Readers’ wildlife photographs

April 25, 2015 • 7:48 am

I’ve decided that Saturday’s edition of RWP will henceforth be shorter than usual, as this day always includes a special cat feature.  But although the quantity of readers’ photos may fall on Caturdays, the quality will not.

Reader Colin Campbell contributed four bird photos using an unusual camera rig:

Here are several pictures taken this winter in the south of France for the photo rain barrel. They were all taken on an iphone 5 mounted on a Lego stand and operated from behind the curtains with the headphone cable!
They are the Eurasian Blue tit (Cyanistes caeruleus), European Goldfinch (Carduelis carduelis carduelis), great tit (Parus major) and greenfinch (Chloris chloris).
The blue tit and European goldfinches are the most common visitors to the feeder on the windowsill in winter. The goldfinches are rather garrulous and argumentative and frequently come in mobs of a dozen. All are lovely to contemplate.
I’ve put the photographs in random order, so you get the chance to match the birds listed above with their photos. This should be a cakewalk for most readers here.
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Saturday: Hili dialogue

April 25, 2015 • 4:38 am

It’s Saturday, my “nominal” day off (nominal because I work about half the normal hours). However, it’s supposed to be cold and rainy today, and that’s a bummer. But from the pictures below, there’s a lovely spring in Dobrzyn and the trees are flowering.

A: What do you see there?
Hili: A link in a food chain.

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In Polish:
Ja: Co tam widzisz?
Hili: Ogniwo łańcucha pokarmowego.
And lagniappe: A picture of Hili’s bête noire, Fitness, in the garden, with a comment by Malgorazata:

He is a beautiful cat. I only he had a bit nicer character!

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And an extra picture by Andrzej of the ménage à deux walking by the Vistula.
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Philomena!

April 24, 2015 • 3:30 pm

Let’s end the work week not with a cat photo, but with a picture of the Official Website Sweetheart™.

Reader David, also a Philomena fan, sent me this picture taken from Diane Morgan’s recently-constructed Facebook page, which she introduced with the words, “Hello! Welcome to my Facebook page where I will post stuff about me, like a complete and utter narcissist.”

I want this shirt!

Philomena!

The Big Dichotomy

April 24, 2015 • 2:40 pm

Trigger warning: Video contains sexual truths and very raw language! Also a short preliminary commercial.

Everyone who’s sentient knows that, at least in America, there’s a double standard applied to men vs. women who are both ageing. This five-minute Comedy Central clip, with Tina Fey, Patricia Arquette, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and Amy Schumer, is really funny, but beneath the humor the women are, I suspect, dead serious.

Book by murdered editor of Charlie Hebdo just out, defiant in right to criticize Islam

April 24, 2015 • 1:39 pm

Stéphane Charbonnier (“Charb”), the editor of Charlie Hebdo who was murdered by Muslim thugs, has a new book out, sadly still only in French, that was completed just two days before his death, and published April 9.  The New York Times has a brief description of the book, which gives the lie to two myths about the magazine:

1. It made fun of Islam but not of other faiths, and
2. It was “Islamophobic,” that is, it made fun of Muslims in general and thereby was a “hate magazine.”  In reality, the magazine was pro-immigrant and against those segments of French society that denigrated immigrants, including Muslims.

But there’s also another important part of the book:

3. It warns of the dangers of Western liberals capitulating to fears of Muslim rage

Here’s what the Times says about Chabonnier’s book, which I hope will soon be translated into other languages (Arabic would be nice!):

The book, “Open Letter to the Fraudsters of Islamophobia Who Play Into Racists’ Hands,” argues that all religions, including Islam, are fair game for ridicule in secular Republican France. The weekly newsmagazine L’Obs published excerpts from the book this week.

And indeed, Charlie Hebdo often mocked other faiths, particularly Catholicism. Although my French is probably good enough to read the excerpts linked above, I haven’t the time. Francophone readers may want to do so, and weigh in below.

. . . “By virtue of what twisted theory is humor less compatible with Islam than it is with any other religion?” he wrote. “Saying Islam is not compatible with humor is as absurd as claiming Islam is not compatible with democracy or secularism.”

. . . In keeping with the spirit of Charlie Hebdo, the book does not shy away from harsh jabs at religion. “The problem is neither the Quran nor the Bible, sleep-inducing, incoherent and badly written novels,” Mr. Charbonnier wrote. The problem, he said, is the faithful who read the holy books “like instructions for assembling Ikea shelves.”

Re point 2:

“If tomorrow all the Muslims of France convert to Catholicism or abandon all religion, that would change nothing to racist discourse: These foreigners or French citizens of foreign descent will still be singled out as responsible for all problems,” Mr. Charbonnier wrote. He added that “being afraid of Islam is most likely stupid, absurd and many other things, but it isn’t a crime.”

Re point 3:

Warming to his theme that the fight against Islamophobia had backfired, he argued that a misplaced fight against Islamophobia led by white elites had stifled free speech and paradoxically encouraged the mistreatment of Muslims by singling out their religious identity.

. . . In the 120-page book, which does not contain any new caricatures, Mr. Charbonnier criticized the media, politicians and some civil society groups for what he called “disgusting white, left-wing bourgeois paternalism.”

. . .He placed special blame on the media for creating a climate that allowed Charlie Hebdo to be targeted.

“It is because the media decided that republishing the Muhammad caricatures could only trigger the fury of Muslims that it triggered the anger of a few Muslim associations,” he wrote in reference to 2006, when the newspaper reprinted cartoons of Muhammad that had first been published by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten.

I was upset, but not surprised, when a number of bloggers immediately accused Charlie Hebdo of “hate speech” after the terrorist attack, more or less blaming the magazine for its own fate.  But I was surprised when one of these clueless critics was Garry Trudeau, creator of Doonesbury. Apparently some people took a cursory look at a cartoon or two and jumped to the conclusion that Charlie Hebdo hated Muslims.

Well, like me, the magazine doesn’t care much for Islam, but doesn’t bear personal animus against Muslims themselves. And it wouldn’t have been hard to find that out. One could, I suppose, blame the time pressure involved in writing on websites, but it’s clear that much of the pushback against Charlie Hebdo came from the very kind of liberal, Islam-coddling guilt that Charbonnier criticized.

Here he is with some of his covers:

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(Photo and caption from NYT): téphane Charbonnier, editor of Charlie Hebdo, in 2012. A book he finished two days before his death has been published. Credit Francois Guillot/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

My New Republic piece on Dzhokhar Tsarnaev

April 24, 2015 • 10:30 am

The New Republic has published a rewritten version of my piece from yesterday on Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and his lack of free will. The TNR piece is called “Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s Crimes Were Terrible, But Morality Has Nothing to Do With It“.

For sure I’ll get it in the neck for this one, for they used “morality” in the title rather than “free will” or some variant of “agency.” (I don’t get to pick the title.) But if the readers don’t like it, they can take a number, get in line, and . . .

Those of you who read it yesterday, especially those who disagreed with me, might go over there and see what the commenters are saying.

Why being gay can never be a “choice”

April 24, 2015 • 9:30 am

You surely know that there’s a big kerfuffle about whether being gay is a “choice” or—the implied alternative—a biological imperative: something that results from an individual’s development: hormones, neurons, or whatever. I happen to fall into the latter camp, along with the American Psychological Association.

The former camp, those saying that homosexuality is a “choice,” largely comprises religious individuals. This is, I think, for two reasons. First, many religious folk are already conditioned to believe in fully libertarian “you-could-have-chosen-otherwise” free will, for that’s a tenet of many faiths. Lots of Christians, for instance, require libertarian free will to support their foundational claim: that you can freely choose whether or not to accept Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior. After all, that choice is supposed to determine whether you’ll either fly or fry in the afterlife.

Too, many theologians try to explain the existence of human-caused evils on the planet as an inevitable byproduct of God having given us “free will”.  That divine bequest goes along, they claim, with the possibility that humans could make the wrong choices, leading to stuff like Auschwitz. (Yes, that example has been used, and was dismantled by someone who excoriated the idea that the Holocaust occurred so that Nazis could have free will.)

It struck me yesterday, as I was reading one of WordPress’s most popular posts of the day (“Yes, homosexuality absolutely is a choice,” by minister John Pavlovitz [it doesn’t say what the title implies, for the guy is sympathetic to gays]), that the Christian insistence that being gay is a choice is also wrong. In fact, it cannot be right!

The idea that people “freely choose” to be homosexual is of course a way to damn them for making the wrong “choice,” a choice that supposedly is deemed sinful by the Bible, as it indeed is. And so, in Catholicism, if you commit homosexual acts, and don’t confess them, that is a “grave sin” that can send you to hell. That view makes sense only if, at any moment, you could freely choose between performing or abstaining from homosexual acts.

The most famous recent example of religious stupidity about homosexuality was former neurosurgeon Ben Carson’s remark to CNN (yes, he’s a Christian, and apparently a Republican Presidential candidate) that being gay must be a choice because of reasons:

“Because a lot of people who go into prison go into prison straight — and when they come out, they’re gay. So, did something happen while they were in there? Ask yourself that question.”

Now that’s just ridiculous on the face of it. (Carson later apologized for the remark.) Going into jail straight (if you were straight) and coming out gay doesn’t mean that you’ve made a “choice”. All it means is that your sexual orientation and/or behavior has changed because your surroundings have. To a determinist, that’s simply the effect of your environment (prison) on your neurons.

Which brings us to the point. If you’re a determinist, then being gay can never be something that a person chooses freely. Your genes and your environment—be it your peers, your “internal” environment (whether or not it comes from genetic endowment), and your social surroundings—must ultimately be the “cause” of homosexuality.  It can’t be a free choice because we simply do not have free choices about anything.

And it doesn’t matter whether the factors determining gayness are hormones and genes, or your experiences and environment (both, of course, can act together). There is no distinction between “biological” and “nonbiological” causes of homosexuality, for the trait ultimately results from how your brain works, and that’s completely biological. Being gay cannot be a choice any more than being short (like me) or being Asian.

Maybe I’m off the mark, here, but I don’t think so. If nothing can be a libertarian choice, then neither can being gay. Period.

Now compatibilists (those who believe in both determinism and some form of free will) may be able to find a way that being gay somehow reflects “free will”. Perhaps they’ll say that there’s a meaningful difference between, say, a developmental feature that produced homosexuality (the equivalent to them of “coercion” or “acting with a gun to your head”), and being gay because you had a homosexual experience and it seemed natural and enjoyable. But I don’t think that difference (if it is a difference) is a meaningful one. In neither case is being gay a choice in the sense religious people mean—a free choice where you could have decided not to be gay.

And that’s yet another advantage of emphasizing determinism over the diverse and conflicting definitions of “free will” promulgated by compatibilists.

Readers’ wildlife photos (and video!)

April 24, 2015 • 8:00 am

We have two great bird items today.  The first comes from reader, biologist, and naturalist Lou Jost, who lives and works in Ecuador. I’ll let him tell you the story, but it involves a decade of planning to get one photograph, as well as a cool seed-dispersal strategy of a parasitic plant:

This picture of a Golden-rumped Euphonia (Euphonia cyanocephala) took ten years of planning. These birds are quite thinly distributed and eat mostly mistletoe berries. My only hope of photographing them was to have mistletoes growing next to my kitchen window. So ten years ago when I started building my house, near my kitchen window I planted a tree that I knew was a good host for mistletoe. Five years ago the tree seemed big enough to host mistletoes, so I planted some on the branches, especially on the lower branches that would be in good view from my window. Finally this year the mistletoes made fruits, and the euphonias came, and I got my picture! This is a male; the female is mostly green.

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Their poop is amazing–long sticky dangling thread-like chains of mistletoe seeds. The birds have to wipe their butts on the branches to free the chains, thus planting the seeds on the hosts’ branches. The chains blow in the wind so more seeds get stuck on other branches. I put additional poop pictures here.

JAC: This seems likely to be an adaptation for the mistletoe to spread its seeds. Those mistletoe individuals who had the chemical composition in their fruits to make bird poop sticky were those who left more of their genes. Evolution is cleverer than you are! (For even more cleverness, read below the photo.)

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More by Lou on the poop from the Fundacion EcoMinga website, with other fascinating information:

After it left the mistletoe, it perched on a branch and wiggled its butt like an American football player doing a victory dance in the end zone after scoring a touchdown. I didn’t realize it at the moment, but it was actually wiping its butt on the branch to remove the stringy poop it had just made. The poop is a remarkably long (12-15 cm) transparent sticky thread, with big green mistletoe seeds embedded in it at regular intervals. The dangling sticky seeds get stuck on branches, and the bird’s wiggling butt-wipes also plant some of the seeds directly on the branches of the host. The remarkable structure of the poop is especially surprising considering that each mistletoe berry contains only one seed. The glue in the berries (viscin) joins the seeds together into these long chains inside the bird’s intestines!

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The top seed in this chain of poop has stuck to a host branch and may produce a new mistletoe plant. Photo: Lou Jost/EcoMinga.
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Three strands of euphonia poop on the tree with the mistletoe. Note the chains of mistletoe seeds embedded in the strands. Photo: Lou Jost/EcoMinga.

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And, since we’re keeping track of Stephen Barnard’s bald eagles in Idaho (parents Luci and Desi, with an unknown number of chicks), here’s a video and some photos of eagle childcare:

First, Desi brings a half-eaten fish home (look hard; it happens at 14 seconds). Luci appears to get all excited when she sees Desi on the way:

I couldn’t see the fish so well, but Stephen sent me a screenshot and a note: “You can clearly see the half-eaten fish in the talons.” He added this:

That was a pretty big fish, by the way. I’d guess over 20″. I can understand why he’d want to eat part of it rather than carry it to the nest. They fish within a radius of several miles.

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And another photo of this magnificent bird:

Reliable evening pose. I had to shoot portrait mode to fit him into the frame.

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