Richard Conniff's Blog, page 20

Why Does Congress Sell Itself So Cheap To The NRA?

Granted that our system of legalized bribery allows rich people to buy political office-holders, I’ve never understood why the price seems so cheap.  For instance, the Washington Post reports that the National Rifle Association has donated $3,782,803 to members of Congress since 1998.  Divide that by 18 years and it’s just $210,000 a year, to be subdivided among 100 senators and 435 representatives.


Assuming the money goes to just half of them, that works out to less than $800 per year.  You would not think it would be enough to make even our preternaturally venal elected officer-holders turn against the interests of the people they have sworn to represent.

And it’s not.As one reader explains it:

Direct contributions to candidates is a sliver of the amount of money the NRA spends in campaigns via PACs and in spending against their chosen candidates’ opponents. In the case of Senator Cory Gardner (R-CO), the following figures have been reported elsewhere:

Direct Contributions by NRA: $5,950 (this figure matches yours)

Independent Contributions (via PACs): $1,225,129

Campaign Spending to Defeat His Opponent(s): $2,708,120

Total Spending by NRA on Cory Gardner: $3,939,199

This data tells a much different story.

So take comfort, citizens! The members of Congress who sold out our interests and made Orlando, and San Bernardino, and Newtown, and many other massacres possible may well be whores. 

But they are at least high-priced whores.

 

Animal Music Monday: “The Fox Went Out”

I mostly recall this carnivore’s delight from the Burl Ives version of 1956. But my father also used to sing it to us when we were small. One of my sisters remembers: “Dad once picked my up and threw me over his shoulder while that song was on, imitating the fox who flings the grey goose over his back. I was probably five years old and was wearing a skirt, which flew over my head, and was not amused. Other than that, it’s a fine song, an old folk song.” She played it for her kids in turn.

The idea of a freshly killed duck or goose “greasing” anybody’s chin has an earthiness that probably would not get past the modern sensitivity police. (But what do I know about sensitivity?  I used to sing my kids “Weile Weile Waila,” an Irish song about a woman who sticks a knife in a baby’s head.)  Versions of “The Fox” date back to 1500, and it has no doubt been sung around the barnyard by every generation since.

I love the calamitous mouthful of this stanza:

Old mother Widdle Waddle jumped out of bed,

And out of the casement she popped her head,

Crying, “The house is on fire, the grey goose is dead,

And the fox has come to the town, oh!”

And I also like an early version that gives a sympathetic role to the fox in his depredations.  (Some of that survives in the Burl Ives version.):

I haue a wyf, and sche lyethe seke;

many smale whelppis sche haue to eke;

many bonys they must pike

will they ley adowne!”

This is a more recent version by Nickel Creek, with mandolin and fiddle.

I’m going to spare you the version by Garrison Keillor, who loves the sound of his own voice the way the fox loves goose greasing his chin (but nobody else wants to share that meal).

What a Lovely World of Liars and Frauds

Butterfies disguised as dead leaves held inspire Alfred Russel Wallace’s work on natural selection. (Photo: James Laing/Flickr)

by Richard Conniff/The Wall Street Journal

The notion that anything natural must be wholesome and good is, to be honest, idiotic. Polygamy is a natural behavior for some species. Infanticide is natural. Turning your mate into a post-coital snack is not only natural, it’s a strategy for reproductive success.

We are not those species, fortunately, and “Cheats and Deceits” is not a how-to book for humans. The subtitle is “How Animals and Plants Exploit and Mislead.” Martin Stevens is an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Exeter and also a sensory ecologist. He studies disguise and deception as they appear not just to us but to other species, which may rely on chemical signals we can’t perceive or visual signals we can’t see. For instance: Soon after hatching, the caterpillar of the alcon blue butterfly drops to the ground, where one might expect it to be attacked and eaten by foraging ants. But this caterpillar instead gets carried back to the ants’ nest and fed as an honored guest.

This very hungry caterpillar is a fraud: It emits chemicals closely resembling the ones that serve local ants as a means of recognizing nestmates. (Just to be sure, the researchers who demonstrated this applied caterpillar chemicals to tiny glass dummies, and the ants also treated them as newfound friends.) Once inside the nest, the caterpillar adjusts its chemical signal to match the particular ant colony more precisely and ensure continued feeding.

It wants to be very well fed, in fact. So the caterpillar quickly starts mimicking the sounds and vibrations with which the queen of the ant colony communicates her special status. When the caterpillar has finally gotten enough food to pupate and emerge into its adult butterfly form, it does a run for the door. The ants, realizing that they’ve been duped, make a grab for the fleeing intruder but generally come away with nothing more than the scales loosely attached to its body.

The natural world is full of such sophisticated con games, as Mr. Stevens abundantly demonstrates. On Indo-Pacific coral reefs, for instance, certain species, called “cleaner fish,” set up a sort of carwash for other fish species, which duly line up to have the parasites picked off their flanks. No tipping required: For the cleaner fish, the parasites make a meal. But the bluestriped fangblenny is after bigger game. It mimics the appearance of innocent cleaner fish, and when an unsuspecting customer swims up, it darts forward and rips off a chunk of its flesh.

This is naturally bad for business at the carwash, so the fangblennies succeed in part because they are relatively rare. You might think the cleaner fish would do their best to weed out even the occasional imposter, but the fangblennies make this challenging. Their bodies contain chromatophores that “act like packets of pigment,” allowing the fangblennies to switch their mimicry on or off or adjust it to better match the neighbors.

Deception is more than just a curious aspect of animal behavior. Camouflage—particularly the way certain butterfly species disguise themselves as dead leaves—was one of the things that led Alfred Russel Wallace to formulate his ideas about the origin of species, leading to the joint publication by Darwin and Wallace of their theory of evolution by natural selection.

Camouflage, and the case of the peppered moth, also provided the first evidence of evolutionary change observable on a human time scale. As industrial pollution became widespread in mid-19th-century England, the lighter form of these moths, suited to hiding itself against pale or lichen-covered tree trunks, became less common. A darker form, better disguised against soot-blackened trees, proliferated. Then, as antipollution laws went into effect in the mid-20th-century, the pattern began to reverse. Either way, natural selection was a result of hungry birds picking off the less camouflaged form. Creationists have criticized the peppered-moth story as an evolutionary myth. But extensive scientific research has recently vindicated the particulars in painstaking detail. (A study published this month in the journal Nature identified the precise genetic mutation that caused the original color change and dated it to about 1819.)

Mr. Stevens writes as a scientist and does not aim to be particularly colorful or entertaining. But the behaviors he describes take care of that by themselves, and Mr. Stevens makes for a clear, thoughtful, jargon-free guide. He provides plenty of examples to parse out the many varieties of deception, from “sensory exploitation” to “aggressive mimicry” and “motion dazzle.” The book is especially helpful in explaining the details of how scientists over recent decades have refined our understanding of old theories using modern devices “to measure the colours, smells or sounds of animals and to understand and model how animals perceive the world.”

I knew, for instance, about female bolas spiders, which mimic the sex pheromone of certain female moths to attract male moths. Then, when a moth comes in range, the spider flings a sticky ball on a string and hauls it in for dinner. But I didn’t know about recent research on one kind of bolas spider that starts its night’s work by emitting the seductive scent of a moth species common around 10:30 p.m., then shifts to the scent of another species that turns up around 11. It’s a sort of utility femme fatale.

Nor was I aware of recent evidence that leaf mimics have been evolving for at least 126 million years, or that marine brachiopods may have disguised themselves as unpalatable sponges more than 500 million years ago. These delicious, duplicitous details make exploring the natural world seem all the more fascinating. If you want to understand just how thoroughly we live in a realm of intrigue and deception, this book is a fine place to begin.

—Mr. Conniff is the author of “House of Lost Worlds: Dinosaurs, Dynasties, and the Story of Life on Earth.”

You Know, You Should Really Be Outside Right Now

An elevated bog where I like to walk (Photo: Richard Conniff)

by Richard Conniff/Takepart.com

The other day I was listening to a National Public Radio report about a California land trust trying to keep tabs on its population of red-legged frogs, a threatened species. It used to be that the only practical way to count them was for trained biologists to hang around the marsh listening for their calls. Now the land trust does it automatically, with a system of microphones and a computer algorithm that picks out the distinctive red-legged-frog “ribbit” (actually more like a “chuck-chuck-chuck”).

It was a promising report for underfunded land managers and conservationists everywhere. But for me, it also raised one of the great dilemmas in modern wildlife biology: Technology giveth, but technology also taketh away.

Wildlife biologists can now cover vastly more territory with the help of listening devices, camera traps, drones, satellites, remote DNA testing, and other technological shortcuts. This doesn’t just save time and money—it also clues them in to the presence of species they didn’t even suspect existed in a particular habitat. It helps them catch and convict poachers. And it provides them with the sort of big data—quantifiable, verifiable sightings—that gets respect from so-called hard sciences.

But the inevitable corollary is that biologists

no longer spend as much time hanging around in marshes listening for red-legged frogs, because they are too busy monitoring data on a computer screen.

“Like probably most of you reading this journal, I do not get out in the field much anymore,” complained a writer in Conservation Biology. “It is easy to rationalize the life of armchair biology (now better called keyboard ecology)…. Computer modeling produces publishable results much quicker, anyway.” The alarming thing is that Reed F. Noss, a conservation biologist at the University of Central Florida, wrote that lament 20 years ago, in 1996, before the internet and the iPhone had taken over our lives.

The problem is infinitely worse today, and the fears Noss voiced then ring even more true: “What do our students lose when we teach them how to model population viability and analyze remote sensing data, but not how to distinguish the song of the Bay-breasted Warbler from that of the Cape May, the track of the mink from that of the marten, the taste of the birch twig from that of the cherry?” He feared that conservation biologists, like their old rivals in molecular biology, would become technology nerds “with no firsthand knowledge of natural history.”

He was right. In the mid-20th century, colleges routinely required biology majors to take courses in natural history, which also dominated introductory biology textbooks. Today, according to a 2014 study in the journal BioScience, “the majority of universities and colleges in the United States have no natural history requirements for a degree in biology,” and the natural world has lost 40 percent of its former space in introductory biology textbooks.

Instead, biology majors read about molecular biology, theoretical and experimental biology, and ecological modeling—that is, what the natural world looks like to a DNA sequencing machine or a computer algorithm. Even environmental science majors now feel inadequately educated about the natural world. As Noss predicted in 1996: “I cannot help feeling uneasy that the middle-aged biologists” of that era “may be the last generation to have…been taught serious natural history.… The naturalists are dying off and have few heirs.” Add that to the steady decline in the other traditional ways of getting to know the natural world—hunting and fishing—and we are entering a new realm of ignorance.

So, what do we do about it? I contacted Noss and asked for a few ideas. (This was by email, I regret to admit. Even phoning seems so 20th century now.) Both he and Harry Greene, a Cornell University herpetologist and author of Tracks and Shadows: Field Biology as Art, gleefully replied that they were about to retire in large part so they could spend more time in the field.

During his teaching career, added Noss, he kept sane by making field time part of his routine: “I chose to live in a small town 10 miles from campus, which has several natural and semi-natural areas next door, with several trailheads for the very uncrowded Florida National Scenic Trail. I work from home as much as I can get away with, ignore snide comments from colleagues who ask ‘hello, do you work here?’ and take walks several times a week on and off the Florida Trail to practice natural history.”

Summer in particular should be field time, added John Anderson, an ecologist at the College of the Atlantic. At the summer field station he leads on Great Duck Island in the Gulf of Maine, Anderson strictly limits student computer and phone time, even supplying paper, pen, and stamps to acquaint them with another vanishing art, the writing of letters. He also bans “i-anything that has ear-buds. Why? Well, I am trying to reinforce the idea that natural history is multi-dimensional. It isn’t just visual. So if you are bopping along to the Soundtrack of Your Life, you just aren’t as present on site as you need to be.” You do not hear the “chuck-chuck-chuck” of red-legged frogs, or—in the case of Great Duck Island—the purring, chattering, and squealing of nesting Leach’s storm petrels.

If separating people from their digital addictions seems draconian, bear in mind that seeing butterflies mimicking dead leaves led Alfred Russel Wallace to devise his theory of evolution by natural selection. For Charles Darwin, coauthor of the most momentous idea in the history of science, it was about looking at so many barnacles that he once wrote, “I hate a barnacle as no man ever did before.” For G. Evelyn Hutchinson, it was scooping up water beetles that eventually made him the father of modern ecology. For John Ostrom, founder of the modern dinosaur revolution, it was staring endlessly at fossil birds and dinosaurs until he began to see how they were the same thing.

But none of this is just for scientists or field biologists. If you want big ideas (Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” a René Redzepi salad), shut down the computer and turn to nature for a while instead. The answer—or at least the relaxation you need to find the answer—is there.

 

Here’s Why Conservatives No Longer Vote Green

These are a couple of letters to the editor in response to my recent New York Times op-ed “Dear Conservatives, You Can Go Green Again”  They are both literally on the money:

To the Editor:

Re “Dear Conservatives, You Can Go Green Again” (Sunday Review, June 12):

I read with interest Richard Conniff’s plea for bipartisan solutions on the environment. I share his hope. But you can’t overlook the dark figure in the shadows with the club.

Whether it’s the Koch brothers pushing for a vote to reject a carbon fee (Republicans’ only proposed solution for climate change); or Exxon Mobil pretending that it likes a carbon fee while its trade association actively lobbies against any such thing; or Peabody Energy’s bankruptcy revelations of its climate denial funding: The dark hand of the fossil fuel industry looms over and controls the Republican Party.

The political spending threats unleashed by Citizens United stamped out what had been recurring bipartisan proposals on climate. Our failure on climate change is not a failure

within the political system so much as a success for brute fossil fuel influence deployed on the political system.

Keep your eye on that guy in the corner with the club. The day he puts it down, we’ll have a solution.

SHELDON WHITEHOUSE

U.S. Senator from Rhode Island

Newport, R.I.

 

To the Editor:

Richard Conniff cites roughly a dozen important examples of Republican leadership to protect the environment, going all the way back to Teddy Roosevelt. What Mr. Conniff doesn’t do, however, is help us understand what has turned so many Republicans into climate change deniers and protectors of the coal industry.

He could have helpfully noted that between 1990 and an average of the years 2012-14, fossil fuel industry political contributions leapt six-and-a-half-fold, mainly going to Republicans.

With this knowledge, we know that the problem isn’t an insurmountable ideological divide. We know what to do: Remove Big Money’s death grip on our democracy by pushing for legislation enabling small-donor public financing and more.

FRANCES MOORE LAPPÉ

Cambridge, Mass.

The writer is a co-founder of the Small Planet Institute, a research center

 

 

Animal Music Monday: “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”

I probably first heard this song in the Kingston Trio version from 1959, because my older brother was a fan and their “.. from the Hungry I” album got played to ruin on the family’s monotone record player.

But the song dates from 20 years earlier, when a group called The Evening Birds stepped up to the microphones in a studio in Johannesburg and lead singer Solomon Linda, otherwise employed as a cleaner and packer for the record company, began to extemporize.  His song, call “Mbube,” or “The Lion,” became a hit in southern Africa.

In 1952, Pete Seeger and The Weavers introduced the song to the West, largely intact, based on a copy of the 78 rpm recording brought to him by the great musicologist Alan Lomax.  Seeger somehow misheard Linda’s “Mbube Uyimbube,” Zulu words meaning “the Lion, you are the lion” as “Wimoweh,” meaning absolutely nothing.  But his heartfelt, soaring falsetto caught some of the loneliness, fear, and courage of a kid out guarding cattle from lions in the African bush.

That eventually led to the 1961 version by The Tokens, which added a rather perky I’ve-never-had-to-worry-about-a-lion-in-my-life beat to Linda’s haunting lead.  That version also added words by lyricist George David Weiss, over Seeger’s “Wimoweh”: “In the jungle, the mighty jungle, The lion sleeps tonight…” and “Hush, my darling, don’t fear, my darling…”  Here’s that version of the song.

The song quickly became an international hit. Here’s how Rian Malan put it in a 2000 article for Rolling Stone:

By April 1962 the song was topping charts almost everywhere and heading for immortality. Miriam Makeba sang her version at JFK’s last birthday party, moments before Marilyn Monroe famously lisped, “Happy Birthday, Mister President.” Apollo astronauts listened to it on the takeoff pads at Cape Canaveral. It was covered by the Springfields, the Spinners, the Tremeloes and Glen Campbell. In 1972 it returned to the charts, at Number Three, in a version by Robert John. Brian Eno recorded it in 1975. In 1982 it was back at Number One in the U.K., this time performed by Tight Fit.

R.E.M. did it, as did the Nylons and They Might Be Giants. Manu Dibango did a twist version. Some Germans turned it into heavy metal. A sample cropped up on a rap epic titled “Mash up da Nation.” Disney used the song in The Lion King, and then it got into the smash-hit theatrical production of the same title, currently playing to packed houses in six cities around the world. It’s on the original Broadway cast recording, on dozens of kiddie CDs with cuddly lions on their covers and on an infinite variety of nostalgia compilations. It’s more than sixty years old, and still it’s everywhere.

Solomon Linda died in 1962, having received no credit or compensation for his work, and his wife was too poor even to give him a gravestone.

Dear Conservatives: Yes, You Can Go Green Again

Teddy Roosevelt and the conservative roots of American conservation.

by Richard Conniff/The New York Times

NOT long ago I wrote an essay on how to talk about environmental issues with conservatives. Talk persuasively, that is, not confrontationally. A conservative promptly replied that I was afflicted with “fundamental ignorance,” and possibly worse. The gist of it was that conservatives are already environmentalists, and the rest of us are just too stupid to recognize it. I put on my cheerfully positive face and suggested that he amplify his point by listing 10 pro-environment actions by conservatives in this century. (O.K., maybe that was my passive-aggressive face, given that George W. Bush was president for eight of those 16 years.) He replied with more name-calling.

This is a shame, because conservatives used to be almost by definition conservationists, focused on preserving our shared heritage from destructive influences. You can, in fact, date the rise of the conservation movement as a political force in this country to a December 1887 dinner party of wealthy big game hunters, largely Republicans, hosted in a Madison Avenue house by Theodore Roosevelt (still a hero to many modern conservatives, despite certain progressive leanings). He and his guests that night formed the Boone and Crockett Club, dedicated to preservation and management of game.

Putting to work their considerable social and political clout, as well as their money, they went on to save the bison from extinction, greatly expand the national park system, and help establish both the National Wildlife Refuge System and the United States Forest Service. The Lacey Act, still our most important law against wildlife crime, was largely their doing. Ducks Unlimited, a Boone and Crockett offshoot, became an early force for wetland conservation.

This natural link between conservatives and conservation lasted through much of the 20th century. Conservatives may complain about oil companies being shut out of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, but most of the credit for protecting that habitat belongs to Dwight D. Eisenhower, who also signed the nation’s first air pollution control law. Richard M. Nixon, not otherwise a candidate for sainthood, changed the way the nation lives, breathes and does business, establishing the Environmental Protection Agency and enacting the Clean Air Act and the Endangered Species Act, among other major environmental initiatives. George H. W. Bush, finally …

to read the full story,

Raid Frees Whale Sharks Illegally Bound for Ocean Theme Parks

A diver leads a whale shark out of the holding pen and safely back to the wild. (Photo: Paul Hilton/WCS)

by Richard Conniff/Takepart.com

In the latest episode in a remarkable crackdown on illegal wildlife trafficking in Indonesia, law enforcement officers there have staged a nighttime raid on a major supplier of large ocean species to the international wildlife trade. The raid revealed a scheme to illegally catch whale sharks—the largest fish species in the world, with the potential to grow to 41 feet in length and weigh 47,000 pounds—and export them to Chinese aquatic amusement parks.

Agents of the Ministry of Fisheries and Maritime Affairs found two whale sharks, each about 14 feet long, being held in submerged pens. Even fully grown, the sharks are harmless, slow-moving fish, typically swimming with mouths agape to filter-feed on plankton. Divers entered the pens and guided the sharks, which had been held for three months, back to freedom.

The raid was the result of a tip from Indonesia’s Wildlife Crimes Unit, a wing of the Wildlife Conservation Society. WCU had conducted an 18-month  investigation of the target company in the case. It was Indonesia’s seventh marine law enforcement action to take place this year with WCU support. In addition to those cases, which involved illegal trafficking in manta ray body parts, seashells, and sea turtles, the WCU assisted this year in the arrest of two poachers trading the body parts of endangered Sumatran tigers.

The raid was also part of an extraordinary campaign against wildlife trafficking by President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo and Minister of Fisheries and Maritime Affairs Susi Pudjiastuti, a former seafood entrepreneur. Indonesia has been notorious as the scene of

widespread illegal fishing, costing the country an estimated $20 billion per year in lost revenue and also causing severe damage to its coral reefs. Since Widodo and Pudjiastuti took office in 2014, the government has not only seized foreign vessels working illegally in its vast ocean territory but also blown up or sunk 170 of them, with 30 more scheduled for demolition.

The “sink the vessels” policy, though legal under international law, has caused concern in neighboring countries. But television coverage of these events has helped make the fiery Pudjiastuti a popular national figure.

The whale shark raid targeted facilities of Blue Aquatic Co. (also known as PT. Air Biru Maluku) on the island of Kasumba in East Indonesia. Workers there displayed a letter from the governor of Maluku province allowing them to collect ornamental fish. But the governor does not have the authority to grant that permission. In any case, whale sharks are a protected species in Indonesia and do not qualify by any stretch of the imagination as ornamental fish, a term generally referring to tropical fish for the home aquarium market.

Blue Aquatic Co. is owned by a mid-level Indonesian military official and a Chinese resident of Singapore, both now facing charges carrying a penalty of up to six years in prison and a $115,000 fine. “There is no excuse for catching whale sharks,” said Pudjiastuti in a press conference after the raid. “This is conservation. It has rules. Nothing can legalize what they have done.”

The WCU investigation in the whale shark case began in 2014 when an undercover contact provided a tip about live manta rays being shipped to a Chinese company called Zhuhai Chimelong Investment & Development. Chimelong had just opened Ocean Kingdom, the world’s largest ocean theme park, built at a cost of $5 billion, in Zhuhai, a coastal city in Guangdong province.  Zuhai aims to become “the Orlando of Asia,” serving tourists from neighboring  Macau, known as “the Las Vegas of Asia.” According to a source close to the investigation, evidence indicates that the whale sharks were also destined for display at Ocean Kingdom.

The South China Morning Post in 2014 reported “unanswered questions about the range of the animal attractions at Ocean Kingdom and the way they have been acquired.” The Post article included sharp criticism of Ocean Kingdom’s lack of transparency about its acquisition practices: “When people aren’t acquiring properly, all it does is open a market for more people to do the same,” said the head of a rival ocean theme park in Hong Kong.

The Post also quoted a Hong Kong dolphin conservationist who lambasted Ocean Kingdom for “doing everything you don’t want them to do.” He noted that Ocean Kingdom is the largest of perhaps 50 ocean theme parks planned or operating in mainland China but added that it is impossible to do anything about use of wild-caught animals or other animal welfare issues there, because “you can potentially be put in jail.” A spokesperson for Zhuhai Chimelong previously declined to comment on such charges.

The whale shark case, with its extensive international implications, is evidence of the difference one individual can make against the wildlife trafficking epidemic. In 2003, Dwi N. Adhiasto was working on trade issues for the Wildlife Conservation Society when he came up with the idea for a wildlife crimes investigation unit. The WCU now has a staff of 19 people and a budget of just $400,000. But it has helped bring 354 cases to trial and last year alone provided support in half of the 112 cases of wildlife trafficking prosecuted by Indonesia.

That work is making Indonesia a model for what other hot spots for wildlife crime—notably South Africa, Tanzania, Vietnam, and China—could be doing to protect the wildlife and resources that are their national heritage.

 

Animal Music Monday: “Cantus Arcticus”

This is a good one to listen to at dawn, with your coffee. It’s also known as “Concerto for Birds and Orchestra.”  The style is classical and it’s about 16 minutes long.  Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara wrote it in 1972. It features the calling of birds that Rautavaara taped around the Arctic Circle and in the marshlands of Liminka, Finland.

This is apparently from the liner notes, though I am taking it (with apologies) from Wikipedia:

‘The work is in three movements: The bog opens with a flute duet, after which the other woodwinds join in, followed by the birds. The second movement, Melancholy, features a slowed-down recording of the song of the shore lark. The final movement, Swans migrating, takes the form of a long crescendo for orchestra, with the sounds of whooper swans. At the end both birdsong and orchestra fade, as if into the distance.“

Peppered Moths–Fraud or Textbook Case for Evolution–Face The Test

(Photo: Ben Sale/Flickr)

The peppered moth has long been one of the most popular stories in all of evolution—for Darwinians and creationists alike. The Darwinians have always treated the sudden appearance in the mid-nineteenth century of dark-winged moths of this species (Biston betularia) as the first evidence of evolution taking place within a single human lifetime. Creationists have countered that this supposed slam-dunk for natural selection was instead just a product of biased scientific research, bordering on fraud.

A new study being published this week in the journal Nature finally resolves this often-bitter debate with irrefutable genetic evidence. So which side wins? Is it the textbook case for Darwinism? Or was it all a terrible mistake, as the creationists have alleged? I’m going to make you hold your breath for a bit while I fill in the background.

Until the mid-nineteenth century, the common form of peppered moth had a pale coloration suited to hiding on the bark of light-colored or lichen-coated tree trunks. The theory was that this camouflage enabled it to avoid being eaten by birds. But in 1848, in the English industrial city of Manchester, a specimen with black wings turned up, and by the end of the nineteenth century, this version of the peppered moth was everywhere. The paler, mottled version disappeared, almost becoming extinct.

The sudden shift was no accident, according to scientists. Reliance on coal for heating and industrial production in the nineteenth century blackened skies and forests. An editorial in the same issue of Nature quotes an 1851 railroad guide to the English industrial midlands: “The pleasant green of pastures is almost unknown, the streams, in which no fishes swim, are black and unwholesome … the few trees are stunted and blasted.” Pale moths could no longer hide against blackened tree trunks, and birds presumably devoured them. But the random appearance of the black form of the same species conferred a distinct advantage, because those moths were much harder for hungry birds to spot. It was natural selection in action.

(Incidentally, the same shift occurred in the same species at about the same time in the United States, particularly around pollution-blackened Pittsburgh. But most of the research took place in Britain.)

To test the Darwinian version of events, an Oxford University scientist named Bernard Kettlewell in the 1950s introduced moths of both colorations in polluted and unpolluted forests. He verified the theory that camouflage suited to local conditions—whether dark or light—saved those moths from being gobbled up by birds. Additional circumstantial evidence for natural selection developed after the 1950s, when anti-pollution laws began to unblacken the landscape. That proved advantageous to the lighter form of peppered moths, which began to make a broad resurgence.

Other scientists later quibbled over some of Kettlewell’s methods: Was it a valid test to pin dead moths to tree trunks, or to flood a forest with an unnatural abundance of living moths? Creationists then treated this healthy scientific scrutiny of methods as if it were a debate about the fundamental science—and blew it out of proportion, often with the help of selective quotation. In the normal course of science, other researchers subsequently tested the original proposition using better methods and verified Kettlewell’s results in meticulous detail. But Creationists have generally ignored that evidence and stuck with the original quarrel.

This brings us to the new genetic study, by a team of scientists largely working in the laboratory of Ilik Saccheri at the University of Liverpool. Applying “next-generation sequencing technology to open up what were previously treated as genetic black boxes,” they tracked the change in peppered moths to a specific gene. Then they narrowed the change down to a specific random mutation on that gene, exactly as Darwinian theory had predicted. The mutation involved what is popularly known as a “jumping gene” (a “transposon” or transposable element, to scientists)—a mobile segment of DNA that can change position within a genome and alter the expression of other genes. The researchers not only found the specific mutation, but they dated its appearance to about 1819, early in the modern era of heavy reliance on coal

Since Creationists have continued to use the peppered moth “to further an anti-science agenda,” said Saccheri in an interview, “I think it’s important to respond with additional layers of evidence. And so here we have in some sense the ultimate piece of evidence, that’s now written in stone.”

Jerry Coyne, the University of Chicago biologist that creationists love to quote for his past criticisms of peppered moth research, praised Saccheri’s work.  “I’m satisfied that the bird predation story is sound and the original experiment was right,” he said. The new study “completes this story. We now know what happens all the way from the mutation itself to the ecological forces involved.”

Saccheri recommended that Creationists–or the people who call themselves “creation scientists”– go to any natural history museum with a collection of peppered moths, and extract the DNA from both lighter and darker varieties. “You can do the test that we describe in the paper, and you will find the transposon”—that is, the mutation—“in the black ones. And further, you will find that not a single light colored moth has that. We’re no longer relying on historical records that people can cast aspersions on. You look inside modern biological material and there is only one conclusion you can draw.”

But I’m going to make a prediction: Creationists will not draw that conclusion. They will instead ignore the science, because what they care about ultimately has nothing to do with science, or facts, or even truth–and everything to do with blind religious faith.