Using deleterious mutations to cross fitness valleys - as misunderstood by ID creationists

It is fitting that an article I just got published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B [1] has been blogged about on the ID lover's Uncommon Descent: Are Fitness Valleys Too Deep?

This research is part of my PhD thesis which I started in 2007, in part inspired by the creationist claim that deleterious mutations are only bad and prohibits evolution. My first objection was that they can of course exist on the line of descent as hitchhikers - deleterious mutations that go to fixation because they occur in close temporal proximity* to a beneficial mutation, so the combined effect is beneficial. Then I learned about epistasis - the interaction between mutations - which is ubiquitous and essential for non-trivial adaptation. Trivial adaptation is when evolution occurs by accumulating only beneficial mutations, as when a single fitness peak is ascended. But if the fitness landscape is rugged with many local peaks (as it necessarily always is in reality), then it is of great benefit to be able to climb down one peak and up another higher one.

The study is also highlighted in MSU Research**: Evolutionary kings of the hill use good, bad and ugly mutations to speed ahead of competition.

On Uncommon Descent, someone called PaV says

Second, here’s what the lead author had to say:
“These fitness landscapes simply could not be traversed with mutations that did not interact.”

This wasn’t a ‘main conclusion’ of the study; however, I don’t know about you, but this sounds to me like any ‘single’ mutation cannot get you across any fitness valley, and, therefore, seems to rule out having a single mutation ‘sweep’ across a population to fixation.

IOW, without epistatic effects, evolution cannot move forward. This is unexpected. It makes simple neo-Darwinian evolution that more complex with more hurdles to get over. And, it is another nail in the coffin of neo-Darwinism. That is: “Another day, another bad day for Darwinism.”

The level of ignorance comes as a surprise to me, but that is of course entirely my own fault. Never underestimate these people's denseness.

That a single mutation cannot get you across a valley should rule out that a single mutation can go to fixation reveals a gaping hole in the writer's understanding of very basic population dynamics. It is a complete non-sequitur. Crossing a valley is not necessary for a mutation to go to fixation; if a mutation is beneficial it can (but doesn't always) go to fixation by selection, and whether this is one step in crossing a valley or not is besides the point.

In this study we only allowed single point mutations, which is why it is true that no single mutation can cause an organism to jump from one peak to another (this is short-hand for the parent sitting on one peak has an offspring with one mutation). In order to move from one peak to another, at least two mutations are needed - otherwise the genotypes of the two organisms would be adjacent, and so one of them would not be sitting on a fitness peak. With larger-scale mutations such as insertions, deletions, transposons, etc., it would not be impossible to go from one peak to another in a single mutational event.

Another possible misunderstanding is that evolution never occurs up one peak. It does of course, as recently reported in two papers on experimental evolution side by side in Science [2,3]. In those cases, evolution can proceed by beneficial single point mutations, until the peak has been ascended (which in non-digital evolution often takes a very long time).

Lastly, PaV says it is unexpected that evolution cannot move forward without epistasis. It isn't at all. There are cases where epistasis is not important, but overall we already knew that epistasis was required.

I picture a game of King of the Hill where the ID creationists stand atop a little hill of faulty understanding of evolutionary theory claiming victory, while the rest of us have long ago ascended an adjacent and much higher peak that the ID creationists aren't able to locate.



Apologies to Randall Munroe.

References:
[1] Østman, B., Hintze, A., & Adami, C. (2011). Impact of epistasis and pleiotropy on evolutionary adaptation Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2011.0870
[2] Chou, H., Chiu, H., Delaney, N., Segre, D., & Marx, C. (2011). Diminishing Returns Epistasis Among Beneficial Mutations Decelerates Adaptation Science, 332 (6034), 1190-1192 DOI: 10.1126/science.1203799
[3] Khan, A., Dinh, D., Schneider, D., Lenski, R., & Cooper, T. (2011). Negative Epistasis Between Beneficial Mutations in an Evolving Bacterial Population Science, 332 (6034), 1193-1196 DOI: 10.1126/science.1203801

* I am no popular science writer, but if you don't know what I mean, feel free to ask.

** And on PhysOrg, Science Daily, Irish Weather Online, and NSF.

Stenger's physics of atheism

Gotta love Victor Stenger.

As a biologist, I have frequently been irritated to no end with creationists who say that what I believe (yes*) and do for a living - evolution - is a hoax. Though I deal with these people less often nowadays (but in the past...**), it is always somehow in the back of my mind. Geologists, too, have a problem (see, for example, PZ's post on that), though geology claiming that the Earth is million and billions years old vex creationists less than the idea that humans evolved from monkeys (yes***). And physicists even less so, even though one of the hardest arguments to refute is that of fine-tuning. But enter Stenger:

Yet for Stenger, fine-tuning is a fallacy and so there is no case for atheists to answer. They simply do not need to resort to Multiverses or to cyclical universes. His book discusses each of the usual examples of fine-tuning that Christian apologetics raise. He applies well-established physics, seeking to demonstrate that in each case, “the parameters of physics and cosmology are not particularly fine-tuned for life, especially human life.”

For example, Stenger agrees that the ratio of protons and electrons in the universe is sufficiently precise as to enable life to ultimately form. However that does not mean that there was the need for a divine being to intervene to ensure that the ratio was correct. He writes, “The number of electrons in the universe should exactly equal the number of protons because of charge conservation, on the reasonable assumption that the total electric charge of the universe is neutral—as it should be if the universe came from ‘nothing’ and charge is conserved.”

Similarly, it is true that the universe would have collapsed before it reached its present size if its expansion rate at one second after the Big Bang had been lower by as little as one part in many billions. However he explains that the expansion rate was automatically very close to the critical rate due to the energy density of the universe.

You can read the rest on eSkeptic.

* I believe it based on the evidence. 'Believe' does not only mean 'on faith', and I do not care to let creationists (or atheists) dictate how I use the word.

** For some past posts dealing with creationists, also in the comments:
Watching multicellularity evolve before our eyes
The Rzeppa game show
My own pet creationist

*** Surely, given the diversity of animals that we call 'monkeys', the last common ancestor of all primates looked like a monkey (though not necessarily like any extant monkey).

In Oklahoma for Evolution 2011

I've arrived in Norman, Oklahoma for the 2011 Evolution conference. You can follow tweets here: #evolution2011.

Tomorrow, Saturday, I'm giving a talk on evolutionary metagenomics, which you can also read about on BEACON's blog.

And if you're here yourself, come and say hi (good luck finding me).

Evolutionary metagenomics

We would like to know how soil bacteria evolve. They are important for humans and other living things, as they are involved in chemical processes that are both beneficial and harmful to us. They emit and absorb greenhouse gases: carbon dioxide (CO₂), methane (CH₄), and nitrous oxide (N₂O), and they are part of the nitrogen cycle, which is important for agriculture. Which you care about even if you don’t eat your veggies.

There is a reason why soil bacteria are not model organisms in biology. They are hard to study because they are difficult to grow in the laboratory. Also, there are many different species of soil bacteria, so even if we did mange to grow a couple in the lab, we would not likely learn much about the overall function of the bacterial communities in soil. So what to do?

You take a handful of soil and you sequence that – after removing earthworms. Simple. It’s called metagenomics.

Read the rest on BEACON's blog.

Homophobes are turned on by homosexuality

Unfortunately I can't access the full length article of this one: Is homophobia associated with homosexual arousal?

But it is obviously too good to miss. The abstract reads:

The authors investigated the role of homosexual arousal in exclusively heterosexual men who admitted negative affect toward homosexual individuals. Participants consisted of a group of homophobic men (n = 35 ) and a group of nonhomophobic men (n = 29); they were assigned to groups on the basis of their scores on the Index of Homophobia (W. W. Hudson & W. A. Ricketts, 1980). The men were exposed to sexually explicit erotic stimuli consisting of heterosexual, male homosexual, and lesbian videotapes, and changes in penile circumference were monitored. They also completed an Aggression Questionnaire (A. H. Buss & M. Perry, 1992). Both groups exhibited increases in penile circumference to the heterosexual and female homosexual videos. Only the homophobic men showed an increase in penile erection to male homosexual stimuli. The groups did not differ in aggression. Homophobia is apparently associated with homosexual arousal that the homophobic individual is either unaware of or denies.

So, homophobic men are aroused by homosexual porn, and either they don't know it (hmmm), or they deny it (looking at you, Fred Phelps).

Reference:
Adams, H., Wright, L., & Lohr, B. (1996). Is homophobia associated with homosexual arousal? Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 105 (3), 440-445 DOI: 10.1037/0021-843X.105.3.440

CoE 36 is up

At Greg Laden's blog.

This month there are several posts by researchers at BEACON, which is the place that I work at myself at Michigan State. One of those is by a postdoc, Kevin Theis, who works on the microbial communities in the anal pouch of spotted hyenas. The bacteria in those pouches produce scents that the hyenas use for communication. Kevin is investigating if the bacteria and the hyena are coevolving.


Kevin Theis with an anesthetized adult male hyena named Detroit.

Are dolphins the new subhumans?

Reading an article in Science on dolphin brains, Are Dolphins Too Smart for Captivity?, I am glad to finally see someone but myself making the point that the level of sentience is key when deciding how one can deal with other animals. Not the only thing that matters, yet sentience - the ability to feel things - is in my view the most important, simply because hurting is bad for all creatures that feel it. As opposed to plants, which no one (sane) has any problem inflicting damage on for the fear that they would feel pain (though admittedly that doesn't mean I endorse cutting down the rainforest, etc.).

Marino has also teamed with advocacy groups like TerraMar Research, a nonprofit organization based in Seattle, Washington, dedicated to protecting marine wildlife. TerraMar's director, Toni Frohoff, argues that if dolphins are as self-aware as people, they deserve the same basic rights. “The more sentient we see dolphins to be,” she says, “the greater our ethical obligation to them. We can't study them like goldfish or lab rats.”
[Emphasis added.]

And if they really are very sentient, then I agree with Lori Marino that we ought not to keep them in captivity - especially not for entertainment. As I wrote some time ago, perhaps dolphins are the new subhumans?

We don't know for sure, but I think that when dealing with whales and other animals (e.g. elephants and dolphins) that clearly show what we call empathy, sorrow, and compassion in humans, we should assume that they feel it. Otherwise we might make the same mistake as Europeans did with Africans and Native Americans, and end up hurting them to an extent we will come to regret.

Also, for the Faroe Islanders: Pilot Whales are dolphins.

One of Marino's many detractors, Lou Herman, says the following. Please read this carefully and see if you can catch the self-contradiction:

Herman agrees. The godfather of research on dolphin cognition and a contributor to the journal package, he says that the evidence for higher dolphin mortality in captivity versus in the wild is “very, very questionable,” adding that a recent study based on National Marine Fisheries Service data showed no significant difference. “The mortality is horrific in the wild. Fifty percent of wild dolphins bear shark scars—and those are the ones that are still alive.” Marino, he says, reminds him of John Lilly, who eventually railed against captivity as a concentration camp: “Once you mix politics with science, you lose objectivity.”

Herman says he, too, has struggled with the ethics of keeping dolphins in captivity. But he notes that Marino is basing many of her ethical arguments on understanding gained from captive research. “That's the irony of it. How do they know dolphins are intelligent? Because of the captive studies. And now they don't want us to do that research.” Herman says he never could have made his cognitive breakthroughs in the wild. Researchers have to train animals, collect baseline readings, and follow individuals for months or years, he notes: “Science demands controls and replication. What they're proposing is a fantasy.”

Shorter version: When Marino bases her advocacy on science, then she has lost objectivity. When Herman does it by conlcuding that research must go on, then it's fine.

Herman objects that Marino bases her opinion on science (what, pray tell, should she base them on? Faith?). He think it's ironic that Marino's opinion stems from the scientific observation that dolphins are intelligent. What the hell does it matter how it is discovered? Just because it is discovered through science, then this way of doing science is forever safe? That people die when you shoot a bullet through their brains was based on the observation of shooting a bullet through a head... So Herman would label advocacy against shooting people in the head as ironic?

Yes, to do science (though not all science), one has to repeat experiments. But that does not dictate that we must do the science. If we wanted to know what the effect would be putting babies in microwave ovens, then would Herman also say that science demands that we replicate? That line of argument is so asinine that it would never work for experiment with humans, and yet for dolphins it is somehow okay.

So, dolphins researchers are divided on this issue. However, when dolphins are just slaughtered, then at least they can stand together:

Reiss, who continues to work with dolphins in captivity—a position that drove Marino to stop speaking to her in 2009—doesn't support Marino's movement, arguing that there's still value in captive research. But Reiss does think dolphin researchers can find common ground. Now at Hunter College in New York City, she is spearheading a campaign to stop the bloody dolphin hunts in Taiji, Japan, for example. Marino joined this effort, as did scientists on both sides of the captivity debate. Reiss and others who support captive research also believe that many zoos and aquariums should improve their dolphin facilities. Everyone wants the best for these animals, Reiss says: “To me, the biggest thing is to keep the knowledge coming, whether they're in captivity or in the wild.”

And that's a fine thing. Those dolphin killers need to be stopped, and I'm glad to hear that they all agree with that. However, Reiss' comment that the biggest thing is to keep the knowledge coming irrespective of how that knowledge is found is just as asinine as Herman's comment above. Would Reiss think so even if we one day were to - very hypothetically - learn how to communicate with dolphins, and they told us how miserable they are in captivity?

I am not saying I am certain that dolphins are miserable or suffering in captivity. I am merely saying that if they are, then we should stop keeping them.

Evolution is wrong, unproven and a blasphemy

Here's an imam in London who spoke out saying that evolution is not incompatible with the Koran, and then retracted his views because of threats against his life.

Recently you retracted your views because of the outrage they caused. Could you explain?

My retraction was saying that I misjudged how to go about explaining these things. Sooner or later someone will have to address the issue of evolution - it's a no-go area, especially with the clerics - but I'm abandoning my attempt to reconcile it with the Koran until things settle down. I am not willing to risk my life over this issue.

Good for him, I suppose. I would have made the same choice. It's just that it's a freakin' England! Why is there even the need?

How common is the creationist position among Muslims?

It is the default position. Most of us are taught that evolution is wrong, unproven and a blasphemy. A lot of people enjoy science programmes on TV such as those by David Attenborough, but they tend to say he's an unbeliever so we can't trust him.

Couple that with fanatical righteousness and a penchant for violence, and this is the result.

Doing science vs. writing science

These days I am writing up a paper on some metagenomics research I have been doing while at Michigan State. It is hard and takes time. For me. Not so for everyone that I know, and that's good for them, because writing is an essential part of being a scientist*. Doing the research alone is not enough - writing about it is of course part of the process.

However, it has made me think that maybe this situation is not the best of all possible worlds. Rather, I find that I am better at making models and analyzing data than anything else, while some other colleagues are really good writers. So, why shouldn't we split the tasks among us? Someone collects the data, I do the analysis, and someone third writes up the manuscripts. That would suit me just fine.

The analyst is always first author, right?

* By the way, I like to say 'scientist' rather than researcher. I once conducted a poll asking random people which term they would prefer, and the one airport security person I asked said that he liked 'researcher' better, because 'scientist' made you think of 'evil'.

Lars von Trier is a Nazi

Go to Politiken (scroll one page down for the movie) and see this clip of a press conference Lars von Trier gave about his new film Melancholia.

He says that he sympathizes a bit with Hitler, and that he is a Nazi. von Trier (that's pronounced 'fun', btw) is trying to make a joke with some truth in it. It's a very Danish thing to do, and a very Danish way to do it. Something that most Americans cannot understand. Look at Kirten Dunst. She is so uncomfortable that at one point she even leans over and says something to von Trier (maybe "time to shut the fuck up!") that makes him object that he is trying to make a point.

Granted, I cringed as well, but not because he talk about being a Nazi in order to make some point, but because his delivery was pathetic.

Also in video: why did Newt Gingrich say "Nice to live in a free country"?



Is it just me or did he really mean it's a bugger to live in a free country?

---

Update 5/24/11:

von Trier has released this statement:

"In my opinion, freedom of speech, in all its shapes, is part of the basic human rights. However, my comments during the festival’s press conference were unintelligent, ambiguous and needlessly hurtful.

My intended point was that the potential for extreme cruelty, or the opposite, lies within every human being, whatever nationality, ethnicity, rank or religion. If we only explain historical disasters with the cruelty of individuals we destroy the possibility of understanding the human mechanisms, which in turn are necessary in order to avoid any future crimes against humanity."

Which I find very true.

Again, homosexuality is not a choice

New research strongly suggests that if human sexuality isn't determined before birth, then at least it happens shortly after. That is, way before any "lifestyle" choices can be made.

A group of 90 healthy gay and heterosexual adults, men and women, were scanned by the Karolinska Institute scientists to measure the volume of both sides, or hemispheres, of their brain.

When these results were collected, it was found that lesbians and heterosexual men shared a particular "asymmetry" in their hemisphere size, while heterosexual women and gay men had no difference between the size of the different halves of their brain.

In other words, structurally, at least, the brains of gay men were more like heterosexual women, and gay women more like heterosexual men.

A further experiment found that in one particular area of the brain, the amygdala, there were other significant differences.
In heterosexual men and gay women, there were more nerve "connections" in the right side of the amygdala, compared with the left.

The reverse, with more neural connections in the left amygdala, was the case in homosexual men and heterosexual women.

Homosexuality is not a choice. But we already knew that, because no one can say that they chose to be heterosexual at some age.



But, even if it was a choice, that would be their choice.

Oh, and, see this post by someone who knows statistics well, and found that something was amiss with the original paper.

Rapture May 21st - save your pets

Apparently the (next) Rapture is May 21st.

But what of your pets? They are not likely going with, so are they just to starve in you absence? No, they aren't, at least if you pay up $135 in advance (!) to a company of atheists who are as unlikely to be taken as your pets.

In 2009, he launched Eternal Earth-Bound Pets USA. Centre guarantees that if or when the Rapture comes he or one of his 44 contractors in 26 states, including Washington, will drive to your home within 24 hours, collect your dog, cat, bird, rabbit or small caged mammal, and adopt it. (Rapture rescue services for horses, camels, llamas and donkeys are limited to New Hampshire, Vermont, Idaho and Montana.)

The cost is $135, plus $20 per additional animal. Payable upfront, of course, and good for 10 years.

"Right now, we have over 250 clients," said Centre, 62, who is retired and pens anti-religion books under the name Dromedary Hump.

Centre says he has carefully screened all the rescuers. They have to love animals, of course, but just as important is that they don't love Jesus. For obvious reasons, they're all atheists.

[Source.]

Keller shows robots evolving altruism - Nowak dismisses simulations

As also reported on Panda's Thumb, Laurent Keller's group have evolved robot behavior in a computer (report in Science). The robots were given the ability to share food with each other, and more related groups quickly evolved altruism, sharing food with other robots they were related to. Classical and unsurprising, at least given our theoretical understanding of the evolution of altruism.



However, Martin Nowak, champion of the anti-kin-selection view, in a stunning feat of denial, dismisses the result because they are mere robots.

But Harvard University theortician Martin Nowak is more cautious about drawing conclusions based on computer simulations. Virtual robots are not a stand in for real life, he says. "[The work] tells us nothing about whether Hamilton's rule makes a correct prediction for actual biological systems," he says.

If you don't think that's ironic, then you don't know much about Nowak's work. Nowak mainly uses mathematics to make inference and draw conclusions about "actual biological systems". In my book, robots that actual do stuff seems much closer to biology than equations.

That being said, as I've previously noted, I am personally agnostic about the role of kin-selection in group selection.

altruism quickly evolved in the simulation, with greater food-sharing in groups where robots were more related, the researchers report online today in PLoS Biology.

Yes, but the fact that individuals groups that are more altruistic are related begs the question of causality. Did altruism evolve because they were related, or did groups of related individuals evolve because they were altruistic? In a situation like the one by Keller's group, these two scenarios may be inseparable. Is there another way to test what comes first, altruism or relatedness? Or rather, can we get altruism in groups of no relatedness?

Check out some other cool robots.

Waibel, M., Floreano, D., & Keller, L. (2011). A Quantitative Test of Hamilton's Rule for the Evolution of Altruism PLoS Biology, 9 (5) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1000615

Grow up, Americans!

Seriously, Americans. What is this infatuation you have with your founding fathers?

Whenever Americans from the right of the political spectrum (which, btw, is far right compared to normal countries*) insist that America is a Christian country, they turn to the founding fathers to prove their point. And when Americans from the left of the spectrum (why is quite far to the right compared to normal countries**) counter that it is not, then they too turn to the Constitution. Fair enough, you might say. It is the law, after all (at least the Constitution is, which says nothing about America being a Christian nation: We The People ring a bell?). However, it is the law as written centuries ago. Newsflash: it is outdated.

Last night on The Daily Show, Jon Stewart interviewed David Barton about whether America is a Christian nation.

See it here:



Should we*** have prayer be in school? Whenever Americans discuss whether we are a Christian nation, they always look to their dear founding fathers. Of course, they can't agree on what they meant, which makes it extra ridiculous. But the really stupid part is that it is so infantile.

It's infantile because America and Americans have changed, so what the founding fathers said is outdated. It's immature because when discussing how things should be, arguing over what your parents thought they should be really should be beside the point.

Instead, we should be talking about how things should be today based on what the current conditions are. Take guns. Back then it made a lot of sense to write into law that a militia should be allowed to carry guns. The threat from governments was real, and guns weren't used to kill schoolchildren. Today, there is no threat from the government, despite conspiracy theories originating on the stupid right side of the political aisle. And guns aren't muskets that take minutes to load, but things that the British could have won the war with had they had just five men armed with them. And they are used mainly for killing schoolchildren. So, allowing everybody to buy guns is stupid, so the freaking Constitution needs to be changed. It is outdated.

Completely ignoring the notorious discussion about many of the founding fathers not really being religious, letting your forefathers dictate how you should live centuries hence is puerile. It's tantamount to tradition. Eeew! Tradition is one of my favorite hating words. Tradition means doing something just because people did so in the past. Tradition is eating lutefisk because your parents did it. Tradition means not thinking for yourself. Which is something Americans excel at.

Time to grow up, Americans!

* Yes, normal countries, such as those where people care for each other by paying taxes in order to provide universal health care and the sale of guns are restricted to hunting rifles - for hunters.

** No, we are not talking about communism, you ignorant tools.

*** I say 'we' deliberately. While I am not American myself, I have lived here for most of my adult life, and my children go to school here, so it matters to me, too.

Carnival of Evolution #35

The thirty fifth Carnival of Evolution is up on Lab Rat.

Are carnivals relevant?

Recently I have been thinking about the use of blog carnivals. Do they get read by enough people to be considered useful? Do the people who read them actually click through to blog posts they wouldn't have otherwise? Presumably people who read carnivals regularly read a number of blogs regularly, too. So does the carnival add anything for these readers? And what about people who aren't regular readers of featured blogs? Are there any? Do people who don't usually read about the subject matter learn about it through carnivals?

Read more at Carnival of Evolution.

Evolutionary psychology assumes a simple genotype-phenotype map

Satoshi Kanazawa on why older parents are almost twice as likely to have a daughter than a son:

Because both the quality of the eggs and the quality of the sperm decrease with age, it is tempting to explain the declining likelihood of having a son among older parents potentially in terms of such quality of gametes (although I’m not aware of any argument that suggests that lower-quality gametes are more likely to produce girls). However, such explanations, even when correct, are proximate, not ultimate. They answer the question of how; they don’t answer the question of why. The lower quality of gametes, if it indeed lowers the probability of producing boys, is the mechanism that evolution employs to make sure that older parents are more likely to have daughters. But such a proximate mechanism does not explain why evolution “wanted” to make sure that older parents are more likely to have daughters, in other words, why it is adaptive for older parents to have daughters, not sons. That requires an ultimate evolutionary explanation.

The adaptive explanation is given as a necessity. Yes, proximal and ultimate explanations aren't the same thing, but the point here is that there need not be an evolutionary reason. Being more likely to have girls when above 40 does not need to be adaptive, as assumed by Kanazawa. This very assumption, however, is the very livelihood of working evolutionary psychologists.

Here's Kanazawa's proposition:

Being orphaned young is bad both for boys and girls, but it’s much worse for boys than for girls.

Sure, I'll bite. That is a great explanation right there, but in order to work with this hypothesis, it helps (though isn't strictly necessary) to further assume that there is enough variation for selection to act on. For example, it would without a doubt be great for humans if they had evolved flight to better escape predators back in the day, but also without a doubt selection couldn't select for flying humans because no children were ever born with this ability (or even anything that comes close).

In terms of genotype-phenotype maps (the relationship between a given genotype and the phenotype it codes for), it is not easy to reconfigure the genome so that humans are born with rudimentary wings. Some things are more likely to evolve than other, simply because they can occur at all - and wings aren't so likely (though not impossible). Genetic constraints make some things more likely to appear, and for selection to act on - or not. As with the observation that older parents are more likely to have daughters, which may stem from genetic constraints which make it less likely to make sperm with Y-chromosomes, for example. So, even if there is no advantage for older parents to have daughters, it could still be that way without it being selected for. Having more daughters could be a neutral trait.

But that's no fun. It does not make for a newsworthy story, so people in that business are more apt to assume that selection did it. But it really lacks scientific rigor.

In my browser I am...

• Trying to get around to reading these new journal articles:

Bacteria-Phage Antagonistic Coevolution in Soil
Molecular Evolution, Mutation Size and Gene Pleiotropy: A Geometric Reexamination
On the Evolution of Mutation in Changing Environments: Recombination and Phenotypic Switching
Which Primates Recognize Themselves in Mirrors?
Human-specific loss of regulatory DNA and the evolution of human-specific traits

• Trying to get around to reading these other items of interest:

Lawrence Krauss vs. William Lane Craig
Kunstige knogler er rykket et stort skridt nærmere

• Trying to buy these:



• Listening to this:

A.C. Grayling's Bible

A.C. Grayling et al. is just out with The Good Book: A Humanist Bible (Amazon). It's a book supposed to replace the Bible, for those who need someone else to guide them through life. Judging by how many needs the real Bible to tell them how to behave, perhaps many ought to read this one.

Or perhaps not, because after all, even those who claim to get their morals from the Bible really don't. The Ten Commandments and other guidelines say nothing of many of the moral dilemmas we often find ourselves in (human cloning), are unfailingly broken by Christians (covet not your neighbors possessions would be the very fabric of how capitalism works), contain lots of parables of supposedly good men who behave in utmost appalling manner (giving your wife and daughter to a mob so that they may "know them"), and all of the horrifying acts perpetrated on innocents by God himself (plagues on the people of Egypt, despite only the Pharao refused to let his people go). Also, shellfish are not an abomination.

It is an often repeated canard that we get our morals from the Bible or from God. We all (more or less) come equipped with a sense of morality that tells us how to behave, and this sense of morality comes from our evolutionary history. Empirically, many other primates have been shown to possess morality, from which we can infer that it is not something unique to humans or to the religious. Theoretically, we have a very good understanding of why individuals should behave altruistically towards others. It is no mystery why we don't go around stealing and killing, and it is not solely because the law says so. Rather, the law says so because we all (mostly) think so. There is no law against eating shellfish - my guess it's that in the Bible because the author thought they were nasty.

Grayling offer these ten to replace the original ten.

The secular humanist version of the Ten Commandments:

1. Love well
2. Seek the good in all things
3. Harm no others
4. Think for yourself
5. Take responsibility
6. Respect nature
7. Do your utmost
8. Be informed
9. Be kind
10. Be courageous

And who can disagree with those? Really, tell me if you do.

Personally, I go by George Carlin's ten two commandments. Watch:

Simona drums on after four engagements and two marriages

[I just read this fascinating story about a Muslim girl growing up in Denmark in Politiken (Danish newspaper). Here's a translation, with apologies.]

Written by Ditte Giese, published online on Politiken April 7, 2011.

Politiken just asked me to removed the translation due to copyrights. I'll ask if they will allow me to put it back up with proper acknowledgments.

---

Update 4/8:
Yeah! They allowed me to post it - for a fee of 750 Danish kroner (~$150). I think they should be paying me.

So, instead here's a great quote from this excellent article. You can read the rest here in Danish, or run the whole thing through Google Translate here.

Already when she was 15 years the young men began to propose. Flirting is totally banned in that environment, so we meet each other at weddings and engagement parties.

We do not talk at all, but maybe steal a few looks at each other. Or a man could have seen her standing on the balcony and then decided to propose. Simona Abdallah is trying to explain the peculiar process, while laughing at it:

"First our mothers call each other. Then his mother comes for coffee and ask for my hand on her son's behalf. Then the bridegroom and his family comes for coffee, and I would then run around looking good with red cheeks while serving them, and maybe even look him in the eyes to see if there is a... connection, right? And I have to constantly clean and show that my mother has raised me well. "

"You usually have two weeks to think about it. One must NEVER say yes immediately, but should play hard to get. Finally my father asks if I want him. And then I try to assess from what others have said about him and that one time we saw each other. If I accept the negotiations begin'.

Pretty grim outlook for girls raised in such families, I think. Congratz to Simona for breaking free of such narrow-mindedness.