“Darwin is best known for the theory of evolution, arguing that men are not only, quote, are, are only, not, not created, but they are not equal, as more, as some are more evolved. Whereas Darwin’s theory was used by atheists to explain away the belief in God….” — Jeff Frederick, GOP Member of the Virginia House of Delegates

How is it that thinking conservatives don’t cringe when they hear this? This man is, after all, the chairman of the GOP in Virginia. But I must suppose that the term thinking conservative is an oxymoron. As for Delegate Frederick, well, he is just a moron.

This is the GOP. If Jeff Frederick is the best and the brightest that the GOP has to offer, I’d hate to see the worst.

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It’s that time of year again.  The time when most (some?) people soften their hearts and and are a little kinder to their fellow man.

This video is amazing.

Watch it a few times and see if you don’t get a little misty eyed.  Notice how the dog does not use his teeth, which would have been faster and safer, but his front paws to clumsily drag his injured friend to safety.  Personally I think if it doesn’t touch your heart you simply don’t have one.

Following the week when a man was trampled to death by people fighting for Plasma TeeVees while no one stopped to help and in a world where we see things like this and this perhaps we could stop for a moment in this season for caring and take a lesson from this little dog who is most likely a homeless stray.

Happy Holidays.

Speaking only for me.

This week, the By The Fault Weekend Reader looks at the question of who are we?

From Big Think:

Who Are We?

Niall Ferguson, Professor of History, Harvard University

David Kennedy, Professor of History, Stanford University

Jonathan Haidt, Professor of Psychology, University of Virginia

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Primate Family Tree

Nearly half of all primates are in danger of becoming extinct, according to a study by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.

Habitat destruction and hunting for food and the illegal wildlife trade are the main threats to the world’s 634 primate species – 303 of which are now classed as vulnerable, endangered and critically endangered. The outlook for monkeys, apes and other primates has dramatically worsened due to logging and hunting, with some species being ‘eaten to extinction’. I might add that overpopulation and depeletion of natural resources threatens the survival of another primate but that’s another story.

Yellow Cheeked Gibbon

Gibbons are native to South-East Asia. Gibbons are the most distinct of the Great Apes still humans and gibbons share 95% of the same DNA. We share a common ancestor some 20 million years ago. Gibbons are also unique in that they are truly and exclusively monogamous. The theory of extramartial mammalian sex holds that the larger the difference in body size between a male and female of species, the higher the number of sexual partners. Male and female adult gibbons are identical in size and mate for life.

Red-shanked Douc Langur

The red-shanked douc langur, Pygathrix cinerea, is found in Vietnam. In Asia, more than 70% of primates are classified on the IUCN red list as vulnerable, endangered or critically endangered and in both Vietnam and Cambodia, approximately 90% of primate species are considered at risk of extinction.

Zanzibar Red Colobus,

In Africa, 11 of the 13 species of red colobus monkeys assessed were listed as critically endangered or endangered. Two may already be extinct: Bouvier’s red colobus (Procolobus pennantii bouvieri) has not been seen in 25 years, and no living Miss Waldron’s red colobus (Procolobus badius waldroni) has been seen by a primatologist since 1978, despite occasional reports that some still survive.

Golden Lion Tamarin

On the positive side, intense conservation efforts in Brazil have helped targeted species like this golden lion tamarin (Leontopithecus rosalia) to recover, and their status has been upgraded from critically endangered to endangered. Golden lion tamarin are simply amazing.

Family of Mountain Gorillas Killed in Rwanda

Scientists also came close to downlisting the mountain gorilla to endangered following population increases in their forest habitat that spans the borders of Rwanda, Uganda and Democratic Republic of Congo. However, political turmoil in the region and an incident in which eight animals were killed in 2007 led to the decision to delay the planned reclassification. There are no words for me. I don’t believe in capital punishment, but this is a crime against humanity. They are our cousins and such wanton destruction of life is hard to fanthom. In my own travels I remember once in Sumatra I was offered a tiger skin and penis. It is hard to see a magnificent creature felled for folklore.

The news for western lowland gorilla is better. A census by the Wildlife Conservation Society raised the estimate for gorillas in the Congo jungle from between 50,000 and 100,000 to around 200,000, substantially changing the picture of a great ape population thought devastated by the Ebola virus, hunting and deforestation.

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The Linnean Society of London is to publish a biological survey of the Yasuní National Park located in Ecuador’s Amazon basin. Studying an area of just two hectacres, a team of German scientists counted over a 100 different species. Most surprising was the find that ten different species of bats roosted in the zone. It is unclear how so many different species of bats coexist.

Unfortuntately, Yasuní is threatened by logging and oil and gas exploration.

My own personal fascination is with catepillars. I just think them amazing. In the first video, check out the one at the 1:10 mark and another at the 1:39 mark. Just amazing. In my native Colombia, I have seen so many amazing specimens. Frogs in Colombia are unbelieveable. The second video boasts a giant tree sloth that has to scurry for safety when its tree is felled by loggers.

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Today marks the sesquicentennial of the first public debate on the topic of evolution at the Linnean Society of London. It was an event planned in haste and set off by a letter received by Charles Darwin on 18 June 1858. The letter came from Ambon in the Ternate, a group of islands known as the Moluccas, between Sulawesi and Papua New Guinea. Writing to Darwin was a young English ornithologist named Alfred Russel Wallace who had been collecting specimens throughout the Malay Archipelago. Wallace would collect over 125,000 different specimens, over 80,000 of them beetles alone. Over a thousand of them were new to science. More importantly, Wallace noticed a distinction between the fauna of islands closer to the Asian mainland and those closer to Australia, the zoogeographical boundary now known as the Wallace line.

Recovering from a bout with malaria in 1858, Wallace took the time to write to Darwin about his observations.

The problem then was not only how and why do species change, but how and why do they change into new and well defined species, distinguished from each other in so many ways; why and how they become so exactly adapted to distinct modes of life; and why do all the intermediate grades die out (as geology shows they have died out) and leave only clearly defined and well marked species, genera, and higher groups of animals?

Darwin read Wallace’s maunscript with alarm for he had sat on his ideas (he had discussed them with others but had never set them to paper) on natural selection since his return on the Beagle in 1841. It is thus in the fortnight between 18 June and 1 July, 1858 that Darwin wrote a quick paper that together with the Wallace manuscript were presented to the Linnean Society of London.

For the next year and half, Darwin would write feverishly and in November 1859, The Origen of Species would be published. It is, without a doubt, the greatest book ever written.

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So much for the 36 year old wunder kid of the GOP, Governor Bobby Jindal has less than impressed me me twice this week. First he (and Barack Obama as well on this score) railed against the Supreme Court ruling that overturned the death penalty for child rapists. But now he has signed into law in Louisiana that allows the teaching of intelligent design in the classroom.

Louisiana public school teachers can now educate their students about the theory of intelligent design and scientific criticisms of Darwinian evolutionary theory thanks to a new law signed this week by Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal. The Louisiana Science Education Act now allows teachers to supplement the state’s curricula with additional scientific materials, but groups opposed to any debate over the “origin of the species” have warned that the new law will become the origin of the lawsuits if they believe it facilitates religion.

Lawmakers, however, were enthusiastically in favor of the Act signed by Jindal. The state Senate had passed the bill (SB733) with a unanimous vote, and the state House had approved it by a vote of 93-4.

The new law requires teachers to follow the standard curriculum, but allows a school district to permit a teacher to supplement his course with additional scientific evidence, analysis, and critiques regarding the scientific topics taught to his students.

One major goal of the law is to support an “open and objective discussion of scientific theories being studied including, but not limited to, evolution, the origins of life, global warming, and human cloning” in public elementary and secondary schools.

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Cross-posted from The Global Sociology Blog.

Ha! I knew it! But now, I have the science to support it! Via Lifescience.com,

“Evolutionary biologists claim that sociality is what has made humans such a successful species. We are masters at what anthropologists and others call “social intelligence.” We recognize and keep track of hundreds of relationships, and we easily distinguish between enemies and friends.

More important, we run our lives by social calculation. A favor is mentally recorded and paid back, sometimes many years later. Likewise, insults are marked down on the mental score card in indelible ink. And we are constantly bickering and making up, even with people we love.

Sarcasm, then, is a verbal hammer that connects people in both a negative and positive way. We know that sense of humor is important to relationships; if someone doesn’t get your jokes, they aren’t likely to be your friend (or at least that’s my bottom line about friendship). Sarcasm is simply humor’s dark side, and it would be just as disconcerting if a friend didn’t get your snide remarks.

It’s also easy to imagine how sarcasm might be selected over time as evolutionarily crucial. Imagine two ancient humans running across the savannah with a hungry lion in pursuit. One guy says to the other, “Are we having fun yet?” and the other just looks blank and stops to figure out what in the world his pal meant by that remark. End of friendship, end of one guy’s contribution to the future of the human gene pool.”

So it’s more about the people who “get it”, who might then become part of one’s in-group versus the people who don’t, those who remain outside, the out-group. The stronger one’s in-group, of course, the stronger the evolutionary advantage as one can activate these links for survival.

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The UK Guardian reports today on a team of British psychologists working in the forests of western Uganda have recorded the first evidence of sexual politics influencing the mating calls of our closest primate ancestors. The findings are intriguing:

The findings suggest that chimpanzees are able to use their calls for more complex social communication than previously thought.

Simon Townsend, a psychologist at the University of St Andrews who led the study, said the 25 adult females in the community had apparently developed subtle tactics to either boost their reproductive success, or reduce the risks to their newborn offspring.

One of the most serious risks a chimpanzee faces is being killed at birth by an older male. Females also kill other chimps’ young if they consider them a drain on food resources or as a potential competitor for a mate.

Only 1.6% of our DNA differs from that of closest cousins, the chimapanzee and the bonobo. As Jared Diamond (of Guns, Germs and Steel fame) has written we are but one species of chimpanzee. Their traits and habits are largely our own. Infantcide is common among chimpanzees as is genocide, a trait we share with our close cousins. Bonobos are more gentle but they have sex of all kinds all the live long day.

Last year, scientists at Stirling University in Scotland reported that male chimps in West Africa appeared to raid orchards and farms for fruit as gifts for their potential mates.

No different than flowers and diamonds really.

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