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.
When you’re teaching, having the proper footwear gives you that extra soupçon of authority. Here’s a fine pair of boots from Rodney Ammons of El Paso. Guess the hide: need the proper species, with the right Latin binomial:
Hili: I wasn’t doing badly and now I have it better still.
A: And what is your conclusion about it?
Hili: That hedonism still has great potential.
Hili: Nie było mi źle, a teraz jest mi jeszcze lepiej.
Ja: I jaki z tego wniosek?
Hili: Że hedonizm ma duże możliwości rozwojowe.
This is from Bern Morley’s Tw**er feed, labeled “Ominous sub-editing of the day”:
Too right!
h/t: Grania
We all know that honey badgers (Mellivora capensis) are badass mammals, but I bet you didn’t know that they’re really clever, too. This short clip from a longer BBC program details the many ways that one captive honey badger contrived to escape from his enclosure:
The badger seems to be named something like “Stoffel,” but perhaps an alert reader can give the correct name.
And you’re in the UK, you can watch the whole hour program on this species here for four more weeks. I’d watch if I could!
h/t: Barry
Four days ago I described a Torygraph piece recounting Prime Minister David Cameron’s recent spate of pro-religious remarks, including these:
The prime minister’s religious messages began last week with an Easter reception at Downing Street, at which he said religion had brought him his greatest moments of peace and claimed “Jesus invented the big society 2,000 years ago”.
He also released a videoed Easter message for the country, in which he talked about the “countless acts of kindness carried out by those who believe in and follow Christ”.
In a separate article for the Church Times, he argued that some atheists and agnostics did not understand that faith could be a “guide or a helpful prod in the right direction” towards morality.
While acknowledging many non-believers have a moral code and some Christians do not, he added: “People who advocate some sort of secular neutrality fail to grasp the consequences of that neutrality, or the role that faith can play in helping people to have a moral code.
“I believe we should be more confident about our status as a Christian country, more ambitious about expanding the role of faith-based organisations, and, frankly, more evangelical about a faith that compels us to get out there and make a difference to people’s lives.”
Thank Ceiling Cat that nonbelievers are more vocal these days! Today we find four letters in the Torygraph criticizing the PM’s unwise religious comments. And one, reproduced below, is signed by a panoply of heathen luminaries. You’ll recognize many of the names.
SIR – We respect the Prime Minister’s right to his religious beliefs and the fact that they necessarily affect his own life as a politician. However, we object to his characterisation of Britain as a “Christian country” and the negative consequences for politics and society that this engenders.
Apart from in the narrow constitutional sense that we continue to have an established Church, Britain is not a “Christian country”. Repeated surveys, polls and studies show that most of us as individuals are not Christian in our beliefs or our religious identities.
At a social level, Britain has been shaped for the better by many pre-Christian, non-Christian, and post-Christian forces. We are a plural society with citizens with a range of perspectives, and we are a largely non-religious society.
Constantly to claim otherwise fosters alienation and division in our society. Although it is right to recognise the contribution made by many Christians to social action, it is wrong to try to exceptionalise their contribution when it is equalled by British people of different beliefs. This needlessly fuels enervating sectarian debates that are by and large absent from the lives of most British people, who do not want religions or religious identities to be actively prioritised by their elected government.
Professor Jim Al-Khalil
Philip Pullman
Tim Minchin
Dr Simon Singh
Ken Follett
Dr Adam Rutherford
Sir John Sulston
Sir David Smith
Professor Jonathan Glover
Professor Anthony Grayling
Nick Ross
Virginia Ironside
Professor Steven Rose
Natalie Haynes
Peter Tatchell
Professor Raymond Tallis
Dr Iolo ap Gwynn
Stephen Volk
Professor Steve Jones
Sir Terry Pratchett
Dr Evan Harris
Dr Richard Bartle
Sian Berry
C J De Mooi
Professor John A Lee
Professor Richard Norman
Zoe Margolis
Joan Smith
Michael Gore
Derek McAuley
Lorraine Barratt
Dr Susan Blackmore
Dr Harry Stopes-Roe
Sir Geoffrey Bindman QC
Adele Anderson
Dr Helena Cronin
Professor Alice Roberts
Professor Chris French
Sir Tom Blundell
Maureen Duffy
Baroness Whitaker
Lord Avebury
Richard Herring
Martin Rowson
Tony Hawks
Peter Cave
Diane Munday
Professor Norman MacLean
Professor Sir Harold Kroto
Sir Richard Dalton
Sir David Blatherwick
Michael Rubenstein
Polly Toynbee
Lord O’Neill
Dr Simon Singh
Dan Snow
Richard Dawkins is conspicuously missing, but I suspect he simply didn’t get a chance to sign, as he’s on tour. And where is Ian MacEwan? But I’m glad to see my old friend Steve Jones among the signatories.
h/t: Aaron
My prediction that Russia will invade eastern Ukraine is coming true. Or so the New York Times reports, which some readers misguidedly see as an anti-Russian tool of the U.S. government. Read for yourself, and have a look at the pictures. After all, it’s evidence. From the Times:
For two weeks, the mysteriously well-armed, professional gunmen known as “green men” have seized Ukrainian government sites in town after town, igniting a brush fire of separatist unrest across eastern Ukraine. Strenuous denials from the Kremlin have closely followed each accusation by Ukrainian officials that the world was witnessing a stealthy invasion by Russian forces.
Now, photographs and descriptions from eastern Ukraine endorsed by the Obama administration on Sunday suggest that many of the green men are indeed Russian military and intelligence forces — equipped in the same fashion as Russian special operations troops involved in annexing the Crimea region in February. Some of the men photographed in Ukraine have been identified in other photos clearly taken among Russian troops in other settings.
And Ukraine’s state security service has identified one Russian reported to be active among the green men as Igor Ivanovich Strelkov, a Russian military intelligence operative in his mid- to late 50s. He is said to have a long résumé of undercover service with the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Russian general staff, most recently in Crimea in February and March and now in and around the eastern Ukrainian city of Slovyansk.
. . . The Kremlin insists that Russian forces are in no way involved, and that Mr. Strelkov does not even exist, at least not as a Russian operative sent to Ukraine with orders to stir up trouble. “It’s all nonsense,” President Vladimir V. Putin said Thursday during a four-hour question-and-answer session on Russian television. “There are no Russian units, special services or instructors in the east of Ukraine.” Pro-Russian activists who have seized government buildings in at least 10 towns across eastern Ukraine also deny getting help from professional Russian soldiers or intelligence agents.
Putin and his minions are lying, as Russian troops mass at the Ukrainian border and the Russians continue to cook up accusations that Ukraine is exacerbating the situation. (Actually, Ukraine has made no moves to attack the buildings held by Russian separatists).
I predicted that Russia will invade within a month under one pretext or another, though I’d be delighted to be proved wrong. Putin is a bully and an aggressor, and I have little patience for readers who feel that this Russian activity is justified.
I can’t believe the Cold War is starting all over again.
I’ve realized that what religious people and faitheists have been doing to atheists lately is putting us on the defensive: insisting that we read this or that book; we answer this or that argument—and if we don’t, well, then they won’t pay us any attention. (As if they would anyway!) And I also realized that we can turn the tables on these people. After all, they’re the ones making unevidenced truth claims, not us. So I propose two strategies for nonbelievers:
1. Make believers read about unbelief before you listen to them. This one I’ve suggested before. Tell believers that we won’t pay any attention to their superstitions, or their criticisms of atheists, until they’ve read The Very Best of Atheist Thought.These works must include the books of the Four Horsemen (one would think the faithful would already have read these, but their misunderstandings about The God Delusion lead me to believe otherwise), the complete works of Robert G. Ingersoll, selected readings from Mencken and Bertrand Russell, Christopher Hitchens’s The Portable Atheist, selected writings of Hume, Walter Kaufmann’s The Faith of a Heretic and Critique of Religion and Philosophy, and Herman Philipse’s God in the Age of Science: A Critique of Religious Reason (I highly recommend the last book, which is fairly new). I’m sure readers can think of others.
If people can fault us for not reading Aquinas, Augustine, Origen, Tertullian and (ugh) Alvin Plantinga and David Bentley Hart, well, then, we can do the same to them. If they haven’t read extensively in the honorable intellectual tradition of nonbelief, then they have no credibility as believers. Frankly, Salon should publish a piece that says this.
2. Make atheism-of -the-gaps arguments. Religionists often float God-of-the-gaps arguments, saying that God must lie in the interstices of our scientific understanding. Well, we can play that game, too. There are huge gaps in believers’ understanding of God, and in those lacunae, I claim, lies strong evidence for No God. Here are some of those religious gaps:
(I’m sure that readers can add other gaps, including the dozens of inconsistencies in Scripture.)
Now it’s no use for believers to respond “God is mysterious. Perhaps some day we’ll know the answers.” For that is precisely the answer they won’t accept about scientific puzzles—like the oft-touted mystery of consciousness—that they adduce as evidence for God. If we were to respond, “The brain works in mysterious ways,” or “Evolution works in mysterious ways,” theists like David Bentley Hart would just sneer and say that materialism could never provide answers.
Well, theism doesn’t even begin to provide credible answers to the goddy puzzles above, and, unlike science, has never made a bit of progress in attacking them. So, I claim, we can find good evidence for atheism in the gaps of religious understanding. And that tactic trumps religious God-of-the-gaps arguments, because the gaps in science grow smaller as we learn more (neuroscience is one example), while the gaps in theism are always the same size.
We have two contributors today, both with lovely bird photos for show and tell. First is Stephen Barnard, who sent two photos and his comments—made while tugging on his tie. Click to enlarge:
The eagles regard me as irrelevant. I get no respect. No respect at all, I’m telling ya. The ripples in the water are reflected from the neck and breast of this American Avocet.
Recurvirostra americana (click to enlarge):
And a passel of photos from reader Bruce Lyon, along with his notes:
I recently returned from a nine day trip to Costa Rica and took tons of wildlife photos, some of which might be of interest to your readers.
I came across a couple of nice owls during my recent visit to Costa Rica. Ferruginous Pygmy Owls [Glaucidium basilianum] are fairly common in the northwestern Costa Rica, but they are easier to hear than see. They are small—smaller than an American Robin in weight. April is the beginning of the breeding season and I was lucky to stumble on a pygmy owl nest, but it took a bit of sleuthing to find the actual nest. I flushed the owl from the same general location on two different hikes, a suspicious pattern that suggests “nest”. Pygmy owls nest in tree cavities—typically old woodpecker nests—but I could not see any contenders. I eventually found what looked like a perfect nest cavity and confirmed it was the owl nest by returning at night and finding the bird in the hole.
Pygmy owls are often mobbed by songbirds and it seems they don’t like to perch exposed in open areas too long because they risk being mobbed. Another reason I was initially suspicious that this owl had a nest was that when it flushed up into the trees, it did not fly to cover but remained exposed and vulnerable. It was soon mobbed by two different flycatchers—a Greater Kiskadee and a Tropical Kingbird—both of which dive-bombed the little guy. The first two photos below show the tropical kingbird perched behind the owl, waiting for its chance to strike. Note the fake eyes on the back of the owl’s head in the second photo—studies with northern pygmy owls in Montana, using balsa wood models painted with and without false eyes on the back of the head, showed that fake eyes reduce close approaches from behind the bird by mobbing birds [Deppe et al. 2003. Effect of northern pygmy-owl (Glaucidium gnoma) eyespots on avian mobbing. Auk 120: 765-771]. Thus study suggests that fake eyes might reduce the risk of injury from attacks to the back of the birds head, where the owl might not see the attacker coming. Small cats like Bobcats and Servals also have what seem to me to be fake eyes—the white patches on their ears. Wikipidia suggests various functions, including intraspecific communication, but not anti-mobbing. Perhaps a reader can weigh in on whether there have been studies of fake eyes in cats serving an anti-mobbing function.
Below: Owl with a tropical Flycatcher perched nearby, waiting for an opportunity to strike:
Below: Plumage markings on the back of the owl’s head thought to resemble eyes and deter birds mobbing the bird from behind. [JAC: that’s a new on one me!]
Nervous-looking pygmy owl [JAC: It was mobbed by a magpie jay right after this photo was taken.]
A white-throated magpie jay [Calocitta formosa], not the one that attacked the owl.
I also stumbled on another small owl, a Pacific Screech Owl [Megascops cooperi]. Several Rufous-napped Wrens were making a huge ruckus by some dense foliage—this behavior often indicates mobbing an owl or snake. A Pacific Screech Owl soon flushed from the foliage and sat in the open for a couple of minutes.
Pacific screech owl after being flushed by some mobbing wrens:
The mobbing culprit—a Rufous-naped Wren [Campylorhynchus rufinucha]
