Readers’ wildlife photos (with moar biology)

September 6, 2014 • 4:38 am

Whales—our first cetacean! Reader Bruce Lyon [JAC note: I originally misattributed these photos to another reader; my apologies] sent these photographs on September 4, with lots of information:

I am sending some Humpback whale photos. Most where taken yesterday but a couple are from a from a month ago. I also include a link to a video that shows something I was not able to get photos of—lunge feeding. The video is also interesting because it shows two divers almost becoming inadvertent dinner for the whales.

Humpback Whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) have been very active this year in Monterey Bay California. What is particularly unusual is that they have been coming very close to shore—people on shore have been able to see eye to eye with whales. They even came into the mouth of Moss Landing Harbor. The whales are feeding anchovies this year, and it seems like weather/marine conditions are pushing the anchovies up close to shore, and the whale are simply following the food. Because the whale activity seems unusually good this year I have taken three whale watching boat trips out of Moss Landing Harbor, half way between Santa Cruz and Monterey. I took a tour on Tuesday and the whales did not disappoint. For any readers within a couple of hours driving distance from Monterey Bay, this is a pretty special year to take a tour. I have been very impressed with Sanctuary Tours—the captain never chases or harasses the whales but really understands their behavior and always seems to be able predict in advance where some interesting behavior might happen. He is also an excellent photographer and the Sanctuary Tour website has many of his amazing photos in the Captains Log section.

The photos below capture some of the highlights I was able to photograph.

We saw about 10 breaches very close to the boat. According to Wikipedia, a breach occurs (by definition) when a whale leaps with at least 40% of its body out of the water, otherwise it is a lunge. The lunges I have seen involve lunge feeding, where the whale comes to the surface and it mouth wide to engulf a concentrated school of prey.

Below: A full on breach. About 90% of the whale cleared the water in this breach. According to WikipediaHumpbacks gain speed for breaches by swimming rapidly close to and parallel to the surface, and then “jerking upward to perform the breach”. Apparently, the whale has to be swimming 18 miles per hour to achieve 90% clearance of the body. Given their enormous size, breaches almost seem to occur in slow motion, but I still find them notoriously difficult to photograph.

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Below: Another breach.

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Below: Breaches result in enormous splashes, as this photo illustrates (this is the splash produced by breach in the previous photo). The function of breaches is unclear but several hypotheses have been proposed: communication (signal of dominance, courting, danger), dislodging parasites, prey scaring, visual assessment, and sheer joy. As a biologist who studies communication, I am convinced that there is likely to be a communication component to breaches. Breaching is one of a few different ways that Humpbacks make big splashes—they can slap their huge tails or huge flippers on the water (see photos below). Also, according to the captain on the tours I take, young animals often breach a lot. To me, this suggests practice (= play) of a behavior that is important in life. Wikipedia has the comment that some biologists think that breaching could be an ‘honest signal’—“The immense cloud of bubbles and underwater disturbance following a breach cannot be faked; neighbours then know a breach has taken place.”

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Below: Another way of making splashes—a whale performed a headstand in the water with its tail sticking straight up in the air and then repeatedly slapped the water with its tail, which caused a huge splash. I also observed an individual making large splashes with its large pectoral fins. These fins apparently measure up to 15 feet in some whales (6 meters in one monster) or 30% of body length. According to Wikipedia, this is the longest pectoral fin in proportion to body size for any Cetacean.

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Below: A playful whale (youngster?) playing on its back in the kelp. The whale was floating belly up at the surface with its fins out of the water. It seemed to be wrapping itself in the kelp.

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Below: The same animal seems to be playing with the kelp.

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Below: A couple of months ago I took my new kayak out for an inaugural spin and had some fun encounters with Humpback Whales. I joined some other kayakers just offshore from Moss Landing harbor and several whales approached us and surfaced within 20 feet. It took some skill to stay out of their way.

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Below: The lovely silvery back of a whale surfacing near my kayak.

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Finally, although I do not have a photo of lunge feeding, this video shows what lunge feeding is like. It also shows what it is like to be a diver who almost becomes whale food for two lunge-feeding humpbacks:

JAC: The double lunge occurs about 32 seconds in—don’t miss it!

 

 

OMG, now they’re in Germany!

September 5, 2014 • 12:52 pm

From a tw**t by Salf Rahman:

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Why doesn’t it say “Polizei” if this is in Germany?

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From Bild in (the link above), we learn that a group of Shariah Police has been founded in the city of Wuppertal, Germany. I’ve translated the German: the picture above reads, “Wearing vests, displayed by the men in this Facebook picture, the Salafis [a sect of Islam], go about their Sharia patrols.”

Here’s a YouTube video showing their activity as they patrol discos and video-game parlors, trying to pull Islamic youth back to the faith or recruit them to Salafism:

The translation of the short article is basically this:

“The Islamists speak to young people on the street and take them to lectures to recruit them to Salifism. And they want to impose their rules on these people:

  • No alcohol
  • No gambling
  • No music or concerts
  • No pornography or prostitution
  • No drugs or smoking”

I suppose these people have every right to proselytize for their sect, although disturbing others who are having fun seems a bit much.

The worst part, of course, is the attempt to impose sharia law on Muslims living in Germany. Although I don’t favor the assimilation of all cultural practices of immigrants (in many ways diversity is good, as it has been in the U.S.), this religious policing is scary, and Germans have every right to be worried about it. In the end, these Muslims would no doubt favor Sharia law imposed on all Germans, as the Caliphate extends its tentacles to the west.  (That does not mean, of course, that all German Muslims agree. Surely many of them came to the west to get the freedoms and opportunities they lack in their own homelands.)

Readers’ beefs and insults

September 5, 2014 • 10:20 am

Yesterday we had the encomiums; today we have the opprobrium.

It’s that time again, although most of the unposted comments that have arrived the past two weeks have been full of invective, lacking the unintended humor that makes me chuckle. The third one below is one example.  But again I’ll give banned readers a chance to air their views—once.

All errors and grammatical infelicities are as they appear in the original

Reader cducey2013 comments on “Jesus ‘n’ Mo ‘n’ missionizing“:

It is really sad to see a UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PROFESSOR (c’mon people) resorting to the foolish conclusion that belief in evolution entails an unrelented Dawksonian criticism of religion. You, sir, are acting not like a scientist but like a charlatan, a fool, and a bigot afraid of what he does not understand. You put evolutionists to shame by “devolving” to the level of ignorance of religion akin to that shown by fundamental Christian creationists against Darwin’s theory and the New Synthesis. Please contact me if you want to understand how belief in evolution and religion are not mutually exclusive.

Here again we see the accusation that 1). evolution entails atheism and 2). that much atheistic criticism of religion (including mine) is misguided: making all religions akin to fundamentalism.  I would say that for many people, #1 has been true: that is, it’s is hard to reconcile evolution with the idea of a beneficent and omnipotent God. Two letters from readers yesterday drew that connection explicitly, and reading about evolution has certainly caused many people to abandon their faith. (This incompatibility was probably true for Darwin, for instance). That’s just a fact. As for #2, I have answered that criticism sufficiently on this website, as I’ve read a lot about sophisticated theology and don’t see it as more credible in its truth claims than, say, Pentecostal Christianity or fundamentalist Islam. More important, the theological knowledge of many of my readers far exceeds mine; indeed, many of them were members of “sophisticated” religions until they realized that those religions’ claims weren’t credible, either.

and, a bit later, cducey2013 added this on the same post:

To whom it may concern: I understand that the UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PROFESSOR who runs this site dislikes that certain sects of fundamental religious people oppose the teaching of a theory that I personally find convincing, but does he realize that the Catholic Church, the largest single Christian congregation ACCEPTS Darwin’s theory for how life came to exist in its present form? And does he know that belief in evolution does not entail an all-out Dawkinsonian excoriation of religion? Frequent posts critiquing religious straw man arguments only devolve this site into a petty mud-slinging forum as ignorant of religion as many religious fundamentalists are of Darwin’s theory and the New Synthesis.

Catholicism does not accept naturalistic evolution, for it posits that God inserted a soul somewhere in the human lineage. Further, 23% of Catholics are young-earth creationists, rejecting their Church’s dogma. Finally, the Church’s official position is that Adam and Eve were the historical ancestors of all humanity, something that is simply scientifically wrong.  The rest of the post is the same as the first.

Reader Jay Shawn comments on “Once again: did Jesus exist?”

It’s amazing how you Jews exhaust your time to dispell Jesus and Christianity. Why do you attack Christians to the most filthy passages found in the Bible to be in the part you beliee in (Torah). Fuck you Jews. I wish the Muslims swallow you.

Who said anti-Semitism was dead? And does he realize that the most “filthy” passages in the Bible are in the Old Testament, which is the part accepted by Jews?

Reader David Yount comments on “Monday: Hili dialogue“:

OK, enough of the cute cat photos, trip pictures, and other posts not directly related th “Why Evolution is True?” That’s not why I signed up for these alerts. I don’t need to have my email inbox filled up with such trivia!

That, my friends, is the fastest way to get yourself banned from this website. Every reader should read the Roolz, located on the sidebar of the front page. There you will find an admonition to avoid telling me what to write about.  If you don’t like my content, please go elsewhere: the Internet is huge and diverse!

Reader Jeffismyname comments on “Accommodationism from a physicist“:

Reblogged this on philosophyinathoughlessworld and commented:

The very fact that science can even be framed in a debate with religion already belies its religious character. Because it has no claim to truth, and it gathers knowledge inductively means that it is always a matter of faith, as least in a Humean sense. Science is a method of observation and the logic of its practice serve the directives obligatory to the method- in other words, doing science is always justifying science. And science holds as “values” things which are simply given in ones study of their world, thus creating metaphysical strawmen. So the claim, for instance, that the observer is independent from the observation, in that nothing callled for such a claim, now makes it appear as if the alternative meant that the world is a “product” of observation; both of these situations are absurd, and neither need to be said. Finally, science does not account for what is observed, but for everything absent in observation. Thus, physics is construed as an animistic order driven my ineffable “forces” through space, but in non-relation to space itself, meaing that absence becomes the causative origin of presence. This leads inevitably to the situation in which the Universe originates out of nothingness- and to even acknowledge such a thing, you are now ready to concede to any preposterous lie told to you, insofar as you are committed to the authority of the liar.We do not think about what we do.

First I’d recommend that this reader have a look at my Slate article, “No faith in science,” which dispels the notion that science rests on a kind of faith analogous to religious faith. It rests on confidence, not belief in the unevidenced.  As for the “observer-dependence” nonsense, that says nothing about what happens on the macro-level, i.e., most of science; and even physicists argue about what it means. If this reader claims that science and religion are equally valid ways of knowing, with both based on faith, I’d ask him to visit a faith healer rather than a doctor the next time he has an infection or is seriously ill.  Streptococcus is not a product of observers.

The last part of Jeffismyname’s screed is virtually unintelligible to me, and so requires no answer.

Guest post: On the historicity of Jesus

September 5, 2014 • 7:33 am

Ben Goren, a regular here who frequently argues with other readers about the historicity of Jesus (he denies it), has written a post for general consumption. He’s leveling a challenge at believers equivalent to John Loftus’s “Outsider test for faith.” Ben calls it, well, it’s the title. . .

The Jesus Challenge

by Ben Goren

Many æons ago, in the heyday of USENET, I was first exposed to the idea that maybe there simply wasn’t any “there” there at the heart of Jesus’s story. It was, of course, at first a bizarre notion…but one that eventually become overwhelmingly compelling to me — and especially, ironically enough, after I took the time to look up the original sources Christian apologists offered as evidence for Jesus’s existence.

Somewhere along the line, I started challenging apologists to offer a coherent apologia, a theory of Jesus that was both self-consistent and supported by evidence. In all the years since then, I cannot recall even one single person, Christian, atheist, or other, who argues for an historical Jesus who has ever taken me up on this challenge, despite repeatedly offering it and even begging people to take a whack at it. And, so, I’d like to thank Jerry for letting me use his own soapbox to present this challenge to what’s, I’m sure, the largest audience it’s yet received.

It’s quite simple.

  1. Start with a clear, concise, unambiguous definition of who Jesus was. Do the Gospels offer a good biography of him? Was he some random schmuck of a crazy street preacher whom nobody would even thought to have noticed? Was he a rebel commando, as I’ve even heard some argue?
  2. Offer positive evidence reliably dated to within a century or so of whenever you think Jesus lived that directly supports your position. Don’t merely cite evidence that doesn’t contradict it; if, for example, you were to claim that Jesus was a rebel commando, you’d have to find a source that explicitly says so.
  3. Ancient sources being what they are, there’s an overwhelming chance that the evidence you choose to support your theory will also contain significant elements that do not support it. Take a moment to reconcile this fact in a plausible manner. What criteria do you use to pick and choose?
  4. There will be lots of other significant pieces of evidence that contradict your hypothetical Jesus. Even literalist Christians have the Apocrypha to contend with, and most everybody else is comfortable observing widespread self-contradiction merely within the New Testament itself. Offer a reasonable standard by which evidence that contradicts your own position may be dismissed, and apply it to an example or two.
  5. Take at least a moment to explain how Jesus could have gone completely unnoticed by all contemporary writers (especially those of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Philo, Pliny the Elder, and the various Roman Satirists) yet is described in the New Testament as an otherworldly larger-than-life divine figure who was spectacularly publicly active throughout the region.
  6. Last, as validation, demonstrate your methods reliable by applying them to other well-known examples from history. For example, compare and contrast another historical figure with an ahistorical figure using your standards.

And, for everybody’s sake, please be brief. You shouldn’t need more than about five hundred words to outline your thesis. By way of example and for the sake of fairness, here are my own answers making the case for Jesus’s mythical nature:

  1. Jesus is a syncretic Pagan death / rebirth / salvation demigod in the mold of Osiris, Dionysus, and Mithras grafted onto Judaism.
  2. Justin Martyr, the very first of the Christian apologists writing in the early second century, devotes much of his First Apology to exactly this thesis. Indeed, once you eliminate all the prior parallels that he unambiguously identifies from Jesus’s biography, nothing else remains. Further, Lucian of Samosata describes “Peregrinus” as having been a con artist who interpolated Pagan religion wholesale into the nascent Christianity — and Paul’s introduction of the Mithraic (as identified by Justin Martyr) Eucharist into Christianity in 1 Corinthians 11 is a perfect example of this in practice, especially in the full context of the chapter.
  3. Justin Martyr’s explanation for the extensive imitation (his word) is that evil daemons with the power of foresight knew Jesus was coming and so planted false stories of Pagan demigods centuries in advance in order to lead honest men astray. His identification of the Pagan elements of Jesus’s story stand on their own; I do not think it much of a stretch to discount his supernatural explanation for the cross-contamination.
  4. At least superficially, the Gospels purport to be honest reporting of Jesus and his ministry as the God’s honest Capital-T Truth. However, again as described by Justin Martyr, they are nothing more than fantastic faery tales imitating well-known Pagan myths. The Gospel according to Matthew, for example, doesn’t merely report that Jesus died on the cross; in the same passage, he claims that the Sun was blotted out, the Earth shook, and all the graves opened and an horde of zombies descended upon Jerusalem. As such, even if the author sincerely believed he was honestly reporting factual history, the death reported clearly is not that of a mere mortal nor an historical figure. Such is the case for all other Gospel stories; the mundane events are an afterthought that only serve as insignificant vessels for the spectacular pyrotechnics. Concluding historicity from them is like concluding that Luke Skywalker was an historical figure because he grew up as an orphan on a farm.
  5. Jesus wasn’t noticed by his contemporaries because he hadn’t yet been invented — or, at least, he was just starting to be invented. The Pauline Epistles represent an early stage in that process when Jesus was more divine spirit than human interloper; the Gospels represent the point at which the Church later decided development was complete. (And the Angel Moroni represents Smith’s continued development.)
  6. What I propose of Jesus is no different from what virtually everybody would agree is true of all the Pagan demigods Justin Martyr identifies with Jesus — Bacchus, Perseus, Bellerophon on Pegasus, Mercury, Mithras, and all the rest. Examples of entirely mythical gods are legion in antiquity. We see the same pattern continue into modernity; Joseph Smith and L. Ron Hubbard were historical figures, but the angel Moroni and Xenu are purest fiction. Similarly, the various authors of the New Testament texts were real humans, but the “stone soup” Jesus they collectively created over the course of a few generations is not.

For those who’re counting, that was just about five hundred words. Any case for an historical Jesus should be possible to make similarly succinctly…

…but I’ll predict right up front that the streak will remain unbroken, and not a single soul will attempt to meet this challenge. Oh, sure; there’ll be plenty of replies to this post, esepcially many arguing with my own mythicist argument. But of actual point-by-point responses to the challenge there will be none.

Readers’ wildlife photos (and a biology lesson)

September 5, 2014 • 5:29 am

Regular Diane G., whom I thought was mostly into birds, sent a bunch of Monarch butterfly pictures as well as an extra lep species. She also has two questions for butterfly mavens—see after picture #4:

Last Friday I was birding on the shores of Lake Erie, at a site that consisted of several large impoundments bordered by causeways, when I noticed a flutter of Monarch Butterflies  (Danaus plexippus) at my feet. They apparently were drawn to a rather unattractive plant managing to eke out a living in the dry graveled surface of the causeways.
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I reflexively pointed my camera down and grabbed just a few quick shots, being primarily interested in birds. Later I became more intrigued when I had a look at my pictures and noticed that the butterflies were extending their proboscises (proboscides for Diana), not to the minute, difficult-to-notice flowers of this nondescript herb, but instead apparently to the surface of the twisty gray, hairy leaves themselves.  (I suppose it’s possible they were merely searching for the flowers, but somehow one expects butterflies to be more adept than that.)
See tiny flowers here, to the right:
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And proboscis here:
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And I’ll throw in one of the few spread-winged shots I got, though my shutter wasn’t fast enough to stop the wing closing action that began as soon as a butterfly touched down:
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 So–I’m wondering if any of our resident entomology experts can explain this behavior?  (The name of the plant would be appreciated as well.)
And speaking of lepidopterans, I snapped a few shots of this lovely Common Buckeye (Junonia coenia) the same day:
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(Excuse the lack of paragraph spacing below; I can’t seem to fix it.)
By the way, our resident butterfly evolutionist, Dr. Marcus Kronforst, informed me that the Monarch/Viceroy “Batesian mimicry” story is bunk—or at least more complicated than conventional wisdom dictates.  People have been saying this for a while, but I wanted to ask an expert. Let me recount the story.
The classic tale is that the Monarch is unpalatable because it eats mostly milkweed, which renders it toxic and sickening to bird predators. (Milkweed contains cardiac glycosides, which the butterflies sequester in their bodies, probably as a defense against predators. A Monarch fed on non-toxic plants is perfectly edible). The bright black-and-orange of the monarch was supposed to be “aposematic”: a warning coloration that says “don’t eat me” to birds. (I won’t get into the evolution of aposematic coloration, as it’s complicated.)
The Viceroy butterfly (Limenitis archippus), also North American, was supposed to be tasty and edible, but gained protection from bird predation by evolving a mimicry of the Monarch’s colors and pattern: a resemblance called “Batesian mimicry” after the British naturalist H. W. Bates. Birds entrained on the Monarch pattern would simply avoid taking Viceroys. I taught this as the classic example of Batesian mimicry for years, and it was in all the textbooks. (I am sure creationists will hop on this, for they haven’t learned that science advances, and truths are provisional.)
The mimicry between these two largely unrelated species is striking, but the story isn’t quite correct. Here’s a picture from A Network of Ideas, which presents the erroneous story and also gives an incorrect characterization of the butterflies’ palatability.
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In fact, in many places the “palatable” Viceroy is actually unpalatable, eating toxic compounds that also render it distasteful to predators.  In such places the mimicry may be of a different form: Müllerian mimicry (after the German naturalist Fritz Müller), in which two unpalatable species mimic each other.  Natural selection would favor a convergence of color and pattern among unpalatable species, for by resembling something the predator has already learned to avoid, you would minimize your chances of being attacked and killed—even if the predator does spit you out after it tastes you.  So in places where both species are distasteful, we have a case of Müllerian rather than Batesian mimicry.
But in other places Viceroys are tasty and nontoxic as they don’t eat plants whose compounds make them distasteful. In those places the mimicry might truly be described as Batesian.
That still leaves the question of how the system began. For surely the resemblance to Monarchs did not evolve twice in Viceroys independently, in some areas as a Batesian pattern and in others as a Müllerian one. But once the resemblance did evolve, it could be useful no matter whether the Viceroy was toxic or not.  Which evolutionary process came first? Who knows?
Finally, as I’ve implied, things can get quite complicated. In some parts of the world a single pattern can serve to enforce both Batesian and Müllerian mimicry. Here’s a figure from Wolfgang Wickler’s classic book Mimicry in Plants and Animals (1968) showing three instances of what are called “mimicry rings.” Each column represents a series of diverse species from one area that resemble each other. Those species above the gray bar are said to be Müllerian mimics of each other: they are all distasteful. Those similar species below the gray bar are said to be Batesian mimics of those above: they are all tasty and evolved a similar pattern to species above the bar as it would reduce predation. Remember, each butterfly is a separate species. The resemblance among species within each of the three groups is remarkable.
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Now, you might ask yourself, how do we know which species are distasteful and which are edible? I don’t know the answer, but I suspect that biologists simply tasted them! Hairy-chested field biologists (males, that is) often will pop insects into their mouths, assuming that if it’s noxious to them, it’s noxious to predators.  Dan Janzen, a famous naturalist who was the head of my Tropical Studies course in Costa Rica in 1978, used to do this. I’m not sure, though, whether that’s a good test!
The best way would be to use the same method Lincoln Brower did when he demonstrated that Monarchs are toxic. Give a Monarch to a naive, hand-raised bird (he used blue jays). The naive jay noms it eagerly. A few minutes later, the jay gets queasy and vomits. When presented with another Monarch, the jay freaks out and won’t eat it. Only one experience is sufficient to teach the bird to avoid the pattern. This shows that the Monarchs are toxic and that birds can learn quickly.
Here’s the classic series of photos of a naive jay nomming a Monarch and then throwing up shortly thereafter:
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Left to right. Naive bird given Monarch; bird eats it eagerly; bird doesn’t feel so well; bird pukes.
Brower also showed that an entrained bird avoids Viceroys as well, although they’ll nom them eagerly and want more if they haven’t previously tasted a Monarch. This is the experiment that led to the notion that Viceroys are tasty and are avoided because they resemble monarchs, which birds have tasted and rejected. And that was the classic demonstration of Batesian mimicry.
Now I’m not sure if Brower used Viceroys taken from an area where they are indeed palatable, but, as I said, the story is more complicated than this. Had he used the toxic races of Viceroys, he might have concluded that they are Müllerian rather than Batesian mimics. In fact, regardless of how the system evolved, Viceroys are Batesian mimics of Monarchs in some places and Müllerian mimics in others.