Bats photographed in flight

February 19, 2016 • 2:30 pm

Our old friend Piotr Naskrecki, biologist, naturalist, and crack photographer (photo page here, website here), has an article at Cognisys about how he set up a portable studio in the field to photograph bats—and other animals—in flight.

Piotr has apparently been spending most of his time at Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique, and I’ve featured a lot of his photos from there. This time, a fellow biologist asked him to help photograph bats in flight. Piotr gives a huge amount of information about how he set up his portable studio, but I’ll let the photo buffs go see that for themselves, and I’ll reproduce only one paragraph in favor of the stunning bat and insect photos:

The biologist documenting Gorongosa bats, Jen Guyton of Princeton University, required images that were not only technically good but also taxonomically diagnostic. This means that they needed to show all the details of the bats’ bodies that allow for positive identification of the species. This requirement made me decide to photograph them in a studio setup, rather than attempting to shoot them in caves or at roosting sites. Since Jen was catching bats in a mist net almost every night to take measurements and DNA samples I knew that I would have no shortage of subjects. The difficulty was that the bat documentation was taking place in multiple, often very remote locations in Gorongosa, and thus I had to be able to photograph the animals in the field, far from access to electricity and other amenities of civilization. I had to build a photo studio portable enough to be able to take with me wherever the biologists were working, yet capable of capturing images of the highest quality.

The studio:

The bats (these are all copyrighted, but I have permission from Piotr to use his photos):

egyptian-slit-faced-bat — Egyptian Slit-faced bat (*Nycteris thebaica*)

landers-horseshoe-bat — A brown form of Lander’s Horseshoe bat *(Rhinolophus landeri*)

fruit-bat — Wahlberg’s epauletted fruit bat (*Epomophorus wahlbergi*)

red-landers-horseshoe-bat — A red form of Lander’s Horseshoe bat (*Rhinolophus landeri*)

And one insect:

leaf-katydid — Leaf katydid (*Eurycorypha lesnei*)

The species above has the common name of Lesne’s Oblong-eyed Katydid. I have to say that the animals in this post have cool names!

Krauss: Fill Scalia’s Supreme Court vacancy with an atheist

February 19, 2016 • 1:30 pm

Given the New Yorker’s softness on faith, I’m heartened—and very surprised—to see that the magazine has published Lawrence Krauss’s has third godless column, “Put an atheist on the Supreme Court.” (Krauss was surprised too, emailing that “Maybe there is a god.” Note to religionists: he was joking!). At any rate, go look at it; I’ll give a short excerpt.

First, though, Krauss notes that 3% of Americans declare themselves atheists, and another 4% agnostic. In effect, nonbelievers make up 7% of all Americans, while, according to Wikipedia, between 1.7% and 2.6% of Americans are Jews. Yet there have been eight Jewish Supreme Court justices (let me name them, since Americans will recognize most of them: Louis Brandeis, Benjamin Cardozo, Felix Frankfurter, Arthur Goldberg, Abe Fortas, and, still serving, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, and Elena Kagan). I’m unaware of a single overtly atheist Supreme Court justice.

We thus have a gross underrepresentation of atheists on the Court, but of course there’s good reason for that. Imagine an atheist justice being confirmed by today’s Senate! Antonin Scalia claimed before he died that there was a gross underrepresentation of evangelical Christians and Protestants on today’s court (i.e., none), but Krauss says that we’re also missing nonbelievers.

So Krauss, while offering great arguments for an atheist justice, also recognizes what he’s up against. His suggestion will of course be ignored, but what’s good is that he’s able to even offer it in one of the country’s most respectable magazines.

From a judicial perspective, an atheist Justice would be an asset. In controversial cases about same-sex marriage, say, or access to abortion or birth control, he or she would be less likely to get mired in religion-based moral quandaries. Scalia himself often got sidetracked in this way: he framed his objections to laws protecting L.G.B.T. rights in a moral, rather than a legal-rights, framework. In his dissent, in 2003, in Lawrence v. Texas—a case that challenged a Texas law criminalizing gay sex—Scalia wrote that those who wanted to limit the rights of gay people to be teachers or scoutmasters were merely “protecting themselves and their families from a lifestyle they believe to be immoral and destructive.” To him, religion-based moral objections seemed to deserve more weight than either factual considerations (homosexuality is not destructive) or rights-based concerns (gay people’s rights must be protected). Indeed, Scalia’s meditation on the Court’s lack of religious diversity was part of a larger argument that the Court’s decision on same-sex marriage did not reflect prevailing religious and moral values. An atheist Justice, by contrast, would have different intellectual habits. I suspect that he or she would be more likely to focus on reason and empirical evidence.

In addition, the appointment of an atheist Justice would send a meaningful message: it would affirm that legal arguments are secular, and that they are based on a secular document, the Constitution, which was written during the founding of a secular democracy. Such an appointment would also help counter the perceived connection between atheism and lawlessness and immorality.

There’s more, including a ringing peroration, but I’ll let you read that for yourself.

May I suggest Richard Posner for the vacancy? He’s more or less a centrist, is the most cited legal scholar in America, and, as far as I know, has no belief in gods. And he has a cat, too. There are others more liberal that I’d like, but their chance of confirmation is zero.

Harper Lee dies at 89

February 19, 2016 • 12:00 pm

Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), passed away this morning at age 89, apparently dying in her sleep. She’d not been well for a while, with some even claiming that she wasn’t compos mentis enough to approve the recent publication of Go Set A Watchman, the first draft of Mockingbird, which appeared last year to lukewarm reviews.

But Mockingbird was a true classic, and even if Lee was a one-book author, that book will live for generations. How many of you haven’t read it? I doubt there are many, at least among Americans. The 1962 movie, too, was a classic. I also know her because she was Truman Capote’s bestie, accompanying him to Kansas for the arduous job of researching Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966; another classic work you should read).

Lee became pretty much of a hermit after the movie came out, living modestly in Alabama and trying to avoid publicity. But she continues to garner praise and honors for her book. In 2007 she received the National Medal of Freedom from W (below).

Lee and Capote:

Lee with Gregory Peck, who of course played Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, nabbing an Oscar for Best Actor. The film won two other Oscars, though not Best Picture.

And here’s Mary Badham (born 1952), who played Scout—then and now. She was nominated for Best Supporting Actress (but didn’t win) at the age of ten:

Chino Valley town council vows to continue prayer

February 19, 2016 • 10:45 am

Two days ago I reported that Mayor Chris Marley, mayor of Chino Valley, Arizona (and a “part-time Baptist minister”, whatever that is), has repeatedly begun the town council meetings with a Christian prayer. After promising that he’d stop the process pending a discussion of the prayer issue, Marley reneged on his promise (i.e. lied) and again praised Jesus at a meeting on February 9. A rabbi in attendance, Adele Plotkin, objected vociferously, whereupon Plotkin had her heaved out of the meeting (the link includes a video).

A little bird told me that both the ACLU and the Freedom from Religion Foundation have warned Mayor Marley that they have to stop this unconstitutional practice now. That was confirmed by the local paper. Do you think the council will listen?

Hell, no! It’s Arizona, Jake. As the Chino Valley Review notes, they’re standing firm:

Chino Valley has been ending its invocation with “praying in Jesus’ name” for years. The controversy began on Dec. 8 when a Chino Valley resident, Sherry Brown, objected to the practice.

Marley said he’s drawing a line in the sand and the rest of the Town Council backed him up, saying they have no intention to change their invocation.

After the Mayor chucked out Rabbi Plotkin, the council voted to stick with Jesus. The mayor said this (my emphasis):

“Unfortunately, the content of the invocations offered here in Chino Valley has become the subject of some contention, so we – your Town Council – will deal with it,” Marley said in an opening statement. “Our Bill of Rights protects us against the establishment of religion by the state, and yet it would appear that secular humanism with its mantra of political correctness has become just that, the state established religion which the First Amendment was supposed to protect us against.

“Our oath of office requires that we defend the Constitution, and yet we are being asked to give up our right to freely worship according to the dictates of conscience. As a nation, we have already lost a number of our freedoms: The right to peacefully assemble and our protection against unreasonable search and seizure are already gone, and a number of others are being stripped away as we speak.

“I can’t speak for the rest of the Council, but I believe it is time to draw a line in the sand, at least for me it is.”

After discussing eight different options on how to handle the invocation at future Town Council meetings, the council voted that they would make no changes to the current tradition, which is a member of council gives the invocation without any guidance if they wish to be in the rotation to do so.

“I believe that we as a council have every right to continue to offer the invocations,” Marley said.

I’m always amazed how state imposition of religion, as the town council is doing, is justified as adhering to the First Amendment. The founding fathers, who voted against opening the Constitutional Convention with a prayer, would surely disagree. Note too that Mareley argues that by opposing public Christian prayer, his detractors are trying to make secular humanism the state established religion! It’s hard to avoid calling people names when I hear crazy arguments like that. That is, “no religion” is characterized as a religion!

And the “right to freely worship” means, chowderheads, anywhere but at governmental functions! Why can’t Preacher Marley restrict his prayers to his house or to his Baptist Church? For some reason, these people feel that their “right” to pray means a “right” to impose their religious beliefs on others in a formal government setting. Would he sit quietly if a Muslim offered up a prayer to Allah? Or if a Satanist proffered a prayer? I doubt it.

What will happen? The die is cast:

“I want the citizens to be aware, us standing our ground, if this is challenged, it could cost the town money to defend it,” Council member Corey Mendoza said. “Personally, I’m willing to do that. But we are representatives of the town, so speak up when you get a chance and we’ll unite around this.”

Yes, it will cost them considerable money if there’s a lawsuit, and if they don’t give in, I suspect there will be. Although such suits require someone with “standing” to initiate them, and there’s a certain peeved rabbi who, I think, does have that standing.

h/t: Dennis D.

My review of Matt Ridley’s new book, “The Evolution of Everything”

February 19, 2016 • 9:00 am

Matt Ridley is not only a businessman and a banker (or was—he headed Northern Rock before it went bust in 2007), but also a Viscount with huge landholdings, a member of the House of Lords and, to top it off, holder of a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology from Oxford (I believe he was Richard Dawkins’s student). (UPDATE: I’m told that he wasn’t Richard’s student, but Chris Perrins’s.) He’s written five science books, among them the highly regarded works The Origins of Virtue, The Red Queen, and Genome.

Ridley is also an extreme libertarian, holding that virtually all functions of the government should be privatized or left to individual initiative. In his latest book, The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge, he claims that there’s a “law of progress” whereby “bottom up” initiatives from individuals always lead to better results than do “top down” ideas proposed or sponsored by governments and bureaucracies. Thus, he argues, we should privatize things like medical care, pensions, schools, the prison system, law enforcement, and even the issuing of currency. Ridley claims that he derived this “law” of social evolution from his work on biological evolution, which he also sees as a “bottom up” process (the sorting of genes leads to adaptation at higher levels).

I’ve just reviewed this book in the Times Literary Supplement (TLS), in a review called “Not natural.” Sadly, very few reviews in the TLS are free, so I can’t post a link here, though judicious inquiry might yield you a copy. In the meantime, I’ll just say that while some of the book’s extreme libertarian arguments are good, The Evolution of Everything sinks under the weight of Ridley’s ideology, into which he crams virtually every social institution as best run on libertarian principles, and also under the superficiality of the analogy between natural selection on genes and cultural selection on good ideas (“memes” if you will). But contra regular meme hypotheses, Ridley argues that good memes virtually never come from the top down, but from individual initiative.

I’ll add two bits of my review:

. . . Yet while many of Ridley’s libertarian arguments ring true, his analogy between social progress and evolutionary change suffers from two problems. First, Ridley’s “theory” of cultural evolution is trivial, boiling down to the notion that things change with time, usually for the better, and that change involves testing dif-ferent ideas and keeping the ones that work better. That’s not a “theory” but a description, and hardly a novel one.

Further, the comparison with biological evolution is at best superfluous. After all, while natural selection involves the competi-tion and sorting of genes, it can also be seen as a top-down rather than a bottom-up process: the success of genes depends on the organism’s environment, which imposes the conditions for genetic success. Polar bears are white because their snowy habitat dictates that genes removing their colour – and camouflaging them from prey – leave more copies. Whales and fish are streamlined because that shape reduces the energy needed to navigate a watery milieu they cannot escape.

And, unlike biological evolution, the “mutations” that advance culture – good ideas – are consciously directed. People try different things, like tinkering with the design of smartphones, because they think they will improve matters. DNA mutations, on the other hand, are random – indifferent to whether or not they will improve an organism – and most are harmful. The unique aspect of natural selection, the fact that complexity and change result from an undirected process, is absent from Ridley’s scenario, which resembles goal-directed intelligent design more than evolution.

More important, Ridley’s arguments for the superiority of bottom-up change are not always convincing. For example, although private systems of healthcare have sprung up beside government ones in countries like Sweden and Britain, many argue that this reflects not an endemic flaw in universal healthcare, but a shortage of government funding. . .

I was particularly exercised when Ridley not only knocked environmentalism and mocked those who claim that global warming is produced by humans, but also proclaimed that science funding should be completely privatized and not left at all to governments:

As a scientist, I see Ridley’s argument for privatizing science funding as especially wrong-headed. Few private organizations would fund “pure” research with no clear potential for turning a profit, even though some of that research can eventually become useful. In the case of smartphones, many components such as multi-touch screens, liquid-crystal displays and lithium-ion batteries – not to mention the internet itself – were the products of government funding. Individual initiative combined these elements into something immensely useful, but top-down support was essential.

Crucially, huge swathes of science that expand our knowledge of the universe, but not our pocketbooks, would simply vanish. One of these is the field in which both Ridley and I work: evolutionary biology. Space exploration and much of physics would also fall under the axe. Of the past ten Nobel Prizes in Physics, for example, at least five – involving large and expensive government-funded facilities that discovered marvels like the Higgs boson and “dark energy” – would never have been funded privately. [JAC: add gravity waves to that now!] Government sponsorship of science is vital precisely because it values the acquisition of knowledge for its own sake rather than for our material well-being.

Two other aspects of the book detract from its value. The first are the many digressions – often involving Ridley’s libertarianism – that have little to do with the book’s thesis. There are repeated sneers at environmentalism, including Ridley’s fulminations against the concept of man-made global warming (whose proponents he compares to religious zealots), the green movement (which he smears by associating it with eugenics and Nazism), and governmental attempts to control population growth (he assures us that technology and the free market will solve that problem).

And yes, Ridley did compare the green movement to the Nazis and to proponents of eugenics.

Ridley is very good when sticking to evolution, but when he bangs on about libertarianism and capitalism, the ground becomes treacherous. And don’t even ask me how he manages to blame the failure of his Northern Rock bank—whose bailout cost the British taxpayers £27 billion—on too stringent government regulation! In fact, it was exactly the opposite. But such is the Procrustean Bed that Ridley makes, forcing all phenomena into his theory. And a theory that can’t be refuted cannot be validated.

Readers’ wildlife photographs

February 19, 2016 • 7:30 am

Reader John Pears sent two dollops of photos: this one and some lions he snapped on a trip to Africa. I’ll show the lions later, but here’s the first batch, with John’s comments indented.

It’s a while since I’ve shared photos with you due to house moves, new grandchild, etc but I didn’t retire my camera and had some exciting trips and photo opportunities in 2015.

John’s photos are below, and you can see more pictures on his Instagram photo account, @jdphoto60.

The year started with a trip to a local reservoir at Blithfield where I watched 2 Grey Squirrels (Sciurus carolinensis) squeezing into a small hole!

Note the nose of squirrel #2 at the bottom of the hole!

Eurasian Robins (Erithacus rubecula) are always worth a photograph or two. I grew up being told they are part of the thrush family but are now classified as chats.

Eurasian Treecreepers (Certhia familiaris) are tricky to photograph as they seldom pause in their search for insects underneath the bark.

Finally Goldcrest (Regulus regulus) are one of Europe’s smallest birds (I believe the firecrest is the smallest). This one was hovering and flitting in the branches taking midges before finally settling for this capture, one of my favourites from 2015.

The following morning I return for the sunrise and was rewarded with clear views of sunspots (bottom left quadrant)

Friday: Hili dialogue

February 19, 2016 • 6:30 am

It’s Friday at last, and in a week I shall be in Ottawa, about to head for a brief holiday stint in Montreal. All the poutines and smoked meats better hide! On this day in history, Thomas Edison patented the phonograph in 1878, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique was published in 1963, and in 1985 the BBC’s Eastenders was broadcast for the first time (it’s still on, right?). The births on Februay 19 include Copernicus (1473), Carson McCullers (1917; read her!), Will Provine (1942, died last year), Amy Tan (1952), and Prince Andrew (1960). Deaths on this day included Ernst Mach (1916), Knut Hamsun (1952; the same day Amy Tan was born), and Leo Rosten (1997). Meanwhile in Dobrazyn, Hili is again spouting off about the superiority of cats. I don’t know how Cyrus can stand it!

Hili: Dogs adore a personality cult. They like to serve one master.

A: And cats?

Hili: Cats are democrats. Anybody can serve them.

(Photo: Sarah Lawson)

In Polish:

Hili: Psy kochają kult jednostki, lubią służyć jednemu panu.
Ja: A koty?
Hili: Koty są demokratami, każdy może im służyć.
(Zdjęcie: Sarah Lawson)

From Rhymes with Orange by Hilary Price, courtesy of Diane G.:

And something from Facebook (source lost), showing that somebody really loves their cat. It appears to be an elaborate cat shelter/cat door:

	Susan on Saturday: Hili dialogue
	Leslie MacMillan on Saturday: Hili dialogue
	whyevolutionistrue on Saturday: Hili dialogue
	whyevolutionistrue on Saturday: Hili dialogue
	grasshopper on Saturday: Hili dialogue