Some winners of the 2017 Audubon Photography Contest

July 16, 2017 • 2:30 pm

The Atlantic has published some absolutely stunning photos that are the winners of the 2017 Audubon Magazine photography contest:

The winners of the the eighth annual Audubon Photography Awards competition have just been announced.  Photographers entered images in three categories: professional, amateur, and youth. More than 5,500 images depicting birdlife from 49 states and eight Canadian provinces, were judged. The National Audubon Society was once more kind enough to share some of this year’s winners and runners-up with us below. To view even more great bird photography, you can also see the top 100 entries at  the Audubon website.

The Atlantic reproduces 21 photos (all of birds of course); I’ll put up my favorite seven, but be sure to go look at them all, as well as the top 100 entries, some of which are as good as the winners. It was really hard to choose these seven out of 21!

Atlantic Puffin. Photo: Ann Pacheco / Audubon Photography Awards:

This is my favorite:

Ring-necked Duck. Photo: Chris Hartzell / Audubon Photography Awards:

Piping Plover. Photo: William Page Pully / Audubon Photography Awards:

Peregrine Falcons. Photo: Glenn Conlan / Audubon Photography Awards [JAC: note how the male holds his talons so as not to injure his mate during copulation]:

American Oystercatchers. Photo: Warren Hatch Andrew Lee / Audubon Photography Awards:

Great Gray Owl. Photo: Steve Mattheis / Audubon Photography Awards / 2017 Professional Winner:

Bronzed Cowbird. Photo: Carole Wiley / Audubon Photography Awards:

h/t: Diane G

Evolution news: A statue of Clarence Darrow is unveiled at the “Scopes” courthouse in Dayton, Tennessee

July 16, 2017 • 1:15 pm

Reader Rick called my attention to a  New York Times piece about a new statue in Dayton, Tennessee, which, you’ll recall, is where the famous Scopes “Monkey Trial” took place in 1925. John Scopes was convicted of teaching human evolution to high-school students, thus violating Tennessee’s “Butler Act” prohibiting the teaching of non-Biblical accounts of human origins. (Teaching evolution of non-humans was not illegal, underscoring the perennial human exceptionalism in evolution.)

It was a titanic trial, pitting William Jennings Bryan for the prosecution versus Clarence Darrow as the lead defense attorney. Scientists weren’t allowed to testify, yet Bryan himself was allowed to take the stand and testify on his views about the Bible. Darrow ripped him apart, and it was duly reported by H. L. Mencken in a series of wonderfully acerbic pieces for the Baltimore Evening Sun (you can see Mencken’s full coverage here).

Scopes was convicted, of course, for he’d clearly violated the law. The defense appealed, and the guilty verdict was overturned on a technicality: the judge had levied the punitive $100 fine, but state law prohibited judges from giving fines over $50—that was the jury’s bailiwick.

At any rate, on to the statue—click on the link below to see the story. If you’re ever near Dayton, go see the courthouse, which is just as it was 92 years ago, and still the venue for trials. It’s a lovely and sleepy town, and there’s an exhibit at the trial. Sadly, the town also harbors Bryan College, a fundamentalist institution where creationism remains the official biology tale.

As for the statue of Darrow, well, it’s about damn time! After all, there’s already a statue of William Jennings Bryan on the Rhea County Courthouse grounds, and he came off the worse, though he won. Here’s the Bryan statue, erected in 2005:

But our old friends the Freedom from Religion Foundation found $150,000 to put up a swell statue of Darrow, and here it is with its creator (read more about its creation at The Humanist). Darrow has long been a hero of mine: an atheist, eloquent and hard-working lawyer, and a fighter for truth and justice.

(From NYT): The sculptor Zenos Frudakis with his new statue of Clarence Darrow outside the Rhea County Courthouse in Dayton, Tenn., in a photo provided by the Frudakis family. Credit via Associated Press

Of course Dayton being Dayton, the Darrow statue aroused controversy. As the NYT reports:

Brad Putt, the owner of a downtown music store, is among those who say that the statue of Darrow — sculpted by a Pennsylvania artist, Zenos Frudakis, and designed to stand at about the same height as the Bryan statue — simply serves to balance the historical record.

“People around here know that if you have a court case, you have to have two sides,” said Mr. Putt, who fell back on Eastern philosophy and the “Transformers” movies to bolster his case: “You can’t have Optimus Prime unless you have Megatron. You’ve got to have a yin to the yang.”

The opposition to the Darrow statue, which was installed Thursday morning, has been headed by June Griffin, 77, a repeat long-shot candidate for political office who was once lampooned by “The Daily Show” for her creationist beliefs. She was instrumental in arranging a July 1 anti-Darrow rally at the courthouse that included State Senator Mae Beavers, a Republican candidate for governor, and Larry Tomczak, a public policy adviser to the conservative Liberty Counsel. He described the gathering as a protest against the “ongoing attempt by secularists in America to blur or remove symbols reminding us of our Judeo-Christian heritage.”

The FFRF had a special trip to Dayton for the installation, and I would have loved to be there (I was supposed to be on an FFRF video show on evolution that was to air this week, but Skype didn’t work, so look for me in a few months). But Annie Laurie was there in all her glorious amiability:

Among those at the official dedication of the statue Friday morning were Mr. Frudakis, the artist, and Annie Laurie Gaylor, the co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, an atheist group. Ms. Gaylor said in an interview on Wednesday that she would come to town holding no grudges.

“It’s the missing link,” she deadpanned, “in the courthouse display.”

E. O. Wilson: Science, not religion or philosophy, will tell us the meaning of human existence

July 16, 2017 • 11:45 am

Reader Rick called my attention to this 2014 video from E. O. Wilson on “The Big Think” site. The nine-minute talk is apparently based on his then-recent book, The Meaning of Human Existence—the one book of Wilson’s I haven’t read. When you’ll watch the video, you’ll see that Wilson appears firmly in the camp of what Rebecca Goldstein calls “philosophy jeerers” (note: I am not one of these!). He’s advocating scientism in the sense that he sees philosophy as providing no answers to the question of the meaning of existence, but science does. But that depends on Wilson’s wonky construal of the question.

Wilson doesn’t construe “meaning” as “how should we live?, but rather as a series of three questions:

What are we and why?

Where do we come from?

Where are we most likely to be headed?

If you take these as questions whose answer give us our “meaning”, then their answer clearly falls to science alone. (That even goes for “why are we what we are”?, as the answer to that is “evolution.”) Wilson dismisses religion as providing good answers because—and I agree—all religions give different answers. But he also frames the questions in a way that philosophy can’t answer them, either. To quote the Big Think‘s precis:

Wilson believes philosophy is ill-equipped to tackle the meaning of existence. In fact, the storied biologist has few kind words for the field as a whole:

“I like to say that most of philosophy, which is a declining and highly endangered academic species, incidentally, consists of failed models of how the brain works. So students going into philosophy have to learn what Descartes thought and then after a long while why that’s wrong and what Schopenhauer might have thought and what Kant might of thought or did think. But they cannot go on from that position and historical examination of the nature of humanity to what it really is and how we might define it.”

Wilson concludes then that, by default, the task of explaining meaning necessarily falls to science. There are five disciplines in particular which he identifies as the leaders in determining meaning:

1. Evolutionary biology: “That is, biology seen in a historical context going all the way back millions of years to the origin of the human species.”

2. Paleontology: “Which segues as we come closer to modern humanity and the invention of agriculture and the birth of the Neolithic period turns into archaeology. So archaeology and paleontology, which are on a different time scale, is the other discipline, a second discipline.”

3. Neuroscience: “It’s progressing so rapidly in so many ways.”

4. Artificial Intelligence: “Coming out of brain science or running parallel to it and trading with it and depending upon it and driving from it.”

5. Robotics: “The notion of studying the mind in perfecting artificial intelligence, and more than that; creating what the artificial intelligence and robotics people call whole brain emulation. That is using robots as avatars and creating robots that are by design an imitation of what we know about the brain more and more like humans.”

The five disciplines above serve as bridges “to tell us what the meaning of humanity is.” Wilson calls it the product of a grand epic, the full story of humanity. Together, they will explain what we are, where we came from, and where we’re going.

In reality, I think the whole issue of “what is the meaning of human existence?” is barely worth discussing, since there isn’t an answer. Our species simply came about according to the laws of physics working through evolution. It’s naturalism, all the way down. The notion that our existence has a “meaning” makes no sense to me. Now what does make sense, and what I think Wilson is answering by citing evolutionary biology, paleontology, and neuroscience, is saying “How did we come about?” But that doesn’t say anything about “meaning”—any more than does the question, “What is the meaning of the Andes mountains?”

The other two disciplines, AI and robotics, may tell us what humans are capable of, or even give us hints about how our brain works or evolved, but seem to add even less to a question that’s problematic from the outset.

Where philosophy can make a contribution to this question, I think, is the narrower questions of “What is the meaning of my existence?” and “What is the purpose of my existence?” I’ve written about this before, and my answer is that people take their meaning and purpose from what they find congenial: there is no ultimate answer to those questions that applies to anyone, much less that applies to all humans. In other words, we reify our preferences into grander questions of meanings and purposes. One of the purposes of my life is to travel and to do science, but that’s because my genes and environment has made me like traveling and doing science.

But philosophy can at least analyze these preferences, seeing if they’re consistent or coherent, interrogate us about what kind of life and society we want, and then (with the help of science) suggest ways of realizing our preferences—or seeing if our preferences even make sense.  This, to me, is the only meaningful way to look at “the meaning of life” beyond answering “how did we get here?”; and the analysis of preferences and their consequences is where philosophy can make a real contribution. Wilson has dismissed the discipline unfairly,

A new paper says that belief in free will makes people more likely to criticize unethical acts and favor strong punishment

July 16, 2017 • 10:15 am

People who are determinists but are also compatibilists—that is, they believe that our actions are dictated by the laws of physics, and we can’t “will” them beyond that, but that we can still conceive of some form of free will—often justify their re-framing of “free will” on utilitarian grounds. That is, although we may not have “contracausal” free will (the kind that says that, at any given moment, we could have decided to do two or more different things), it’s still important for society to believe in some form of free will, for such a belief acts as an important social glue. Without a belief in agency, these folks say (Dan Dennett is one of them), society will fall apart, as everyone will just lie in bed and do nothing because determinism makes them nihilists. That argument resembles the old Argument from Utility for God; even if there’s no god, it’s good for society to believe in one, for it helps people behave morally. It’s also been called the “Little People” argument: although I know the truth, we need to let the Little People have their belief in contracausal free will.

Both arguments are wrong. Even though we feel and act as if we have contracausal free will, we can still accept rationally that we don’t, and make the social reforms mandated by that realization—especially reform of the judicial system. We don’t need Little People arguments to have a good society.

One of the famous papers used to justify compatibilism was published by Kathleen Vohs and Jonathan Schooler in Psychological Science, “The value of believing in free will: Encouraging a belief in determinism increases cheating.” But that paper is problematic. Besides its design flaws (i.e., “cheating” was tested shortly after students read passages either promoting or denigrating free will, with no long-term monitoring of behavior), it’s also failed to be replicated at least twice (see here,  here and here). And there’s at least one paper showing that accepting determinism makes you more empathic and less vindictive, which isn’t that surprising if you don’t think people are able to “decide’ whether to do good or bad things.

My own view is that while these studies are interesting, we need to concentrate less on testing the effects of free will on people’s views or on confecting new semantic arguments for free will, and more on working out the consequences and implications of determinism for society, for we know that determinism, (or, if you include quantum effects, “naturalism”) happens to be true, and we should accept it and work from there.

But the papers keep coming out. There’s a new one in PNAS by Nathan D. Martin, Davide Rigoni, and Kathleen Vohs (the same Vohs) that examines the effects of believing in free will on attitudes towards unethical acts and the need for “strong punishment”. (Reference and free link below, be sure you have the legal “Unpaywall” extension.)

I’ll try to be brief. Martin et al. used existing data from the World Values Survey, which asks questions not only about free will (the effect of “fate”), but whether certain actions are considered unethical and whether “criminals should be severely punished” (how severely is not specified). They also correlated the results with the nature of the country surveyed (65,111 people were surveyed from 46 countries): was the country one with a high “corruption index”, and was it a democracy?  They then did a massive correlational analysis to see what effects various demographic variables, as well as belief in contracausal free will, had on attitudes towards ethics and criminal punishment.

Here are the data, with the left and right sides showing the regression of either intolerance for unethicality (left side) or support for strong criminal punishment (right side) on some variables; the bottom part of the graph (“B”) is better as it takes care of other variables correlated with the two items of interest:

 

Considering the regression coefficients (β) and the probabilities of getting them by chance alone (those with asterisks are considered statistically significant), you find these main results:

a.) Belief in free will is positively and significantly correlated with both intolerance for unethicality and support for criminal punishment; the association is stronger for the latter. This isn’t surprising: if you think people can choose to behave good or badly, then you would be more prone to pass moral judgment of them (be intolerant of their acts) and support punishment for them. (The authors note from other studies that the punishment is often seen as “retributive”: not to deter others or sequester criminals for “curing” and removal from society, but simply because criminals deserve to be punished because they made the wrong choice.

The regression for disapprobation of unethical acts, is pretty small, and of borderline significance. In fact, factors like gender, age, education, and religion are at least as strong. (As you’d expect, religious belief is positively associated with both disapprobation of unethical acts and calls for severe punishment; that’s likely because the Abrahamic religions are explicitly dualistic, favoring contracausal free will.)

b.) The relationship between belief in free will and support for criminal punishment holds across all societies, but the relationship for “intolerance of unethicality” holds only in countries that have “institutional integrity”—those where corruption is uncommon. Examples of high-integrity societies (determined in other analyses) include Chile, Japan, and Spain; medium-integrity societies are Poland, South Korea, and Trinidad and Tobago; and low-integrity societies are Iran, Moldova, and Rwanda.

Again, this is unsurprising; in all societies, people who accept contracausal free will should call for retributive punishment; but you can understand why those who live in corrupt societies might go a bit easier on those who commit unethical acts, for that’s how you get along there. As the authors note:

Institutional integrity reflects the extent to which countries’ public sectors are free of corruption and maintain strong, transparent governance. Among residents of countries with average to high institutional integrity, stronger free will beliefs predicted stronger intolerance of unethical behavior. However, in countries with widespread corruption and lax governance, whether people slightly or strongly endorsed free will beliefs was decoupled from their attitudes toward unethical action. In these countries, unethical behavior could be attributed to external circumstances or viewed as a rational strategy rather than a reflection of moral character.

c.) The authors construe this as strong support for the Vohs and Schooler paper and its conclusion that belief in free will makes you less likely to cheat.  While the present paper doesn’t really say anything about people’s beliefs and tendency to act unethically, it does show a connection between free will and how you judge the behavior of other people. And since it’s based on a huge sample of people from many countries, it shows that a connection between free will and punishment or disapprobation holds pretty widely, especially in societies of “integrity.” I don’t doubt their conclusion, as it would seem to follow naturally from realizing that contracausal free will makes you see other people’s actions as a result of free choice, and thinking that they could have done otherwise.

What’s the upshot? The authors, mercifully, don’t even come close to saying that we should believe in free will because it’s good for society. All they do is point this out:

Belief in free will might seem esoteric, unworthy of scientific study, or academic (in the pejorative sense). It is not. Attesting to its widespread impact, our global analysis found that the more that people endorsed notions supporting free will beliefs, the harsher their attitudes toward wrong-doing and wrong-doers, with one notable exception. For residents of countries with corrupt and ineffectual public sectors, free will beliefs did not bear on judgments of unethical actions but nevertheless predicted preferences that criminals receive harsh punishments. The influence of free will beliefs in people around the world, along with the moderating influence of countries’ institutional integrity, provides evidence that seeing one’s own and others’ actions as reflecting personal choice, accountability, and self-determination can broadly affect moral attitudes and judgments.

Well, I have no problem with that; it’s a statement of fact. But what you do with that fact is disputable. Seeing that the “free will” associated with moral judgment is true contracausal free will, we already know that that belief is simply wrong. And I feel that basing social policy on something that’s known to be wrong is, in the long run, bad.

Naturalism and physical causation of behavior are true, and we must accept that. When we do, then we can deal with its supposed inimical effects. I for one think that a view of determinism (or naturalism) behind people’s behavior will be good for societies in the long run. I’m a naturalist and determinist, and I don’t lie in bed every day wondering what is the point of getting up. And yes, I feel as if I make free choices. But in my heart (or brain) I know that I don’t. This realization, to me, is one that can have immense and salubrious effects on the criminal justice system, and Robert Sapolsky, who’s way smarter than I, agrees. But I’ve already discussed that, and won’t go into it here.

h/t: Karl

_______

Martin, N. D., D. Rigoni, and K. D. Vohs. 2017. Free will beliefs predict attitudes toward unethical behavior and criminal punishment. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114:7325-7330.

Sunday morning mimicry

July 16, 2017 • 8:45 am

I needn’t explain why I’m so fascinated with the phenomenon of animal and plant mimicry, so let us just marvel at two examples this Sunday morning as we worship at the church of Our Lady of Perpetual Naturalism.

Both were found by Matthew Cobb, and both were retweeted by Gil Wizen from the same source, which is written in Japanese. The first is a leaf-mimicking moth. Can you spot which one is the moth?

The species is found in China and Taiwan, and looks like this when pinned. Look at the markings of the forewings:

Here’s a video showing the stunning mimicry; its wings are not curled but give the illusion of it. It’s remarkable!

And a behavioral adaptation to facilitate hiding. Several insects repeatedly turn around when moving, like this one. Can you guess why? Put your guesses below, and then see the answer here.

 

xxx

Another clue: here’s the image of one species in the genus. Its head is to the right.

Readers’ wildlife photos (and video)

July 16, 2017 • 7:45 am

We have a bird video from reader Art in Ohio:

We have been following the development of three noisy but adorable wood thrush chicks (Hylocichla mustelina) and their industrious parents. Here is a short video of them feeding.

And reader Will from Morris, Illinois sends a strange example of animal behavior.

Today, I observed and photographed (attached) odd behaviors in Cooper’s Hawks (Accipiter cooperii) in my backyard in Grundy County Illinois.  Three juvenile (?) birds landed and two of them “bowed down” to the third bird.  This lasted about two minutes before they were startled by something and flew off.  I’d guess this was a mating display but they seem to be juveniles.  Strange.

Will updated me this morning; the behavior is well known:

Dr. Robert N. Rosenfield promptly answered my query about this behavior in Cooper’s Hawks.  He directed me to his paper in the Journal of Raptor Research, “Proning Behavior in Cooper’s Hawks (Accipiter cooperii)“.

The behavior, which Rosenfield and coauthor Larry Sobolik call “proning” (good word!), may be a way to avoid detection by predators, or it may simply be a “byproduct” expression on the ground of a behavior that these birds normally show in the nest. A quote from his short paper:

. . . It is routine for older nestling and fledgling Cooper’s Hawks and other young raptors to lie down on the nest to rest and/or sleep.

. . . Reynolds and Wight (1978) indicated that researchers may overlook fledged accipiter young, and hence underestimate reproductive output, in part because young occur farther away from the nest as they develop flying skills. These liabilities may be aggravated by reduced detection probability associated with proning because a proning bird away from the nest likely ‘‘blends’’ in with the branch on which it is lying (Fig. 1), or it may be overlooked when on the ground (or on a house structure

Here’s figure 1 from Rosenfield and Sobolik’s 2004 paper along with its caption:

Figure 1. Proning by a (a) female, (b) a male (eyelid closed), and (c) a group of three fledgling Cooper’s Hawks (tip of right wing of mostly obscured bird visible behind left shoulder of bird in right forefront). All fledglings are about 44 d old. Photographs by Larry E. Sobolik.

And Stephen Barnard has contributed a photo of a Cedar Waxwing (Bombycilla cedrorum) I’ve always said that if a running shoe could fly, it would look like this bird:

 

Sunday: Hili dialogue

July 16, 2017 • 6:45 am

Good morning on a quiet Sunday, July 16, 2017. and it’s a good food day: National Corn Fritters Day. I like mine big, crunchy, spherical and lightly drizzled with syrup, comme ça:(Do they have these in the UK? If so, they’d be called “sweetcorn fritters”.)

On July 16, 1935, the world’s first parking meter, known as “Park-O-Meter #1”, was installed in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; it cost 5 cents per hour. And, on this day in 1941, Joe DiMaggio hit safely for his 56th consecutive game, still a record for major league baseball.  On this day in 1945, the first nuclear bomb was detonated by the Manhattan Project in New Mexico. Only a month after the success of this “Trinity test,” the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A photo of that test is below. When Robert Oppenheimer witnessed it, he uttered a line from Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita, that became famous, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds”. (The guy knew his literature!) There’s a longer story behind this quote, which you can read here.

The bomb was placed atop a 100-foot tower to mimic the effects it would have when exploded in the air after being dropped from a bomber.

On this day in 1969,  Apollo 11, the first space mission to put astronauts on the Moon, was launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. How many of you watched the first Moon walk live? (I did.). And exactly 30 years later, JFK’s son, John Jr.. along with his wife and sister-in-law, were killed in a plane crash off Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. John Jr. was at the controls of a small Cessna.

Notables born on this day include Mary Baker Eddy (1821), Roald Amundsen (1872), Ginger Rogers (1911), and Tony Kushner (1956). Here’s Ginger doing a tap routine with her perennial partner, Fred Astaire. What a great pair! Click on the arrow to start it:

Those who died on this day include Mary Todd Lincoln (1882), Heinrich Böll (1985), Julian Schwinger, who won the Nobel Prize along with Feynman and Tonegawa (died 1994), Kitty Wells (2012) and Johnny Winter (2014). Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the beasts and their staff are being visited by the former lodger, Gosia, with her two children Hania and Tomek. Hili is a bit scared of the children (though Cyrus loves them), and is practicing an emergency drill:

Hili: If you think there is some danger pick me up.
A: But there is nothing here.
Hili: I know. I’m reminding you just in case.
In Polish:
Hili: Gdybyś uważał, że jest jakieś niebezpieczeństwo, to weź mnie na ręce.
Ja: Ale tu nic nie ma.
Hili: Wiem, przypominam na wszelki wypadek.
Here’s Hania frolicking with Cyrus:
And Hania wearing a teeshirt that Andrzej and Malgorzata had made for her. It says, in Polish, “Never mind a star… I will be an astronaut and I will fly to stars!”
Here’s Andrzej and Malgorzata holding Hania and Tomek. They do love kids!