Pacifism in the age of the professional military

Posted on by

It’s a little weird being a pacifist in the modern United States. Sure, we don’t pick fistfights, and we vote for anti-war (or at least less pro-war) politicians, but even in wartime we don’t face the hard choice of a military draft, as my grandfathers did during World War II. The military is an all-volunteer organization these days, and pacifists are free not to volunteer.

Is that all there is to peaceful living? The new issue of The Mennonite has an excellent essay by M.J. Sharp, in which he reminds his readers that pacifism means more than omitting to participate in war – it means actively helping to oppose it. M.J. recounts the story of Robert Weiss, a serviceman who came to be a conscientious objector while in the Army, and argues that those of us for whom pacifism is easy should stand up to help those for whom it is still a tough choice:

I have had many opportunities to tell the stories of our forbears, and I know from experience that those stories inspire others. But let’s make it more than our history. God is moving among some service members today as vibrantly as God moved among the early disciples and early Anabaptists. Our task is to help meld our historical understanding of Jesus’ call to peace with the fresh awakenings among those who once wielded weapons of war.

Nowhere to go but uphill

Posted on by

ResearchBlogging.orgHistorical data sets are invaluable in assessing the impact of climate change on natural systems. Case in point: in today’s issue of Science, a new paper uses a century-old survey of small mammals in Yosemite National Park to see how the park’s community has shifted as climate warmed [$-a].


Belding’s ground squirrels contracted their
high-altitude range as climate warmed.
Photo by infinite wilderness.

Moritz et al. repeated a survey of small mammals – chipmunks, shrews, ground squirrels, and the like – originally conducted by the biologist Joseph Grinnell between 1914 and 1920. Since that time, average minimum monthly temperatures in the Yosemite area have increased approximately three degrees Centigrade (five and a half degrees Fahrenheit), and Moritz et al. found significant changes in the distributions of small mammals associated with that warming.

In the face of warming temperatures, the easiest thing for animals to do is move up to the cooler climes at higher elevations, and this is what many species did. Those at lower elevations expanded their ranges uphill. But small mammals already living at high elevations, like the aptly named Alpine Chipmunk (Tamias alpinus) have nowhere cooler to go – so their ranges contracted over the last century. As the globe warms up, this pattern is likely being repeated in ecosystems everywhere – not a happy prospect for critters that live at high elevations.

Reference

C Moritz, JL Patton, CJ Conroy, JL Parra, GC White, SR Beissinger (2008). Impact of a Century of Climate Change on Small-Mammal Communities in Yosemite National Park, USA. Science, 322, 261-4 DOI: 10.1126/science.1163428

Best weekend in ages

Posted on by

Glacier National Park is spectacular even when it rains all day.

The anti-rumor

Posted on by

You won’t hear it from the mainstream media, but Barack Obama is a really nice guy. Best part is, it’s true.

Joshua tree genetics suggest coevolutionary divergence

Posted on by

ResearchBlogging.orgThe latest results from the Pellmyr Lab’s ongoing study of Joshua tree and its pollinators are online as part of the new October issue of Evolution. It’s the cover article, no less. The study, whose lead author is Chris Smith (now on the faculty at Willamette University) compares patterns in the population genetics of Joshua trees and the moths that pollinate them, and shows that although the moths have become two separate species, the trees may not have followed suit [PDF].

Evolution cover
Photo by Chris Smith.

Female yucca moths carry pollen between Joshua tree flowers in special mouthparts. When she arrives at a new flower, the female moth lays her eggs inside it, then deliberately applies pollen to the flower’s receptive surface. When the fertilized flower develops into a fruit, the moth eggs hatch, and the larvae eat some of the seeds inside the fruit.

Among the yuccas, Joshua trees are unique because they’re pollinated by two species of moths, which are each other’s closest evolutionary relative. One species is found in the eastern part of Joshua tree’s range, the other in the west. Joshua trees from the east and west have differently-shaped flowers [PDF], which is consistent with the hypothesis that coevolution between moths and trees has driven both toward an evolutionary split.

“Western” Joshua trees at Joshua Tree National Park. Photo by me.

The new study goes deeper to look at genetic relationships between different populations of the moths and the trees, and what it finds isn’t as tidy as the earlier work might suggest: While Joshua trees’ morphology corresponds nicely to the split in the pollinators, the patterns visible in their chloroplast DNA does not. In some populations, trees look “eastern,” but have chloroplast DNA more closely related to “western” populations. This suggests that, although the moths have become separate species, they’re still moving between the two kinds of Joshua tree frequently enough that the trees haven’t quite split. Why do the two tree types look different, then? One possibility is coevolution with the two moth species, which might exert selection the trees in different ways.

There’s still a lot of work to do before we fully understand what’s going on here. Will Godsoe, the other doctoral student in our lab, is doing some intensive niche modeling to see how much environmental differences might be contributing to the patterns we see here. My own dissertation will look at whether the same incongruities turn up in nuclear DNA, which can have a different evolutionary history than that in the chloroplast.

References

W. Godsoe, J.B. Yoder, C.I. Smith, O. Pellmyr (2008). Coevolution and Divergence in the Joshua Tree/Yucca Moth Mutualism The American Naturalist, 171 (6), 816-23 DOI: 10.1086/587757

C.I. Smith, W.K.W. Godsoe, S. Tank, J.B. Yoder, O. Pellmyr (2008). Distinguishing coevolution from covicariance in an obligate pollination mutualism: asynchronous divergence in Joshua tree and its pollinators. Evolution, 62 (10), 2676-87 DOI: 10.1111/j.1558-5646.2008.00500.x

Utopian lepidoptery

Posted on by

This month’s issue of Wired reports on DNA barcoding, with extensive interviews of barcoding masterminds Dan Janzen and Paul Hebert. In spite of myself, I’m charmed by the article’s description of Janzen as a “utopian lepidopterist.”


Photo by fabbio.

I’ve posted about one recent Janzen-Hebert barcoding paper, and about a subsequently-released study that suggests a major problem for the usefulness of the preferred “barcode” gene, COI. I’d say the Wired coverage is actually pretty OK for a popular treatment – it acknowledges criticism of barcoding, even though, in typical Wired fashion, the piece is obviously most interested in the whiz-bang ideas like a “species tricorder” handheld device for field I.D. of organisms. Good geek that I am, I would have liked to see more discussion of the actual technical issues – what about the difficulties of using mitochondrial DNA for plant I.D.?

Update: No one is proposing using mitochondrial DNA for barcoding plants. Which is good, because it would be silly – DNA in the plant mitochondrion mutates extremely slowly, so it doesn’t build up much difference between closely-related species. Instead, Kress and coauthors proposed using both a nuclear gene and a segment of chloroplast DNA in a 2005 paper.

For the record

Posted on by

I am in no way related to the manufacturers of Yoder’s canned bacon. As far as I know. I assume it would have shown up at some sort of family gathering, and I would not forget canned bacon at Christmas dinner.

It would appear

Posted on by

… that McSweeney’s Internet Tendency has published a little piece I submitted. I am pleased. [Be advised: The piece in question would probably get an “R” for language, and a “meh” from Manohla Dargis.]

Having their cake and eating it, too

Posted on by

There’s been much coverage (on Public Radio, anyway) of today’s “Pulpit Initiative” from the conservative Alliance Defense Fund, in which a handful of pastors risk their congregations’ tax-exempt status by endorsing political candidates from the pulpit. The goal is to provoke the IRS into following the law of the land and revoking tax exemption, so that ADF has one or more test cases with which to challenge said law. The clergy’s free speech rights are at stake, is the argument – the Pulpit Initiative is only trying to get government out of the church house.


Photo by Ben McLeod.

Except, of course, that government is already in the church, providing a subsidy in the form of a tax exemption. I don’t see any particular reason to think that pastors shouldn’t say what they want about politics in whatever forum they wish – but when they’re taking money from the government while they do it, something smells. Regardless of what the ADF boosters say, tax-exemption plus freedom to endorse is a recipe for corruption.

Mennonites in the marketplace

Posted on by

In this week’s Mennonite Weekly Review, my friend Steve Kriss muses about the religious offerings in the marketplace of ideas:

When considering that the U.S. religious reality is a marketplace of faith and ideas, it’s easy to think that it becomes a competition. …

But the marketplace also invites creativity, not just competition. I think of the markets of Morocco or the shops at Reading Terminal Market in Philadelphia. Sure, what’s offered is largely the same — clothing, art, food — but it nourishes differently and uniquely.

Steve’s describing exactly the sort of interfaith relations that are key to a functional, multicultural, democratic society. But the thing about marketplaces is that everyone has to more or less agree on the rules that govern them. For different religious positions (including non-religion) to take part in a marketplace of faiths, every one has to consent to a certain level of mutual respect and civility, and everyone has to agree on some set of universal “goods” by which competing religions are measured. The separation of church and state is supposed to enforce exactly this idea – regardless of who is in the majority, be they Christian, Hindu, atheist, or whatever, society still works by a set of rules that everyone recognizes as good.

But I don’t know how many religious people are interested in playing by a set of common marketplace rules. To do so is to admit that there are some overarching ethical principles that are held in common by people with all faith positions – and that these common principles are more important to the way society works than the special revelation of any one faith or denomination. That’s directly opposed to the claims of most religions (and anti-religions), who are more interested in establishing a monopoly than trading ideas in the marketplace.