The Guardian asks us if we need a new theory of evolution

Betteridge's Law of Headlines: If the headline poses a question, the answer is "no."

Although it's interesting, I'm not sure what this Guardian article is trying to achieve. If there's a problem with the theory of evolution known as the Modern Synthesis, it's that every time you criticize it, it adds your objection to itself as a complexity or wrinkle, so it's hard to falsify. It certainly isn't "wrong," though there are many ways you could look at it from a different angle and see a completely different emphasis, which some contemporary theorists do.

 
The article itself is harmless, waffling about some dusty corners of evolution that are fascinating, weird, and wonderful, but not in themselves threats to what most people know as "evolution."

What was really off-putting was the article starting out upfront with the Creationist's Gotcha: Where do eyes come from?

"The usual explanation of how we got these stupendously complex organs rests upon the theory of natural selection. You may recall the gist from school biology lessons. If a creature with poor eyesight happens to produce offspring with slightly better eyesight, thanks to random mutations, then that tiny bit more vision gives them more chance of survival. The longer they survive, the more chance they have to reproduce and pass on the genes that equipped them with slightly better eyesight. Some of their offspring might, in turn, have better eyesight than their parents, making it likelier that they, too, will reproduce. And so on. Generation by generation, over unfathomably long periods of time, tiny advantages add up. Eventually, after a few hundred million years, you have creatures who can see as well as humans, or cats, or owls. This is the basic story of evolution, as recounted in countless textbooks and pop-science bestsellers."

He goes on, "The problem, according to a growing number of scientists, is that it is absurdly crude and misleading. For one thing, it starts midway through the story, taking for granted the existence of light-sensitive cells, lenses and irises, without explaining where they came from in the first place."

And yes, it would be crude and misleading, but unless he went to school in 1859*, it isn't described that way. Professors do not postulate that some poor creature somewhere was born with a bad retina, poor lens, substandard optic nerves and rubbish rhodopsin, but over subsequent generations each of those things got better. What is taught, I hope, is that even very simple creatures can have light-sensitive pigments that allow them to sense whether they are in the dark or in the light, and every "innovation" thereafter exists in a living thing today or is clear in the fossil record. We can still see (sorry) single-celled animals with eye-spots, insects with compound eyes, octopuses with their right-way-up eyeballs, and vertebrates sporting the weird eye configuration humans have, with blood vessels and nerves on top of (and therefore obscuring) the retina.

Wikipedia has a discussion here. (And before anyone starts, Wikipedia's main problem these days is that it's not simple enough. It's certainly not that it's biased (at least in this case) or over-simplified.) If you want a more scholarly explanation, here's one, and here's another.

*Because that's the speculation Darwin himself engaged in back in 1859. It was rapidly improved upon.

Upside-down retina reference

Ants in my bioactive vivarium

 

Mrs. F being miserable in her temporary cage

Does anyone know any good ways to get rid of ants in a bioactive vivarium?

The vivarium is on a cart whose wheels are treated so that ants can't climb up them. There's a tablecloth velcroed around the cart to hide its utilitarian nature. A couple of nights ago, when the cart was on concrete, a blade of grass from the flower planter was long enough to touch the fabric. By morning the ants had made that tiny bridge into a thoroughfare and moved in. The ants are the ones with multiple queens that can set up a nest with just a few migrants. Obviously I've relocated the geckerino, trimmed the veg, and evicted the vast majority of ants but there are a few still in there.

Will Neem Oil work? So far it's lived up to its hype of killing every single thing I don't like while not harming a hair on the head (or leaf) of anything I actually cherish but I would not be at all surprised if that didn't hold for geckos.

My experience of ant baits and ant hotels has been that ants see them a mile off and never visit. But spray chemicals are spray chemicals. 

Mrs. F is a day gecko who eats baby foo and crested gecko food so I don't have to introduce crickets after treatment for weeks, or even months. 

But what kills ants?

Robert Plant & Alison Krauss - When the Levee Breaks (Glastonbury 2022)

I don't have the main strength to go to festivals these days, but I sure appreciate the live feeds they have. 

This is the sort of performance I'd have given my eye teeth to have seen back in the day. Robert Plant doing Levee with a kind of Kashmir vibe. The audience don't seem to know what it is they have in front of them. 

Led Zeppelin - Live in Landover, MD (Feb. 10th, 1975) - 8mm film

I love the way new Led Zeppelin films and tapes continue to surface after all these years. Enjoy this slice of history. 

You all follow Heart of Markness, I hope? 

Mark Donohue's podcast plays selections from the new soundtapes as they arrive. Bookmark it!

Jackson's Chameleons hanging out

 Khachaturian (Mr K for short) is a Jackson's Chameleon. It's not his birthday. But behind him, being almost invisible, is his wife, Mrs K. She was one year old in April. It's not long since I saw her being born. (Jackson's are live-bearing; they don't lay eggs.) She's certainly grown into a big, bossy adult but it's the male of the species that has the spectacular looks. 

Mr and Mrs K here are enjoying the morning summer sunshine in So Cal. (They're not tropical lizards so they get put back into the shade before midday.)

Ms F at a few days old - well, it could be her. She was in a plastic tote with her brothers and sisters. 

Mr F the giant day gecko is 26 this month

 My Grandis Day Gecko - formerly known as a Geico Gecko - was 26 this month. At least, that's his observed birthday. His vet records show him as an adult in late 1996 and he was fully grown at least a few months before that, when I got him.  

Books generally say Phelsuma grandis lives around 13 years, but Mr F has beaten those odds. He's not exactly in prime condition, I have to admit. He's been blind for years and we hand feed him with fruit-based Crested Gecko food. (Day Geckos love fruit as well.) He seems to mostly enjoy life. His favorite things are warmth, sticking to vertical glass surfaces, hiding in bamboo tunnels and fruit-based gecko food. He had all of these things for his birthday party. 

Happy Birthday, Mr. F!

Mr F sitting on his bamboo hide-away

Hopwood Hall opening for tours

 Hopwood Hall.

According to the BBC, Hopwood Hall, built in the 1420s, is being restored by an American, Hopwood DePree.

I've forgotten what my part of the family's association is with Hopwood Hall - ISTR the name coming from service there, rather than being the owners - but I'm glad a Hopwood has come forward to restore it. It seems he thought it would be a fun thing to do, but found it intricate and tedious. Still, he's sticking with it. Part of it is opening for tours this month. Sadly, I'm where DePree is from - I'm near LA, he's back in Lancashire.

Last I heard the hall was full of monks or the RAF or something but I guess they went away and the roof started to fall in, as they do.

I might even buy his book.

Kalanchoe collection - update on K. millotii

Correspondent Kyle lets me know that the plant labeled K. millotii which I described here is most probably Kalanchoe x gildenhusii.  That's a hybrid of K. millotii and K. tomentosa, and explains why it's showing characteristics intermediate between the two. 

Here's the page on the International Crassulaceae Network with the deets. 

Mine was labeled (incorrectly) as K. millotii. Kyle says that this hybrid is often sold under the invalid name Kalanchoe 'Behartii'. 

Egrets

Egrets

I've had a few

But then again, too few to mention.

Birds on hay bales, near the Salton Sea. 

They may not be egrets. I'm no birder. 

On writing: The one eyed, one horned, flying purple people eater vs aphantasia

A friend and I watched Dune recently.

“That’s not how I imagined Leto,” I said of Oscar Isaac.

“What do you mean, not how you imagined him?” he said.

“Not like the picture in my mind’s eye when I read the book,” I said.

After a few follow-up questions, I learned that he didn’t have a mind’s eye.

I assumed everyone experienced a book the same way. After a while, the words on the page disappear, and you’re watching people move around places and do things. As someone explained it online, "The words describe something, and you imagine it happening as you read. That's what reading a story is.”

But for 2% of readers, no movie plays in the mind. They have aphantasia, inability to visualize imagery. (Everyone has different levels of this ability – it’s a spectrum. Some people imagine it so perfectly, that they can even smell it. That’s hyperphantasia. I’m not going to go all Oliver Sacks on you. That’s it for the psychology.)

I thought at first they must not read enough to have learned the trick. Apparently not. In an experiment, people were fitted with goggles and presented with two images, one for each eye. The brain only sees one of them. If the person was first asked to imagine something, and then presented with one image resembling their mind’s eye picture, and in the other eye an unrelated picture, most people see the related picture. Those with aphantasia see either picture, with no correlation. There is no image “generated” by imagining something. (Dreams, which don’t involve the visual processing part of the brain, are not affected by aphantasia.)

Imagine a "a one-eyed, one-horned, flying, purple people eater.”

Got it?

Some of you just saw their screen. The rest of us saw a purple monster eating people. (And a few pedants saw a monster eating purple people.)

This revelation made some difference to my writing habits. Why? Because writing involves simile and metaphor and there’s a basic assumption that readers can hold the images in their head and compare them.

(Not mine - I nicked it from Facebook.)

 
The first ever mention of the “mind’s eye” is in Cicero, where he explains what makes a good simile. An orator should not speak of “Charybdis” but of “a whirlpool,” because “the eyes of the mind are more easily directed to those objects which we have seen than to those of which we have only heard.” Good advice, I always thought – but what if a reader has no mind’s eye?

Carl Zimmer, writing in the New York Times, described it as “thinking only in radio.” In online conversations, I learned that those who saw head-movies as they read loved upfront descriptions, because they could furnish the room or plant the garden in their mind and commence watching. Those who heard only the radio quickly tired of description, which to them is a list presented for no good reason. They dropped any book that failed to focus on a character’s inner life (their relationships with people, emotions, and reactions).

As a reader and a writer, I love description. Setting the scene with a Charybdis or two, ensuring flowers are correct for the season, choice of silverware or plastic forks match the characters’ current circumstances…it all adds up. But some readers will never “see” it.

One writerly trick is to “storyboard” what you’re writing, either on paper as cartoons or in your imagination. I spend an hour working out the movements of say, a fight, because someone will certainly tell me if I’m wrong.

“If he’s standing between her and the window, against the light, how could she see the gleam of a knife in his hand?”

But I learned some readers are skipping descriptions. They just want to know WHY he has a knife. Maybe a little less choreography is warranted?

Another thing writers do is critique other writers’ stories. That means deliberately slowing down to catch typos, homonyms, and poor or confusing grammar. I’ve found that critical reading snaps the internal stream of pictures for me, and text becomes a series of ciphers to be decoded. Is that what aphantasics see?

I learned a lot from watching Dune with that friend. We don’t all have the same experience when we crack open a book. And the more I try to write a description that can have only one meaning, the more likely it is that 2% of readers will throw the book against a wall.

[Written for my writing class's end-of-term presentation]

Kalanchoe collection: new K. beharensis bush

 I said I was getting a new Kalanchoe - here it is. It's a dwarf K. beharensis. According to the label, it'll grow to about 3 feet (a meter) high and slightly less than that in spread. Mind you, according to the label, it's a "Fang". It clearly isn't a Fang - there are no under-leaf tubercles in sight. The previous owner has written 2020 on the label, and it's apparently over five years old. It's going to look a little small in a barrel close to the tree-form beharenses but its abundant curly foliage should more than make up for its size. 

Kalanchoe longiflora, Tugela Cliff Plant

 Last but not least, I have a Kalanchoe longiflora, a relatively common South African succulent that is grown for its spray of long-lasting flowers.  The one I got has not grown or divided much at all over the course of a year, nor has it flowered, but it's sitting there looking quite pretty. It's the red plant at the back, behind the K. fedtschenkoi.  (The tiny stalky ones are baby Pink Butterflies, which get everywhere.)

More information can be found here. 

(I say last but not least, but I'm getting a new plant tomorrow...possibly more to come!)