Missing Links Found

Since creationists still like to complain about all the "missing links" they imagine in the fossil record, I decided to post some of the most famous, recently discovered "transitional" species.

The "Link" Between Fish and Amphibians: Tiktaalik roseae

This creature lived around 375 million years ago, and it has an almost perfect mix of fish and amphibian features. The fossils were found on Ellesmere Island in the Canadian arctic.

Some "Links" Between Hippos and Whales

Genetic studies show that the land animals most closely related to whales are hippos. Fossils found in Pakistan over the past 20 years give an almost complete sequence from hippo-like animals to true whales. Above, Skeleton and reconstruction of Ambulocetus natans. Based on the structure of the skull and neck bones, this animal was a cetacean, but it had large legs with bones strong enough to support its weight. It lived about 50 million years ago.

Rodhocetus. This animal lived about 46 million years ago. It is clearly more like a whale than Ambulocetus, and its fossils are found in marine sediments, indicating that it spent time in deep water.

Basilosaurus, about 40 million years ago. This animal -- mistaken for a dinosaur when it was found, hence the name -- is clearly a whale, a full-time marine creature, but with features of land life no modern whale has, like developed hind limbs. Creationists used to mock the notion that whales could have evolved from land animals, but this is now one of the most complete evolutionary sequences.

The "Link" Between Humans and Chimps: Australopithecus afarensis

The species of the famous "Lucy" fossil, with a chimp-sized brain but fully upright gait and useful hands.

Australopithecus afarensis lived in Africa between 3.9 million and 2.9 million years ago. They are recognizably somewhere between humans and chimpanzees. And they are only part of a chain of fossils that extends from even more apelike forms through Homo habilis, Homo erectus, and archaic Homo sapiens to us. The notion that there is a "missing link" between humans and apes is fatuous.

A Van Gogh Drawing

In the shop at the Phillips Collection today I found a card showing this Van Gogh drawing, which they own. I asked the clerks if it was on display, and they said no. Ack -- I like this ten times more than most of what they have on their walls, although I suppose it isn't really part of their mission.

I wrote some time ago about how much I love Van Gogh's drawings, of which there is a fabulous collection here.

The Phillips Collection

This started yesterday, when I left my phone in my office. I didn't want to be phoneless all weekend, and I am supposed to be in the field Monday, so I started toying around the idea of driving down to Washington to get it. But I wasn't going to drive all that way just to pick up the phone. It occurred to me I have been vaguely intending to take my elder daughter to an art museum, and I have also been vaguely intending to someday visit the Phillips Collection, which is only a few blocks from my office. Aha! A plan was formed. Mary seemed enthusiastic, so we did it.

The Phillips Collection is a private museum founded by Duncan Phillips in 1921 to showcase contemporary painters. The most famous parts of the collection are the Impressionist works, including Renoir's The Luncheon of the Boating Party -- Phillips paid a huge sum for this in 1923, knowing it would put his museum on the map -- and some Van Goghs. My favorite of the impressionist works was Pierre Bonnard's The Riviera, above.

There is sizable collection of mid 20th-century American works, including this famous Georgia O'Keefee, Red Hills, Lake George (1927).

This was my favorite work that I had never heard of, Window Shade by Loren MacIver. You may laugh, but I think this is cool. There was a bunch of strange stuff in the collection, and I liked that. There was also a bunch of stuff that just left me shrugging. But that's the price you pay for idiosyncrasy.

My daughter is still in the anti-Modernist phase of youth, and she doesn't like the Impressionists, so there wasn't much here for her. I'll have to take her to the Walters soon. I had fun.

Today's Dumb Headline

Why Obama is ending the war in Iraq

This version is from Yahoo, but I have seen similar wording elsewhere. Argh. Obama is not ending the fighting in Iraq, which hardly deserved the name of war anyway. He is withdrawing US troops from the country. The fighting may or may not go on.

While I'm at it, let me point out that this is not really Obama's decision. Several Republican Presidential candidates attacked him for this, and the Post is running an online poll asking, "Do you support President Obama's decision to withdraw troops from Iraq by the end of the year?"

But it wasn't his idea. At the end of the year the existing agreement between the US and Iraq, under which US troops are in the country, expires, and the Iraqi parliament will not support a new agreement. They will not agree because their constituents, the Iraqi voters, are overwhelmingly opposed to letting US troops stay. We said when we invaded that we wanted to create an Iraqi democracy, and this is democracy in action.

A Dead Mastodon, a Bone Fragment, and a Controversy

Back in the 1970s, a mastodon skeleton was excavated near Manis, Washington. The skeleton had a strange feature: a stray bone fragment seems to be sticking into one of the rib bones. The excavator, Carl Gustafson, dated the mastodon to around 14,000 years ago and speculated that the bone fragment might be a human-made spear point. There the matter rested for 35 years, just another unexplained anomaly in a world full of them.

Then along came archaeologist Michael Waters of the University of Texas, a big believer in "pre-Clovis" (before 13,300 years ago) humans in the Americas. Waters had the specimens redated using modern methods and used a CT scan machine to image bone fragment. The fragment has not been removed from the surrounding bone, which would require destroying the specimen, but the scan (bottom left image above) does make it look like a bone point.

And now both the bones of the mastodon and some surrounding charcoal have been dated to around 13,800 years ago, around 600 years earlier than the first Clovis sites in the northwest.

Which is very interesting. But I still don't understand what these early dates are supposed to mean. Whoever else was living in the Americas when Clovis culture emerged, about 13,300 years ago, they immediately disappeared. Clovis spread across North America in a century, became the dominant culture everywhere (which is hard to imagine if the continent was already full of people) and then spawned an offshoot that spread across South American to Tierra del Feugo in a few more centuries. Everywhere Clovis people went, animals went extinct. And so, it seems, did any people who were here before them, since all the genetic studies show that Native Americans are descended from a single small founder population.

If there were people here before Clovis, they seem to have had about as much impact on North American history as the Vikings.

I don't want to sound certain about any of this; it was a long time ago, and we don't know very much about what was happening. But I wish people would think about the implications of their data instead of just getting excited about old radiocarbon dates. If there were people in North America for hundreds or thousands of years before Clovis, what happened to them, and why did they leave so little evidence of themselves?

An Arundel Tomb

Side by side, their faces blurred,
The earl and countess lie in stone,
Their proper habits vaguely shown
As jointed armour, stiffened pleat,
And that faint hint of the absurd—
The little dogs under their feet.

Such plainness of the
Hardly involves the eye, until
It meets his left-hand gauntlet, still
Clasped empty in the other; and
One sees, with a sharp tender shock,
His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.

They would not think to lie so long.
Such faithfulness in effigy
Was just a detail friends would see:
A sculptor’s sweet commissioned grace
Thrown off in helping to prolong
The Latin names around the base.

They would not guess how early in
Their supine stationary voyage
The air would change to soundless damage,
Turn the old tenantry away;
How soon succeeding eyes begin
To look, not read. Rigidly they

Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths
Of time. Snow fell, undated. Light
Each summer thronged the glass. A bright
Litter of birdcalls strewed the same
Bone-riddled ground. And up the paths
The endless altered people came,

Washing at their identity.
Now, helpless in the hollow of
An unarmorial age, a trough
Of smoke in slow suspended
Above their scrap of history,
Only an attitude remains:

Time has transfigured them into
Untruth. The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.

--Philip Larkin

Senate Confirmation

John Bryson has finally been confirmed as Commerce Secretary. Matt Yglesias:

Recall that Bryson was nominated way back in June. He was nominated for a post that is only ever the subject of political controversy when a Census with redistricting implications is underway. He was nominated at a time of maximum distance from a Census controversy. Not only was it an utterly uncontroversial job, he was an utterly uncontroversial choice—a kind of old-time moderately conservative businessman with some environmentalist leanings. But Senate Republicans vowed to block him anyway. Not because they had objections to him, but because they wanted unrelated policy concessions. Specifically they wanted ratification of trade agreements that the Obama administration already supported. Since President Obama had already agreed to GOP demands, it was extremely difficult for him to give in to GOP demands. Then Republicans made a new demand that the trade deals couldn’t be ratified unless congress also stopped offering Trade Adjustment Assistance funding. At that point, Bryson was being held hostage to the ratification of trade deals that were being held up by Republicans! So the post languished vacant for months. Then finally the trade deals got signed late last week. . . .

Someday, maybe, we’ll adopt a form of government in which jobs aren’t regularly deemed so crucial as to require Senate confirmation but sufficiently trivial as to be allowed to have nobody doing them for years.

History

The lesson of history is not that it has no lesson; the lesson of history is that only by patience and thought do we amid a thousand blunders slowly improve the lot of man. And to the study of man in this large sense the humanities and history must remain forever committed.

--Howard Mumford Jones

Today's Statistic

About 11% of adult Americans do not have a government-issued photo id. For African Americans, the number is closer to 25%.

Source is the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University

Rolling Downhill

Down a Namibian sand dune, to be precise. From National Geographic.

The Earth Really is Getting Warmer

As I have said several times, the data underpinning fears about global warming are really very good:

Back in 2010, Richard Muller, a Berkeley physicist and self-proclaimed climate skeptic, decided to launch the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project to review the temperature data that underpinned global-warming claims.

He and his team would scour and re-analyze the climate data, putting all their calculations and methods online. Skeptics cheered the effort. “I’m prepared to accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves my premise wrong,” wrote Anthony Watts, a blogger who has criticized the quality of the weather stations in the United Statse that provide temperature data. The Charles G. Koch Foundation even gave Muller’s project $150,000 — and the Koch brothers, recall, are hardly fans of mainstream climate science.So what are the end results? Muller’s team appears to have confirmed the basic tenets of climate science. Back in March, Muller told the House Science and Technology Committee that, contrary to what he expected, the existing temperature data was “excellent.” He went on: “We see a global warming trend that is very similar to that previously reported by the other groups.” And, today, the BEST team has released a flurry of new papers that confirm that the planet is getting hotter. As the team’s two-page summary flatly concludes, “Global warming is real.”

In particular, the BEST data refute the "urban heat island effect," the argument that since cities are hotter than the countryside, it was urbanization, not climate change, driving the curve upward. No, it's getting warmer in the country, too.

I remain skeptical about predictions concerning the climate future (and almost all other predictions), but this is real science, not some scam dreamed up by environmental socialists.

The Obama Doctrine

Crowing about Gadhafi's end, Obama and some of his advisers are touting this operation as a model for projecting American power:

A senior administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal thinking, described Obama’s strategy as one that “uses U.S. military power in a more focused way with smaller footprints, leveraging our very unique capabilities.”

“When we took office, you had an approach of very large U.S. military footprints in Iraq and Afghanistan,” the official said. “We’ve moved toward a far more targeted approach that leverages U.S. military capabilities rather than large forces overseas”. . . .

“We’ve taken out al-Qaeda leaders, and we’ve put them on the path to defeat,” Obama said. “We’re winding down the war in Iraq and have begun a transition in Afghanistan. And now, working in Libya with friends and allies, we’ve demonstrated what collective action can achieve in the 21st century.”

What this reminds me of is the early thinking of Donald Rumsfeld, who also wanted to emphasize America's "unique capabilities" -- air power, drones, special forces -- instead of sending in large American armies. The overthrow of the Taliban, engineered by Rumsfeld, was a perfect example of this kind of operation. Obama's emphasis on "collective action" riles up today's Republicans, but in Afghanistan we also relied on NATO allies and Afghans who hated the Taliban. The Rumsfeld doctrine failed when it came to overthrowing Saddam, an operation that required a large ground army, but of course I don't think we should ever have attempted that. My general presumption is that if we need a large ground army, because nobody else wants to fight beside us, we should probably stay home. And since Afghans don't much want to defend their government against the Taliban, we should get out and let events take their course.

In the Autumn Woods

Spent the morning exploring some woods along Antietam Creek, looking for places where Indians might have camped. It was a perfect morning. I watched a hawk hunting groundhogs in a field, hovering and diving like a tern over the ocean. I startled eight or ten turkeys who flew up from their hiding place all around me. I met a herd of deer at close range, including a buck with the biggest antlers I have seen in years.

After stumbling up and down steep bluffs, blundering into a thicket of stinging nettles, and falling over a slick log, I finally found a lovely little terrace right next to the creek. I knew I was close to the park boundary, though, so I went searching for a sign or fence that would mark the boundary to make sure I wasn't on private property.

And I found this lovely old stone wall. God bless these old German farmers, I thought, with their rigorous ideas about order and property. No question about where this boundary line is.

All in all it was a wonderful morning, even though we didn't find anything.

Gaddafi is Dead

And killed rather gleefully, it seems. Well, that chapter of Libya's history is over. I wish them all the best, and fear that they will find democracy less wonderful than they imagined.

Libyan Rebels Control Sirte

According to numerous witnesses, Libyan rebels now control Gaddafi's home town of Sirte, the last major settlement in the hands of loyalists:

Libyan fighters on Thursday overran the remaining positions of Moammar Gadhafi loyalists in his hometown of Sirte, ending the last major resistance by former regime supporters still holding out two months after the fall of the capital Tripoli.

Reporters at the scene watched as the final assault began around 8 a.m. and ended about 90 minutes later. Just before the assault, about five carloads of loyalists tried to flee the enclave down the coastal highway but were met by gunfire from the revolutionaries, who killed at least 20 of them.

“Our forces control the last neighborhood in Sirte,” Hassan Draoua, a member of Libya’s interim National Transitional Council, told The Associated Press in Tripoli after Sirte’s fall. “The city has been liberated.”

Now comes the hard part.

Grand Banks Cod are Finally Recovering

The world's richest fishery, the cod fishery on the Grand Banks off Newfoundland, was destroyed between 1960 and 1990. It started in the 1950s, when huge factory ships from Japan, Russia, and other countries descended on the Banks with giant nets. This trend accelerated in the 1960s, and the catch rose from its historical level of around 200,000 tons a year to 800,000 tons in 1968. Then it started to decline, falling 60% by 1975. At that point Canada banned foreign fisherman from within 200 miles of its shores, and the cod started to recover. But with the foreigners excluded the Canadian government decided to push for Canadian cod fishing in a big way, lending money for investments in boats and processing plants. For a while the catch was strong -- 688,000 tons in 1988 -- and the economy of Newfoundland boomed like never before in its history. In the late 1980s scientists started to warn that the level of fishing was unsustainable, and government scientists recommended a limit of 125,000 tons per year. The government thought this threatened too many jobs and arbitrarily doubled the limit. Starting in 1990 the catch began to crash, and in 1994 the government was forced to declare a complete moratorium on cod fishing on the banks. More than 30,000 jobs were lost.

Everyone thought the moratorium would last only a few years, but the cod stubbornly refused to come back. In fact, from 1994 to 2002, despite the fishing ban, the cod continued to decline. The once teeming waters of the Banks, where fishermen could catch cod just by dipping baskets into the water, were empty. The tiny, isolated "out towns" of the Newfoundland coast, founded to fish for cod and without any other economy, went into a despair from which they may never recover.

Nobody really knows why the cod could not recover, but a good guess is that the fishing was so intense, using heavy nets that were dragged across the ocean floor, that the ecosystem was damaged in ways we don't fully understand. Another problem is that fishing continued on the banks for other other species, including mackerel (which eat herring which eat young cod) and the small shrimp that feed many larger species, further messing up the ecosystem. Also, these fishermen often caught cod "accidentally", as "by-catch", sometimes so many that some environmentalists accused mackerel fishermen of taking cod on purpose. Whatever the reason, the cod did not come back, and it seemed like they might never come back. When I first learned about this, nearly ten years ago, I found it profoundly depressing.

Now, though, there is finally some good news. According to World Wildlife Fund-Canada, the number of cod on the Banks has grown by 69% since 2007. This is nothing to crow about, since the estimated population is only about 20% of what it was in 1980, but at least the collapse seems to have been stopped. Perhaps we will one day see the Banks teeming with fish again.

UPDATE

I just discovered another reason why the cod population was so slow to rebound: cod mature slowly:

Cod mature late — at 4 to 6 years old — and they can live as long as 25 years. Female cod do, in fact, produce astonishing numbers of eggs. But older cod lay two or three times as many eggs as younger cod. This means that a healthy cod population must include relatively large numbers of older fish.

Ancient Etruscan Image of Birth

This may be the oldest known depiction of childbirth in western art. Dating to 600 BC, it is a fragment of an Etruscan ceramic vessel. It was found in a sanctuary at Poggio Colla that seems to be dedicated to a goddess, so that may be the goddess in the picture.

Occupy Wall Street and the Stumbles of Left Democracy

In this excellent column Anne Applebaum makes two important points about the recent wave of protests in both America and Europe. First, the protesters everywhere feel alienated from the normal course of democratic politics.

In New York, marchers chanted, “This is what democracy looks like,” but actually, this isn’t what democracy looks like. This is what freedom of speech looks like. Democracy looks a lot more boring. Democracy requires institutions, elections, political parties, rules, laws, a judiciary and many unglamorous, time-consuming activities, none of which are nearly as much fun as camping out or chanting slogans.

As she notes, there is actually at least one good reason why the protesters are not interested in the rigamarole of democracy:

Yet in one sense, the international Occupy movement’s failure to produce sound legislative proposals is understandable: Both the sources of the global economic crisis and the solutions to it lie, by definition, outside the competence of local and national politicians. . . . The emergence of an international protest movement without a coherent program is therefore not an accident: It reflects a deeper crisis, one without an obvious solution. Democracy is based on the rule of law. Democracy works only within distinct borders and among people who feel themselves to be part of the same nation. A “global community” cannot be a national democracy. And a national democracy cannot command the allegiance of a billion-dollar global hedge fund, with its headquarters in a tax haven and its employees scattered around the world.

Globalization increases the sense that much of what matters in our lives is not under our control. As studies of stress show, feeling out of control is very bad for us. So if whether we get to keep our jobs depends, not on how hard we work or on how well our own organization performs, but on decisions made in Hong Kong, Beijing, or Brussels -- if we have no chance of influencing those outcomes, even through the government that is supposed to represent us -- that pretty much sucks.

I think that for Americans, at least, the fear of globalization is overblown. The United States is big enough to have a huge impact on how global trade is conducted and similar issues. But if you ask what we ought to do with that power, you enter a political war zone. And not only do the two parties slug it out over this in every election, only one side knows what it wants. American conservatives believe in the free market. What do American liberals believe in? I cannot think of an answer that would fit into a long paragraph, let alone into a slogan. Speaking just for myself, I think that capitalism is dynamic but inherently unfair and we should use the power of the government to smooth out the unfairness and make sure that everyone gets a fair deal. Yet I am deeply suspicious of regulation as a way of accomplishing anything, and I think our government is bloated and in important ways insane. So I waver back and forth between supporting schemes to rein in capitalism (e.g., regulation of Wall Street) and feeling like we are drowning in bureaucracy. If you have never seen the amount of paperwork Sarbanes-Oxley (our post Enron law) requires for two publicly traded companies to form a joint venture, you probably would not believe it. I think we ought to use taxation instead of regulation in many cases (e.g., tax carbon emissions instead of regulating them) but Americans as a group are so fed up with paying taxes that they can easily be whipped up to vote out anyone who even proposes raising their taxes (as opposed to those on other people).

I do not believe that anyone knows how to create an economy that is both dynamic and fair. At Occupy Wall Street they oppose the huge bonuses of Wall Street firms, but what can anyone do about it? Schemes to limit what companies pay in compensation strike me as unworkable and doomed to fail. I think we can do better at creating a more just world, starting with a real national health insurance scheme. But I don't think anyone knows how to go about building the sort of world I and most other liberals would like to see. Hence the frustration.

In Bruegel's Backgrounds

Until this week I knew only two things about Pieter Bruegel (1525-1569).

I knew that he did apocalyptic, hellish nightmare scenes, like this (from Fall of the Rebel Angels, 1562), full of frogs, fish and scatology.

The other was that he drew and painted scenes of peasant revelry, like this (from Kermiss at Hoboken, 1559). I am impressed by the twisted creativity of the hellish scenes but have never gotten into them like some people do, and I always saw the revels more as sources for social history than art.

This week at the library, looking for something to peruse while I waited for an oil change (my next stop), I grabbed a copy of a big, beautiful picture book, Pieter Bruegel by Philippe and Francoise Roberts-Jones, originally published in French in 1997. All the familiar stuff is here. But what really blew me away was the blown-up details from the backgrounds of Bruegel's historical paintings. Some of these are tiny; that bird image at the top of the post can't cover more than a square inch (2.5x2.5 cm) of canvas. But what a little wonder it is. It and the image above are from the background to The Census at Bethlehem, 1566.

Just one of the numerous background figures from Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery, 1565, a painting that in total measures only 9.5 x 13.5 inches (24 x 34 cm).

From Hunters in the Snow, 1565.

From Winter Landscape with Skaters and Bird Trap, 1565. On the original the house is less than an inch (about 2 cm) tall, the bird trap about the same size.

I suppose there is something modern or post-Impressionist about my fondness for these images, rendered so small that they must necessarily be coarse, grainy, and unpolished. But love them I do.

Dollhouse Murder Scenes

The Judsons family didn't make it through Halloween night, 1937. All the windows and doors were locked from the inside. . . .

From the documentary, Of Dolls and Murder:

Before forensics, DNA, and CSI we had dollhouses – an unimaginable collection of miniature crime scenes, known as the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death. Created in the 1930s and 1940s by a crime-fighting millionaire heiress grandmother Frances Glessner, the Nutshells helped homicide detectives hone their investigative skills.

In Unpapered Bedroom, "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" checked in, but only Mr. Smith checked out. . . .

Around the boarding house, Maggie was known as a "good time girl" who never let a thing like epilepsy stand in her way. . . .

Retroscope has a nice collection of images.

Herat Citadel Restored

The medieval citadel of Herat in Afghanistan has just been restored, thanks to grants from the US and German governments.

Antietam was a Union Victory

It is commonplace to refer to the Battle of Antietam as a "bloody stalemate" or some such -- Wikipedia has "draw" and "tactically inconclusive." Civilwar.org has "While the Battle of Antietam is considered a draw from a military point of view, Abraham Lincoln and the Union claimed victory" and later uses Union "victory" in sneer quotes.

Now it is true that thanks to McClellan's cautious bumbling, what could have been a stupendous Union victory became something less.

But it seems to me what if your enemy invades your country, and you send your army to stop him, and there is a battle, and he turns tail and marches rapidly back the way he came, that counts as a victory. Or am I missing something?

Antietam: Bloody Lane, Terrain, and Battle

Back at the Antietam Battlefield today. I had long wondered, pondering the awful photographs of the landmark known as "Bloody Lane," how the Federals had managed to take it.

In the photographs it looks like a strong position, and it was defended by crack Confederate troops, the divisions of D.H. Hill and Anderson. Yet one Union Corps, Sumner's, stormed the position, routing both divisions, destroying the Confederate center and opening Lee up to a decisive defeat. McClellan, of course, failed to take advantage of this moment even though he had a whole corps in reserve (Porter's) he could have thrown into the breach opened by Sumner. This folly allowed Lee to regroup and flee unmolested back to Virginia. When I pondered how many positions Lee's men had defended against attack by much stronger Union forces, I always wondered why they failed to hold this one.

As soon as I reached the spot, I understood immediately. Never, in all my years of wandering battlefields, has one glance told me so much. The sunken road that became Bloody Lane runs, more or less, along the crest of a ridge, but like the rest of the Antietam area the terrain in front is complexly folded into a mess of hills, ridges, and valleys. There are several places along the road where a company of men could easily walk to within 50 yards of the lane before its defenders would even see them. In some places the road is on the back side of the ridge, and from the crest of the ridge any attackers could easily fire down into the lane.

These photographs don't really convey how hilly and complicated the terrain is, and how many angled valleys and blocked lines of sight make it a nightmare for defenders. The sunken road was not a strong position, but a trap.