Carnival of Evolution 47

The latest Carnival of Evolution is at Evolving Thoughts, hosted by that guy Wilkins who usually covers the philosophical beat…but we’ll let him out of that cage this one time.

The Carnival of Evolution 48 will be held right here, on Pharyngula. You can submit entries via the carnival widget; get them in before 1 June, or I’ll ignore them and they’ll be passed on to the next carnival host, who doesn’t exist. And therefore doesn’t have a blog. Which means your carefully crafted science post will be shipped off to dev:null. So you might also consider volunteering for the hosting duties some time. The electrons you save might be your own.

(Also on Sb)

God moves in malicious ways

Cholera is an ugly little beast loaded with all kinds of nasty optimizations to kill human beings. Read this post for a nice summary of all the gory details, and then after explaining all the specific elements of the cholera toxin, asks this plangent question:

How would a Creationist or I.D. advocate explain all of this? They don’t believe that bacteria can develop significant new adaptations, so they’d have to attribute all these changes to recent surreptitious tinkering by an Intelligent Designer (who is presumably still tinkering with cholera bacteria to make it look like they’re evolving, of course). For the sake of argument, let’s assume for a minute that this unlikely explanation is true. If so, we could deduce at least three things about the Intelligent Designer (possibly more):

1) The Intelligent Designer does not like humans. (Why else would s/he/it design lethal pathogens?)

2) The Intelligent Designer is tricking us by surreptitiously intervening in a way that makes it look like bacteria are evolving in order to fool us.

3) The Intelligent Designer is not very smart. If you were an all-powerful Intelligent Designer that wanted to make bacteria that would kill lots of humans, you could do a much better job, because cholera bacteria don’t survive very well in highly acidic conditions. The vast majority of the cholera bacteria you ingest when you drink contaminated water will perish in your stomach acid. From an evolutionary perspective this makes perfect sense, because we know that cholera became a killer through a blind process of evolution by natural selection. From a Creationist or I.D. perspective, however, it makes no sense at all. Indeed, the only way a Creationist or I.D. advocate can explain cholera is to shrug and say that “God moves in mysterious ways”, which is just dodging the question altogether.

Some recognize the problem. I’ll recommend (!) Michael Behe’s book, The Edge of Evolution, which isn’t very good science but at least he comes right up to this problem of the parasites and nasty-man killing nature of Nature, and comes right out and says it: his Intelligent Designer had to have gone in to specifically engineer every brutal feature of every hostile microbe and protist. Further, his Designer is pursuing an ongoing project, and is intentionally introducing almost every significant set of mutations to make pathogens more lethal right now.

I’ve been amused to see the stunned and embarrassed silence of the creationist community to that book. They laud Behe still for Darwin’s Black Box, but The Edge of Evolution? Nah, let’s pretend that one didn’t happen.

“First class problems”

I think I’m beginning to understand why the airlines have that nonsensical demand that we all shut off our electronic devices during takeoff (it’s very annoying when you’re using your iPad just for reading or listening to music) — and I’m beginning to think that maybe they ought to enforce the rule as soon as you step aboard the plane. The reason: have you ever noticed those assholes in first class who order a Scotch as soon as they sit down and then fire up their smart phones? Have you ever wondered what they were doing? They’re apparently doing an inebriated Neandertal in a locker room act.

Some Chicago newspaper columnist named Joe Cowley used that interlude on the runway to unleash his inner jerkwad over twitter. Apparently, he’s sexist and racist.

I’m more likely to see a Squatch before I see a hot flight attendant. Then again, I think the airlines are hiring Squatch’s to do that job.

Chick pilot. Should I be OK with that or am I just a sexist caveman?

Kid next to me looks like “Short Round.” Think I’ll give him a dollar to say to me, “You cheat, Dr. Jones!” #firstclassproblems

It always sets me back a bit to discover that people actually think like that, and worse, that they’ll openly babble that way. At least Cowley has learned that the latter is not OK — he has now deleted his entire twitter account.

It’s too bad his brain is probably still broken.

Truth will sometimes make you cry

Dan Savage upset some Christian students who walked out on one of his talks when he pointed out the hypocrisy of Christians who cherry-pick which rules to follow…and often seem to pick the worst rules, like “keep slaves” or “beat up gay people”. I thought it was very mild stuff — wait until those craven wimps get a load of me — but it has the right wing in a tizzy, and several of my fellow freethoughtbloggers have commented on it (here, here, here, and here, for instance.)

I just wanted to add one more link to your reading list. Zinnia Jones says Savage is right about the Bible, and she’s exactly right. Fox News can whine that Savage made girls cry (and isn’t that a weird complaint?), but when it gets right down to it, what matters is that what Dan Savage said was true.

Why I am an atheist – Anonymous

It would be fanciful self-flattery to assume that coming to atheism was all my own doing, based solely upon some youthful intellectual shrewdness and critical thinking abilities. Of course, we all can lay claim to unconsciously filing away in our brain any signals and inconsistencies we encounter over time. But of course there were outside influences as well that helped me along the way. I have appreciated this process of reflection upon the more significant causal factors in my youth that helped me clear my mind of a childhood of supernatural nonsense.

[Read more…]

Gaily frolicking squid

Some species of cephalopods are incapable of concealing their sexual history. The males produce packets of sperm called spermatangia that they grasp with a specialized arm that they then reach out and splat, poke into their mate. In Octopoteuthis deletron, a deep-sea squid, these spermatangia are large, pale, and distinctive, so every time a squid is mated it’s left with a little white dangling flag marking it — so sex is like a combination of tag and paintball. The males are loaded with ammo — 1646 were counted in the reproductive tract of one male — and the spermatangia can be counted using a video camera.

So a ROV went down deep into the Monterey Submarine Canyon and documented the profligate promiscuity of these squid. The females had been busy: individuals had between 21 and 147 spermatangia dangling from them.


(a) A female Octopoteuthis deletron showing implanted spermatangia in the ventral arms, the ventral lateral mantle and the ventral mid and posterior mantle (arrows) and the characteristic rugose skin of the anterior mantle in females. (b) A spermatangium showing the bulbous proximal portion containing sperm, and the trailing open end. (c) A male O. deletron with implanted spermatangia on the dorsal mantle; the trailing ends are visible in profile. (d) Close-up of (c).

The surprise was that the males were equally likely to have been inseminated multiple times in their life, between 15 and 25 times. They’re all manic bisexuals! They’re also creative in their sexual behavior; as you can see below, spermatangia are implanted everywhere, mantle, arms, ventrally, dorsally. It’s all one big gay orgy down there under the sea.


Frequency of occurrence of spermatangia present on the (a) dorsal and (b) ventral body of male and female O. deletron. The colours of the body parts correspond with the colours of the bars in the graph.

Most cephalopods, this species included, live short lives and the perpetuation of the species relies on rapid, successful mating. The authors explain this same-sex mating behavior as an adaptive response to a life-style in which discrimination is less important than simply getting the job done.

We have only observed them as solitary individuals. The combination of a solitary life, poor sex differentiation, the difficulty of locating a conspecific and the rapidity of the sexual encounter probably results in the observed high frequency of spermatangia-bearing males in this species. Apparently, the costs involved in losing sperm to another male are smaller than the costs of developing sex discrimination and courtship, or of not mating at all. This behaviour further exemplifies the ‘live fast and die young’ life strategy of many cephalopods.

I prefer to think of it as a brief happy life spent writhing constantly, passionately in the arms of love.

Hoving HJT, Bush SL, Robison BH (2011) A shot in the dark: same-sex sexual behaviour in a deep-sea squid. Biol. Lett. doi:10.1098/rsbl.2011.0680.

(Also on Sb)

NO RACIAL PROFILING, PLEASE

I’m more than a little appalled. Sam Harris defends racial profiling in airport security screening. I reject this categorically.

We should profile Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim, and we should be honest about it. And, again, I wouldn’t put someone who looks like me entirely outside the bull’s-eye (after all, what would Adam Gadahn look like if he cleaned himself up?) But there are people who do not stand a chance of being jihadists, and TSA screeners can know this at a glance.

Terrorists are people who have an ideological commitment so fierce that they encourage violence in its defense, even to the point of self-destruction. It is a behavioral property, not a racial one; to argue that one can identify it by so superficial a characteristic as appearance is unjust and ineffective. If we’re going to play the odds game in the United States, for instance, the people we ought to be stopping are white males. These are our terrorists, for instance.

Shall we single out people who look like them for special scrutiny? Of course not, that would be so many people, you might say, and most light-skinned European-Americans are not terrorists, so it would be an incredibly inefficient screening protocol. So why should we focus on people with dark complexions and Semitic features? There are many of them, too, and the overwhelming majority are most definitely not terrorists, and it would similarly be terribly inefficient. We would be harrassing mostly innocent people…but of course, these are innocent minorities, so their rights be damned to give the majority a little more privilege.

Harris also argues that some people are obviously not capable of terrorism, mentioning specifically the elderly — “an elderly couple who couldn’t have been less threatening had they been already dead and boarding in their coffins”. I had not realized that destroying required less guile and cunning and technological sophistication than muscle. I know that I don’t plan on seeing my capacity for nefarious scheming to diminish as I become increasingly decrepit physically, and I’m pretty sure that setting off a bomb in the bathroom doesn’t require vast reserves of youthful muscle.

Harris is right to complain about the superficial show of frisking down a subset of people passing through the security chokepoint — it’s a stupid way to prevent terrorism. It would be far more effective to catch them before they show up at the airport, on the basis of associations and activities, rather than their skin color or the shape of their nose; it would also be better to have more robust recognition of identity at the airport, in order to connect information about threatening behavior to the individual.

But never mind me. Ask a security expert, Bruce Schneier, about profiling. He advocates behavioral profiling (are they acting hinky? Is there something unusual about their activities?) but rejects the stupidity of profiling by ancestry.

  • Whenever you design a security system with two ways through — an easy way and a hard way — you invite the attacker to take the easy way. Profile for young Arab males, and you’ll get terrorists that are old non-Arab females. This paper looks at the security effectiveness of profiling versus random searching.

  • If we are going to increase security against terrorism, the young Arab males living in our country are precisely the people we want on our side. Discriminating against them in the name of security is not going to make them more likely to help.

  • Despite what many people think, terrorism is not confined to young Arab males. Shoe-bomber Richard Reid was British. Germaine Lindsay, one of the 7/7 London bombers, was Afro-Caribbean. Here are some more examples:

    In 1986, a 32-year-old Irish woman, pregnant at the time, was about to board an El Al flight from London to Tel Aviv when El Al security agents discovered an explosive device hidden in the false bottom of her bag. The woman’s boyfriend — the father of her unborn child — had hidden the bomb.

    In 1987, a 70-year-old man and a 25-year-old woman — neither of whom were Middle Eastern — posed as father and daughter and brought a bomb aboard a Korean Air flight from Baghdad to Thailand. En route to Bangkok, the bomb exploded, killing all on board.

    In 1999, men dressed as businessmen (and one dressed as a Catholic priest) turned out to be terrorist hijackers, who forced an Avianca flight to divert to an airstrip in Colombia, where some passengers were held as hostages for more than a year-and-half.

    The 2002 Bali terrorists were Indonesian. The Chechnyan terrorists who downed the Russian planes were women. Timothy McVeigh and the Unabomber were Americans. The Basque terrorists are Basque, and Irish terrorists are Irish. Tha Tamil Tigers are Sri Lankan.

    And many Muslims are not Arabs. Even worse, almost everyone who is Arab is not a terrorist — many people who look Arab are not even Muslims. So not only are there an large number of false negatives — terrorists who don’t meet the profile — but there an enormous number of false positives: innocents that do meet the profile.

Thorough reform of the security process is needed to make us genuinely safer. Scapegoating ethnic groups is not, however, the answer.