New Rattlesnakes Rattle Creationists

Reassessing Those Rattlers | Research Frontiers.

One of the indispensable dogmas of creationism in its desperate attempt to fool people into thinking the Theory of Evolution is fatally flawed is that 'microevolution' and 'macroevolution' are different things needing different processes to explain them. 'Microevolution' is supposedly the evolution of variation, varieties, races, subspecies etc, while 'macroevolution' is supposedly the evolution of a new species.

Lessons From The Dordogne - Evolving Insects

Here are some examples of one of the important drivers in evolution - the need to avoid being eaten. I took these pictures on our recent holiday in France but you don't need to go all the way to France to find similar ones. You can probably find several in your back yard or any roadside verge or hedgerow.

The first, on the right is of a grasshopper. It's slightly above dead center.

Can't see it? Well, that's rather the point. Zoom in to find it.

This species lives in grassland and, if it keeps still, looks just like a piece of brown vegetation, even having marks that mimic the shadows cast by blades of grass.

Scroll down for a close up.

Lessons From The Dordogne - Why Are Things Different?

Dordogne Meadow

In case you're wondering where I've been, don't worry - I haven't given up blogging. We’ve been in the Dordogne, South-West France, for a couple of weeks, taking in some of the local culture and history as well as seeing the wildlife. Unfortunately, our gite didn't have broadband and Blogger on Android - well... needs some work.

We were hoping to see the wildlife particularly because it’s different to the wildlife we normally see in the UK. Not entirely different, of course, but different enough to be interesting and certainly different enough to be able to tick off a few more birds, butterflies and wildflowers in my field guides.

But why is it different? I wonder if creationists ever give any thought to this question.

To a biologist, and anyone with even a modicum of understanding of evolutionary biology, the answer to that question is stark-staringly obvious – it’s because the environment is different, so what constitutes ‘fitness’ is different, so the survival value of certain characteristics will be different, so the ecological balances will be different because ecosystems, no less than species, evolve over time.

Geographical diversity is entirely dependent on local environmental factors and how they change. These local factors can include the type of underlying rock strata – chalk, sand, clay, volcanic tufa, etc., – elevation, latitude, average hours of sunlight, average, maximum and minimum temperatures, average rainfall, humidity, human interference, and so on.

Old Dog Teaches Science New Tricks

Ancient DNA suggests dogs split from wolves 40,000 years ago - life - 21 May 2015 - New Scientist

Here we have a very nice example illustrating why science gets it mostly right most of the time in contrast to religions which, if it ever gets anything right, it gets it right by accident. This is something that people like creationists and religious fundamentalists who seek certainty in everything, above even truth, find confusing. They seem to confuse certainty with knowledge and uncertainty with not knowing.

Black Flamingo Poser for Creationists

Here are a few simple little questions for creationists to ignore in the hope they'll go away, like ignored facts do.

These pictures are of the only known all black flamingo. It was photographed in Cyprus in the last few days. There was one previous record of a black flamingo in Israel last year. This one from Cyprus may be a different one, but given that the Israeli one has disappeared and given that Cyprus is an easy flight for a flamingo from Israel, there is a strong possibility that this is the same one, and possibly the only one in the world.

Obviously, the mutation which gives rise to melanism (an overproduction of melanin) is a rare event. We know flamingos produce melanin because they have some black wing feather and some black on their beaks, so what is probably happening here is that the gene(s) controlling when and where the gene for making melanin is switched on (or off) has failed.

The New Forest - No Intelligent Design Here

I thought I'd share a couple of holiday photos with you. We've been to Bournemouth for a few days and spent one day in the nearby New Forest, just wandering around, looking at birds and flowers and generally appreciating nature.

But when you look at nature and really try to understand and appreciate why things are as they are, the one thing that stands out most markedly is how utterly stupid so much of it is. It is full of examples of pointless and ultimately wasteful arms races as one species seeks to gain an advantage over another in the general competition for resources or even as one species tries to use another as a resource and the other tries to resist it.

The result is the wonderful complexity and diversity we can see and enjoy but to pretend it all has some ultimate purpose directed towards humans is sheer anthropocentric arrogance.

Look at these pictures of thicker broad-leaf woodland and what do you see?

Bearing in mind that it's early Spring here in the UK and most trees are just breaking into leaf, so what you are seeing is the wood without it's canopy. In a matter of weeks this forest floor will be considerably darker than what you see here.

Looking At Elms

The Cornfield.
John Constable 1826 showing typical English elms in the landscape

The National Gallery

We went to church today.

No, not that church, silly; to the real one where something worthy of praise and adoration lives. We went to the countryside; to the fields, hedgerows and woods where nature lives aloof and indifferent to us; offering no rewards for praise or threats for ignoring it, but deserving love and wonder and protection none-the-less.

We went for a walk in the English countryside on a glorious bright sunny February day with an azure blue Mediterranean sky and birds already staking out their territories and attracting mates with songs and displays. And we saw how natures budges over, accommodates change and carries on. We saw English elm trees in their new guise and role as hedge plants and small thickets for windbreaks and wildlife.

Forgive me if I get a little sentimental here - elm trees were big in my life as a child.

Anyone born after about 1970 in Britain will not remember the giant elm trees that seemed to line every

Crabby Tenants Cooperate Naturally

Trepezia flavopunctata. The largest species of guard crab.

Photo: Seabird McKeon

Crabby Tenants Defend Corals From Marauding Predators | Science | Smithsonian

A stunning example of mutualism - the sort of cooperation which 'selfish gene' theory predicts - was published recently by Smithsonian.com - the online science magazine of the Smithsonian Insitute.

It shows how a complex ecosystem like a coral reef has evolved a defensive system of guard crabs which receive shelter in crevices in the coral and nutrients in return for vigorously defending the living coral polyps from attack by predatory molluscs and starfish. Its not just the presence of the crabs themselves which is important but the presence of several different types, each with a particular role.

While the relationship between coral and crab has been known for a while, researchers have now found

How Transitional Fish May Have Learned To Walk

Polypterus senegalus

How fish can learn to walk : Nature News & Comment

A fascinating piece of research published a few days ago shed some light on how transitional fish/amphibians may have learned to walk on land as they moved from an aquatic to a terrestrial existence.

The researchers from the University of Ottawa, Canada, led by Emily Standen, took juvenile bichir (Polypterus senegalus) - a freshwater fish from Africa which has a primitive lung as well as gills and so can live on land - and raised them on land for eight months. The control group was raised in water as normal.

The land-raised bichir showed not only a noticeably more sophisticated style of walking but there were

Yawning Wolves Show Empathy

Yawning Spreads Like a Plague in Wolves | Science | Smithsonian

More evidence emerged this week that the ability to empathise with members of the same species, and even, in some cases, across species, is not unique to humans but is also present in non-humans. A paper published today in PLOS One by a team of researchers from Tokyo University showed that yawning is contagious in wolves (Canis lupus).

Yawning is generally regarded as an empathetic response when it is copied. It is very difficult for

More Evolved Mimicry

This is my last blog for a while on the fascinating topic of mimicry in animals and plants. Previously I wrote about Batesian and Müllerian mimicry in Copycat Evolution and More Mimetic Evolution where a harmless species comes to resemble a harmful one and so gains protection from a predator which has learned to avoid the harmful one (Batesian), or two harmful species come to resemble one another and so gain from the evolutionary 'spade-work' of the other (Müllerian).

Now I'm going to look at another form of mimicry where (usually) a plant deceives another species into thinking it's something else, not to repel or avoid it, but to attract it. Almost invariably this improves pollen or spore distribution so it's not hard to understand how any improvement in this system gave the plant an advantage and so natural selection favoured it.

Murmuring Starlings Do It Naturally.

Decisions ripple through flocks of birds like a wave - physics-math - 27 July 2014 - New Scientist

One of the most spectacular sites in nature in Britain is a winter 'murmuration' of starlings, and I'm fortunate enough to live just a short drive from the open stretch of moorland north of Oxford known as the Otmoor, now a wonderful RSPB-owned nature reserve and important inland wetland site, where this spectacle can be seen most winter evenings at sunset in suitable weather.

Watch these videos first, then I'll discuss them. The first was filmed over Otmoor, the second at Gretna in Scotland.

More Mimetic Evolution

Having blogged a couple of days ago about the role of mimicry in evolution I decided to look more closely at the subject, especially the widespread mimicry found in butterflies. The results are fascinating.

But before I get on to that I'll just deal quickly with another aspect to evolution - speciation - following on from something I mentioned in the same blog. I pointed out how mimicry involved a two species both of which are prey to the same predator and where at least one of them is toxic or harmful to the predator.

I mentioned that the selection pressure for one species to become more and more like the harmful one depends on the presence of the predator in the local environment but the species range may well include areas with different predators, different comimics or indeed the absence of one or both. In this case, and in that part of the range there may be no selection pressure and no particular advantage in adopting the colour pattern of the toxic or harmful species, and there may even be a disadvantage because a different predator may not have any aversion to the mimicked colour.

Intelligent Design - Even Intelligent Pigeons Refute It

Bird brainiacs: The genius of pigeons - life - 04 May 2014 - New Scientist

More evidence emerged earlier this month that humans are far from unique in certain attributes that creationists like to present as uniquely human, God-given attributes such as intelligence, self-awareness, consciousness and inductive reasoning ability. Not only do we know that several apes and monkeys have these abilities but now feral pigeon, Columba livia, can be added to the list.

Feral or town pigeons are the descendants of pigeons which were first domesticated by Man about 5000 years ago from wild rock doves, which tend to inhabit rocky areas. The wild rock dove is now quite rare in many parts of its range. In the UK it is now restricted to north and West Scotland, some offshore islands and the coast of Northern Ireland. I have only ever seen two pairs; one in Oman, almost certainly the C. l. palaestinae subspecies, and one in the Tunisian Atlas Mountains. The feral form has adapted to living alongside humans for which it needed to be both flexible and opportunistic, both implying intelligence and the ability to learn. Similar attributes can be seen in rats, dogs and cats, for example. The variations in colour and markings to be seen in the feral form are almost certainly the result of human selective breeding.

Of course, ever since the famous psychologist B.F.Skinner showed with his operant conditioning experiments, we have known that pigeons will develop religion when 'rewards' become dissociated from actions. Like religious humans, operantly conditioned pigeons perform rituals apparently in the belief that they influence the outcome of what is actually a randomised and unpredictable system, just as humans sing, say prayers and adopt ritual body postures thinking they are influencing the future.

Now it seems that this is due to a limited form of simple reasoning ability which probably includes both self-awareness and the ability to 'philosophise', i.e to think about thinking and to be aware of their own knowledge - I'm talking about pigeons here, not religious humans, by the way.

For example, Mike Columbo of Otago University, New Zealand, has shown the pigeons can memorise more than 100 images and recall them more than two years later. He also showed that they can handle numbers and subtle relationships between them. For example, pigeons trained to peck at a series of images of ascending numbers of object, when given a series of images with larger numbers of objects up to nine, still pecked them in ascending order.

They can also apply deductive reasoning logic such as working out that if person B is taller than person A and person C is taller than person B then person C is taller than person A. They can do this with up to five people. This was a logic puzzle upon which Aristotle mused.

Some researchers have also shown that they can recognise the style of different artists and distinguish a Monet from a Picasso. They can also distinguish between major styles of art such as cubism and impressionism.

In another experiment, pigeons were fed by two very similar people in terms of skin and hair colour, height and age but wearing different coloured coats. One person simply fed them whilst the other chased them. The pigeons quickly learned to tell the 'hostile' person from the neutral one. They even recognised the right person when they swapped coats.

Abstract
Considered as plague in many cities, pigeons in urban areas live close to human activities and exploit this proximity to find food which is often directly delivered by people. In this study, we explored the capacity of feral pigeons to take advantage of this human-based food resource and discriminate between friendly and hostile people. Our study was conducted in an urban park. Pigeons were fed by two experimenters of approximately the same age and skin colour but wearing coats of different colours. During the training sessions, the two human feeders displayed different attitudes: one of the feeders was neutral and the second was hostile and chased away the pigeons. During the two test phases subsequent to the training phase, both feeders became neutral. Two experiments were conducted, one with one male and one female feeder and the second with two female feeders. In both experiments, the pigeons learned to quickly (six to nine sessions) discriminate between the feeders and maintained this discrimination during the test phases. The pigeons avoided the hostile feeder even when the two feeders exchanged their coats, suggesting that they used stable individual characteristics to differentiate between the experimenter feeders. Thus, pigeons are able to learn quickly from their interactions with human feeders and use this knowledge to maximize the profitability of the urban environment. This study provides the first experimental evidence in feral pigeons for this level of human discrimination.
© Springer-Verlag 2011

Belguermi A, Bovet D, Pascal A, Prévot-Julliard AC, Saint Jalme M, Rat-Fischer L, Leboucher G.;
Pigeons discriminate between human feeders.;
Anim Cogn. 2011 Nov;14(6):909-14. doi: 10.1007/s10071-011-0420-7. Epub 2011 Jun 7.

Other experiments have shown that pigeons can plan ahead, are aware of their own knowledge, and can recognise themselves in a video.

Abstract
The ability to recognize self has been known to be limited to some animal species, but previous research has focused almost exclusively on the animal's reaction to a mirror. Recent studies suggest that the temporal contingency between a subject's action and the corresponding visual scene reflected in a mirror plays an important role in self-recognition. To assess the roles of visual-proprioceptive contiguity in self-recognition, we explored whether pigeons are able to discriminate videos of themselves with various temporal properties. We trained five pigeons to respond to live video images of themselves (live self-movies) and not to video filmed during previous training sessions (pre-recorded self-movies). Pigeons learned to peck trial-unique live self-movies more frequently than pre-recorded self-movies. We conducted two generalization tests after pigeons learned to discriminate between the two conditions. First, discrimination acquired during training sessions was transferred to a test session involving live self-movies and new pre-recorded self-movies. Second, the same pigeons were tested in extinction procedure using delayed live self-movies and new pre-recorded self-movies. Although pigeons responded to delayed presentations of live self-movies more frequently than to new pre-recorded self-movies, the relative response rate to delayed presentation of live self-movies gradually decreased as the temporal discrepancy between pigeons' own behavior and the corresponding video increased. These results indicate that pigeons' discrimination of self-movies with various temporal properties was based on the temporal contiguity between their behavior and its visual feedback. The methodology used in the present experiment is an important step toward improving the experimental analysis of self-recognition in non-human animals.

Toda K, Watanabe S.;
Discrimination of moving video images of self by pigeons (Columba livia);
Anim Cogn. 2008 Oct;11(4):699-705. doi: 10.1007/s10071-008-0161-4. Epub 2008 Jun 3.

The interesting thing is that bird intelligence, which has also been demonstrated in the crow and parrot families, seems to have evolved independently from mammalian intelligence and involves different parts of the brain, although the neurons involved seem to be very similar, as though there is only the one solution to the 'problem' of evolving intelligence at the cell level. Nevertheless, and to further embarrass the proponents of the intelligent design hoax, nature appears to have 'invented the wheel' at least twice so far as evolving intelligence is concerned.

It would be interesting to see how cephalopods (octopuses and squids) fare in intelligence tests and how that has evolved, because, with their known to be intelligent behaviour and ability to plan and their very different nervous systems, one thing we can be sure about is that nature has invented the wheel yet again with these molluscs.

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Evolution Has More to Crow About

Carrion crow, Corvus corone corone

Carrion crow, Corvus corone corone

A few days ago I mentioned at the end of a blog post about the evolution of crows in the presence of the great spotted cuckoo, the fact that carrion crows and hooded crows are now regarded as different species. This illustrates neatly the problem of defining a species, especially where two closely related species are at a stage in their evolution where they have not fully diverged and retain the capability of interbreeding. I'll discuss this more later, but first, the case of the Eurasian crows.

As you drive north from England across southern Scotland and up towards the Highlands, you might, if you're interested in the birds, notice that the ubiquitous glossy black crows you will have seen almost everywhere from town parks to country fields and woodlands have quite suddenly been replaced by an equally common crow with a black head, tail and wings and a grey back and underparts.

Edible Frogs and Unintelligent Design.

Pelophylax kl. esculentus. Image: Grand-Duc, Wikipedia.

Here's a puzzle for the 'Intelligent Design' movement. All you have to do is explain the intelligence behind the design and say why ID is a better explanation than that offered by evolution theory.

Here are the facts (I hope that word hasn't put the IDiots off!):

The Edible Frog (Pelophylax kl. esculentus) is a name for a common European frog, also known as the Common Water Frog or Green Frog (however, this latter term is also used for the North American species Rana clamitans). It is used for food, particularly in France for the delicacy frog legs...

P. esculentus is endemic to Europe. It naturally occurs from the northern half of France to western Russia, and from Estonia and Denmark to Bulgaria and northern Italy. It is introduced in Spain and the United Kingdom. The natural range is nearly identical to that of P. lessonae...

Pelophylax kl. esculentus is the fertile hybrid of the Pool Frog (Pelophylax lessonae) and the Marsh Frog (Pelophylax ridibundus), hence the addition of the "kl." (for klepton) in the species name.

During the ice ages, the population of the common ancestor of both species was split into two. These populations diverged, but remained genetically close enough to be able to create fertile hybrids. However, when edible frogs mate with each other, their offspring are often malformed, so there are no pure populations of edible frogs.

The hybrid populations are propagated predominantly by female edible frogs mating with males of one of the parental species (P. kl. esculentus × P. lessonae or rarely × P. ridibundus).

Hybridogenesis implies that gametes of hybrids don't contain mixed parental genomes, as normally occurs by independent chromosome segregation and crossover in meiosis (see also second Mendel's law, recombination), but intact one of them or two. Usually because one entire genome of the parental species is excluded prior to meiosis during gametogenesis.

Source: Wikipedia - Edible frog.

P. lessonae. Image:Piet Spaans.

P. ridibundus. Image: © Marie-Lan Nguyen.

Typical hybridization between pool frog (P. lessonae), marsh frog (P. ridibundus)
and their hybrid - edible frog (P. kl. esculentus, P. lessonae x P. ridibundus) in a
native LE (lessonae-esculentus) hybridogenetic population invaded additionally by
P. ridibundus. Predominant matings are P. kl. esculentus females x P. lessonae
males and P. ridibundus females x P. lessonae males. P. kl. esculentus x P. kl.
esculentus crossings result in inviable P. ridibundus tadpoles and are not shown here.
Large circles - adult frogs, small circles - gametes.,
x - lack of gametes containing genome of one of parental species.

On a technical note, some authorities dispute the statement that there are no pure populations of P. esculentus because triploid P. esculentus individuals are common and can produce fertile offspring and so form pure populations, however these populations tend to be short-lived.

The reason this 'green frog complex' has arisen during the course of evolution is because during the production of gametes the frogs chromosomes do not exchange genes and so mix up their genomes. In P. esculentus there is one complete P. ridibundus set and one complete P. lessonae set. In a triploid form there will be two sets of one and one of the other. So, when they mate with one or the other parent species, they can produce offspring with the complete genome of eitherP. ridibundus or P. lessonae, or more P. esculentus.

Okay, so that's all straightforward so far. Nothing there that can't be explained in terms of evolution and perfectly natural things with no magic required. So, the question for creationists then is, why would an intelligent designer create edible frogs in such a bizarre and unorthodox fashion when it had designed a perfectly sensible way to produce other species with perfectly normal sexual reproduction? The supplementary question of course, is how is whatever explanation you manage to come up with better than the scientific one and what does it explain that the scientific one doesn't?

Incase you're wondering, I have eaten frog's legs. I found them slightly unpleasant tasting. Maybe I was unfortunate but I probably won't be eating them again through choice.

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Eelgrass And Circular Reasoning

ScienceShot: Mysterious Underwater Circles Explained | Science/AAAS | News

The thing about geometric shapes like circles is that they look designed. They look as though something intelligent made them deliberately.

A few years ago a tourist took some photographs of mysterious rings that had appeared in the sea near the chalk cliffs of the island of Møn in the Baltic Sea and a host of magical theories, conspiracy theories and other wacky notions sprang up, all claimed to be the cause of the circles and the circles to be evidence of the cause. Each theory (and I use the term in its non-scientific sense here) claimed to be the cause of the rings and claimed the rings to be proof of the theory.

Death and Elephants

Pachyderm politics and the powerful female - life - 07 January 2014 - New Scientist

To those who assume that humans are the only species with complex social systems complete with the system of ethics which makes this system work, the above article in New Scientist may come as something of a surprise.

To a creationist who believes humans are a special creation and that our morals were handed down to us by a magic creator, it will come as a shock and will need to be ignored or dismissed in some way to help overcome the inevitable cognitive dissonance.

Rooting For The Robin

British subspecies of robin (Erithacus rubecula melophilus)

Of course we can never know for sure what a bird like the European robin thinks but, based on observations of their behaviour over much of their range, we can make a few reasonable assumptions, and what they seem to see humans as is not at all flattering.

In Britain we are used to the robin, Erithacus rubecula (not to be confused with the American robin, Turdus migratorius, to which it is only distantly related) in our gardens feeding from bird tables or playing close attention to our gardening activities and darting in to pick up the occasional worm we might dig up. They can even be quite easily tamed, especially with mealworms, and will take them from your fingers.

Such is its familiarity to us, and such is the affection in which we traditionally hold it, that its name derives from the early English habit of giving familiar wild animals human names, such as Jenny Wren, Tom Tit, Brock Badger, Reynard Fox and Robin Redbreast. In fact, it was previously called the redbreast but the humanised name stuck.

In the rest of Europe, especially the forested parts, the robin is a rather shy bird of the woodlands, so why this difference?

Well, where the robin is a woodland bird, the wild boar is still reasonably common. To understand why, we need to understand how the wild boar feeds - by using its snout to turn over the top few inches of soil looking for anything edible - roots, grubs, worms, etc. Robins will perch close by and dart in to grab anything the boars roots up and miss. Whether or not the boars benefit from this association is unknown and probably no concern of the robin. It could be that the robin's alarm call warns of predators - not that the adult boars have many in Europe but bears, lynxes and wolves will take the young if they get a chance.

Wild boar, rooting

In Britain we hunted the wild boar to extinction by the 13th-century and so deprived the robin of its natural ally and a major provider, so those which confused human gardening activities with those of the wild boar found an easy substitute and robins moved out of the forests, which were also disappearing, into the gardens of the expanding towns and villages.

In short, the robin sees humans as pigs because to a robin our 'rooting' activities in the soil yield the same harvest.

This illustrates nicely how, from the perspective of genes, what looks like a major environmental change to some sets of genes - those of humans and wild boars - to those of the robin so far as its feeding behaviour is concerned, the change was barely noticeable and only needed a slight tweak to continue much as before, forming an alliance with a new set of genes in place of a very similar old set.

It is humbling to think that our companionable little garden robin is seeing us, for all practical purposes, as pigs. Tweet

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Lessons From Nature - How Birds and Berries Gave Us Colour Vision

Hips and hawes in an Oxfordshire Hedgerow in Autumn

© 2013 Rosa Rubicondior

We've just spend a lovely afternoon walking over a footpath from Abingdon to the village of Sunningwell, where we had an especially good English Sunday roast dinner with a very drinkable Rioja at the Flowing Well. What made it even more enjoyable, apart from an almost cloud-free blue sky, was the profusion of wild berries amongst the autumn leaves on the hedgerows. The footpath is mostly ancient, so is well stocked with different plant species.

Now, a religious person, and especially a religious person who knew little of evolution and so would almost certainly not believe in it, would probably look at the beauty in the English countryside and marvel at how wonderful his or her god had been in magicking such a pretty planet just for them to marvel at. They