Daily Archives: August 20, 2017

Zeynep Terzi, left, 23, a medical student in Istanbul, and Betul Vargi, 22, a college student studying English literature, are part of what Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoan calls a new "pious generation" of Turks. They wear headscarves and attend mosque, but they also believe in a separation of religion and state. Gokce Saracoglu/NPR hide caption

Zeynep Terzi, left, 23, a medical student in Istanbul, and Betul Vargi, 22, a college student studying English literature, are part of what Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoan calls a new "pious generation" of Turks. They wear headscarves and attend mosque, but they also believe in a separation of religion and state.

When children in Turkey head back to school this fall, something will be missing from their textbooks: any mention of evolution.

The Turkish government is phasing in what it calls a values-based curriculum. Critics accuse Turkey's president of pushing a more conservative, religious ideology at the expense of young people's education.

At a playground in an upscale, secular area of Istanbul, parents and grandparents express concern over the new policy.

"I'm worried, but I hope it changes by the time my grandchildren are in high school," says Emel Ishakoglu, a retired chemical engineer playing with her grandchildren, ages 5 and 2. "Otherwise our kids will be left behind compared to other countries when it comes to science education."

With a curriculum that omits evolution, Ishakoglu worries her grandchildren won't get the training they'll need if they want to grow up to be scientists like her.

Nearby, an American expat who's married to a Turk pushes her toddler on the swings and describes a book they've been reading at home.

"It's for 3- to 5-year-olds, and it teaches evolution," says Heather Demir. "It starts off, 'I used to be fish, but then I grew some legs.'"

The Demir family plans to leave Turkey before their son reaches grade school, in part because of this new curriculum.

Suat Keceli, left, a retired stockroom worker, and his barber Yasar Ayhan pose in Ayhan's barber shop in Kasimpasa, the Istanbul neighborhood where President Recep Tayyip Erdoan grew up. Keceli is a conservative Muslim who kept his daughter out of school when headscarves were banned in the classroom. Gokce Saracoglu/NPR hide caption

Suat Keceli, left, a retired stockroom worker, and his barber Yasar Ayhan pose in Ayhan's barber shop in Kasimpasa, the Istanbul neighborhood where President Recep Tayyip Erdoan grew up. Keceli is a conservative Muslim who kept his daughter out of school when headscarves were banned in the classroom.

"I just think it'd be too confusing for him, to teach him two opposing viewpoints," Demir says.

At a news conference last month, Turkey's education minister announced that new textbooks will be introduced in all primary and secondary schools, starting with grades 1, 5 and 9 this fall, and the rest next year. They will stop teaching evolution in grade 9, when it's usually taught.

"Evolutionary biology is best left to be taught at the university level," Education Minister Ismet Yilmaz told reporters. "It's a theory that requires a higher philosophical understanding than schoolchildren have."

That means students who don't go on to university may never learn who Charles Darwin was.

"Among scientists, of course, we feel very sorry and very, very worried for the country," says Ali Alpar, an astrophysicist and president of Turkey's Science Academy, an independent group that opposes the new curriculum. A Turkish association of biologists and teachers' unions have also expressed concern about the new textbooks.

"It is not only evolution. Evolution is a test case. It is about rationality about whether the curriculum should be built on whatever the government chooses to be the proper values," Alpar says. He also objects to how the government has converted many secular public schools into religious ones Turkey's publicly funded Imam Hatip schools in recent years.

Some Muslims, like some Christians, believe in creation, not natural selection. Turkey is majority Muslim, with a constitution that emphasizes its secular character.

But a battle has been underway between secular and religious Turks ever since President Recep Tayyip Erdogan came to power. He was elected prime minister in 2003, and president in 2014.

Erdogan does not support implementing sharia law. But he has repeatedly been elected by religious voters who felt their beliefs were neglected during decades of enforced secularism.

In a barber shop in the Istanbul neighborhood where Erdogan grew up, a bearded man in a traditional Muslim cap chats with the barber as he gets a shave. He explains how he kept his daughter out of school when Turkey didn't allow girls to wear headscarves in classrooms. The ban was lifted in middle schools and high schools in 2014.

"In school, they taught us humans evolved from monkeys. But that's not true," says Suat Keceli. "I support our government taking it out of biology textbooks. I think it's Satan's work."

In revising these textbooks, the government sought input from a small cadre of religious academics, including the president of Turkey's Uskudar University, a private institution that will host an academic conference on creationism this fall.

"Most Turks don't believe in evolution because it implies that God doesn't exist, and we're all here on earth just by chance! That's confusing," says the university's president, Nevzat Tarhan. "Turkey is a modern democracy, but we should not be afraid to embrace our Islamic culture as well."

Outside an Istanbul flower shop, two college students, Zeynep Terzi and Betul Vargi, are part of what Erdogan calls the new "pious generation." They wear headscarves. But they also support the separation of religion and state and accuse the president of chipping away at it.

"You can't learn religion in school, I think. It's about you and God. You should learn maybe in your home," Terzi says.

"They can send their kids to mosques. Schools are for science, I think," says Vargi.

Terzi is in medical school. Her scientific training in Turkey makes her competitive for jobs here and abroad. But she fears that might not be the case for the next generation of pious Turks.

Original post:

In Turkey, Schools Will Stop Teaching Evolution This Fall - NPR

Frontier, the developer behind the sublime Elite Dangerous and Planet Coaster has new sim in the works. Jurassic World Evolution is a theme park sim, but instead of ferris wheels you have Triceratops, and instead of worrying about guests getting sick, you have to worry about guests getting eaten by a freaking T-Rex.

Jurassic World Evolution puts players in control of operations on the island of Isla Nublar, as featured in the original Jurassic Park. The goal is to build new attractions, bioengineer new dinosaur breeds, and figure out the best way to keep said dinosaurs away from paying punters. "Every choice leads to a different path and spectacular challenges will arise when 'life finds a way,'" says Microsoft.

Further details are thin on the ground, but there is a release date of "Summer 2018," which just so happens to be when the next film,Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, is due to be released.

"As long-time fans of the entire Jurassic series we're thrilled to be putting players in charge of their own Jurassic World," Frontier exec Jonny Watts says. "We're excited to bring over 15 years of management, simulation, and creature development expertise to a destination and franchise that remains an inspiration to us."

This post originated on Ars Technica UK

Original post:

Jurassic World Evolution is a theme park sim from Planet Coaster dev Frontier - Ars Technica

U.S. study entitled 'A Psychological Profile of the Alt-Right' unveils the specifics of the race theory embraced by the movement

NEW YORK American researchers have published a working paper showing that people identifying with the alt-right consider Jews, Mexicans, blacks, Democrats, journalists, feminists and Muslims as subhumans, below homo sapiens on the evolutionary scale.

The study, entitled "A Psychological Profile of the Alt-Right," unveils the specifics of the race theory embraced by the movement. For example, unlike other far-right groups, members of the alt-right do not rank Jews at the bottom of the racial hierarchy.

In the study, Prof. Patrick Forscher of the University of Arkansas and Prof. Nour Kteily of Northwestern University questioned 447 people who identify with the alt-right and 382 members of a control group who do not.

The study is a working paper; it has not yet been published in a scholarly journal. The initial findings were released two days before the Unite the Right demonstration in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a man has been charged with murder for allegedly ramming his car into a crowd, killing a 32-year-old woman and injuring 19 people.

To study the dehumanization of various social groups by the alt-right, Forscher and Kteily showed their subjects the iconic March of Progress illustration describing the five phases of human evolution, from apes to homo sapiens, and asked them to mark where various population groups fell.

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On average, those identifying with the alt-right placed whites, Republicans, Americans, Swedes and Christians at evolutions highest level of development as homo sapiens. The other groups were ranked as belonging to earlier evolutionary stages. Among the inferior groups, in descending order reflecting an alleged lack of development, were Jews, Mexicans, blacks, Democrats, journalists, feminists and Muslims.

The members of the control group ranked all the groups as homo sapiens except for Donald Trump, whose name the researchers had offered for classification by the respondents. The control group put the president one stage lower than modern humans. Both groups were also asked to rank Hillary Clinton; alt-right adherents placed Clinton at the level of Muslims, two stages below modern humans.

The researchers also studied the extremism of members of the alt-right based on aggressiveness and so-called Dark Triad traits including narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy that are associated with callous, manipulative behavior. They determined that the alt-right respondents fell into two subcategories, one that the researchers dubbed supremacist, the less extreme one populists.

Members of the supremacist group showed traits of narcissism, psychopathy and aggression, and said they had engaged in violent behavior such as threats and harassment, both in social encounters and online.

The members of the second alt-right group were more moderate; they were less aggressive and more concerned with issues such as government corruption. But both alt-right groups viewed major media outlets such as CNN, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal with suspicion. They opposed Black Lives Matter and expressed concerns about discrimination against males and whites in the United States.

In the paper, Forscher and Kteily said they found some of the findings surprising and contrary to the stereotype attributed to the alt-right. For example, in questions about the social relations of the extremists whom they examined, there were no significant differences between them and the control group.

Contrary to the image of the troll hiding in his parents basement, members of the alt-right reported having close social relationships at levels similar to the control group. Also, there were no significant differences in the level of concern that alt-right members and the general population had about the state of the U.S. economy.

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Read more:

Evolution According to the 'Alt-right': Journalists, Blacks and Jews Among the Subhuman - Haaretz

Im currently deep in the world of turtles its because of the textbook. And long-time readers will know that I suffer from Turtle Guilt anyway and have long aimed to put things right. In view of both of these things combined with the fact that I feel the urge to produce a new Tet Zoo article here are some brief thoughts on turtles that I hope you find interesting. The world of turtle evolutionary history and phylogenetic research is rich and complex, so I thought it would be fun to throw out a small selection of interesting factoids, not to focus on one specialised area. Here we go

Whos on the stem, whos in the crown? If you know anything about the geological history of turtles, youll be aware that a few anatomically archaic Late Triassic and Early Jurassic turtles have been regarded as the oldest representatives of Cryptodira and Pleurodira, the two great turtle groups that exist today. Most notable among these are the Late Triassic Proterochersis (originally described as the oldest known pleurodire) and the Early Jurassic Kayentachelys (originally described as the oldest cryptodire). A Late Triassic pleurodire would mean that the common ancestor of crown turtles was in existence by this time.

But this has been challenged. In a study devoted to phylogenetic analysis of Mesozoic turtles, Joyce (2007) argued that these early turtles are outside the crown group (crown group = the clade that contains living species and all descendants of their most recent common ancestor), and that crown turtles did not, in fact, evolve until considerably later (the Late Jurassic). Joyce (2007) and, later, other authors (Sterli et al. 2013) went further, proposing that a large number of additional taxa among them the remarkable meiolaniids of the Cretaceous and Cenozoic, the fabled Kallokibotion of the Late Cretaceous of Romania and the diverse and abundant baenids of the Cretaceous and Paleogene were stem-turtles too, not archaic cryptodires as long thought. Thisreallocation of taxa and revised view of turtle history has been accepted by some turtle specialists but not by others, and these two schools of thought currently appear to be at an impasse.

You might be thinking that none of this matters much, and perhaps youd be right. But the proposal that those archaic turtle lineages are outside the crown has some important implications: meiolaniids, you see, persisted to relatively recent times, their youngest geological occurrence being from the Holocene of Vanuatuwhere theyve been dated to just c 3000 years ago. We only just missed them, and by missed them I mean that ancient members of our species hunted them to extinction. Had they persisted to the present, we would according to the model proposed by Joyce have especially archaic, early-diverging turtles still with us today, members of a lineage that originated far earlier in the Mesozoic than the other turtle lineages still present. A complication here is that if meiolaniids were still alive our definition of the turtle crown would be far more inclusive, since all or virtually all of those lineages outside the cryptodire-pleurodire clade would now be inside the crown.

Side-necked turtles once lived just about everywhere. Today, pleurodires the side-necked turtles are southern animals of Africa, Madagascar, South America and Australasia. But the fossil record shows that this is absolutely not reflective of their distribution in the past: they were effectively cosmopolitan, with species across North America, Europe and Asia. Most of these animals belonged to groups that are now wholly extinct, like the bothremydids: these were around from the Late Cretaceous until eitherthe Oligocene or Miocene (Lapparent de Broin & Werner 1998, Gaffney et al. 2006). But others belonged to groups that now have a more restricted distribution: Neochelys known from around 8 species that inhabited Europe during the Eocene is a member of Podocnemididae, a group only present today in South America and Madagascar.

Archelon is not the biggest turtle. It has often been said, or at best implied, that certain of the Late Cretaceous marine protostegids in particular the famous Archelon (Archelon! Archelon!, quoth Raquel Welch, 1966) were the biggest turtles ever. This hasnt been true for a while, even though those particular turtles sure were big. Nope, the biggest turtles of all are pleurodires, the record-holder being Stupendemys of the Upper Miocene and Pliocene of northern South America. This giant reached 3.3 m in carapace length and thus must have exceeded 5 m in total length. Incidentally, if youve been to the AMNH in New York and seen the Stupendemys on display there, note that its skull is not actually that of Stupendemys, its an enlarged replica of the skull of another sort of pleurodire: the very deep-faced Miocene podocnemidid Caninemys, named on account of its bulldog-like appearance (Meylan et al. 2009).

Giant tortoises were formerly widespread, and not just on islands. Today we associate giant tortoises with oceanic islands, most famously the Galpagos but also the Seychelles. If youre up to speed on recently extinct animals youll also be aware of the recently extinct Cylindraspis tortoises of the Mascarenes, and perhaps of the big tortoises that also once occurred on the Caribbean islands. The impression you get from these animals is that giant size in tortoises was an island thing, and that tortoises are only able to achieve giant size when evolving in isolation from continental predators. But the fossil record paints a different picture.

Giant tortoises those with a carapace length exceeding 70 cm were a widespread presence in continental habitats too, and in fact have been since the Oligocene at least. Taraschelon an Oligocene form from France reached c 80 cm in carapace length. The biggest tortoise of all Megalochelys atlas (carapace length 2.1 m, mass c 1000 kg) inhabited southern Asia between the Miocene and Pleistocene and lived alongside a typical assortment of big continental mammals, and similarly big tortoises (they may be additional specimens of Megalochelys) also inhabited eastern Europe during the Pliocene (Boev 2008). Another giant Cheirogaster was present in Greece during the Miocene, Pliocene and Pleistocene. Some Cheirogaster specimens exceed 1.5 m in carapace length; the skull alone can be 23 cm long. Europe was also home to several species of Titanochelon during the Miocene and Pliocene: this animal occurred from Portugal all the way to western Asia and seems to have had a carapace length of about 1.2 m. North America was home to Hesperotestudo during the Pleistocene, some species of which rivalled Galpagos giant tortoises in size. This brief listing is far from complete, but you get the point: there were really big, fully terrestrial tortoises in many continental environments during the Cenozoic.

Its also worth noting that giant continental tortoises still exist today: there are some big South American Chelonoidis species, and the very large Centrochelys and Stigmochelys species of Africa. Another assumption that these animals were limited to tropical, frost-free places is also challenged by the fossil record, since some of these very large tortoises (thinking here of the North American Hesperotestudo) appear to have been able to dig deep burrows and avoid the cold surface temperatures sometimes present in the places where they occurred (thanks to Mark Gelbart for this idea).

That will do for now. We will revisit turtles again soon. While on the subject of this group, my review of Olivier Rieppelnew book Turtles As Hopeful Monsters has recently been published (Naish 2017). For previous Tet Zoo turtle articles, see

Refs - -

Bakker, R. T. 1986. The Dinosaur Heresies. Penguin Books, London.

Boev, Z. 2008. First finds of giant land tortoises discovered in Bulgaria. Science News April 2008, 2-4.

Gaffney, E. S., Tong, H. & Meylan, P. A. 2006. Evolution of the side-necked turtles: the families Bothremydidae, Euraxemydidae, and Araripemydidae. Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 300, 1-700.

Joyce, W. G. 2007. Phylogenetic relationships of Mesozoic turtles. Bulletin of the Peabody Museum of Natural History 48, 3-102.

Lapparent de Broin, F. de & Werner, C. 1998. New late Cretaceous turtles from the Western Desert, Egypt. Annales de Palontologie 84, 131-214.

Meylan, P. A., Gaffney, E. S. & Campos, D. de A. 2009. Caninemys, a new side-necked turtle (Pelomedusoides: Podocnemididae) from the Miocene of Brazil. American Museum Novitates 3639, 1-26.

Naish, D. 2017. Review of Turtles as Hopeful Monsters: Origins and Evolution. Palaeontologia ElectronicaVol. 20, Issue 2; 1R: 3p.

Sterli, J., de la Fuente, M. & Cerda, I. A. 2013. A new species of meiolaniform turtle and a revision of the Late Cretaceous Meiolaniformes of South America. Ameghiniana 50, 240-256.

Read the original:

Letters From the World of Turtle Evolution - Scientific American (blog)