Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
And the Google Doodle celebrates it with a stop animation of flowers growing and a bee coming around; click on the screenshot below to go there:
I’m told that there’s an eclipse Doodle in the UK, which differs slightly from the above; reader Grania sent in a screenshot. It’s animated, but I don’t think US readers can access it:
The end of the week is nigh, though not the end of the world, as some pastors predict. Today the CeilingCatMobile gets its inspection by my insurance company, and then it can be fixed, at enormous expense to my university shuttle-bus company’s insurance carrier. It will need a new left eye, whiskers, and a refurbished coat on the front.
Yesterday Hili met the woman who rescued her. After Hili’s predecessor died, the awesomely wise tabby Pia (she had but one tooth in her mouth), Andrzej and Malgorzata were disconsolate, and didn’t even contemplate getting another cat. And then one day, about two years ago, Aneta showed up on their doorstep with a tiny tabby kitten in her hands. It was Baby Hili, who needed a home. Andrzej and Malgorzata took her in, and the rest is history. And here she is:
Hili: It was Aneta who brought me here when I was little, wasn’t it?
A: Yes.
Hili: Ask her to come more often to pet me.
As lagniappe, here’s Baby Hili shortly after she arrived at her forever home:
In Polish:
Hili: Czy to Aneta mnie tu przyniosła jak byłam mała?
Ja: Tak.
Hili: To poproś ją, żeby teraz częściej przychodziła mnie głaskać.
Reader Dom called my attention to this video showing a mated pair of peregrine falcons (Falco peregrinus) who seem to be nesting in Norwich Cathedral. I’ve never actually heard them call, but listen to the cacophony as they talk to each other. They sound like penguins!
First, to prove it: here’s a screenshot of the data from the last post:
And, the Big Announcement, which has to come from Hili, of course (I’m told she had to be dragged inside to perform her duty):
A: Hili, in a moment there will be 10,000th post on Jerry’s website.Hili: 10,000 is less important than 10,001.
At any rate, I read the readers’ suggestions for what to do on this post, and I appreciated them all, but in the end they were either too much work or didn’t strike me as just right. So what I’ll do is say one thing and announce another.
I’ve been writing on this site (NOT A BLOG) since January of 2009, when WEIT came out, and it’s hard to believe that it’s been six years. I originally planned this, on my editor’s advice, to just be a site where people could come to learn about the book. My idea was that every couple of weeks or so I’d add a new post about the evidence for evolution.
Well, that didn’t work so well. The site grew—I won’t say “out of control”, but into into a collection of things that I like to write about, including science, boots, food, travels, philosophy—and of course, cats. I don’t plan any big changes, but I have to say that I love writing on the site, even when I drag myself to work wondering what in the deuce I have to say. And I especially love the faithful readers who follow the site and make good comments. I think you’ll know that this site is known for its civil and thoughtful commentary (as well as puns!), and I’m proud of that; but it wouldn’t have happened without the readership. As you’ll see when you read Faith vs. Fact—you have ordered it, haven’t you?—that one of my acknowledgments is to all the reader whose comments helped educate me about the fraught relationship between science and religion. So thank you all, and, as Maru says, we do our best.
My announcement is this: I’m planning a Big Road Trip this summer, something I’ve always wanted to do. That would involve taking off a month or more and driving across the country, avoiding interstates, visiting my friends, and, of course, investigating regional noms. I’d like to include in the trip brief visits to some of the readers on the route—a route that will be partly determined by who wants a visit.
I’ll probably circle south from Chicago, go across the southern US, and then up through the West Coast heading back east through the Big Empty States. I also want to visit Anthony Hutcherson in Maryland to look at some Bengal kittens.
I’d love to document the trip not only with descriptions and photos of what I see and do, but with information about and pictures of readers and their animals (preferably cats, of course). If you want to say “hi” on this trip, shoot me an email with your location. I already know many of you through either your comments or your emails, and think it would be fun to meet readers in person along with the several friends I haven’t visited in a while.
By “visit,” I don’t mean that people should feed me or put me up: I’m just looking for a brief peek into the lives of some of the readers. I can’t visit everyone, of course, but I’ll try to see some of the people I’ve gotten to know on this site.
So. . . that’s it. As the Furry Princess of Poland says, it’s time to move on to the next post.
Reader Lou Jost told me that a very rare hummingbird, the Blue-Bearded Helmetcrest (Oxypogon cyanolaemus), thought to be extinct since 1946, has just been rediscovered in its very restricted habitat—the páramo in the Santa Marta Mountains of Colombia. It’s a beautiful creature, and the authors who discovered and described the finding (reference below, no link), took the first ever picture of this bird alive (all other photos are apparently of dead specimens).
According to Wikipedia, the bird is known from only 62 museum specimens and was last seen alive 69 years ago; but I noted that the entry has been quickly updated to reflect the rediscovery (despite Greg’s beefing, Wikipedia is good for some things!):
Surveys during 1999-2003 failed to detect the species. A brief survey in February 2007 and December 2011 failed to detect the species but survey efforts have not yet been sufficient to list this species as Critically Endangered (Possibly Extinct). In March 2015, the blue-bearded helmetcrest was rediscovered by researchers from the foundation ProAves while documenting fires set by local farmers that now threaten the species.
This February, Carlos Julio Rojas and Christian Vasquez were inspecting the Parque Nacional Natural Sierra Nevade de Santa Marta, concerned about fires that the locals had set to create pasture as well as about pigs that had been allowed to roam free in the fragile habitat. On their trip, they saw the bird. From the paper:
At 11:00 AM on 4 March 2015, during surveys of fires in high elevations (3,930 m elevation) of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta some 14 hours by foot above ProAves’ reserve, CJS saw a small bird move quickly past him and perch on a bush nearby. He took a quick photograph of it before it flew off. The photograph on the camera screen revealed the striking plumage of the long-lost Blue-bearded Helmetcrest.
That picture is below, along with the proud caption, “First ever photographs in life of the spectacular Blue-bearded Helmetcrest (Oxypogon cyanolaemus).” Look at that crest and blue beard—what a beaut!
I can’t find any other photographs (or even drawings) of the species on the Internet.
Here’s a bit of description from the paper, in which you can sense the discoverers’ excitement (my emphasis):
Collar & Salaman (2013) illustrated specimens of all species in the genus and analysed plumage differences. They considered O. cyanolaemus uniquely to possess a (narrowly white-bordered) glittering purplish-blue beard, dull greenish sheen on the crown-sides, brown-and-whitish mottled underparts, a white undertail except for dark distal edges and central rectrices and a relatively short crest. All these features are clearly visible from the photographs presented here. The photographs presented here clearly match those of O. cyanolaemus specimens in Collar & Salaman (2013). Blue-bearded Helmetcrest is a highly distinctive species in its plumage and no other species in this genus is expected at the observation locality high in the Santa Marta mountains. There can be no doubt as to the identification based on the photographs presented, and that this long-lost species has finally been found.
Here’s the same individual in another place. They saw a total of three birds.
This species is a long way from safety. It’s endemic to a small patch of habitat that is under siege from the locals, who set fires to provide pasture for their livestock. Although the park is given the highest level of protection possible in Colombia, that protection also allows “indigenous peoples to carry on their livelihoods.” All the researchers can suggest is to educate the locals and restore the páramo where the bird lives if those locals agree to stop grazing. But really, how easy can it be to tell people to stop raising their animals so that a rare hummingbird could survive?
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Julio Rojas, Caros, and C. Vasquez. 2015. Rediscovery of the Blue-beareded Helmetcrest Oxypogon cyanolaemus, a hummingbird lost for almost 70 years. Conservacón Colombiana 22: 4-7
If anybody thinks that Buddhists are a lot less concerned about criticism of their faith than are members of other religions, think twice. Myanmar, for instance, is hard on its Muslim minority population: even one of my heroes, Ang San Suu Kyi, has been criticized for being indifferent to the welfare of those Muslims.
And now Myanmar has sentenced three people, a New Zealander and two Burmese (Myanmrians?) to two years in jail—for the horrible crime of insulting the Buddha! How did they do it? By advertising an event at a bar with a picture showing Buddha wearing headphones! As The New York Times reports:
A bar manager from New Zealand and two Burmese men were sentenced to two years in prison in Myanmar on Tuesday for posting an image online of the Buddha wearing headphones, an effort to promote an event.
The court in Yangon said the image denigrated Buddhism and was a violation of Myanmar’s religion act, which prohibits insulting, damaging or destroying religion. “It is clear the act of the bar offended the majority religion in the country,” said the judge, U Ye Lwin.
The image was posted in December on the Facebook page of the VGastro bar and restaurant in Yangon. After an outcry from hard-line Buddhist groups, the police arrested the restaurant’s general manager, Philip Blackwood, 32, of New Zealand, along with the bar owner, U Tun Thurein, 40, and the manager, U Htut Ko Ko Lwin, 26. The three have been held in Insein prison in Yangon.
Here’s the offending picture, now removed from Facebook. Horrible, isn’t it?
The offenders were forced to make a grovelling apology:
The three convicted men faced possible prison terms of as long as four years in connection with the image, which was posted on the bar’s Facebook page. The image was quickly removed, and the bar issued an apology, saying it had not intended to cause offense.
“Our ignorance is embarrassing for us, and we will attempt to correct it by learning more about Myanmar’s religions, culture and history, characteristics that make this such a rich and unique society,” the apology said.
That’s six years total out of three lives, all for putting headphones on the Buddha. What rot. Buddhists are supposed to be better than that.
I’ve long been puzzled by the many writings of “compatibilists”: those philosophers and laypeople who accept physical determinism of our choices and behaviors, but still maintain that we have a kind of “free will.” Such people reject the classical form of free will that’s been so important to many people (especially religious ones)—the kind of “libertarian” free will that posits that we really can freely control our actions, and in many cases could have chosen to behave other than how we did. This is the kind of free will that most people accept, as they don’t see the world as deterministic; and most also feel that if the world were deterministic, people would lose moral responsibility for their actions (see my post on the work of Sarkissian et al.).
Based on statements of some compatibilists, I realized that one reason philosophers spend so much time trying to define forms of free will compatible with determinism is because they see bad consequences of rejecting all free will. Some compatibilists think that if people realized that they don’t have the kind of free will they thought they did, the world would disintegrate: people would either lie in bed out of sheer languor and despair, or behave “immorally” because, after all, we can’t choose how to behave.
I’ve been rebuked sharply for imputing these motivations to compatibilists. Their efforts, I’m told, have nothing to do with trying to stave off possible bad results of rejecting free will. Rather, they’re supposedly engaged in a purely philosophical exercise: trying to show that we still have a form of free will that really matters, even if the libertarian form has been killed off by science. I have, however, responded by pointing out statements by compatibilists like Dan Dennett warning about the bad things that could happen if neuroscientists tell us that we don’t have free will.
If you ever doubted that compatibilism is motivated largely by philosophers’ fears about what would happen if people rejected classical free will, and weren’t presented with a shiny new compatibilist form, watch this “Big Think” video by Dan Dennett. It’s called “Stop telling people they have free will”:
Supposedly aimed at promulgating a better concept of free will, Dan’s video in fact doesn’t do that at all. Rather, Dennett tries to show that those neuroscientists who tell people they don’t have free will are being “mischievous” and “irresponsible.” He devises a thought experiment that shows only one thing: if people don’t think they have free will, they start behaving badly, and could even commit crimes! They become “morally incompetent people.” His short talk is an exercise in consequentialism, not a philosophical recasting of free will.
Dennett even cites the Vohs and Schooler experiment purporting to show that if people read passages showing that they have no free will, they tend to cheat more on subsequent puzzle-solving tests. (Note that those supposed effects are tested over a very short span—an hour or two—and say absolutely nothing about the long term effects of rejecting classical free will.)
Dennett, however, fails to cite the work of Rolf Zvaan at Rotterdam, who failed to replicate the results of Vohs and Schooler while pointing out defects in their experimental design. (See my post on that here.) Zvaan found absolutely no effect of reading pro- and anti-free will passages on the level of cheating in subsequent tests. His paper is being submitted for publication.
But even if people behaved worse if they were told that determinism reigns and libertarian free will doesn’t exist, so what? The truth is the truth, and if science shows us something like that, we simply have to deal with it. After all, science has found no evidence for God, either, and yet there are studies showing that belief in God similarly produces better short-term behavior on psychological tests. Do philosophers like Dennett then try to confect new definitions of God—”the kind of a God worth wanting”? Maybe we should redefine God to comport with science: “God is the Cosmos.” No, of course they don’t do that. They’re atheists!
It is curious that Dennett has spent a lot of time attacking the concept of “belief in belief”: the idea that we should tolerate religious belief because, even if not based on truth, it still makes people behave better. Yet when the “belief” is in free will rather than God, then “belief in belief” becomes not only okay, but essential.
And that, I think, is why some compatibilists try to invent forms of free will to replace the libertarian version. They do it, I believe, because they can then tell people that they really do have free will, and so we’ll all continue to behave well and society will thrive.
But I don’t believe that people will either run amok or become vegetables if they become incompatibilists and realize that all our behaviors are determined (or perhaps slightly affected by quantum indeterminacy, which still does not constitute anybody’s idea of “free will”). I’m an incompatibilist, and since I became one neither I nor anyone else has noticed a change in my behavior. I haven’t started robbing banks or assaulting people, and I sure don’t lie abed in the morning!
Society will learn to live with determinism, as it has learned to live with death and the absence of God. And, as I always maintain, abandoning the idea of free will is actually good for society in several ways: it undermines religion, and it is a highly useful attitude when thinking about how to reform the criminal justice system.
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BTW, while we’re on free will, reader Jim E. sent a short (2-minute) animation about the famous Libet experiment, and pointed out that Professor Ceiling Cat makes a cameo appearance as a critic of free will. And I do! Look for me at 1:05 in the video below. Dennett is in there, too—as an experimental subject!
Today we have photos from two regulars, showing animals in their backyards—that is, if you consider Stephen Barnard’s backyard to be a huge swatch of Idaho. Here are Stephen’s photos:
Mule Deer (Odocoileus hemionus):
Red-tailed Hawk (Buteo jamaicensis) I spooked while walking my d*g.
Trumpeter Swans (Cygnus buccinator) are gathering into flocks, preparing for migration.
Belted Kingfisher (Megaceryle alcyon):
Common Raven (Corvus corax), unhappy with my company.
These Red-winged Blackbirds (Agelaius phoeniceus) were having a furious battle in my back yard:
Nature: red in wing and claw:
And Diane MacPherson sent two common animals that we really should look at more closely:
Here are a couple of today’s animals. I finally get to see the chipmunk again (I think this is the one that lives in my back garden—and the one who destroyed my moon flower deciding to live there). A very cautious chipmunk today—I suspect there is some disorientation after such a long torpor.Eastern Chipmunk (Tamias striatus) Awakes from Torpor in Spring:
Small birds also enjoyed the left out seeds intended mostly for the chippy. Here is a pensive house sparrow (Passer domesticus):
This chipmunk just looks so cute—all muddy and suspicious! It’s as if it’s thinking, “Be still. She won’t know I’ve just been taking those seeds and burying them.”
