Category: Evolution

Evidence Babies Are Born with a Sense of Fairness

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Source of book image: http://news.yale.edu/sites/default/files/imce/main-bloom.jpg

(p. 15) Is morality innate? In his new book, “Just Babies,” the psychologist Paul Bloom draws from his research at the Yale Infant Cognition Center to argue that “certain moral foundations are not acquired through learning. . . . They are instead the products of biological evolution.” Infants may be notoriously difficult to study (rats and pigeons “can at least run mazes or peck at levers”), but according to Bloom, they are, in fact, “moral creatures.”

He describes a study in which 1-year-olds watched a puppet show where a ball is passed to a “nice” puppet (who passes it back) or to a “naughty” puppet (who steals it). Invited to reward or punish the puppets, children took treats away from the “naughty” one. These 1-year-olds seem to be making moral judgments, but is this an inborn ability? They have certainly had opportunities in the last 12 months to learn good from bad. However, Bloom has found that infants as young as 3 months old reach for and prefer looking at a “helper” rather than a “hinderer,” which he interprets as evidence of moral sense, that babies are “drawn to the nice guy and repelled by the mean guy.” He may be right, but he hasn’t proved innateness.
Proving innateness requires much harder evidence — that the behavior has existed from Day 1, say, or that it has a clear genetic basis. Bloom presents no such evidence. His approach to establishing innateness is to argue from universalism: If a behavior occurs across cultures, then surely it can’t be the result of culture.

For the full review, see:
SIMON BARON-COHEN. “Little Angels.” The New York Times Book Review (Sun., December 29, 2013): 15.
(Note: ellipsis in original.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date December 27, 2013.)

Book under review:
Bloom, Paul. Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil. New York: Crown Publishers, 2013.

Philosopher Herbert Spencer Defended Capitalism in America

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Source of book image: online version of the WSJ review quoted and cited below.

Spencer was sometimes a much better philosopher than the modern caricature portrays, a caricature exemplified by the review quoted below and, perhaps, by the book reviewed. I would like to look at this book sometime, because there may be some interesting history in it—though I am not optimistic about the book’s economic assumptions, or its account of Spencer’s philosophy.

(p. A11) Herbert Spencer, the 19th-century British philosopher, is remembered today as the forbidding — almost forbidden — father of “Social Darwinism,” a school of thought declaring that the fittest prosper in a free marketplace and the human race is gradually improved because only the strong survive. In Barry Werth’s satisfying “Banquet at Delmonico’s,” Spencer is also a querulous 62-year-old celibate whose 1882 American tour culminates in a feast to which are invited the “mostly Republican men of science, religion, business, and government” who shared and spread the Spencerian creed.

Applying Darwinian insights about evolution to political, economic and social life — though he did not himself use the term “Social Darwinism” — Spencer concluded that vigorous competition and unfettered capitalism conduced to the betterment of society. He predicted that the American, raised in liberty, would evolve into “a finer type of man than has hitherto existed,” dazzling the world with “the highest form of government” and “a civilization grander than any the world has known.”
. . .
The public clamor over the visit of a dyspeptic foreign philosopher to these shores was partly due to the indefatigable promotion of Edward Livingston Youmans, Spencer’s chief American proselytizer, who called his beau ideal the most original thinker in the history of mankind. Youmans is among the several critics and apostles of Spencer and Darwin whose profiles Mr. Werth skillfully interweaves in this Gilded Age tapestry.

For the full review, see:
BILL KAUFFMAN. “BOOKSHELF; Darwin in the New World; When the father of Social Darwinism came to America, the place where the fittest were supposed to thrive.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., January 9, 2009): A11.
(Note: ellipsis added; italics in original.)

The book under review is:
Werth, Barry. Banquet at Delmonico’s: Great Minds, the Gilded Age, and the Triumph of Evolution in America. New York: Random House, 2009.

For a more balanced account of Spencer, see the first review below for the mostly good in Spencer, and the second review below for the mostly bad in Spencer:
Diamond, Arthur M., Jr. “Spencer’s Tragedy: Review of Herbert Spencer’s The Principles of Ethics.” Modern Age 24, no. 4 (Fall 1980): 419-421.
Diamond, Arthur M., Jr. “The State of Spencer: Review of Herbert Spencer’s The Man Versus the State.” Modern Age 28, nos. 2-3 (Spring/Summer 1984): 286-288.

A Path to Bringing Back the Extinct Woolly Mammoth

(p. D3) For the first time in 43,000 years, a woolly mammoth has breathed again on earth.
Well, not the mammoth itself but its hemoglobin, the stuff in red blood cells that takes on oxygen in the lungs and offloads it in the tissues. By reconstructing the mammoth’s hemoglobin, a team led by Kevin L. Campbell of the University of Manitoba in Canada has discovered how the once-tropical species adapted to living in arctic temperatures.
Dr. Campbell’s work raises a somewhat astonishing possibility: that much of the physiology of extinct animals may one day be recoverable from the DNA extracted from their remains.
. . .
Two years ago, scientists at Penn State University sequenced a large part of the mammoth’s genome from a clump of hair. They published the sequence along with the arresting suggestion that for just $10 million it might be possible to complete the sequence and use it to generate a living mammoth.
The suggestion was not as wild as it might seem, given that the idea came from George Church, a leading genome technologist at the Harvard Medical School. The mammoth’s genome differs at about 400,000 sites from that of the African elephant. Dr. Church has been developing a method for altering 50,000 sites at a time, though he is not at present applying it to mammoths. In converting four sites on the elephant genome to the mammoth version, Dr. Campbell has resurrected at least one tiny part of the mammoth.

For the full story, see:
NICHOLAS WADE. “Mammoth Hemoglobin Offers More Clues to Its Arctic Evolution.” The New York Times (Tues., May 4, 2010): D3.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the article has the date May 3, 2010.)

Chagnon Enraged Cultural Anthropologists By Showing Tribal Violence

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Source of book image: http://media.npr.org/assets/bakertaylor/covers/n/noble-savages/9780684855103_custom-4deac679a847f1d6e7d64424b01d0be54b54e3a7-s6-c10.jpg

(p. C) In the 1960s, cultural anthropologists led by Marvin Harris argued that conflict among prestate people was mostly over access to scarce protein. Dr. Chagnon disputed this, arguing that Yanomamo Indians’ chief motive for raiding and fighting–which they did a great deal–seemed to be to abduct, recover or avenge the abduction of women. He even claimed that Indian men who had killed people (“unokais”) had more wives and more children than men who had not killed, thus gaining a Darwinian advantage.

Such claims could not have been more calculated to enrage the presiding high priests of cultural anthropology, slaughtering as it did at least three sacred cows of the discipline: that uncontacted tribal people were peaceful, that Darwinism had nothing to say about human behavior and culture, and that material resources were the cause of conflict.
. . .
Meanwhile the science has been going Dr. Chagnon’s way. Recent studies have confirmed that mortality from violence is very common in small-scale societies today and in the past. Almost one-third of such people die in raids and fights, and the death rate is twice as high among men as among women. This is a far higher death rate than experienced even in countries worst hit by World War II. Thomas Hobbes’s “war of each against all” looks more accurate for humanity in a state of nature than Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “noble savage,” though anthropologists today prefer to see a continuum between these extremes.

For the full commentary, see:
MATT RIDLEY. “MIND & MATTER; Farewell to the Myth of the Noble Savage.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., January 26, 2013): C4.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date January 25, 2013.)
(Note: ellipsis added.)

The Chagnon book that Ridley is discussing:
Chagnon, Napoleon. Noble Savages: My Life among Two Dangerous Tribes — the Yanomamo and the Anthropologists. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013.

Darwin’s Worry About Gradual Evolution of Eye

Darwin and others have worried about whether an eye could have evolved gradually. The issue is whether the earlier gradations leading up to the eye would have given any survival advantage. Matt Ridley’s column, quoted below, argues that Darwin need not have worried.

(p. C4) Davide Pisani and colleagues from the National University of Ireland have traced the ancestry of the three kinds of “opsin” protein that animals use, in combination with a pigment, to detect light.
. . .
. . . , the anatomy of eyes shows every gradation between simple light-sensitive spots and full cameras. The detailed genetic evidence of descent with modification from a single common ancestor further vindicates Darwin and has largely silenced the Intelligent Design movement’s use of the eye as a favored redoubt.
After the duplications that led to working opsin molecules, there seems to have been a long pause before complex eyes appeared.
The first lensed eyes that fossilized belonged to the trilobites which dominated the Cambrian oceans after 525 million years ago.

For the full commentary, see:
MATT RIDLEY. “MIND & MATTER; A Relief to Darwin: The Eyes Have It.” The New York Times (Tues., November 3, 2012): C4.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the November 2, 2012.)

Darwin Shared His Thought Processes Without Condescension

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“SAGE OF AGES; Portrait of Charles Darwin in 1881, by Julia Margaret Cameron.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. C14) . . . Mr. Johnson observes:

No scientific innovator has ever taken more trouble to smooth the way for lay readers without descending into vulgarity. What is almost miraculous about the book is Darwin’s generosity in sharing his thought processes, his lack of condescension. There is no talking down, but no hauteur, either. It is a gentlemanly book.

In both style and substance, this passage is classic Paul Johnson.
. . .
What makes Darwin good, in the biographer’s estimation, is the scientist’s democratic dissemination of knowledge. Darwin triumphed with “The Origin of Species,” Mr. Johnson contends, not only because of his ability to portray the theory of evolution as the inescapable outcome of his decades of study and the work of fellow scientists, whom he was careful to praise, but because he was acutely aware that he had to present his notions of natural selection and survival of the fittest so as not to stir up public controversy. To an extraordinary degree, Darwin deflected attacks by couching his discoveries in terms of the plants he liked to examine and cultivate. He had relatively little to say about human evolution.

For the full review, see:
CARL ROLLYSON. “Studies of the Moral Animal.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., December 15, 2012): C14.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review essay has the date December 14, 2012.)

The book under review is:
Johnson, Paul M. Darwin: Portrait of a Genius. New York: Viking Adult, 2012.

Harvard University Press Dropped Watson’s “The Double Helix” as Too Controversial

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“Partners; James D. Watson, left, with Francis Crick and their model of part of a DNA molecule in 1953. Crick did not like Dr. Watson’s book at first.” Source of caption: print version of the NYT article quoted and cited below. Source of photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. D2) Anyone seeking to understand modern biology and genomics could do much worse than start with the discovery of the structure of DNA, on which almost everything else is based. The classic account of the discovery, “The Double Helix,” by James D. Watson, was first published in 1968 and has now been reissued in an annotated and illustrated edition.
. . .
An appendix makes it clear how close “The Double Helix” came to being suppressed. Dr. Watson sent the manuscript to many of the central players, inviting their comments on its accuracy. Harvard University Press had accepted it for publication, but the Harvard authorities came to feel it was too hot a potato and dropped it.
Atheneum Publishers, which picked it up, requested a blander title — previous versions had included “Honest Jim” and “Base Pairs.” The latter — referring to the paired sets of chemical bases that form the steps in the double helix, and by extension to the two discoverers — gave particular offense to Crick, who failed to see why he should be considered base. Atheneum’s lawyers then tried to make the text inoffensive to the many possible litigants.
But Dr. Watson was able to resist many changes. He had cannily persuaded Bragg to write a foreword, and this endorsement from an establishment figure provided sufficient protection for the book to be published. It proceeded to sell more than a million copies.

For the full review, see:
NICHOLAS WADE. “BOOKS ON SCIENCE; Twists in the Tale of the Great DNA Discovery.” The New York Times (Tues., November 13, 2012): D2.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date November 12, 2012.)

The annotated version of the Watson book is:
Watson, James D. The Annotated and Illustrated Double Helix. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012.

Small Is Beautiful as Life Adapts to Global Warming

SifrhippusFirstHorse2012-03-10.jpg “Artist’s reconstruction of Sifrhippus sandrae (right) touching noses with a modern Morgan horse (left) that stands about 5 feet high at the shoulders and weighs approximately 1000 lbs.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. D3) The horse (siff-RIP-us, if you have to say the name out loud) lived in what is still horse country, in the Bighorn Basin of Wyoming, where wild mustangs roam.
. . .
Its preserved fossils, abundant in the Bighorn Basin, provide an excellent record of its size change over a 175,000-year warm period in the Earth’s history known as the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum, when temperatures are estimated to have risen by 9 to 18 degrees Fahrenheit at the start, and dropped again at the end.
Scientists have known that many mammals appear to have shrunk during the warming period, and the phenomenon fits well with what is known as Bergmann’s rule, which says, roughly, that mammals of a given genus or species are smaller in hotter climates.
Although the rule refers to differences in location, it seemed also to apply to changes over time. But fine enough detail was lacking until now.
In Science, Ross Secord, of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln; Jonathan Bloch, of the Florida Museum of Natural History at the University of Florida in Gainesville; and a team of other researchers report on the collection and analysis of Sifrhippus fossils from the Bighorn Basin.
They report that the little horse got 30 percent smaller over the first 130,000 years, and then — as always seems to happen with weight loss — shot back up and got 75 percent bigger over the next 45,000 years.
. . .
“It seems to be natural selection,” said Dr. Secord. He said animals evolved to be smaller during warming because smaller animals did better in that environment, perhaps because the smaller an animal is, the easier it is to shed excess heat.

For the full story, see:
JAMES GORMAN. “As the Planet Heated Up, First Horse Got Tinier .” The New York Times (Tues., February 28, 2012): D3.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story is dated February 23 [sic], 2012 and has the title “A Tiny Horse That Got Even Tinier as the Planet Heated Up.”)

Some Traits (Including Some Diseases) Depend on Many Genes Rather than a Single Gene

(p. D3) A new exploration of how evolution works at the genomic level may have a significant impact on drug development and other areas of medicine.
The report, published in Nature last week, offers new evidence in a longstanding debate about how organisms evolve. One well-known path to change is a heavily favorable mutation in a single gene. But it may be well known only because it is easy to study. Another path is exploitation of mildly favorable differences that already exist in many genes.
. . .
Three biologists at the University of California, Irvine, Molly K. Burke, Michael R. Rose and Anthony D. Long, followed populations of fruit flies through 600 generations and studied the whole genome of some 250 flies in order to see what kinds of genetic change they had undergone.
. . .
The conventional view is that evolutionary change is generally mediated by a favorable mutation in a gene that then washes through the whole population, a process called a hard sweep because all other versions of the gene are brushed away. The alternative, called a soft sweep, is that many genes influence a trait, in this case the rate of maturation, and that the growth-accelerating versions of each of these genes become just a little more common. Each fly has a greater chance of inheriting these growth-promoting versions and so will mature faster.
In sequencing their subjects’ genomes, the researchers found that a soft sweep was indeed responsible for the earlier hatching. No single gene had swept through the population to effect the change; rather, the alternative versions of a large number of genes had become slightly more common.
. . .
Haldane favored the single mutation mechanism, but Fisher and Wright backed multiple gene change.
. . .
The demise of the Haldane view “is very bad news for the pharmaceutical industry in general,” Dr. Rose said. If disease and other traits are controlled by many genes, it will be hard to find effective drugs; a single target would have been much simpler.

For the full story, see:
NICHOLAS WADE. “Natural Selection Cuts Broad Swath Through Fruit Fly Genome.” The New York Times (Tues., September 21, 2010): D3.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the article is dated September 20, 2010.)

Crows Use Tools Too

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“A captive New Caledonian crow forages for food using a stick tool.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. D3) New Caledonian crows, found in the South Pacific, are among nature’s most robust nonhuman tool users. They are well known for using twigs to dislodge beetle larvae from tree trunks.

And there’s a good reason. By foraging for just a few larvae, a crow can satisfy its daily nutritional needs, which explains the evolutionary advantage of learning how to use tools, researchers report in the journal Science.

For the full story, see:
SINDYA N. BHANOO. “OBSERVATORY; Crows Put Tools to Use to Access a Nutritious Diet.” The New York Times (Tues., September 21, 2010): D3.
(Note: the online version of the article is dated September 20, 2010.)

After Being “Nasty and Unruly for Decades” Henry Becomes a Father at Age 111

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“TUATARA. The tuatara, scientists have learned, is in some ways a so-called living fossil.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. D1) . . . the animal that may well be New Zealand’s most bizarrely instructive species at first glance looks surprisingly humdrum: the tuatara. A reptile about 16 inches long with bumpy, khaki-colored skin and a lizardly profile, the tuatara could easily be mistaken for an iguana. Appearances in this case are wildly deceptive. The tuatara — whose name comes from the Maori language and means “peaks on the back” — is not an iguana, is not a lizard, is not like any other reptile alive today.

In fact, as a series of recent studies suggest, it is not like any other vertebrate alive today. The tuatara, scientists have learned, is in some ways a so-called living fossil, its basic skeletal layout and skull shape almost identical to that of tuatara fossils dating back hundreds of millions of years, to before the rise of the dinosaurs. Cer-(p. D2)tain tuatara organs and traits also display the hallmarks of being, if not quite primitive, at least closer to evolutionary baseline than comparable structures in other animals.
. . .
Tuataras are living fossils in more than one sense of the term. Through long-term capture, tag and recapture studies that were begun right after World War II, researchers have found that tuataras match and possibly exceed in attainable life span that other Methuselah of the animal kingdom, the giant tortoise. “Tuataras routinely live to 100, and I couldn’t tell you they don’t live to 150, 200 years or even more,” said Dr. Daugherty.
They live, and live it up. “We know there are females that are still reproducing in their 80s,” said Dr. Daugherty. At the Southland Museum and Art Gallery in Invercargill, New Zealand, a captive male tuatara named Henry, a local celebrity that had been nasty and unruly for decades until a malignancy was removed from his genitals, mated with an 80-year-old female named Mildred, and last year became a first-time father — at the age of 111.

For the full story, see:

NATALIE ANGIER. “Basics; Reptile’s Pet-Store Looks Belie Its Triassic Appeal.” The New York Times (Tues., November 23, 2010): D1 & D2.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the article is dated November 22, 2010.)