Tonight, I’m spending my evening at my first-ever presidential caucus, for the Idaho Democratic Party. It’s open regardless of party affiliation, which is cool. Between Moscow’s generally weedy liberalism and his heavy advantage with lefty U of I students (including yours truly), Barack Obama probably has Latah County wrapped up, but I really have no idea who’ll win the state as a whole. Democrats in southern Idaho tend to be more blue collar (mining and manufacturing-associated union folks), which is supposed to favor Hillary Clinton. But she’s never even visited the state – whereas the big O stopped in at Boise State U over the weekend.
Hey! I know that tree!
Tonight’s All Things Considered hits a long overdue topic as part of NPR’s ongoing “Climate Connections” series: the fate of Joshua trees in a warming world. I say overdue, of course, because two chapters of my dissertation will be on the population genetics and phylogeography of Joshua tree, and it’s hard to spend much time with Joshua trees and not wonder about how they’ll hold up under global warming.
I’ve spent two spring flowering seasons in Joshua Tree National Park, where much of the story centers. The Park is right at the southernmost boundary of Joshua tree’s current range, where (all else being equal) you’d expect to see the impact of warming earliest. As the NPR story points out, there does seem to be low recruitment (growth of young trees to replace old ones as they die) in the southern populations. On top of that, drier conditions are contributing to more frequent wildfires across Joshua tree’s range, and sprawl from Las Vegas and Los Angeles is rolling right through Joshua tree woodlands. The Park staff I’ve talked to (including naturalist Joe Zarki, who’s interviewed for the story) are seriously considering that they may have to take drastic measures to prevent Joshua Tree National Park from losing its namesake trees.
Cutting-edge creation “research”
Via Wired Science: the good folks at Answers in Genesis, who brought you the Creation Museum, are now launching the Answers Research Journal, an attempt to coat six-day Creationist dogma with a thin veneer of peer-review and slick web design. The premier volume contains a whopping three papers, one of which is the proceedings of a forum from June 2007. Topics include
- Granite can form really fast! Therefore, Earth is six thousand years old.
- Microbes are cool! What day they were created on? and
- Mutation can’t possibly create new adaptations (given the author’s definition of “new,” “adaptation,” and “can’t”), so evolution is impossible!
The “peer-review” at ARJ is as laughable as the content: two contributers to the “forum” do so under pseudonyms, because, says a footnote,
The writers, who hold PhDs in fields related to the topics of their abstracts, are scientists at prominent research facilities in the eastern part of North America. They prefer to keep their creationist credentials hidden for the moment until they achieve more seniority.
In other words, ARJ‘s editor(s) are asserting that it is more important to help their contributors lie to tenure committees than to provide the journal’s readers with information necessary to evaluate the content (authorship, that is). That’s just scummy.
The most positive thing I have to say about ARJ is that they don’t ask you to pay to read their nonsense. It’s all free for download in PDF form, just like a real journal! But, in a move that probably says a lot about the journal’s producers and their intended audience, there’s no citation manager import.
Hummingbirds chirp with their tails
Online at Proc. R. Soc. B: high-speed video and experimental results suggest that male Anna’s Hummingbirds use their tail feathers to produce a chirping sound during courtship displays. This sort of thing is known from other bird species (notably two genera of Manakins), but there was some dispute about how Anna’s Hummingbird chirps. The high-speed video is on You Tube, though it basically only shows a male hummingbird flaring its tail at the bottom of a display dive. The experimental evidence apparently consists of air jet and wind tunnel tests on feathers collected (ouch) from wild birds.
Reference:
Clark, C.J., and T.J. Feo. 2008. The Anna’s hummingbird chirps with its tail: a new mechanism of sonation in birds. Proceedings of the Royal Society Series B.
The original mad scientist
Studio 360 spends this week’s entire episode on the biography of Nikola Tesla, the pioneer of electrical engineering who went head-to-head with Thomas Edison over the alternating current standard, cured Mark Twain’s constipation, and may well have been the original Dr. Strangelove. It’s good radio.
Christian schools: win Ben Stein’s money
In the wake of the victory for common sense that was the Dover Trial and Michael Lynch’s trouncing of their only paper to be published in a peer-reviewed journal, the Intelligent Design movement has refocused its efforts on propaganda. Specifically, the documentary Expelled, in which none other than Ben Stein will apparently argue that evil atheist scientists have “expelled” ID “theory” from its rightful place in the science curriculum. I first heard about Expelled when the New York Times reported that Richard Dawkins and NCSE’s Eugenie Scott were interviewed for the film under false pretenses.
Now, ERV (SA Smith) points out a scheme to bribe Christian schools to take their students to Expelled. How pathetic is that? The producers aren’t even sure that their assumed core demographic (Christian teens) will show up to this movie if they don’t institute “mandatory field trips.” It’s also maddening to me: I went to a Mennonite high school, where I actually got a pretty good grounding in biology, and where I took the class that inspired me to pursue graduate study of evolution and ecology (Thanks, Mr. Good!). Which is to say that, even though many do, there’s no reason that Christian schools have to teach pseudoscience. This Expelled initiative tries to provide exactly such a reason.
An aside: Who exactly is making Expelled, anyway? According to the Times article, the production company that arranged the interviews with Dawkins and Scott called itself Rampant Films – but it turned into Premise Media when the real nature of the project was revealed. Premise Media has a website [mind the creaky flash intro on your way in], the contents of which are concerned only with Expelled. Anyone want to bet it’s a front for the Discovery Insitute?
Moralizing unhelpful? What a silly idea!
This week’s NY Times Magazine cover story is a thoughtful exploration of the emerging scientific understanding of human morality. It covers a lot of the same ground as one of my favorite RadioLab episodes (including an interview about trolley car ethics with Joshua Greene), but goes beyond the simple biology to ask whether there is a universal human grammar of morality, and consider what insights that hypothesis could lend to modern hot-button ethical issues like global warming. The concluding suggestion is that moralizing an issue might actually be counterproductive:
In many discussions, the cause of climate change is overindulgence (too many S.U.V.’s) and defilement (sullying the atmosphere), and the solution is temperance (conservation) and expiation (buying carbon offset coupons). Yet the experts agree that these numbers don’t add up: even if every last American became conscientious about his or her carbon emissions, the effects on climate change would be trifling . . . [effective measures against climate change] will have to be morally boring, like a carbon tax and new energy technologies, or even taboo, like nuclear power and deliberate manipulation of the ocean and atmosphere.
Trees ditch mutualist ants when herbivory stops
Ant domatium on Acacia. Photo by Alastair Rae.
In this week’s issue of Science: African Acacia trees reduce support for a mutualistic species of ant when they aren’t experiencing herbivory [abstract only without subscription]. Normally, the whistling thorn tree (Acacia drepanolobium) enlists the help of an ant, Crematogaster mimosae, to fight off large herbivores and harmful insects. It works like this: The tree attracts ants by providing sugary nectar from glands at the base of its leaves and balloonlike growths called domatia (see photo), which the ants use for shelter. The ants attack anything that tries to eat the tree, for the very reasonable (and selfish) reason that it’s also their nest. It seems like a mutually beneficial arangement, but no one has tested the hypothesis that, if the trees no longer need defense, they’ll stop “paying” their ants to stick around.
Palmer et al. do exactly that by comparing ant provisioning on trees in plots that are fenced in (preventing access by big herbivores) with trees in control plots that aren’t. After ten years inside the fence, they found that Acacia trees had reduced their nectar output and the rate at which they developed new domatia. The mutualistic ants, dependent on these rewards, were displaced by another species, C. sjostedti, which doesn’t need nectar or domatia, but also doesn’t defend the tree as much.
None of the changes in trees’ provisioning for ants are the result of immediate natural selection – the time over which this happened is considerably less than one generation for Acacia. This is individual trees “judging” that they no longer need ant protection because they’re not under attack, a response that is expected to evolve over long periods of balancing the need for protection against the cost of provisioning ants. Another ant species that uses Acacia nectar and domatia, C. nigriceps, didn’t suffer from the lack of large herbivores, probably because it prunes the trees it occupies, which the authors think may be enough to make the tree “think” it’s still being eaten.
Reference:
Palmer T.M., M.L. Stanton, T.P. Young, J.R. Goheen, R.M. Pringle, and R. Karban. 2008. Breakdown of an Ant-Plant Mutualism Follows the Loss of Large Herbivores from an African Savanna. Science 319:192-5.
No further comment.
The science ticket
Via the essential beatfinger: Wired Science summarizes Science’s assessment of how the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates stand on science issues. These include support for science funding in general, support for embryonic stem cell research, acceptance of evolution, plans for improving science education, and willingness to address global warming. Barack Obama comes out on top of the Democrats, but the differences between him and Hillary Clinton or John Edwards seem mainly related to emphasis. Among the Republicans, the list-makers seem to have had difficulty coming up with anything nice to say: Rudy Giuliani gets credit just for being pro-choice!