Research Archives - Page 11 of 13

14/10/201330/09/2013

Sulawesi Bird Expedition 2013

Ah the summer, how I miss it! In mid-June I departed (on the horrendously long journey) to the beautifully sunny, tropical islands off the south-eastern coast of Sulawesi, Indonesia. No, I wasn’t on holidays; I am fortunate enough to call this part of the world my study site. During the six week visit, I aimed to gain further behavioural and ecological data on a number of bird species as part of my current PhD project – for more specifics on that see here. I am even more fortunate to be able to carry out this research with the financial and logistical support of Operation Wallacea, an internationally renowned conservation charity that works with researchers from all over the globe, from a variety of different disciplines. As part of this support, I work with students and volunteers in the field, helping them to design effective dissertation projects and field methods. This year I was joined by five students (as opposed to two last year) from a variety of universities in Ireland and the UK.

From the first day it was back to the usual diet (mostly consisting of rice) and routine: up at 4.30am for breakfast and out surveying by 6am. These surveys consisted of walking 1km transects through scrub, farmland and/or forest edge collecting data on my target species’ diets, competitors (via agonistic interactions), social habitats, courtship and breeding, as well as their foraging and flocking behaviours. In the evening we would establish new transects and then get stuck into data entry at night. This routine makes for days that are long and tiring but hugely rewarding. Watching birds so closely allows you to gain intimate insight into their lives and observe some fantastic interactions, such as family groups of Lemon-bellied White-eyes preening each other and pairs reinforcing bonds with gifts of food. You also see how tirelessly and (sometimes) viciously males will fight off other males in order to retain their mates and, therefore, mating privileges, as we saw in the beautifully adorned Olive-backed Sunbird. Spending so much time in the field, you come across a great variety of other wildlife including troops of macaques, the strange bear cuscus, giant monitor lizards, pythons, huge fruit bats and hairy and multicoloured caterpillars that you never touch, to pick out but a few.

An adult Lemon-bellied White-eye returning with food for its chicks

A beautiful fruit bat relaxing in a banana tree

I’m delighted to say that data collection went exceedingly well for the students and myself – that is, when the weather was on our side (we had a week of non-stop rain while Ireland and the UK were experiencing a heat-wave; typical!). We surveyed five islands in total and got some superb behavioural data on each of our five target species. While managing a large group like this was difficult and tiring at times, it was a great experience and the students were a great bunch really. In the company of the assistants and students on the project, as well as the many other members of staff, students and volunteers from other projects, with their combined wealth of experience and knowledge, it was fantastic to share ideas, brainstorm and discuss current/potential future projects.

The biggest highlight for me was catching up with the elusive ‘Wangi-wangi’ White-eye, a bird we know very little about. It was touch and go for a while, and I was getting quite worried to be honest, but eventually we got excellent data on their flocking and feeding behaviour and who they compete with, directly and indirectly. Between us, the group racked up a number of new bird records for the islands and saw some spectacular species such as the Great-billed Kingfisher, Rainbow Bee-eater, Yellow-eyed Imperial Pigeon, Great-billed Parrot, Yellow-billed Malkoha and Red-knobbed Hornbill. Phwoar!

The stunning Yellow-billed Malkoha, a Sulawesi endemic

Sadly, this summer was the last of my field trips to Indonesia as part of my PhD project. I enjoyed it immensely and, for certain, I will be back. I am grateful to Operation Wallacea for allowing me to be involved in such a programme and I hope that they will continue to expand into more areas of this highly unique and understudied part of the world that is full of discoveries yet to be made.

Author and Photo credits:

Seán Kelly: kellys17[at]tcd.ie, @seankelly999

04/10/201305/04/2019

What I did this summer: Tortured some bees

Among the multiple pressures currently driving decline in bee populations, little attention has been given to naturally occurring toxins in plant nectar. We carried out research this summer on invasive Rhododendron ponticum, a plant that contains neurotoxins in its floral nectar. We found this toxin to be lethal to honeybees, but apparently benign to the plant’s main pollinators, bumblebees. Differential responses by bee species to toxins and other pressures means we need to consider bee decline on a species by species basis. Continue reading “What I did this summer: Tortured some bees”

01/10/201330/09/2013

Radio Ga Ga Science: a student’s point of view

I was planning to write a blog about our new paper recently published in Animal Behaviour however something relatively unexpected seemed to scupper those plans, the media!

For those who haven’t come across an article talking about the best way to swat a fly or heard me rambling away on radio, our paper has been covered from Roscommon to North Korea so I won’t delve into it further here, especially with some nice summaries and our article available through open access.

What I wanted to write about was the perspective of a PhD student caught in the whirlwind of the big bad media world and how I felt about the whole experience as both a student and scientist.

First off I still have not fully grasped what happened, to sit on the Dart and read about your own research in the metro is very surreal and its extremely flattering to think that someone thought that what I was working on would be interesting for someone else to read about!

Despite it being a fantastic thing to be acknowledged in the media, it did also make me feel very anxious as something I had been working on for nearly two years was completely out in the open multiplying every hour as it became part of the international news recycling system. I also now know what it feels like to be the squirrel on water-skis fluffy news piece at the end of the news, there to lighten up the fact that the news is the even more depressing then watching “The Road”.

This lack of control is probably something any scientist is not comfortable with, with every comment section full of ludicrous assumptions and misunderstanding about the research none of which I could, or even should, try to set right or defend. In fact after so many “I knew that when I was five” comments it becomes more fun just to see whether the Independent or the Daily mail fared worse below the line (the guardian was worse again but seems to have closed the comment section).

While I think this experience has been nothing but beneficial through advertising our science, in terms of the more general aspect of science communication with the public I found it a little tricky to decide how useful it was. This is due to what I found to be the fine balancing act of lowest common denominator reporting and getting the intricacies of you research across. For example, while I think the metaphor of swatting a fly is a good way of explaining our research in a real world scenario, we did not expect it would spawn a full article on the best methods to swat a fly, or that we would be referred by Ray D’Arcy as “Fly Experts”, despite the fact that flies were not in our dataset or that none of us have ever studied anything on flies!

It also raises the question of the value of engaging with the media from a scientist’s point of view. In one respect I think it is important to engage with the public as at the end of the day research is largely funded through the State and it’s important to remind the public not only that research is worth it but that “blue skies” (awful term) research cab also be relevant. I think in some respects I am happy we achieved this with sites specifically aimed at 10-12 year olds with a specific educational aim and also through some good interviews on radio that I think got a generally positive response.

However with this there are also a lot of “the best way to swat a fly” pieces which aren’t getting anything across and at times may even start to trivialise the research and hence devalue its worth in the public’s eye (clear from comments hoping that no money was spent on this research).

Overall I think almost any science that enters the media will produce a mixed bag of results. But after the level of enthusiasm from people and the genuine line of questions such as seen in this reddit forum (Unlike the Irish reddit forum), I think it’s nearly always worth it to let your research out there as it will undoubtedly be genuinely appreciated by at least some people.

Author and Photo Credit:

Kevin Healy: @healyke, healyke[at]tcd.ie

30/09/2013

Radio Ga Ga Science

In the midst of the media circus surrounding our paper “metabolic rate and body size are linked with perception of temporal information”, I was invited to speak about our work on several radio shows. What followed was a mixture of immense excitement, nervous trepidation, deflation and all round good fun. This is only the third time I have spoken about research on the radio, but this time there was so much exposure that I really learned a lot – mostly how to manage my own expectations and general sanity with the whole bizarre affair.

It starts with excited phone calls with producers of the radio shows. They tend to call you at ungodly hours and want to chat with you about the work. I get the impression this is as much to sound out what you are going to say and how you will come over on the airwaves as it is to let you know what the focus of their on-air discussion will be.

What followed for me was a very exciting and bleary-eyed 6am trip to our national broadcasting headquarters RTE in their Dublin studios where I would do a “link up” to the British BBC radio stations for their various breakfast shows. Since I was just there to use their facilities, I was shepherded down to the basement to sit in a tiny studio cubicle beside their engineering and IT department. Were it not for a very nice, interesting and friendly sound engineer (lots of engineers I know are “sound” but this guy was both – its an Irish thing) Kevin Cronin, I would have been lonely and bored indeed.

First lesson – you get mucked about. I don’t think a single time-slot I was given was kept strict, so you end up sitting around not quite sure who you are going to talk to next. Then, suddenly, the earphones go live with the sound of the radio show you are going to link with, and a producer’s voice comes over to check the line and give you a few minutes warning alerting you to the go-live. Next thing, typically following some grim story unfolding from somewhere around the world, you are introduced by some typically odd segue and off you go. Talking to what could just as easily be a few million people as a few thousand. They will take liberties with your time, so if you need a break, tell them you can’t talk at a certain time. Don’t feel beholden to them – although if it’s a big show then probably you should make the effort.

Second lesson – the presenter is in charge. Make no bones about it, you are there to answer their questions, not to talk about your actual research. They will have read your press release if you are very lucky, else they will have garnered the gist from the producers notes or worse still from whatever news article they read about your work on the way to work – a chinese whispered, now long-since bastardised version of your science. In my case, I ended up talking about how best to swat a fly, not the tiger beetle that runs so fast it runs blind, or the swordfish that speeds up and slows down its visual processing abilities as and when required. No. Fly swatting. I don’t work on flies, never have, likely never will. I don’t mind though, it’s not up to me to say what’s interesting in my work for other people, just as it’s not up to the artist to determine what people should see in their painting – Jesus face on a piece of toast for all I know.

Third lesson – it gets boring. If you find yourself doing a few of these in one day, you will likely be over the excitement after the first few. Then repetition and boredom sets in. Same questions, but now, more aware of what’s happening and determined to get my point across I try to steer the topic back to the actual work we did and away from flies. Nope. Remember, the presenter is in charge. You can sense their desire to cut you off when you start to drone on, and you are back to flies. It also gets tiring, so remember to eat and load up on coffee.

It gets easier. Once the first nerves die off (I wasn’t particularly happy with my first interview of the day on BBC Radio 4 with John Humphries), and you stop trying to second guess what you will be asked, you find yourself just going with the flow. It has certainly helped me with my “elevator pitch” and I would like to think I would be more confident if and when this kicks off again sometime in the future.

It was a mad day, typified by having loud conversations on my phone in the tea room in Zoology along the lines of “yeah, no, I can’t do that slot, I’m with BBC world service at 12.30, I can probably fit you in after though…”.

Best parts – I got to chat with John Humphries live on air, shook Ryan Tubridy’s hand (I just stopped him in the corridor and gave him no choice!) and I got to talk to “Daddy Ray” (Ray D’Arcy from my childhood favourite Zig and Zag show The Den). My parents are proud to say the least, various people high up in College seem happy, and my PhD student Kevin Healy has had a whirlwind start to his academic career – on 16^th September 2013 he won the internet.

Last pointer – don’t get flippant or try to be funny if you are anything like me. At the end of my piece, I took a swipe at Ray D’Arcy’s audience with a bit of a pun joke saying that some of them had too much time on their hands with their over-thinking of how to swat a fly.

Author:

Andrew Jackson, @yodacomplex, a.jackson[at]tcd.ie

Photo Credit:

Kevin Healy

03/07/2013

How to build a vulture trap

Last month I spent a month in Mbuluzi Game Reserve in Swaziland attempting to build a walk-in trap that will allow me to capture vultures. I want to be able to tag the birds with GPS trackers and ask a host of interesting questions from which a flood of Nature papers will follow.

Step 1 - Clear the area — Step 1 – Clear the area

Step 2 - Create some support for the poles — Step 2 – Create some support for the poles

Step 3 - Erect the frame — Step 3 – Erect the frame

Step 4 - Add the mesh — Step 4 – Add the mesh

Step 5 - bait the area (this sickly Waterbuck had died) — Step 5 – bait the area (this sickly Waterbuck had died)

Step 6 - record everything that comes down — Step 6 – record everything that comes down

Step 7 - play the waiting game (perching African White-backed Vultures) — Step 7 – play the waiting game (perching African White-backed Vultures)

We’ll have to wait for the vultures to get habituated to the area before adding the front to the trap. Once this happens we can proceed. So this is a ‘to be continued’…

Author

Adam Kane: kanead[at]tcd.ie

Photo credit

Adam Kane

28/06/2013

Neglected diseases: Ascaris

Adult Ascaris lumbricoides — Adult *Ascaris lumbricoides*

It has been estimated that less than 10% of global spending on health research is devoted to diseases or conditions that account for 90% of the global disease burden. These are mostly diseases of the world’s poorest people. The general public, and funding agencies, often equate third world diseases with the big three killers; HIV/Aids, tuberculosis and malaria. There is, however, a group of conditions known as neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) which have an even wider impact. They include some of the most common helminth parasites that, while don’t often kill, result in morbidity and debilitation. One of these, the large human roundworm Ascaris lumbricoides, is the focus of research by Professor Celia Holland at Trinity College Dublin.

A. lumbricoides infects over a billion people globally, mainly in tropical and sub-tropical regions. Infection occurs through the faecal-oral route. Poor sanitation results in soil becoming a reservoir for infectious eggs and ascaris is included within the group known as soil-transmitted helminths or geohelminths. This is why, sometimes, the salad is not the safest bet. Once swallowed the infective ova hatch in the small intestine. From the small intestine they migrate to the proximal colon, through the mucosa and onto the liver and eventually the lungs. In the lungs they penetrate the alveolar space, move into the pharynx where they are swallowed and returned back to the small intestine. The migratory route of ascaris and other related helminths may be an evolutionary holdover from a skin penetrating ancestor.

The discovery of the ascaris life cycle in humans is one of those great anecdotes that pepper medical history. In 1922 Japanese paediatrician, Shimesu Koino, infected both a volunteer and himself with ascaris eggs. He realised the larvae were migrating when he found large numbers of larvae in his sputum. Put plainly, he coughed up baby nematodes that had penetrated his lungs. Not a methodology likely to get past ethics committees today.

Worldwide, severe ascaris infections cause approximately 60,000 deaths per year, with serious health consequences observed in a further 122 million people. Children from preschool age to adolescents carry the greatest worm burdens. Ascariasis is the disease associated with ascaris infection and symptoms include appetite loss, lactose maldigestion and impaired weight gain. As children are at vulnerable stages of growth and development, these nutritional deficits lead to stunted growth, diminished physical fitness and impaired memory and cognition. Other symptoms of adult worms include abdominal distension and pain, nausea and diarrhoea. In heavy infections entangled worms have been known to cause intestinal blockages. The migrating larvae cause their own set of problems which include acute lung inflammation, difficulty in breathing and fever.

Ascariasis and other neglected infectious diseases are diseases that result from poverty but also help to perpetuate it. Children cannot develop to their full potential, and infected adults are not as productive as they could be. The good news is that there is a renewed momentum in combating these diseases. The World Health Organization (WHO), and public-private partnerships are linking their efforts to combat NTDs in a more coordinated and systematic way. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have to date committed more than US$1.02 billion in grants to organizations working to address NTDs and have named ascaris as one of their newly targeted diseases. The WHO has set out a strategy for eliminating morbidity from soil transmitted helminths in children by 2020.

This makes Professor Holland’s new book “Ascaris: The Neglected Parasite”, a timely and important contribution to the fight against NTDs. The book is the first on ascaris in over 20 years and presents a wealth of new insights. The 16 chapters from top authors from around the world include detailed information on the biology, epidemiology, host and parasite genetics and public health and clinical aspects of A. lumbricoides and the closely related A. sum, an economically important parasite of pigs. As any researcher new to a field knows, having up to date research collected and summarised in an assessable format, with lists of lovely, lovely references, is a gift. This is the third book Professor Holland is senior editor on, the others being “Toxocara the enigmatic parasite” and “The Geohelminths: Ascaris, Trichuris and Hookworm”.

Author

Karen Loxton: loxtonk[at]tcd.ie

Photo credit

Wikimedia commons

14/06/201314/06/2013

An army of skeletons with lasers

The word “Morphometrics” was already mentioned on this blog here and here. It’s a horrible term which nevertheless describes a really cool field in evolutionary science…

Today we’re having a workshop with François Gould (@PaleoGould) so hopefully everyone will know more about all things morpho by the end of the day. I won’t go into the juicy details of procrustes analyses, elliptic Fourier transform or other Bezier polynomials (see Zelditch and colleagues “Geometric Morphometrics” book or Julien Claude’s excellent “Morphometrics with R” for further details about these friendly terms). Instead, I’d like to talk about one aspect of data collection.

In a simplistic way, morphometric data can be sorted into two categories. Two dimensional data, such as linear measurements or shape outlines, can be obtained in many ways, from trusty calipers (which are digital these days) to computer measurements of landmarks placed on pictures (see here for a nice list of usable software). The second type of data is obviously 3D data which, again, may be collected in many ways using fancy technology from digital microscribes to medical CT-scanners.

I use a surface 3D scanner like this one which has a fairly well defined list of pros and cons.
-Firstly, it is way more time consuming to scan specimens than to use either 2D methods or a 3D microscribe. My scanner takes roughly one hour per skull.
-Secondly, the scanner is quite expensive even though the final scans aren’t always completely accurate and may have problems of poor quality.

Despite these problems, I’ve found that, in the end, the list of pros is much longer!
-It is really easy to use the scanner and, even if the price is not cheap, it’s far from unaffordable.
-The data you get from a scan is easily transportable and therefore easily sharable; think about posting or e-mailing a skull! I think this point is really important when you are studying fossils. You can usually find skulls of most living primates in any natural history museum but fossils are really rare and specimens are only housed in a few places so access to 3D scans would be a great asset to interested researchers.
-Another point linked to this sharing idea: it is more scientifically friendly since you can put your scans into online supplementary materials and publish them with your papers.
-Furthermore, even if it’s a less technical point, 3D scans look pretty amazing and are excellent illustrations for your papers like this 3D ring-tailed Lemur skull:

This list of pros and cons can continue on ad infinitum and ultimately all morphometric methods have both advantages and disadvantages of one kind or another. Aside from all these technical details, I think that the best part of using a scanner is the chance to play with lasers! It’s just so cool to be measuring skulls in a museum with a normal set of calipers while your scanner spits out lasers in all directions and then, by magic, the giant lemur (Megaladapis) on the desk is there staring out from your computer screen.

Screen Shot 2013-06-13 at 14.46.10 — Megaladapis – the skull in the American Museum of Natural History is about 30cm long but only 50MB on my computer!

Author

Thomas Guillerme: guillert[at]tcd.ie

Photo credit

Thomas Guillerme

29/05/201318/02/2019

Do badgers play Friesian tag?

While there is irrefutable evidence for the transfer of bovine TB between badgers and cattle, the mechanisms of transfer are not clearly documented. In order to reduce such transfer, it is obviously important to understand how infection takes place.

With such questions in mind, data from a study of free-ranging badgers was combined with detailed records of paddock use by cattle. Each study badger was carrying a personal GPS unit on a tailored collar, so their movements could be monitored to within a few meters. The paddock use of the cattle was recorded on a daily basis. The data were combined, using mapping software, such that a daily log could be constructed for badger and cattle activity. Continue reading “Do badgers play Friesian tag?”

24/05/2013

May I take your order?

My PhD involves studying the foraging behaviour of vultures. So far I’ve done theoretical work and also had the luck to get some second hand empirical data. But I’d like to be able to get some field data first hand. To that end I’m setting off to Swaziland on Saturday with the intention of building a vulture restaurant and a walk-in trap. The first item takes a little explaining. Vultures are carrion feeders, which means their food source is unpredictable, the bird never knows when the next wildebeest is going to drop dead. So they’re quite sensitive to declines in food availability. But a vulture restaurant is a conservation tool that acts as a supplementary feeding station for the birds. The people organizing the restaurant can deposit carrion at the site thereby providing an extra food supply for the vultures. This is done to keep the birds within an area, to feed them during times of food scarcity or in my case to aid in their capture.

Alongside the restaurant we’re going to build a walk-in trap, a simple structure that the birds walk into before we close the door behind them and have a PhD’s worth of data points. Well, it’s not quite that easy. I want to be able to find out to where these birds are foraging at a high temporal resolution so we will be putting GPS tags on the vultures once we capture them. This means some poor soul will be entering the trap and extracting the birds one by one, each animal getting tagged before being released back into the wild. I should stress this has been done before on many occasions and the birds are all freed within minutes without any ill effects.

So far a lot of research done in this area provides us with broad-scale movement patterns. With my finer scale data I’ll hopefully be able to pick out some quite specific aspects of vulture foraging behaviour. Wish me luck!

Author

Adam Kane: kanead@tcd.ie

Photo credit

Wikimedia commons

22/05/2013

Science be praised, please cure me of my Yoda Complex

My former PhD student, Luke McNally and I authored a paper published recently showing how “Cooperation creates selection for tactical deception”. Using a combination of mathematical models and analysis of empirical data from 24 primate species, we show that acts of deception are more likely to occur when the individuals in the group show greater cooperation. In other words, deception and cooperation go hand-in-hand. Perhaps not a surprising result, as Rob Brooks recently pointed out in a very accurate and nice blog post on our paper, but the evolutionary forces that might maintain deception in society have not been previously described.

We have enjoyed some media coverage with this paper, including some international science slots, a bit of national radio and Rob’s blog post. I take some mixed pleasure in the fact that a creationist website picked up on both our paper and Rob’s post. Its something of a tongue-in-cheek achievement to have caught their eye given my total opposition to creationism in all its forms. I’m also quite proud to have earned a “Darwin baloney” award (which I might add to my website as a badge of honour assuming I’m not infringing copyright). Im also intrigued to have the mental disorder “Yoda Complex” bestowed upon me by this group, even if it is not the Urban Dictionary definition but rather their own invention because “because we thought of it independently” (Editor’s comment in http://crev.info/2013/05/evolutionists-confess-to-lying/). So happy with this flattery than I now tweet under @yodacomplex.

Ordinarily I would steer clear of getting sucked into arguing with such groups, but their article just annoys me. I’m even more annoyed that I can’t reply to their post on their site without signing into their site, and registering with them is a bridge too far. Equally frustrating is their anonymity which makes directing my counter-arguments somewhat indirect.

The consequence of their argument is that “if lying evolved… how are readers to know who is telling the truth?” which leads them to the title “evolutionists confess to lying” (http://crev.info/2013/05/evolutionists-confess-to-lying/).

The basis of their argument goes:

“Imagine a liar so skilled, he convinces his listeners that he is 100% against the worst dishonesties in politics, public relations and propaganda. He tells you he wants to achieve enormous social good to provide a better understanding of how lying evolves. Now, add to it that he is self-deceived. Doesn’t his credibility implode? How could one possibly believe a word he says?”

How can one believe what a person says? This is exactly why we have science. Our results are open for all to examine and check. The results might be incorrect (but we are confident in our analyses), but until someone shows us exactly where we have gone wrong, then we can take them as being a true and fair reflection of our study system. Our mathematical model shows under what circumstances deception (lying) can be sustained in an evolutionary sense in any society subject to a cooperative based reward system (in this case a system governed by the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma). The prediction from the model is that mechanisms that might enforce cooperation (such as only cooperating with other co-operators and spurning those who cheat) create a niche where lying can profit and proliferate. Our analysis of data from 24 primate species backs up our theoretical model, showing that the more likely a species is to engage in cooperative acts, the more likely deception is to occur in their society.

The creationist author goes on to make a major error in interpreting the whole basis of the study of the evolution of social behaviour.

“In the evolutionary world, there is no essential difference between cooperation and deception. It’s only a matter of which side is in the majority at the moment.”

This is just plain incorrect, and is the entire basis for their spurious argument. In the study of social behaviour (irrespective of evolution) there is indeed a fundamental difference between cooperation and deception (although I think they really mean defection here, with deception being a means to hide ones defection in the wording of the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma). In the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma, and related games like the Snowdrift Game, cooperation is the act of assisting another individual so as to share a reward. Defection on the other hand is the act of cheating on the other person in the game so as to walk away with the entire reward for themselves. It is absolutely not a “majority” based definition. Deceivers in our model try to trick co-operators so as to walk away with their share too by convincing them that they intend to cooperate. The kool-aid scenario that follows in that blog post is just not relevant since it invokes a semantic argument about how the players choose to define cooperation and defection that is simply not present in these evolutionary models of social behaviour. All the author has done is to flip the labels of co-operators and defectors. The outcome of their scenario would be that the poisoners (who are actually the defectors as per any sensible definition of their behaviour in cooperative game) would kill all the co-operators leaving only themselves. Indeed, this matches the fundamental prediction of the evolutionary models which offer “defect all the time” as a consistent stable end-game scenario. It is the goal of most evolutionary studies of social behaviour to learn what mechanisms exist in societies that mean we don’t get stuck here, since it is clear that many primates, including humans, have a much more cooperative society than that depressing outlook.

“Since all these evolutionists believe that lying evolved as a fitness strategy, and since they are unable to distinguish between truth and lies, they essentially confess to lying themselves. Their readers are therefore justified in considering them deceivers, and dismissing everything they say, including the notion that lying evolved.”

This is the rather annoying consequence of their incorrect logical arguments. We can and do distinguish very clearly in our models and reasoning between truth and lies – at least in these models we do. Also, just because we point out that lying can have an evolutionary selective advantage (which is hardly surprising), surely doesn’t make us liars? I can’t see what the mechanism there could possibly be.

Just to end, I have to say that it is really difficult not to ridicule this type of article. The reasoning is just so off-the-wall, based on a manipulation of what science is all about, and with a really nefarious motivation running through it of debunking science for the true believers. I did laugh, I did sneer, (and I did take @yodacomplex as a twitter account, and I love it); but, I have tried here to avoid sneering since they use that against us (see the comments under their article). In fairness though, giving us a “Darwin Baloney” logo, and administering a mental health disorder on us (even if they made it up themselves) is pretty much name calling and sneering in my book – even if I am rather flattered to have acquired their attention.

Author

Andrew Jackson @yodacomplex

Photo credit

wikimedia commons