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.
A rare situation: Cyrus is in the garden by himself (with Hili), while his humans remain on the porch, This gives him some anxiety and a need for reassurance. Hili, however, reacts differently!
Hili: We have the garden all to ourselves.
Cyrus: They won’t disappear, will they?
Hili: Don’t worry. You can easily ignore them.
In Polish:
Hili: Mamy cały ogród dla siebie.
Cyrus: Ale czy oni nam nie znikną?
Hili: Nie martw się. Możesz ich spokojnie ignorować.
A different take on evolution vs. religion, from Non Sequitur by Wiley Miller:
And, out of the mouths of swine. . .From The Atheist Pig, a great webcomic that has gone defunct, as the artist appears to have lost interest.
The last panel reminds me of the “one god less” trope of Dawkins and others.
h/t: Linda Grilli, jsp, Mark
From the Lacrosse, Wisconsin office of the National Weather Service, via reader Gregory, we see Doppler radar capturing a massive mayfly emergence on June 23 (a description of how Doppler radar works is here). I believe the species is the giant mayfly, Hexagenia limbata, though I may be wrong.
On Saturday evening, June 23 2012, a massive mayfly emergence occurred along the Mississippi River beginning just after 9 pm. By late evening, mayflies were swarming in La Crosse, La Crescent, and points up and down the river. While the emergence of mayflies from their river bottom mud dwelling can occur at various times through the warm season, this particular event was one of the best seen on radar yet. In the radar time lapse loop from 9 pm to just after 1030 pm (below), the yellows and oranges indicate a large magnitude of airborne mayflies.
Also very evident was the northward track to the mayfly radar ‘echo’. This movement was due to the south wind direction over the area at emergence time. The radar would indicate the bugs were carried north, off of the river, into Blair and Taylor Wisconsin. The radar beam over these locations are detecting mayflies at over 3000 feet above the ground! Their existence was confirmed on the ground north into Trempealeau county near Galesville.
There is more information at the site.
Mayflies are in the order Ephemeroptera, meaning, in effect “short-lived winged things.” (They aren’t really flies, which are in the order Diptera.) The Freshwater Blog details their life cycle; here’s a short extract:
A mayfly’s life cycle starts with the males forming a swarm above the water and the females flying into the swarm to mate. The male grabs a passing female with its elongated front legs and the pair mate in flight. After copulation, the male releases the female, which then descends to the surface of the water where she lays her eggs. Once mated she will fall, spent, onto the water surface to lie motionless, with her wings flat on the surface, where fish pick them off at their leisure. The male fly rarely returns to the water but instead he goes off to die on the nearby land.
Because they live only a day, they cannot feed, as their mouthparts are vestigial (explain that, creationists!). In the species Dolania americana, females live less than five minutes as adults, the shortest life span of any adult insect. What a life—if you can call it that!
Here are some pictures taken the next day in Wisconsin, also from the site:
More from the Freshwater Blog:
Some species exhibit great synchronicity in their hatching. The North American species Hexagenia limbatahatches in huge numbers from the Mississippi every year. The total number of mayflies in this hatch are estimated to be around 18 trillion – more than 3,000 times the number of people on earth. The newly emerged insects are attracted to lights in riverside towns and villages and the local authorities deploy snow clearing vehicle to remove their rotting corpses. Ironically, what is seen as a nuisance in America is seen as a gift in Africa. Locals around Lake Victoria gather adults of the mayfly Povilla adusta together with Chironomid midges to make a type of patty called ‘Kungu’. This protein rich food stuff is an important part of their diet.
Station KARE from Minneapolis/St. Paul reports:
The La Crosse, Wis. office of the National Weather Service (NWS) says this year’s mayfly hatch on the Mississippi River was so prolific that it created a bow echo on radar, similar to one that would be made by a significant rain storm. A NWS employee went out after his shift and captured some amazing images of the short-lived pests covering street lights, gas pumps, buildings, stairs — nearly anything in their path.
The mayfly hatch was a problem up and down the Mississippi. Police in the town of Trenton say a large hatch of mayflies may have triggered a three-vehicle crash on a Wisconsin road.
and adds a picture of the insects at a gas station:
Young-Earth creationist Ken Ham has said plenty of dumb things when it comes to evolution on our planet, but in a new post on his website, Around the World with Ken Ham, he’s extended his lunacy to studies of the solar system and Universe. The U.S. space program, says Ham, is fruitless, for it has as its aim the discovery of terrestrial life, and the Bible has simply ruled that out!:
Of course, secularists are desperate to find life in outer space, as they believe that would provide evidence that life can evolve in different locations and given the supposed right conditions! The search for extraterrestrial life is really driven by man’s rebellion against God in a desperate attempt to supposedly prove evolution!
A UK news site recently reported, “Aliens are out there. We’ll find a new earth within 20 years.” Recent technologies have developed new space telescopes that will be used to study exoplanets (planets orbiting other stars) with the hope of discovering habitable, earth-like worlds that might contain life—at least that is what they hope for!
You see, according to the secular, evolutionary worldview there must be other habited worlds out there. As the head of NASA, Charles Borden, puts it, “It’s highly improbable in the limitless vastness of the universe that we humans stand alone.” Secularists cannot allow earth to be special or unique—that’s a biblical idea (Isaiah 45:18). If life evolved here, it simply must have evolved elsewhere they believe.
The Bible, in sharp contrast to the secular worldview, teaches that earth was specially created, that it is unique and the focus of God’s attention (Isaiah 66:1 and Psalm 115:16). Life did not evolve but was specially created by God, as Genesis clearly teaches. Christians certainly shouldn’t expect alien life to be cropping up across the universe. (There are other theological problems with intelligent alien life that you can read about here).
Well, the Bible said it, Ham believes it, and that settles it.
But in his diatribe Ham conflates “life” with “intelligent life.” If life didn’t evolve, but was created by God on Earth alone, then we shouldn’t even find microbes on other planets, much less brainy creatures capable of apprehending and worshiping God.
The thing is, the vast bulk of money in the U.S. space program is not spent looking for extraterrestrial life, but simply exploring outer space and seeing what it’s like on other planets or in other galaxies, as well as unravelling the history of the Universe. Yes, Rovers have features that enable us to look for life, and people get excited about the possibility of life on Mars or even the moons of Saturn. But that wasn’t why the space program was created, or even its main goal. It’s very unlikely we’ll find life in our solar system.
It gets worse, even by Ham-ian standards. There can’t be aliens—at least smart ones—because they’d be damned to Hell!
Now the Bible doesn’t say whether there is or is not animal or plant life in outer space. I certainly suspect not. The Earth was created for human life. And the sun and moon were created for signs and our seasons—and to declare the glory of God.
And I do believe there can’t be other intelligent beings in outer space because of the meaning of the gospel. You see, the Bible makes it clear that Adam’s sin affected the whole universe. [JAC: does the Bible actually say this? If so, where? Ham doesn’t quote a verse from scripture, which makes me suspect he’s dissimulating about the universality of Adam’s sin.] This means that any aliens would also be affected by Adam’s sin, but because they are not Adam’s descendants, they can’t have salvation. One day, the whole universe will be judged by fire, and there will be a new heavens and earth. God’s Son stepped into history to be Jesus Christ, the “Godman,” to be our relative, and to be the perfect sacrifice for sin—the Savior of mankind.
I thought sin came from being one of Adam’s descendants, who received the sin as if it were genetic. How do aliens, which couldn’t be related to the fictitious Adam, get afflicted by sin? Perhaps a reader can help me here.
Ham goes on, producing a hilarious passage:
Jesus did not become the “GodKlingon” or the “GodMartian”! Only descendants of Adam can be saved. God’s Son remains the “Godman” as our Savior. In fact, the Bible makes it clear that we see the Father through the Son (and we see the Son through His Word). To suggest that aliens could respond to the gospel is just totally wrong.
. . . An understanding of the gospel makes it clear that salvation through Christ is only for the Adamic race—human beings who are all descendants of Adam.
This is bordering on lunacy—the sheer waste of a human mind speculating about meaningless questions. But it puts Ham in a difficult spot, for if we do find life elsewhere in the universe, what will Ham say? Will he admit that the Bible is wrong?
Although garden-variety theologians might say that life elsewhere was just part of God’s plan to be “creative” and “artistic” (yes, they have said stuff like that about God), they’d still face the question of “Why did God create any life at all if it couldn’t be saved by God? What would be the point?” And that question also goes for all the products of evolution that are of no use to humans, like obscure bacteria under the Antarctic ice cap. If we’re the object of God’s creation, and God created everything, and no species besides us can be saved (i.e.,no d*gs in heaven), why the vast superfluity of life?
Michael Ruse, the atheist philosopher who likes to tell religious people how to preserve their faith in the face of science, has written at length about how alien life could be saved. I mocked his answer when I reviewed his book Can a Darwinian be a Christian? in the Times Literary Supplement:
[Ruse] has to muster all his rhetorical and intellectual skills to herd every stray Christian belief into the Darwinian fold. Indeed, the book is a splendid example of how a trained academic can extract himself from a philosophical thicket through the relentless chopping of logic. For example, in a chapter on ‘Extraterrestrials’, Ruse wrestles with the implications for Christianity of life having evolved elsewhere in the Universe. Would this life be human-like and blighted with original sin? If so, who would save the fallen aliens? Ruse floats the possibility of an ‘X-Christ’, who could redeem sinners throughout the Universe – an intergalactic Jesus shuttling between planets and suffering successive crucifixions. ‘One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that,’ George Orwell wrote (in a quite different context). ‘No ordinary man could be such a fool.’
I would love to see Ruse debate Ham on this issue! For, indeed, Ruse often acts—as he did in the book I reviewed—as a theologian. Here we have two theologians manqué giving different answers to the same question.
Further, to those who say there is no conflict between science and religion, how do you respond to Ham’s claim that there can be no extraterrestrial life because scripture rules it out a priori? (Of course, the mere existence of religious creationism disproves that NOMA position from the outset, but Gould, in a breathtakingly evasive move, didn’t regard creationist religions as “proper” religions.)
Finally, Ham claims that salvation through Jesus answers all of life’s questions, apparently including my science questions:
The answers to life’s questions will not be found in imaginary aliens but in the revelation of the Creator through the Bible and His Son, Jesus Christ, who came to die on a Cross to redeem mankind from sin and death that our ancestor, Adam, introduced.
And the footnote to his piece says this:
This item was written with the assistance of AiG’s [Answers in Genesis’s] research team.
What “research,” I wonder? Finding the relevant Biblical verses?
h/t: Barry, Thaddeus
I’ll invent a dialogue here, and since it’s mine there is no Polish translation.
Jerry: Hili, do you like this shirt with you embroidered on it?
Hili: Yes, but it makes me look too fat.
Embroidery by Hiroko Kubota. You can order one through her Etsy shop (GoGo5) with any animal of your choice, but be prepared to wait months, for she not only does the embroidery, but makes the shirt to your measurements.
The pickers came yesterday at 7 a.m.—at least most of them (a few cycled in later). They were a mixture of adults and schoolkids on vacation, with males and females in roughly equal numbers (Andrjez told me that the young men vie to pick next to the young women!)
The cherries were ripe for plucking (they are all “sour” cherries, destined for pie, syrup, and the like):
And the truck, filled with plastic pallets, was ready to receive its haul of fruit:
The pickers largely disappeared into the trees, with only their legs visible. (There were also small ladders to reach the tops.) They were quite efficient: after they had been through a tree, nary a cherry remained. They have a plastic box strapped around their waists, which they fill rapidly, for they get paid by the basket. Each basket holds about three kilos.
A harder tree:
After several baskets are picked, they are brought to the truck, where each picker’s haul is totted up, put into larger plastic pallets, and sorted to remove rotten fruit, leaves, and other debris:
After a while, the cherries begin to accumulate on the truck. The day’s haul was, I’m told, about 3,000 kilos. But there are at least two days of picking left:
The best cherries are reserved for sale in the local market, while the rest are sold to factories that freeze them. As there was a glut of cherries last year, and they’re still frozen, the price for this year’s crop was very low: 1.05 zloty (about 35 cents US) per kilo.
Pre-lunch walkies to the Vistula. Cyrus the d*g came along, though Hili remained behind. Here he nobly surveys the river:
Time for lunch, appetite whetted with a glass of fresh cherry juice:
Lunch was an assortment of Polish charcuterie: ham, local sausages, including the skinny ones (kabanosy), and cheese:
Then, jam and pie making. The batch of half-cooked jam from yesterday was brought out, cooked down further, and then put into sterilized jars. There were about twenty at the end:
Jam, and the makings of PIE:
Malgorzata made another pie with cherries I’d picked and pitted just an hour before. Many pies are required since I eat about four pieces per day. (It’s a great breakfast food!):
A close-up, only moments before it entered my alimentary canal:
For dinner Malgorzata made a recipe of her own devising: a sort of Chinese vegetable-and-pork stir-fry served over noodles. I washed it down with Zubr (“Bison”), my favorite Polish beer. And, of course, another piece of cherry pie to finish
The baskets and ladders were put away in the garden, ready for today’s picking:
Surprise! More birds today. (Where are you insect folks?)
Reader Mal Morrison from Devon sent pictures of Common Swifts and some information:
For some time I’ve been trying to get some decent photos of Swifts (Apus apus) in flight. This is partly because I find them fascinating but mainly because capturing images present a real challenge. There are difficulties because of their speed and erratic flight and also with exposing a dark bird against a bright sky. These were taken just outside my home in Plymouth, Devon. While the birds are quite often high on the wing, they occasionally return to their nesting area and fly at low level over the rooftops and trees. Whether they do this just to check out ‘home’ or maybe for orientation I have no idea but they were doing this when these were taken. Swifts eat, mate and sleep in the air. (According to this site, they can sleep/fly as high as 10000 feet!)
Mal added this:
These were taken with a Canon EOS 5D Mk 3 camera using the 100-400mm lens with an exposure of 2000th of a second.
And what is a set of bird photos without one by Stephen Barnard from Idaho? This one came in an email titled “Swainson’s Hawk starting a dive for prey.”
Swainson’s Hawk (Buteo swainsoni) is found in the western U.S. and Canada and overwinters in southeastern South America. Here’s its range from the Cornell Ornithology site:
Is true!
A: Hili, what are you doing?
Hili: Jerry and I are overcoming Jerry’s jet lag.
In Polish:
Ja: Hili, co ty robisz?
Hili: Przezwyciężamy jet lag Jerrego.
