This is an octopus eye:

This is an octopus brain:

I have to point this out because the creationist Eric Metaxas said a remarkable thing:

But the octopus isn’t the only such miracle. “Convergent evolution” is all over nature, from powered flight evolving three times to each continent having its own version of the anteater. Think about that. As one delightfully un-self-conscious “Science Today” cover put it, convergent evolution is “nature discover[ing] the same design over and over.” Well, good for nature!

But as Luskin argues, there’s a better explanation for a tentacled mollusk having a mammal’s brain and human eyes. And that explanation is common design by an intelligent Engineer. And like all good engineers, this this one reused some of His best designs.

Umm, the octopus has a retina with the photoreceptors on the inner face, unlike mammalian retinae that have the photoreceptors on the side away from the light. The octopus has no blind spot, and the axons of the eye emerge all over the back of the eye; mammalian axons have to traverse the inside of the eye and exit at a spot with no photoreceptors. The visual receptors of the octopus use the rhabodmeric transduction pathway, and mammalian photoreceptors use the ciliary pathway.

What kind of ignoramus would suggest that the octopus has human-like eyes?

Maybe the kind with a small central ganglion wrapped around their esophagus? Nah, that’s an insult to molluscs.

I quite annoyed one of the authors of that “Kill All The Predators argument, who butted heads with me on Twitter and told me I had to go read this longer essay by Jeff McMahan which would address all my objections, because philosophers all seem to think that if they can babble long enough, they’ll ultimately be persuasive. Spoiler alert: it just made the problems with their idea wordier.

In particular, I was told to read section 3 and 4, which deal with objections to their argument. So I’ll just address that bit here, because I think their defense is dead with the second sentence.

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I got up all bleary-eyed this morning, and before I got my first sip of coffee, the first thing I saw, blasted across Twitter and all the popular news sites, was the news that a new species of human, Homo naledi has been discovered in South Africa. They have the partial skeletons of 15 different individuals, over 1500 bones, all recovered from a single cave. They’re calling it a new and unique species, and further, they’re claiming that the site is a ritual burial chamber.

Whoa. Brain is whirling. This thing is all over the net, over night. Better drink more coffee.

OK, that’s better.

I’m a little put off by the abrupt and sensationalist appearance in pop news sites, but here’s the science paper. It’s published in eLife, an interesting journal I’ve written about before. It’s peer-reviewed, the lead authors have a respectable reputation, and it looks legit. It’s a real discovery: a cache of bones in a very difficult-to-reach, sheltered site. One of the fascinating bits of the story is that the cave is so inaccessible, reached through such narrow crevices, that all the bones were recovered by a team of women who were small enough to fit.

No matter what, this is an impressive and exciting discovery. A whole small population of individuals, all found in one place? There are years of analysis waiting to be done. Here’s the holotype and the large collection of bones used in the first publication. Homo naledi is a small-brained, bipedal hominin, that’s for sure.

Now for my reservations.

• The researchers haven’t yet dated the specimens! We don’t even have a guess! That’s how preliminary this publication is. I can sort of understand wanting to get an exciting find like this published as soon as possible, but I have no idea where to place this species in the family tree now. Is it 3 million years old, or 300 thousand?

• It’s been labeled as a new species, but is it? I’m not an expert on human evolution by any means, but it looks like it fits within the parameters of Homo erectus, and the authors note its close resemblance to H. erectus, but also insist that there are small, unique features to the skull. I’d want to see more input from other experts. It’s always tempting to slap a new species name on a new specimen, but I’d be just as thrilled if this turned out to be a comprehensive assemblage of a H. erectus group.

• The news stories are all speculating that this is a ritual burial site, suggesting that our ancestors had certain cultural practices long before we expected. We can’t say anything about the timing, because we don’t know how old the site is! But there are some suggestive details. The cave is extremely hard to access (although we don’t know anything about accessibility when the cave was in use), and most interestingly, only H. naledi bones are found in the cave. That suggests it was not simply a rubbish pit, or that animal remains naturally washed into it. Ritual burial seems like a good explanation, except that these people had brains the size of an orange.

Most of the coverage right now seems gushing and uncritical, but I recommend the article in the Guardian, which has a good balance of enthusiasm and skepticism. I think it’s a great day for the science of human evolution, but the full details are going to take much longer and much more work to emerge. I’m looking forward to further reports. The world had better fund more anthropology/paleontology research so I don’t have to be kept waiting!

If ever I run out of creationist pseudoscience (it will never happen), I can always turn to another source, the Men’s Rights movement, especially their radical anti-woman wing. Here’s a prime example from RooshV: Research Suggests That A Woman’s Body Incorporates DNA From The Semen Of Her Casual Sex Partners. Would you be surprised if I told you that everything in that title is wrong? Would you be shocked to learn that everything Roosh concludes from misreading that research is also wrong?

The above study has two seismic implications. The first is that a woman can absorb enough DNA during her lifetime that it changes her phenotype (i.e. her appearance and overall health state). There could be some truth to the phrase “slut face” in which highly promiscuous women suffer a change to their appearance because of all the variable sperm from different males that have been deposited inside them.

The second implication stems from the fact that it’s scientifically conclusive that single mothers have DNA of their bastard children residing permanently within their bodies. Any man who reproduces with a single mom will have a child that contains DNA from the bastard spawn, which of course includes DNA from the absentee father. This means that men can be genetically cuckolded without being traditionally cuckolded, and that having a baby with a single mom is essentially giving the father of her first child a bonus prize in the game of evolution.

There’s literally nothing correct in any of that mess. Nothing. Roosh has imposed his faulty, biased interpretation on the work in a way that would certainly horrify the authors.

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I saw it coming. The octopus genome was sequenced, and one scientist gushed about the differences between cephalopods and vertebrates, calling them “alien”, and that became the news. People really need to read the paper before reporting on it, because it emphasizes the relatedness of octopuses to other animals.

But the creationists don’t care about facts. They’re motivated to lie. The latest: Darwinism Versus the Octopus: An Evolutionary Dilemma.

No, it’s really not.

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Can you bear a little more Ben Carson? Some yahoo going by the name @CARSON4POTUS has been yammering at me on Twitter: he insists that I’m completely wrong, that Carson is not a young earth creationist, and as evidence he dredges up some godawful talk on creationism that Carson gave in 2011. It convinces me that Carson is even stupider than I thought.

Here are a few quotes from it. The numbers in brackets refer to times in this video, which I have not watched, because listening to Carson talk makes me want to sit him down at the kids’ table with a coloring book and tell him to leave the grownups alone.

[19:41] “You know, I am not a hard and fast person that says the earth is only six thousand years old, but I do believe in a six day creation. And, because, you know, it says in the beginning that God created the heaven and the earth. [19:56] It doesn’t say when he created them except for ‘in the beginning’, so the earth could have been here for along time before he started creating things on it. But when he did start doing that he made it very specifically clear to us, the evening and the morning were the next day, because he knew that people would come along [20:15] and try to say that ‘oh it was millions and millions of years.’ And then what else did he say in the very first chapter: ‘that each thing brought forth after its own kind’, because he knew that people would come along and say you know that this thing changed into that [20:34] and this changed to that and this changed to that. So at the very beginning of the Bible he puts that to rest.”

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I took an awful grainy cell phone picture yesterday, one where it’s hard to see the subjects for the sun glare. But really, this is amazing:

Fifteen years ago when I started out at UMM, our intro biology course had an exercise where students were given butterfly nets and sent out to capture, tag, and release monarch butterflies. It was relatively easy: you’d find a tree with a swarm — and I do mean swarm, they’d be covered with butterflies dripping from every branch, and there’d be clouds of them flying about — and you’d swish that net and catch dozens. Then every year after that, we saw fewer and fewer, until it was an exercise that was frustratingly impossible to do. Most years of late I’d see only an occasional solo monarch, and some years I’d see none.

But yesterday, I was seeing scattered monarchs everywhere, and then I found this tree across the street with masses of butterflies hanging from a few branches. It was nothing like the glory days, but still…maybe they’re making a comeback?