Author: Andrew Sullivan

Ferris Jabr spoke with Nipam Patel, who studies gynandromorph butterflies, which have both male and female characteristics:

Every now and then he has encountered specimens such as the Heliconius butterfly [see above]. It’s a member of a colorful tribe in which males and females look nearly identical. Patel identified this butterfly as a gynandromorph because the two halves of its abdomen differed subtly in size and structure, one having male genitalia and the other female. Its wings should have been the same, but they weren’t.

Patel realized that, in addition to being doubly sexed, this particular insect might have a mixed identity. The patterns on its wings betrayed underlying genetics that could not be explained solely by a medley of female and male cells. … [T]he two wings had clearly activated different color pattern genes, indicating two entirely different genomes. When gynandromorphs differ in more than their sex characteristics, Patel thinks you could be looking at two animals in one.

How could that happen?

An insect egg cell harbors a smaller sister cell known as a polar body—a leftover from the cell division that created the egg cell. Sometimes two sperm manage to slip inside the egg and fertilize the egg’s nucleus as well as the polar body, creating two embryos that develop more or less like conjoined twins.

The two animals’ cells may not always keep to their own sides, however, which could explain why sometimes a gynandromorph has bilateral asymmetry and sometimes ends up a mosaic, with a splattering of opposite cells across a center line. Although other scientists have previously suggested that double fertilization accounts for some gynandromorphs, Patel has uncovered some of the clearest evidence to date.

Gynandromorphs’ duality calls to mind Plato’s Symposium, in which Aristophanes explains the origin of the sexes with a unique creation myth: In the beginning, he says, there were double-bodied primal humans—man and man, woman and woman, and man and woman—until, angered by their hubris, Zeus split them with bolts of lightning. But such duality is not just the stuff of myth.

Hedwig’s rendition of that myth:

(Image of Heliconius butterfly courtesy of Nipam Patel)

Jay Caspian Kang points to a recent study that “seems to confirm one of gambling’s most ubiquitous and destructive theories: the ‘hot hand‘”:

Juemin Xu and Nigel Harvey, the study’s authors, took a sampling of 569,915 bets taken on an online sports-gambling site and tracked how previous wins and losses affected the probability of wins in the future. Over all, the winning percentage of the bets was somewhere around 48 percent. Xu and Harvey isolated the winners and tracked how they fared in their subsequent bets. In bet two, winners won at a rate of 49 percent. From there, the numbers go haywire. A player who had won two bets in a row won his third bet at a rate of 57 percent. His fourth bet won 67 percent of the time, his fifth bet 72. The best gamblers in Las Vegas expect to win 55 percent of their bets every year. Seventy-two percent verges on omniscience. The hot hand, it appears, is real.

Why would that be? Kang explains:

What the research did find was that gamblers on streaks – good or bad – acted under the influence of the gambler’s fallacy. Winning bettors began placing more prudent bets because they assumed their luck would soon run out. Losers began placing bets with longer odds because they wanted to win big when their luck finally, inevitably changed. What this means is that streaky gamblers who win do so because they expect to lose, and streaky gamblers who lose do so because they expect to win. Or, more simply put, when you’re losing, you’re wrong, but when you’re winning, you’re also wrong.

Andrew Butterfield praises “signs of renewed interest” in the art of Paolo Veronese, who, he says, “has often been regarded as a gifted but superficial painter.” He singles out The Family of Darius before Alexander, seen above, as a work “long regarded as among the greatest Venetian paintings”:

The Family of Darius before Alexanderreveals the seriousness of purpose with which Veronese worked. As few other painters of the Renaissance, he sought to make images that drew on the resources of all the arts, not just painting. Veronese had studied sculpture first, and the experience remained fundamental to his approach to image-making. His idea for any picture began with the main figure or figures, which he planned by emphasizing strong motion and forceful disposition in space. Like so many sculptors in the Renaissance, he saw the movements and gestures of the figures, not the expressions on their faces, as the primary means for conveying the emotional content of a scene.

Butterfield goes on to note that Veronese drew inspiration from architecture, theater, and even rhetoric:

Veronese’s style is overtly rhetorical. In the Renaissance, painting was often said to be a form of mute poetry, but Veronese’s first biographer, Carlo Ridolfi, writing in 1646, instead compared his art to oratory. This comment may appear to emphasize the artificial, ceremonial, and unnatural qualities of Veronese’s art. But it was meant as praise:

in the Renaissance, rhetoric was seen as the foundation of the humanities. It is striking to note that in 1557, the year after he published the first Italian edition of his commentary on Vitruvius, Daniele Barbaro also published a treatise about literature and rhetoric calledOn Eloquence. There he praisesgrandezzaas the highest and most sublime style, appropriate for the most elevated topics. The elements he names as the main components ofgrandezza—majesty, vehemence, splendor, vivacity—read almost like a list of the qualities of Veronese’s art. …

Veronese’s prodigious facility, love of magnificence, and untroubled service to the dreams of wealthy clients were all counted against him for much of the twentieth century. Few great artists have seemed less radical or rebellious. But this reaction overlooks his own ambitions as a painter. The show at the National Gallery makes it possible again to see why so many writers were drawn to this artist, and why so many painters, from Annibale Carracci and Giambattista Tiepolo to Delacroix and Cézanne, thought of Veronese as one of the supreme masters of art.

(Image: The Family of Darius before Alexander, 1565–1567, via Wikimedia Commons)

Is it ethical to conduct experiments on captive chimpanzees to help others survive in the wild? Ed Yong’s take:

In February 2011, a team of scientists led by Peter Walsh at the University of Cambridge injected six captive chimpanzees with an experimental vaccine against the deadly Ebola virus. At first glance, the study looked like a lot of other medical research, in which drugs that are meant for humans are first tested on other animals. But this was different. These scientists were working with chimps to help chimps. The twin threats of poaching and habitat loss are driving the African apes – chimps, bonobos, and gorillas – towards extinction. Diseases are also a problem. Our ape relatives are vulnerable to infections like anthrax, malaria, and respiratory viruses that spill over from human tourists and researchers.

As Yong notes, such studies may soon be a thing of the past:

The era of biomedical research on chimpanzees is drawing to a close. The United States and Gabon are the only countries that still allow this kind of research, and the US may soon leave this short list. In 2011, the Institute of Medicine issued a report saying that “most current use of chimpanzees in biomedical research is unnecessary” – a conclusion that the National Institutes of Health took seriously. In 2013, it announced that all but 50 of its chimps would be retired to sanctuaries. Meanwhile, the US Fish and Wildlife Service has tabled a proposal to list captive chimps under the Endangered Species Act – a move that would ban medical procedures beyond those that “enhance the propagation or survival of the affected species.”

Walsh’s study might still fit the bill but it wouldn’t matter, since labs with the right facilities to house and work with chimps would shut down. That’s a problem, since national park managers in Africa insist that scientists prove the safety of vaccines in captive apes before using them on wild ones (and monkey data won’t suffice). To Walsh, you need captive chimps to test vaccines that would save wild ones from diseases. He’s not just talking about Ebola, either. Vaccines could also protect chimps from HRSV – a human virus that they catch from humans, often with fatal results.

Phillip Ball questions the notion that “the kind of beauty sought by science has anything to do with the major currents of artistic culture”:

No one has ever shown a correlation between beauty and ‘truth’. But it is worse than that, for sometimes ‘beauty’ in the sense that many scientists prefer – an elegant simplicity, to put it in crude terms – can act as a fake trump card that deflects inquiry. In one little corner of science that I can claim to know reasonably well, an explanation from 1959 for why water-repelling particles attract when immersed in water (that it’s an effect of entropy, there being more disordered water molecules when the particles stick together) was so neat and satisfying that it continues to be peddled today, even though the experimental data show that it is untenable and that the real explanation probably lies in a lot of devilish detail. …

An insistence that the ‘beautiful’ must be true all too easily elides into an empty circularity:

what is true must therefore be beautiful. I see this in the conviction of many chemists that the periodic table, with all its backtracking sequences of electron shells, its positional ambiguities for elements such as hydrogen and unsightly bulges that the flat page can’t constrain, is a thing of loveliness. There, surely, speaks the voice of duty, not genuine feeling. The search for an ideal, perfect Platonic form of the table amid spirals, hypercubes and pyramids has an air of desperation. … I would be rather thrilled if the artist, rather than accepting this unified pursuit of beauty (as Ian McEwan did), were to say instead: ‘No, we’re not even on the same page. This beauty of yours means nothing to me.’

If, on the other hand, we want beauty in science to make contact with aesthetics in art, I believe we should seek it precisely in the human aspect: in ingenious experimental design, elegance of theoretical logic, gentle clarity of exposition, imaginative leaps of reasoning. These things are not vital for a theory that works, an experiment that succeeds, an explanation that enchants and enlightens. But they are rather lovely. Beauty, unlike truth or nature, is something we make ourselves.