Happy Darwin Day

Hello to all. After a seven month absence I have returned. I'd like to explain my absence with a tale of derring-do, of frontiers crossed and mountains scaled and disasters averted, of femmes fatale and gangsters and wild ambulance rides and desperate last stands, but the honest truth is that I've just been busy with ordinary life. Sigh.

Today is the bicentenary of Charles Darwin's birth. Happy 200th birthday to him! (It's also Abraham Lincoln's 200th.)

It's astounding that, in the year 2009, more than one in two people in the USA don't accept the reality of biological evolution. This is the cause of, and is caused by, the politicisation of biology by religious fundamentalists: evolution has been, for well over half a century, a convenient whipping boy to rally the troops. Opposition to a scientific theory has become a good defining characteristic of a certain type of fundamentalist. It's relatively safe and easy too: it doesn't require you give up your DVD player or plasma TV, like the Amish do, or avoid medical treatment like followers of so-called "Christian Science" do.

While Darwin's contributions to biology are eminently worthy of respect and even celebration, I don't think the plans for Darwin Day are entirely innocent. After all, there's little or no serious movement towards celebrating Sir Isaac Newton's birthday (25th December), or Maxwell's, or Einstein's, or any other noted scientist. I think that there is a little bit of cocking a snook at the Fundamentalists here. They've spent decades demonising Darwin, and I'm sure a lot of people (myself included) wouldn't be too unhappy to see the fundies squirm over Darwin Day. But I think it is important to remember that Darwin never sought controversy, and although he became an atheist himself, he wasn't a militant one. He never begrudged his wife Emma's faith, and he deliberately held off publishing his theory as long as possible because of his concerns that it would upset people.

So, for Darwin Day, some links on why Darwin is important.

From the Guardian:

There can be no such equivocation in the week of a survey which showed that only around half of all Britons accept that Darwin's theory of evolution is either true or probably true. In a democracy, citizens should respect each other's beliefs; and citizens have a right to express their beliefs. But in a democracy, a newspaper has an obligation to what is right. The truth is that Darwin's reasoning has in the last 150 years been supported overwhelmingly by discoveries in biology, geology, medicine and space science. The details will keep scientists arguing for another 200 years, but the big picture has not changed. All life is linked by common ancestry, including human life. The shameful lesson of this 200th anniversary of his birth is that Darwin's contemporaries understood more clearly than many modern Britons.

Jerry Coyne on why Darwin is still important, 150 years after Origin Of Species:

Darwin had far more influence on modern evolutionary research than Newton has on work in modern physics. In fact, in no other area of science has a research program suggested by one person lasted for a century and a half. ...

But some biologists, chafing in their Darwinian straitjacket, periodically announce new worldviews that, they claim, will overturn our view of evolution, or at least force its drastic revision. During my career I have heard this said about punctuated equilibrium, molecular drive, the idea of symbiosis as an evolutionary force, evo-devo, and the notion that evolution is driven by the self-organization of molecules. Some of these ideas are worthwhile, others simply silly; but none do more than add a room or two to the Darwinian manse. Often declared dead, Darwinism still refuses to lie down.

(A small aside: Richard Dawkins has a glowing review of Coyne's book Why Evolution Is True. One for the shopping list, methinks.)

And Darwin fan-grrl Soupytwist has written a short, sweet and kick-arse post about her attitude to Darwin and his theory:

It's about seeing the world for what it is, not for what we might percieve it to be, and seeing the actual underlying processes underneath: processes at once so simple and so far-reaching that they boggle the mind.

I mean, "things that survive are the ones who get to pass on attributes to the next generation" seems pretty obvious, really. But as simple as that idea is, it really wasn't obvious, not in the face of a world where basically everybody thought species were created immutable, and absolutely not before we knew there was definitely such a thing as DNA which might provide the actual mechanics of the whole thing.

On a related note, if anybody tries to tell you that Darwin recanted his theory on his deathbed and returned to Christianity, don't be fooled. It simply isn't true.


UPDATE: thanks to Mrs Impala for her l33t editing and proof-reading skills, and the link to Soupytwist.

Raising the little devils to be little people

Are children little devils or little angels?

Trick question: they're neither. They're little Homo sapiens (sometimes known as Pan narrans), with all that that entails. That means that they're animals, not angels or devils. I don't mean that as an insult. I'm an animal. So are you. What else could you be? You're not a plant, or an abstract concept like "justice", and the state of the art of artificial intelligence is not good enough for you to be a robot. Even if you believe that you have a soul (whatever that is!) your soul doesn't stop you from hurting when you stub your toe, or let you flap your arms and fly, or see electric fields. We can do what our bodies can do, and nothing more.

As animals, our wetware has certain modes of behaviour, and one of those is that we learn. We learn a lot. We're the ultimate learning machines on the planet, at least until 20 or so.

(Animals and machines? Sure, why not? We're machines made of meat instead of steel and plastic. If you think that's an insult to the dignity of human beings, that's only because you're thinking of machines as those clanking, primitive piles of junk like cars and grandfather clocks and space shuttles. What you should be thinking of is the other machines, like eagles and dolphins and tigers and cobras, of hearts and muscles and eyes and nerves. There's nothing clanking about them. The simplest, most basic cell in the human machine is a million times more complex than the most advanced metal-and-plastic thing we can yet make. We'll catch up, eventually, and make machines worthy of being called "alive", but for now, there's a great yawning chasm between meat machines and metal machines. The metal machines might be stronger and tougher, but let's see them make new machines without our help, huh?)

But I digress... so, little children are learning machines. They soak in data like a sponge, and they learn. Depending on what they learn, we label them as little angels or little devils. But in fact they're neither: they're just risen apes, and we older, supposedly wiser risen apes should be helping them to grow into the best apes they can be.

The problem is, they have this annoying habit of learning things that we don't want them to learn. I don't mean such trivialities such as four-letter words, but things like temper tantrums.

There's an imperial ton of advice out there about raising children (and that's bigger than a metric ton). Most of it is bad advice, because it is based on wishful thinking that kiddies are little angels, or little devils, rather than the reality that they're Homo sapiens.

In civilized countries, you won't find many people willing to publicly talk about "beating the Devil out of children" (although there's always a few barbarians who will privately do so), but there's still plenty of folk who will talk about sparing rods and spoiling children without any clue whatsoever about how to get maximum learning from the minimum brutality. If that sounds harsh, it's because I have a generally low opinion of those who mindlessly quote Biblical aphorisms, not because I am philosophically opposed to mild corporal punishment when necessary.

Unfortunately, parenting skills are very low. There's no classes we can take, the books we buy all contradict each other, and when we do what was done to us, the chances are we're just repeating the same lousy mistakes our parents made.

So, what to do? I was going to spend time searching high and low on the Internet looking for serious academic sites to back up the following assertions, but it's the wee hours of the morning and I need to sleep sometime. So I'll fall back on the tried and true Argument By Assertion, and say if you don't believe this, do your own research. You know where Google is.

It's about the timing.

Conditioning is not the only way we Homo sapiens learn, but it is an important part of it. That's the way our brains work: behaviour which is rewarded becomes more likely to be repeated, and behaviour which is given negative reinforcement becomes less likely. Not all learning is based on conditioning, but a lot of it is, especially for children (but also for adults!). The refusal to accept the reality of how we learn means that we are doomed to implement ineffective or even counter-productive teaching strategies, and then wonder why our children aren't learning the lessons we intended them to learn.

The most important factor about reinforcement is the timing. If it doesn't happen immediately, it might as well never happen at all. Yes, people can -- eventually -- learn delayed gratification, but that takes time, and three year olds don't have those skills yet. There's probably nothing, short of brutal physical abuse, less useful and more harmful to a child's ability to grow into a decent human being than "Wait until your father comes home!".

To give a concrete example: when your child screams and cries in the store because he or she wants a candy bar, if you give him or her a candy bar you have just reinforced the temper tantrum behaviour. It's hard to ignore a screaming child, especially when everyone else is giving you those Looks that say "control your brat!", but if you don't ignore it, you're just reinforcing the tantrum. And no, spanking the child isn't going to help, not if the only attention it ever gets is when you smack it. Children will take bad attention over inattention every time.

Just like adults really.

There's more here and here on Violent Acres. They're hardly scholarly articles, and there's some adult language so watch those nanny-filters, but they're worth reading.

Devil toads and narwhals

PZ Myers reports on the discovery of the extinct Beelzebufo frog:

It means "devil toad," and it was a 10 pound monster that lived 70 million years ago, in what is now Madagascar. It's huge, and judging by its living cousins, was a voracious predator. If it were alive today, it would probably be eating your cats and puppies.

In other words, this was an awesome toad, and I wish I had one for a pet.

Who wouldn't want one of these little beauties? (Artist's impression, naturally.)

(Click image for full view.)

And new research into narwhals has solved the mystery of the narwhal's 8-foot-long tooth. It seems that the tooth is actually a high-tech sensor: it is filled with millions of nerve connections, and is capable of sensing changes in water temperature and pressure, and in particle density of the water.

Three links

Three interesting miscellaneous links:

Can the Cavendish banana be saved from extinction? (No.) Can the fruit growers create a new variety acceptable to the American market? (Probably not.)

The town of Brattleboro, Vermont, has tabled a motion authorizing the local cops to arrest Bush and Cheney if they come into the town.

A leaked British government document shows that they intend to coerce the population into giving up their privacy.

Family walking on all fours

National Geographic has an article about a Kurdish family where five out of the nineteen siblings in one family walk on all fours instead of upright.

Scientists who have studied the three sisters and two brothers insist that it is not a hoax.

Uner Tan, a Turkish neurophysiologist, has studied them and believes they are "evolutionary throwbacks" to our ancestors. A team of German scientists led by Stefan Mundlos believes they have found the precise gene which has knocked out their ability to walk upright.

It's not clear what they mean by "the" gene that controls bipedalism: walking on two legs successfully requires many features, both anatomical and mental, and knocking out just one of them will cause the whole system to break. To take an extreme example, it's hard to walk upright if you have no legs. Less extreme example: the move to bipedalism would have required changes to our hips and backs. Our backs are still not completely evolved to suit our upright stance, which is why people are prone to back problems. Comparing us to our cousins (gorillas, orangutans, chimps and bonobos) shows that we have significantly longer legs than they do, relative to our body-size. The evolution of bipedalism would have required all these features to evolve more-or-less in lockstep (albeit presumably in fits and starts), and it isn't credible that there is a single gene that controls them all.

Nevertheless, certainly there could be a single gene -- or many single genes -- that the lack of could disable bipedalism. If you remove the accelerator cable from a car, the car won't move, but that isn't to say that the accelerator cable is the thing that makes cars move forward.

After studying the family, the British evolutionary psychologist Nicholas Humphrey pointed out that the genetic mutation alone wouldn't be sufficient to cause the lack of bipedalism. He gives equal credit to a family that was accepting of the children's strange gait, and making no efforts to cajole them into standing upright. Sensible, so far. But then he goes on:

"This is for real," Humphrey said. "You only have to look at the calluses on the hands of the young man [Huseyin] to see he's been on his hands for a very long time."

Why single out Huseyin? Don't the other four siblings have calluses on their hands? And walking on your hands is hardly the only way to make them callused.

I don't have any specific reason to expect a hoax, but calluses on the hands of one of the five siblings is hardly a reason to give the all-clear. Nevertheless, in the absence of any specific reason to expect a hoax, I think it is worth treating it as genuine.

The behavior could potentially reveal much about our own evolution, Humphrey says.

"Here we've got a living example of how it might be for a member of our species to walk on four legs," he said.

Most experts assume that the quadruped ancestors of humans walked in a similar way to apes such as gorillas and chimpanzees.

But the Turkish brothers and sisters walk on only their wrists or the heels of their hands, with their fingers held off the ground, the researchers say. This position appears to have saved their fingers from damage; the sisters, for instance, engage in both crochet and embroidery.

Chimps, our closest living relatives, use their whole hands and fingers for walking.

"Chimpanzees basically wreck their fingers by walking on them," Humphrey said.

[...]

"I think this new evidence, suggesting that [early-human ancestors] walked on their wrists, is much more plausible and interesting," Humphrey said.

I question this completely. Chimpanzees wreck their fingers? Chimps have very good manual dexterity, I'd need to see some support for this astounding claim before accepting it.

But even if correct about chimpanzees, Humphrey's claim that the siblings walk only on the heels of their hands isn't supported by the evidence available. The article has one photo of four of the siblings walking. In it, you can clearly make out just two hands on the ground, and in both of them, the people are clearly using their entire hand, fingers and all.

(Click image for full view.)

The photographic evidence contradicts Humphrey's claim, and calls into doubt Uner Tan's conclusion that this is a viable model of pre-bipedal human movement.

If you try it for yourself, I'm confident you'll find that it is impossible to do what the researchers claim. With the heel of the hand, or the palm, flat on the ground, it is virtually impossible to bend the fingers back far enough to keep them off the ground. There's maybe a couple of millimetres give in the finger joints, and it is quite tiring. There are basically three ways of hand-walking: with open hands flat on the ground; on closed fists; or on the knuckles of the fingers, as apes do when knuckle-walking. I do not believe there is any evidence at all, either in anatomically modern humans or any plausible ancestor, for a mode of quadrupedal walking where the fingers are held up off the ground.

There is no doubt at all that human development is complex. The five siblings in question all display a range of congenital deficiencies, include mild mental retardation and lack of balance. It is absolutely possible that whatever genetic damage the five siblings have -- and it might be as little as a single gene -- could lead to them doing the "bear crawl" into adulthood.

But I am extremely skeptical that this gives us any insight into human evolution. For Uner Tan to describe this as "backward evolution" is as absurd as it would be to describe Tay-Sachs disease as backwards-evolution, or sufferers of Huntington's Disease as "evolutionary throwbacks" to an otherwise unsuspected ancestor. The siblings are clearly broken. They're not a throwback to "primitive Man". The most one could say is that, possibly, early pre-bipedal ancestors of human beings may not have had the gene which the siblings are missing. But that's not the same thing: if you rip out the computer chip from a modern Ford Fiesta you don't get a Model T Ford, you get a broken Fiesta.

(Unlike modern cars, biological organisms are astonishingly good at continuing to work with bits missing. As fragile as living things are, we're also incredibly resilient.)

Update, January 3rd: More information here.

Tiger and piglets

This mother tiger is raising piglets:


The photo is genuine, and despite gags about it ending in tears when momma gets a little peckish, the tiger herself was raised by a pig and is very unlikely to turn on "her" babies. It's a good example of animal psychology: the tiger isn't likely to be fooled by the tiger skins on the piglets, especially once they skins have been washed a few times and lose any residual tiger scent, but it shows that some animals learn what to consider prey and what not to.

Although the above situation was artificial in the sense that human beings manipulated the tiger to raise the piglets, such situations sometime occur in the wild. True stories (and some not-so-true) of human children being raised by wolves are common. Less common but still well-documented include cases of predators raising babies of their usual prey species, for example the well-documented case of a lioness in Kenya that tried to raise no fewer than three baby antelopes.

The Goddess of the Yangtze

The Baiji, or Yangtze River Dolphin (poetically known to the ancient Chinese as the Goddess of the Yangtze), is essentially no more. Although a few scientists still hold out hope that there may be a few survivors, they would be too few in number for the species to recover.


It has been declared officially extinct, the first official extinction of a large vertebrate for fifty years.

(Thanks to John Lynch at Stranger Fruit.)

So fuzzy and cute

If all moths looked like this, they would be my favourite insects.

PTerry and the baby mammoth

Is Terry Pratchett, author of the Discworld fantasy novels, moonlighting as a biologist for the Russian universities? Judge for yourself:


On the left, a Mystery Man inspects the well-preserved baby mammoth found frozen in the Russian permafrost. On the right, Terry Pratchett.

Biology and science fiction

When it comes to science fiction, I try not to let shoddy science get in the way of enjoying a good story. Sometimes, though, the suspenders of disbelief are stretched past all credibility. But even if they don't quite snap, why have a good story with bad science if you can have a good story with good (or at least good-ish) science?

Biologist PZ Myer has a lament about physics snobbery, especially as it relates to science fiction. I feel his pain -- biology is much more complicated than physics. Rocket science? Bah! Getting a rocket to fly is easy compared to growing a kidney. So why do physicists and engineers treat biology as the soft option?

Biology professor Michael LaBarbera has a look at the biology of some classic sci-fi B-movies, and explains why the best weapon against giant ants would be a strong throwing arm with a house-brick, and why the giant octopus from It Came from Beneath the Sea was so lethargic and passive. He also explains that Stephen Spielberg did a remarkable job of getting the biology of E.T. and Jurassic Park believable.

Truly alien aliens would probably make for truly boring stories, but I don't think it is asking too much of writers that they treat biology with at least as much care and respect as they do physics. (By Wodan's one good eye, that's little enough!) I'm not asking for total scientific realism -- where would SF be without faster than light travel, time travel, aliens that look like humans, and other fantasy elements? But it would be nice to see a little bit of plausibility in SF biology from time to time.

Marmoset chimeras

To my mind, one of the more fascinating biological phenomena is that of chimeras: individual animals which have two (or more) sets of genes. Chimeras have been discovered in a number of mammals, including human beings, but are rare.

Marmosets, on the other hand, are apparently all chimeras: they are almost always fraternal (non-identical) twins, and the twins swap placental cells in the womb. So each marmoset is born with two genetically distinct -- but related -- sets of cells.

Unique leopard

The WWF is reporting the discovery of a new species of clouded leopard from Borneo. Genetic tests have shown that it is a different species to the clouded leopard from the mainland of Southeast Asia, with almost as many differences as between lions and tigers. There are about 40 genetic differences between the two species of clouded leopard, and 56 between lions and tigers.

But what's especially interesting is that apparently there's only one of them, and it's at least 100 years old:

"For over a hundred years we have been looking at this animal and never realized it was unique," said Stuart Chapman, WWF International Coordinator of the Heart of Borneo program

*raises eyebrow*

Two-faced piggy

Back in July, I wrote about a kitten born in Ohio with two faces. Recently, a pig was born in China with a similar mutation.


I wonder just how common such mutations are?

This little piggy went to market,
This little piggy stayed home,
This little piggy had roast beef,
and this little piggy had strontium-90 and radium-226.

Hmmm... I wonder if this mutant has any superpowers?

Chimpanzees using spears

Zoologists working in Senegal on the west coast of Africa have discovered chimpanzees making and using wooden spears to hunt for monkeys.

The BBC reports that Jill Pruetz and Paco Bertolani have published a paper documenting 22 cases of chimps making spears. The chimps use the spears as hunting weapons, not probes, jabbing them into hollows in trees to catch bushbabies.

Although male chimps have long been regarded as the hunters, it was females (particularly adolescents) and not the males who made and used the spears.

Hunting by chimpanzees is not a new discovery, but this is the first time chimps have been found to make weapons, reinforcing their status as one of the tool-making as well as tool-using species. The chimps in this study live in an area of Senegal without their usual prey, the red colobus monkey, and the researchers suggest that having to hunt for a different sort of prey has encouraged the chimps to develop new technology.

More information can be found here.

Evolution, arrogance and stupidity

PZ Myers discusses some common Creationist misunderstandings about evolution, and points out that while they are often based on deep, fundamental errors of how the world works (dare I say it, stupid questions) others are not stupid at all, but reveal insight and good reasoning ability.

PZ contrasts the typical stupid Creationist question "If we evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys around?" with an insightful question about why animals evolved with two eyes. How did they know that one eye is not enough for depth perception and therefore they'd need two eyes?

The answer, and it's not an obvious one, is that two eyes is an accident of developmental biology. As PZ explains, paired structures (two lungs, two arms, two legs...) are a natural consequence of the way cells grown under bilateral symmetry:

It's harder to generate single structures than paired structures with that kind of symmetry, and the real question is how the anterior-posterior and dorsal-ventral axis is generated…and it's not an easy one to answer!

The real problem isn't that Creationists are stupid, because they generally aren't. Ignorant, maybe, but that's not the problem either. Millions of people have no idea of how to raise cattle for beef, but you don't see them protesting that hamburger and steaks are impossible.

PZ puts the blame firmly on arrogance:

The common theme in creationist objections, in the letters I get, in the whole damn culture war, is that creationists arrogantly assume that their ignorance is shared and that it is a valid data point in our explanations of the world. It isn't the scientists who are the arrogant ones in this debate, it's people who come out of 6th grade sunday school utterly convinced that they have all the answers.

PZ is right as far as it goes, but where does that arrogance come from? These people, as a rule, would never dream that they understand how televisions or DVD players work, or imagine that know how to repair bagpipes. Why are they so arrogant about biology?

Two factors: firstly, people have deep intuitions about other living creatures. That folk biology is a set of heuristics that enabled our ancestors to make a good living predicting the behaviour of the natural world over the short-term period of a generation or two. Consequently, we have a deep inherent prejudice for trusting that dogs will beget more dogs. This is so strong, that it took mankind thousands of years to come up with the idea of evolution, even while they were busily using selective breeding to evolve domestic plants and animals from their wild ancestors.

While we might have an inherent prejudice for folk biology, our intellects can over-ride that. And that's were the second factor comes in. Religion. Some religious memes give people deeply felt emotional needs that conflict with facts (be they facts of biology or anything else). Other religious memes give people the totally undeserved certainty that they know the Truth, the Whole Truth and Nothing But The Truth.

Combine the heady mix of false certainty and emotional commitment given by religion with ordinary garden-variety ignorance, plus the human prejudice for folk biology, and you get the Creationist arrogance about science.

Squid the weeds of the sea

PZ Myers has a fascinating post discussing the life of squid. He points out that, unlike most other animals, they just keep growing until they die -- which is generally pretty soon. He describes them as weeds of the sea: they grow fast, live hard, and die leaving a beautiful corpse. At least, beautiful to the beasties that survive by eating dead squid.

War of the Worlds

One of NASA's scientists, Dirk Schulze-Makuch, has revealed that the two Viking space probes that visited Mars in 1976-77 probably killed native-born Martians.

Fortunately, those natives were microbes, and unable to retaliate by (for example) firing heat-rays or disintegrator beams at the Earth.

The Viking probes were designed to search for ordinary Earth-like microbes. Biologists of the 1970s were unaware of the great range of biochemistries exhibited by the so-called extremophiles, and the tests looking for Martian life probably would have killed them.

Last month, scientists excitedly reported that new photographs of Mars showed geologic changes that suggest water occasionally flows there -- the most tantalising sign that Mars is hospitable to life.

In the 1970s, the Viking mission found no signs of life. But it was looking for earth-like life, in which salt water is the internal liquid of living cells. Given the cold dry conditions of Mars, that life could have evolved on Mars with the key internal fluid consisting of a mix of water and hydrogen peroxide, said Dirk Schulze-Makuch, author of the new research.

That's because a water-hydrogen peroxide mix stays liquid at very low temperatures (minus 55 degrees celsius), does not destroy cells when it freezes, and can suck scarce water vapour out of the air.

A new synthesis in reproductive biology

It's time to rethink this whole reproduction thing. It's just a theory.

Reproductive Biology - A New Synthesis

by M. A. Charlatan, M.S., Ph.D., D.Phil, M. Div

(A position paper commissioned by the Indescribable Institute)

Abstract
Commonly-accepted theories in science are not subject to radical re-evaluation except in rare instances (see Kuhn for a fuller discussion). We here at the Indescribable Institute believe that the time is ripe for such a major paradigm shift in the current field of Reproductive Biology - namely, challenging the notion that reproduction (commonly defined as the "production of new individuals" or "perpetuation of a given species") occurs via currently-accepted mechanisms such as "fertilization of egg by sperm" and "36-38 week gestational period" which come under the umbrella of "Sexual Reproduction." Given the numerous inherent problems with the Theory of Sexual Reproduction, we propose that alternate theories such as the Stork Theory, the Cabbage Patch Theory and the Found Beneath a Bridge Hypothesis are deserving of fuller investigation, and should be taught as part of any meaningful biological curriculum at the high school or college level.

Further details here.

Breakdown of elephant culture

Elephants are one of the most intelligent, sensitive animals on the planet, perhaps even approaching human intelligence and emotion. They understand about death, communicate constantly. They can plan ahead, foresee their own mortality, suffer unhappiness and comfort fellow elephants in pain. They live in societies, not just mere herds.

Elephants, when left to their own devices, are profoundly social creatures. [...] Young elephants are raised within an extended, multitiered network of doting female caregivers that includes the birth mother, grandmothers, aunts and friends. These relations are maintained over a life span as long as 70 years.

[...]

When an elephant dies, its family members engage in intense mourning and burial rituals, conducting weeklong vigils over the body, carefully covering it with earth and brush, revisiting the bones for years afterward, caressing the bones with their trunks, often taking turns rubbing their trunks along the teeth of a skull’s lower jaw, the way living elephants do in greeting. If harm comes to a member of an elephant group, all the other elephants are aware of it.

And we're driving them insane.

The last century has seen Homo sapiens fighting an undeclared war against elephants, with machine guns and chainsaws. We're taking their land, sprinkling their habitat with landmines, machine-gunning them and taking their teeth. Even if they don't have human intelligence, they are certainly intelligent enough to understand. Like most intelligent animals, elephants learn from their families, their mother and aunties, from older elephants. In other words, they have a society. And we're ripping that social fabric apart. It is no surprise that they are fighting back: not just isolated attacks against individuals, but carefully planned attacks on entire villages, executed like military raids, showing an almost human grasp of tactics.

Biologists studying elephants have recognised the same signs of chronic trauma in elephants that human victims of war and violence suffer from. Like human beings, elephants in the wild are showing violent, confused behaviour. As the New York Times reports, since the 1990s males in South Africa's Pilanesberg National Park and the Hluhluwe-Umfolozi Game Reserve have been raping and killing rhinoceroses. Like human beings in dysfunctional societies, elephants are also committing violence against their own: in another national park, up to 90% of male elephant deaths are due to attacks by other male elephants, fifteen times higher than the rate in more stable communities.

"Everybody pretty much agrees that the relationship between elephants and people has dramatically changed," Bradshaw told me recently. "What we are seeing today is extraordinary. Where for centuries humans and elephants lived in relatively peaceful coexistence, there is now hostility and violence. Now, I use the term 'violence' because of the intentionality associated with it, both in the aggression of humans and, at times, the recently observed behavior of elephants."

[...]

For a number of biologists and ethologists who have spent their careers studying elephant behavior, the attacks have become so abnormal in both number and kind that they can no longer be attributed entirely to the customary factors. [...] what we are now witnessing is nothing less than a precipitous collapse of elephant culture.

But, even in the midst of this trauma and violence, elephants display an amazing sensitivity. They might be killing us, we might be killing them, but they treat us as equals. After killing a villager, the elephants took his body and treated it to the same careful funeral rites as they would give to one of their own.

When a group of villagers from Katwe went out to reclaim the man’s body for his family’s funeral rites, the elephants refused to budge. Human remains, a number of researchers have observed, are the only other ones that elephants will treat as they do their own. In the end, the villagers resorted to a tactic that has long been etched in the elephant’s collective memory, firing volleys of gunfire into the air at close range, finally scaring the mourning herd away.

Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be Cow Boys...

PZ Myers has the most audacious, only half tongue-in-cheek suggestion about stem-cell research yet: human clones, grown in cows.

I want to see the Pope's head explode when he sees it. I want David Cronenberg there with a camera, cackling happily.

I want the researchers to announce in a press conference afterwards that their successful experiment was funded by the Department of Defense, Sony, the Church of Scientology, and a private donor.

I want that private donor to be Paris Hilton, who, on accepting her cooing new clone baby, declares that she just didn't want to go through that icky pregnancy and labor stuff. "It isn't haaawt," she'd say.

I want 100 million women to sit up and say, "What? I could outsource the nausea and bloating and pain and stretch marks and episiotomy to a cow? Sign me up!"

I want the phrase "family farm" to acquire rich new meanings. I want to see Bible Belt politicians lobbying for new fetus farming subsidies.

I want gay men to rejoice, and become the primary market for this procedure.

I want to hear snooty young bluebloods declare cows déclassé, and that they'd had their little Brittany gestated in a Kentucky thoroughbred.

The scientific/biological problems aren't simple, but still... exploding Pope heads. Shweeeet!

And from Pharma Bawd in the comments:

Of course, the big groups who are against stem cell research are already against this sort of animal-human hybrid. But wouldn't it be interesting if we transferred the cow nucleus into the human cell at the same time we transferred the human nucleus into the cow cell? Then we could play a version of three-card-monty:

"Where's the soul now?"