Order out of chaos

One of the consistent criticisms I hear of the evolutionary model, as embodied in the principle of natural selection, is that it claims that order has appeared out of an essentially random process.

"You admit that mutations are random," the critic says.  "And then in the same breath, you say that these random mutations have driven evolution to create all of the complexity of life around us.  How is that possible?  Chaos can only create more chaos, never order.  For order, there must be a Designer."

Professor Armand Leroi and Bob McAllen, of the Imperial College of London, have teamed up with musician Brian Eno to demonstrate that this view is profoundly incorrect, because it misses 2/3 of what is necessary for evolution to occur.  Not only do you need mutations -- random changes in the code -- you also need two other things: a replication mechanism, and something external acting as a selecting agent.

In order to show how quickly order can come from chaos, Leroi, McAllen, and Eno created a piece of electronic "music" that was just a jumble of random notes and chords (i.e., noise).  They then allowed 7,000 internet volunteers to rate various bits of the string of notes for how pleasant they sounded.  The sum total of these votes was used by a computer program to create a second generation of the tune (replication), making a few changes each time (mutation), and then choosing to retain segments that were the most popular (selection).  The successful loops were allowed to recombine (to "have sex," in McAllen's words), creating the next generation of loops.  Then the whole process was repeated.

After 3,000 generations, a pleasant, and relatively complex, melodic riff was created -- with interlocking phrases and an interesting and steady rhythm.  It's not exactly what the rather hyperbolic headline in Why Evolution is True says it is -- "the perfect pop song" -- but for something that bootstrapped itself upwards out of chaos, it's not bad.  (McAllen created an audio clip that outlines the progression of the piece from random notes to listenable music, along with some fascinating narration of the alterations that occurred in the music over time.)

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The analogy to evolution isn't perfect, in that human judges with an end product in mind (modern western music) were picking the sound combinations that matched that goal the best.  In that respect, it more closely resembles artificial selection -- in which naturally-occurring mutations result in changes to a population, and humans act to select the ones they think are the most useful.  It is in this way that virtually every breed of domestic animal has been created, most of them in the past thousand years.

But still, as a first-order approximation, it's not bad, and certainly gives a nice answer to people who think that chaos can never give rise to order without the hand of a Designer.  It turns out that no Designer is necessary, as long as you have something acting as a selecting mechanism -- even if that something is as simple as 7,000 people on the internet giving a thumbs-up or thumbs-down to tiny fragments of a musical passage.  In the natural world, with the powerful dual selectors of survival and reproduction, and two billion years to work, it suddenly ceases to be surprising that the Earth has millions of different and diverse life forms -- although that fact is, and always will be, a source of wonderment and awe for me even so.

Religious mutants

A couple of days ago, a reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link along with an email, the gist of which was, "Ha ha, how are you gonna argue your way out of this one, Mr. Smarty-Pants Atheist?"

The link was to a recent article in Newsweek entitled, "Religious People Live Healthier, Longer Lives -- While Atheists Collect Mutant Genes."  Notwithstanding the mental image this created -- of us atheists having stamp-collection-like binders of mutant genes on bookshelves in our studies -- the whole premise sounded idiotic.  The article quotes study co-author Edward Dutton as saying:

Maybe the positive relationship between religiousness and health is not causal—it's not that being religious makes you less stressed so less ill.  Rather, religious people are a genetically normal remnant population from preindustrial times, and the rest of us are mutants who'd have died as children back then...  [The Industrial Revolution caused us to develop] better and better medical care, easier access to healthy food and better living conditions.  Child mortality collapsed down to a tiny level and more and more people with more and more mutant genes have survived into adulthood and had children...  Religiousness makes you more pro-social, and you become more religious when you're stressed.  Religious people would have been sexually selected for because their pro-social, moral, unstressed nature would be attractive.

Well, my background is in evolutionary genetics, so I thought, "Here's a claim I'm qualified to evaluate."

Let's look first at his contention that religious people are healthier.  Turns out that there's some weak correlation there, but only if you look at First-World countries.  In the United States, for example, comparing religious people and non-religious people of similar socioeconomic status, there's a small improvement in health and longevity in the religious people over the non-religious ones.  (It very much remains to be seen that there's any kind of causal relationship there, however.)  But if you look at the human race as a whole -- comparing largely non-religious countries (Sweden, Finland, Iceland) with largely religious ones (Bangladesh, Malaysia, Egypt) gives you exactly the opposite pattern.  There's as much evidence that ill people in questionable living conditions seek out religion as solace as there is that religion itself makes you healthier.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The last part of the claim, that religion is due to some kind of sexual selection, moves us into even muddier waters.  If this claim is true, people would be eliminating potential mates on the basis of being non-religious, something I see no evidence of whatsoever.  Also, there's the problem of people like me -- the child of a dad who was a Pascal's-wager kind of guy and a mom who was more or less the Cajun Mother Teresa.  So I almost certainly inherited "religiosity genes" (whatever those are).  My first wife, and the mother of my children, was an agnostic who didn't really care about the question of god one way or the other, and at the time our two sons were born, I was still trying like hell to find a reason to believe, a battle I gave up when my youngest son was about five.

So how do you classify me, on the Religious Mutant Gene scale?

Anyhow, as befits a good skeptic, I decided to go to the source, and went to the paper by Dutton et al. in the journal Evolutionary Psychological Science that makes the original claim.  The paper has the rather histrionic title, "The Mutant Says in His Heart, 'There Is No God': the Rejection of Collective Religiosity Centred Around the Worship of Moral Gods Is Associated with High Mutational Load," and although the entire paper is behind a paywall, the abstract reads as follows:

Industrialisation leads to relaxed selection and thus the accumulation of fitness-damaging genetic mutations.  We argue that religion is a selected trait that would be highly sensitive to mutational load.  We further argue that a specific form of religiousness was selected for in complex societies up until industrialisation based around the collective worship of moral gods.  With the relaxation of selection, we predict the degeneration of this form of religion and diverse deviations from it.  These deviations, however, would correlate with the same indicators because they would all be underpinned by mutational load.  We test this hypothesis using two very different deviations: atheism and paranormal belief.  We examine associations between these deviations and four indicators of mutational load: (1) poor general health, (2) autism, (3) fluctuating asymmetry, and (4) left-handedness.  A systematic literature review combined with primary research on handedness demonstrates that atheism and/or paranormal belief is associated with all of these indicators of high mutational load.

Mutational load is a real thing -- it's the number of lethal (or at least significantly deleterious) genes we carry around, the effects of which we are usually protected from by our diploidy (we've got two copies of every gene, and if one doesn't work, chances are the other one does).  But there is no indication that high mutational load is connected with autism (jury's still out on what exactly causes autism) or left-handedness, and "poor general health" is such a mushy term that if you select your data set carefully enough you could probably correlate it with anything you like, up to and including astrological sign.  (There is some indication that left-handedness correlates with some medical conditions, such as migraine, autoimmune disorders, and learning disability; but the heritability of left-handedness even when both parents are left-handed is only 29% anyhow, and what exactly causes it is still unknown.)

But then I did what (again) all skeptics should do, namely take a look at the paper's sources.  I noticed two things right away -- first, that the sources from highly-respected journals like Nature were only tangentially connected to Dutton et al.'s claim (such as an article on the heritability of longevity in Nature Genetics), and second, that the authors are really good at citing their own work.   No fewer than ten of the sources were authored or co-authored by Dutton or the other two authors of the Evolutionary Psychological Science paper, Curtis Dunkel and Guy Madison.

Then I scrolled a little further, and found these listed as sources:

• Copping, J. (2013). Who you gonna call? Belief in ghosts is rising. Telegraph, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/10310018/Who-you-gonna-call-Belief-in-ghosts-is-rising.html
• Daily Mail Reporter. (2011). The ghost map: Yorkshire tops spook league with a third of adults claiming to have seen a spectre. MailOnline, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1362452/The-ghost-map-Yorkshire-tops-spook-league-adults-claiming-seen-spectre.html
• Greenfield, P. (2017). Christians should pray for Prince George to be gay, says minister. Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/dec/01/christians-should-pray-from-prince-george-to-be-gay-says-c-of-e-minister
• Kelley, M. (2011). Correlates of paranormal beliefs I: schizotypy. Journal of Paranormal Psychology, 75, 301–325.
• Malloy, N. (8 February 2017). Christian girls are beautiful and here’s why. Jesus Tribune. http://jesustribune.com/christian-girls-are-beautiful
• Yahoo Answers. (2008). Why are Mormon girls so hot? https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080713143021AAdArue
• Yelp. (2010). OMG … Why are Christian women extremely [physically] attractive? https://www.yelp.com/topic/los-angeles-omg-why-are-christian-women-extremely-physically-attractive

So you're writing a serious paper in a (presumably) serious journal, and you want us to accept your claim, and you cite Yelp, Yahoo Answers, The Telegraph, The Guardian, The Daily Mail Fail, and -- for fuck's sake -- The Jesus Tribune?

What this makes me wonder -- besides the obvious question of how Dutton et al. pull this stuff out of their asses without cracking up -- is about the reliability of the journal Evolutionary Psychological Science itself.  I wasn't able to find any meta-analysis of EPS's reliability online; that sort of self-policing by academia is sorely lacking.  But this paper has all the hallmarks of a pay-to-play publication in a journal that honestly doesn't give a flying fuck about the study's quality.  It's hard to imagine any study that cites The Jesus Tribune making it into Science, for example.

So predictably, I'm unimpressed.  Nothing in my understanding of population genetics lends the slimmest credence to this claim.  It's unsurprising that Newsweek picked up the story, although one would hope that even popular media publications would be a little more careful what they print.  In any case, we atheists don't have to worry about our being poorly-fit unhealthy left-handed autistic mutants.  We're no more likely to be any of the above than the rest of the general population is.  Although, I have to say that while we're talking fiction, if mutations could work like they do in The X-Men, I'd be all for 'em.  I want a mutation that gives me wings.  Big, feathery hawk wings arising from my shoulders.  It'd make fitting into a shirt difficult, but that's a price I'm willing to pay.

Information revolution

One of the most common tropes that you hear in anti-evolution arguments is what they call the "problem of information."  The idea is that random mutations can't create new information -- perhaps they can modify the information that is already there, but evolution provides no way to generate novel genes (and therefore novel structures).

As Royal Truman put it over at the True Origin Archive:

Selection inevitably removes information from the gene pool... [C]onsider regulatory genes that switch other genes ‘on’ or ‘off’.  That is, they control whether or not the information in a gene will be decoded, so the trait will be expressed in the creature.  This would enable very rapid and ‘jumpy’ changes, which are still changes involving already created information, not generation of new information, even if latent (hidden) information was turned on...   Now, it is questionable whether any mutation can be shown to lead to some kind of improvement without causing deleterious functioning of some processes already encoded on the DNA (this is very different from the question whether one mutation could allow some members to temporarily survive some drastic environmental change).   Presumably a very bad mutation leads to death, weeding out such mutated genes from that species’ gene pool forever.

Despite Truman's confidence and the apparent sophistication of his argument -- he spends a long time, for example, wandering about in the realm of Bayesian information theory to support his views -- almost all biologists consider this view dead wrong.  As an example, consider preaptation  -- the evolution of a gene (and its gene product) in one context, and a small change in the gene resulting in a novel gene product with a completely different function.

The most striking instance of preaptation is the class of proteins called crystallins, which make up the lens of the vertebrate eye.  This is wryly amusing given the fact that the eye is one of those structures that the anti-evolutionist types call "irreducibly complex," even though as Richard Dawkins writes:

[P]lausible intermediates are not only easy to imagine: they are abundant all around the animal kingdom.  A flatworm has an eye that, by any sensible measure, is less than half a human eye.  Nautilus (and perhaps its extinct ammonite cousins who dominated Paleozoic and Mesozoic seas) has an eye that is intermediate in quality between flatworm and human.  Unlike the flatworm eye, which can detect light and shade but see no image, the Nautilus 'pinhole camera' eye makes a real image; but it is a blurred and dim image compared to ours.  It would be spurious precision to put numbers on the improvement, but nobody could sanely deny that these invertebrate eyes, and many others, are all better than no eye at all.

Another blow to the "irreducible complexity" of the eye was dealt a blow when it was found that the transparent proteins in the lens are related genetically to a gene that produces heat-shock proteins, proteins produced during various types of physical stress (including thermal stress, which is what gave them their name).  One small mutation in the gene for heat-shock proteins creates a gene that makes a clear protein that can be used for focusing light.

If that's not "new information"...?

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Even with examples like this, people of Truman's stripe aren't convinced.  They argue that okay, you can modify what's already there, but no one has been able to show how mutations create anything genetic that is genuinely new.

Until two days ago.

A team led by Jorge Ruiz-Orera of the Hospital del Mar Research Institute of Barcelona, Spain published a paper in PLOS-One called, "Origins of De Novo Genes in Humans and Chimpanzees," in which they show exactly how this can happen.  In their groundbreaking analysis, they have basically given a death blow to the so-called "problem of information."  Ruiz-Orera et al. write:

For the past 20 years scientists have puzzled over a strange-yet-ubiquitous genomic phenomenon; in every genome there are sets of genes which are unique to that particular species i.e. lacking homologues in any other species.  How have these genes originated?  The advent of massively parallel RNA sequencing (RNA-Seq) has provided new clues to this question, with the discovery of an unexpectedly high number of transcripts that do not correspond to typical protein-coding genes, and which could serve as a substrate for this process...  We have found thousands of transcripts that are human and/or chimpanzee-specific and which are likely to have originated de novo from previously non-transcribed regions of the genome.  We have observed an enrichment in transcription factor binding sites in the promoter regions of these genes when compared to other species; this is consistent with the idea that the gain of new regulatory motifs results in de novo gene expression.  We also show that some of the genes encode new functional proteins expressed in brain or testis, which may have contributed to phenotypic novelties in human evolution.

I think they show admirable restraint in not taking at least a sidewise swipe at the Intelligent Design advocates.  But in their discussion, even the most diehard IDer couldn't fail to catch the drift of their last statement:

Our results indicate that the expression of new loci in the genome takes place at a very high rate and is probably mediated by random mutations that generate new active promoters.  These newly expressed transcripts would form the substrate for the evolution of new genes with novel functions.

Which I think is about as close to a "boo-yah!' as is allowed in an academic paper.

The history of evolutionary research has been a long series of struggles against objections from individuals who have a vested interest -- usually religious in nature -- in the evolutionary model being wrong.  This assume-your-conclusion stance is pretty transparent to those of us who subscribe to the scientific method as a means for understanding, but their certainty has been remarkably resistant to attack.  Whether the research by Ruiz-Orera et al. will convince anyone remains to be seen, but at least it does one thing; it shows up yet another facet of their argument as specious.

And that, after all, is progress.  Or as Ruiz-Orera might put it, "new information."

Haremageddon

A couple of days ago there was a story out of North Dakota that's been making the rounds of the "Weird News" departments of various news agencies.  It's about a housing development in Fargo that has been "swarmed" by "dozens of dog-sized jackrabbits." 

Fargo resident Kayla Straabe told and ABC News reporter, "Every day, I feel like the crazy rabbit lady chasing them out of the yard where they're having a heyday.  There's at least 40 to 50 everyday, and they're in our yards and by a children's park."

The city pest control department claims not to be able to do anything about them, "because they're wild animals."  This strikes me as pretty peculiar.  Aren't all pests wild animals?  I mean, it's not like people are usually bothered by infestations of hamsters, or anything.

Be that as it may, the pest control department wouldn't do anything, but suggested that Straabe and others poison the jackrabbits, which she doesn't want to do.  So at the moment, the jackrabbits are still swarming in Fargo.

Which is an unremarkable enough story, until you look at the comments section.

Yes, yes, I know, sane people should never look at the comments section.  But I was curious as to what people thought about the cause, and what steps they thought should be taken, for this "flock of jackrabbits," a phrase which made me picture flying bunnies.  (I looked it up, and the correct collective noun for jackrabbits is a "husk," which to me sounds even weirder.  I suggest calling them a "lope of jackrabbits," which is much more euphonious.)

Some of the comments were reasonable enough.  A bunch of them suggested turning the jackrabbits into stew.  A couple recommended, given that it's Fargo we're talking about, running the jackrabbits through a wood-chipper.  But then things got weird, because people started weighing in on where the jackrabbits had come from in the first place, and it went downhill thereafter.

Here are a few samples.  Spelling and grammar have been left unaltered so you can get the full effect.

The government doesn't want you to see what's really happening with animals going on the rampage and flocks of birds dying and the news writes articles like it's completely normal?  Wake up.  This is only the first signs. 

Its a mutation.  Rabbits this huge, its not normal.  We spray pesticides all over the place and now we're reaping what we sow. 

Rabbits is one thing, what if this had been wolves? 

They can carry rabbies and they let them near a playground?  Bring them to Washington DC and let them go there.  You'll see how fast they disappear, and you won't hear the liberal lame stream media crying about the poor bunnies. 

Before the anti gun crazies got in charge, we would have known what to do about them before it became a problem. 

Giant rabbits, another sign of the unnatural things this government is doing.  Genetic engineering experiments gone wrong, and no one wants to blow the whistle, instead this will become more common until one day it becomes too late to do anything about it and people start dying.

Okay, will you people please just calm the fuck down?

These aren't vicious giant mutant bunnies, they're regular old jackrabbits.  According to the Wikipedia page on jackrabbits, this species normally gets to be two feet long and up to six pounds, which is (as the article said) the "size of a small dog."  No mutations, genetic engineering, or other "unnatural things" necessary.

And the bunnies haven't "gone on the rampage," they don't seem to be carrying "rabbies," and allowing people to run around shooting rabbits near a playground would create a whole different set of problems, you know?

So fer cryin' in the sink, let's take a deep breath, and relax.  This is not the Killer Rabbit of Caer Bannog we're talking about here.

Chances are, the jackrabbits have been driven into residential areas because it's winter and the foraging out in the wild is pretty slim, so they're going for decorative plantings in people's yards, which are more accessible through the snow.  The same thing happens in our area, but with white-tailed deer.  The deer, however, are kind of a nuisance year-round.  In some areas they make it impossible to have a garden unless you surround it by six-foot-high fence topped by razor-wire, and the number of car-deer collisions in upstate New York is astronomical.

On the other hand... maybe the deer are part of this whole evil scheme.  Mutated genetically engineered deer, released by Monsanto, so that we can't grow our own vegetables, and will be forced to purchase genetically-modified crops from grocery stores.  Probably the auto-repair industry is in on it, too, making sure the deer are bred to be attracted to car headlights.

And... and... it all started with Disney.  Remember Bambi?  Making us feel sorry for the poor little deer whose mother was killed by hunters.  And guess who Bambi's best friend was?

Thumper.  *cue scary music*

I guess that's enough evidence isn't it?  I believe we now have what the lawyers would call a "hare-tight case."

Giant radioactive mutant dog attack!

It's funny to what extent people will believe unscientific bullshit when they've been primed to do so by fear.

And by "funny" I mean "so frustrating that I facepalmed hard enough to give myself two black eyes."

The tsunami that struck Fukushima, Japan two years ago still weighs heavily on people's minds, and for good reason.  It was a disaster of massive proportion, causing almost 16,000 known deaths (another 2,500 are still missing and are presumed dead).  Add that to the damage to a nuclear facility, and it's no wonder that people consider this one of the scariest events in recent memory.

So let's start there; horrible earthquake, terrible death toll, radiation release from a nuclear plant.  So far, frightening enough.  But the problem is, the last-mentioned -- nuclear radiation -- is a phenomenon that few people understand well enough to judge accurately the hazards it might generate.  This combination of fear and lack of information is a powerful one, and probably explains why hundreds of sites started cropping up last year (and continue today) claiming that the radiation plume from the damaged nuclear reactor was "frying the west coast of the United States."  Usually the story is attached to this map, that allegedly shows the progress of the radioactive water across the Pacific:

The problem is, this isn't a map of radiation -- this is a map, made by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shortly after the tsunami, showing wave heights across the Pacific.

But boy, it sure looks scary, doesn't it?  All those reds and oranges and purples.  That's got to be bad.

And just to (I hope) put your mind further at rest, a study done at the Institute for Cross-Disciplinary Physics and Complex Systems found that the radiation, when it reaches the United States west coast, will be so dilute that it will pose no threat to human health, thus further highlighting the difference between the words detectable and dangerous.

Yet the panic continues, which as I mentioned, sets people up to believe nonsense.  And the nonsense reached new heights in the past couple of weeks, with a set of claims that evidently originated with Topeka's News, an online media outlet that apparently is "news" in the same sense as The Weekly World News is.  Now, let me be up front; I think this could be satire.  It could be that Poe's Law has reared its ugly head again.  But honestly, I'm not sure, and it really doesn't matter, because I'm beginning to see these stories making the rounds of social media -- and people believe them.

Let's start with this one, about a giant radioactive killer dog.

Here's what they have to say:

Russian officials are confirming the existence of a new dog species: the giant Tibetan Mastiff.

Genetic tests have confirmed Fukushima radiation in the dog’s genes, confirming that runoff from Japan has contaminated Russia waters and is not creating genetic monstrosities in the nation [sic: I'm guessing they meant "now creating...," although "not creating..." makes more sense in context].

To date, dozens of reported sitings [sic] of giant Tibetan mastiffs running throughout the Russian Siberian tundra have been reported, but it was not until this week that researchers were able to confirm the dog.

Well, there are a few problems with this claim, beginning with the fact that (1) Tibetan mastiffs are not new (the Wikipedia article calls the breed "ancient," actually); (2) they're not a separate species, but are just ordinary dogs, albeit really big ones; and (3) since Tibet is up in the mountains, it's hard to imagine how "runoff from Japan" could have gotten there since water generally doesn't flow uphill all that well.

Oh, yeah, and you can't have "radiation in your genes."

Yes, but they have photographs, to wit:

Big!  Scary!  Look at the teeth!  Must be a radioactive mutant, right?

Of course, right.

Oh, but they're not done yet.  Not only do we have giant scary mutant dogs running around, we have the rare Fukushima Radioactive Mutant Hamster Lion:

The writer for Topeka's News admits that this photograph hasn't been verified, but says, "the picture does provide an excellent opportunity to once again delve into the topic of nuclear energy."

Then there's the Fukushima Radioactive Mutant Megaturtle:

If you're curious, this photograph is actually a still from the 2006 Japanese horror movie Gamera the Brave.  [Source]

But the problem is, these are being circulated around all over the place, usually with headlines like, "What is the radiation from Fukushima doing to animal life, and what could it do to humans?"  And very few people, that I've seen, are responding to those posts with, "You're joking, right?"

I have a solution to all of this, and it's the same one I always recommend; before you start panicking, learn a little science.  Apply some logic and skepticism to what you read.  And for cryin' out loud, find out what the scientists themselves are saying.  These days, you can often find out the straight scoop just by appending the words "skeptic" or "debunk" to a search (e.g. "giant Fukushima mutant dog debunk"), and you'll pull up what usually reputable sources like Doubtful News or The Skeptic's Dictionary or Skeptoid or Snopes have to say about it.

To sum up; no need to worry about the radiation from Japan causing mutations that will result in gigantic herds of carnivorous Bunny-Jaguars terrorizing downtown Omaha.  As devastating as the situation was (and still is) in Japan, the radiation isn't going to have much of an effect on us here in the United States, and that's not how mutations work, anyway.

Which is unfortunate, actually, because the idea of a "Bunny-Jaguar" is kind of cool.