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.
From reader Mark Sturtevant. This one isn’t too hard, and I’ll show the reveal in a few hours. His caption:
It has been a while since I did a ‘spot the…’, and so here is one. Can the readers spot the turtle? This was taken last Spring. As a bonus, can anyone identify the species? I live in a midwestern state in the U.S.
This one’s from Nick Cohen‘s lovely book What’s Left: How Liberals Lost Their Way. Written in 2007, it’s a prescient and still timely criticism of Regressive Leftism. Cohen is a superb and clear writer, and his views are so congenial to mine that I almost feel as if he’s speaking directly to me. (Yes, I know I’m “reading from the choir,” but give me a break: I spent several years reading theology!) Wikipedia gives a decent precis of the book.
Here’s a quote about identity politics from page 105:
But as many radical intellectuals in the West retreated into the lecture halls before the tide of conservatism they had in part inspired, they fled from universal values. To generalize, the idea that a homosexual black woman should have the same rights as a heterosexual white man was replaced by a relativism which took the original and hopeful challenge of the early feminist, gay, and anti-racist movements and flipped it over. Homosexuality, blackness, and womanhood became separate cultures that couldn’t be criticized or understood by outsiders applying universal criteria. Nor, by extension, could any other culture, even if it was the culture of fascism, religious tyranny, wife burning, or suicide bombing. Each separate cultural group was playing its own “language game,” to use the phrase the postmodernists took from Wittgenstein, and only players in the game, whether feminists or Holocaust deniers, could determine whether what was being said was right or wrong. As epistemic relativism infected leftish intellectual life, all the old universal criteria, including human rights, the search for truth and the scientific method, became suspect instruments of elite oppression and Western cultural imperialism.
Well, it looks as if I screwed up and published TWO wildlife photo posts today. But no problem: surely the more nice photos to look at, the better. Besides, I’m lecturing in Portland today and won’t have a lot of time to post.
Reader Joe McClain of Williamsburg, Virginia (alma mater of Presidents and Professor Ceiling Cat, Emeritus) sent some photos from that lovely town. They show the fascinating process of catching, measuring, and banding a bald eagle chick.
This is eagle nesting season and your alma mater is right in the thick of it. Do you remember Mitchell Byrd? He is doing his 40th year of eagle census flights this year. [JAC: Yes, of course I remember Dr. Byrd, who was not only chairman of biology when I was in college, but was fortuitously named—he’s an ornithologist!]
I got email over the weekend from Bryan Watts at the Center for Conservation Biology, founded here at William & Mary by Watts and Byrd. They have a grant from the National Park Service to look into the level of contaminants in eagles on National Parks lands. Bryan was going to have a crew Monday morning at a site near the neighborhood where we both live. Of course, I went on out. Here are some photos of the process, which may be of interest to you and/or your readers.
Aerial technician Shane Lawler climbs a 90-foot loblolly pine on the grounds of Gospel Spreading Farm outside Williamsburg. At the top is a nest occupied by a family of Haliaeetus leucocephalus.
Bryan Watts awaits delivery of a bagged eagle chick. The parents were flying around Shane, but not getting really close as he extracted the little guy.
It’s a five-week-old male. Eagles don’t fledge fully until 12 weeks old. This fella was pretty calm. Bryan told me that males are more laid back than females.
Bryan (blue) and Bart Paxton attend to the banding. Bald eagles require riveted bands, as they tend to pick off other types. As with most birds, there is a USGS band and a field-ID band, in this case, an alphanumeric purple band.
Many measurements, including the hallux (the thumb talon), the tarsus (the ankle) and several beak measurements including the culmen.
Before the blood draw, Bart hooded the bird. Once the hood was on it looked like the little eagle fell asleep, just drooped on over.
Getting ready for the draw, the eagle looked like one of those Mexican luchadore wrestlers getting revived after a hard bout.
Marie Pitts, raptor phlebotomist, does the draw from the brachial vein.
The chick was out of the nest less than half an hour, tops. The team hit a number of nests on Monday. Jamestown Island currently has five bald eagle nests on it. There are eagles nesting quite near (but not on) campus and they come right on campus more often there is a video of an eagle eating a rabbit in a tree near the Wren Building.
And I’ll add three photos from Stephen Barnard in Idaho, one showing the species above. The captions are his:
Bald Eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) on the nest.
Yellow-headed Blackbird (Xanthocephalus xanthocephalus). He’s looking at Deets.
Killdeer (Charadrius vociferus) hunting midges in the creek.
Reader Bruce Lyon sent some nice bird photos just when the photo tank (traveling version) was on “empty.” His notes:
Here are a few photos of Allen’s Hummingbirds [Selasphorus sasin]that I photographed at the Arboretum of the University of California, Santa Cruz. The Allen’s are migratory and show up in February while the Anna’s Hummingbirds are year round residents. Counter to the normal pattern where larger species are socially dominant over smaller ones, the smaller Allen’s rule the roost and are dominant over the Anna’s. The densities of the hummingbirds are ridiculously high in the Arboretum, perhaps because the Arboretum is full of Australian plants that normally produce nectar for much larger bodied birds, such as sparrow- to robin-sized honeyeaters.
Below: A male Allen’s Hummingbird stretches on his favorite perch.
Same stretch, different bird:
Male Allen’s Hummingbirds are creatures of habit and have a small number of favorite perches, which makes it easy to take photos of them coming in for a landing. I prefocus, turn off the autofocus and then blast away every time the bird comes in for a landing. I discard the 99% of the photos that fail.
by Grania
Good morning! Welcome to Thursday.
It’s Iggy Pop’s birthday today, he of the allergy to shirts in any form, God bless him. Being the age I was in the Seventies, I completely missed his earlier version of China Girl co-written and performed with David Bowie and only was aware of the 1983 version that Bowie released solo. Here’s the original 1977 version from the album The Idiot.
Over in Poland this morning, the Princess is ruminating and having profound thoughts again; illustrating with her actions that all is transitory.
THE FLIGHT FROM FREEDOM
A: But you went out a minute ago.
Hili: And now I’m coming back.
In Polish
UCIECZKA OD WOLNOŚCI
Ja: Hili, przecież minutę temu wychodziłaś.
Hili: A teraz wracam.
Gus has a new box, and it seems that this box lacks the pedigree of the previous one, and is now relegated to being a goalpost instead of a tasty snack. We need to start a Buy Gus an Ikea Box campaign.
. . . in Portland that is, where I’m in the capable hands of philosopher Peter Boghossian at Portland State University, host for half of my visit. We’ve already dined at one of the famous “food trucks” (stalls, really) that fill this food-loving city, and had a great Thai lunch. The evidence is below.
Portland is, as always, lovely, and it’s sunny today: the city is experiencing what the locals call a “heat wave,” in which everyone suffers greatly when temperatures climb into the 80s (Fahrenheit!), but it’s not bad at all. It’s a city of food, craft beer, legal marijuana, and fantastic surroundings, and I’ll do my best to have fun until I return to Chicago Sunday afternoon.
Over lunch I learned about Peter’s new app, which is out in some places. It’s apparently designed to help nonbelievers rebut every possible argument for religion and superstition, and I’ll give more details when it’s released in the U.S.
We also had an animated discussion about whether moral values can be objective. Peter says “yes” (as, of course, does Sam Harris), but I disagree, though I’m willing to be convinced. I asked Peter to tell me the objective answer to these questions: “How many monkey lives is it worth taking to develop a vaccine that will protect 100,000 humans? How about if it were rats?”
I argue that judging the “well being” of animals is something that we’ll almost certainly never be able to do for most species, as it depends on their degree of consciousness and whether they feel pain and pleasure as qualia. So how do we objectively answer such questions, or those involving any such tradeoffs, even if we do take “well being” as the currency of moral value?
Discussion to be continued. Meanwhile, here’s Peter and his teaching assistant Christine in front of the row of food trucks we visited:
So here’s a video, produced by the group Titanic: Honor and Glory, showing how the Titanic sank—in real time. That means that it’s 2 hours and 40 minutes long. It also doesn’t show any people, probably out of a misguided fear of looking gruesome. (If you want to see people die, watch the 1997 movie Titanic). At any rate, it’s fascinating, though if you’re like me you’ll just watch the first bit, when the ship hits the iceberg, and the last bit, when it breaks up and goes under: