toward upper-class tastes: they stock some waxy-looking chocolates and a variety of European sweets, but their real forte is nostalgic American candies. You may not be able to buy them by the piece, but they’re there:  the wax bottles, the licorice whips, the circus peanuts—the whole megillah.  You’ll see stuff  you thought they stopped making ages ago:

Sky bars, with their five individually-filled segments! Mallo Cups, set to ooze white goo all over your shirt! Black Jack gum!  Bonomos’s Turkish Taffy, which we used to slap on the pavement to crack into bits.  Necco Wafers (if you break the white ones apart in the dark, they make a spark.) Sugar Daddies!: those caramel suckers so efficient at removing fillings.  It’s impossible to visit this store and not leave with a sack of nostalgic treats.  (See a list of them here; note that there’s six pages of the stuff.) And lest you ask, “So what’s so Jewish about this store besides its owners?”, there’s this:

Halvah is the King of Candies.  The sesame-paste version isn’t 100% Jewish, but Middle Eastern; the name, however, comes from the Yiddish, and in America the candy is specifically associated with Jews.  You’ll either love it or hate it, and I happen to love it. It’s dense, oily, and crumbly, with a very slight bitterness of the sesame that offsets its sweetness. It’s an adult candy, complex and sophisticated, like good theology.  I eschew the fancy chocolate-covered varieties for the plain ones.

You can mail order the old-time favorites, and much else, from Economy’s website.