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.
Potoos are some of the most cryptic birds around. This video, which isn’t on YouTube, was made by Ciro Albano and shared by Novataxa (link provided by Florian M.).
Click on the screenshot below to see a short but stunning video of a Rufous Potoo (Nyctibius bracteatus) rocking on its perch, apparently mimicking a twig or leaf blowing in the wind. The bird is not being blown itself: it’s rocking to deceive predators. This is something completely new to me, but is described in Wikipedia:
The rufous potoo is the smallest member of its genus, and extremely well-camouflaged, being almost invisible among dead leaves, trees and otherplants. Its body is, like the common name implies, rufous with white spots on the underbody. To improve their camouflage even further, they will rock back and forth while roosting to even closer resemble a dead leaf. They sing almost exclusively on full moons.
. . . This species has a unique nesting habit. They make their nest upon a broken, vertical branch and produce one egg with unerring aim into their nest. Their dead-leaf like movements make this effective camouflage for predators that would prey upon their offspring.
Now you tell me that evolution isn’t amazing, for I strongly suspect that this behavior isn’t learned, but an evolved, hard-wired trait, expressed only when the bird feels the wind.
Individuals of over 5 kilograms (11 lb) in weight and over 80 centimetres (31 in) long have been known in the past, but now, even individuals over 2 kilograms (4.4 lb) are rare. The species is only found in Tasmanian rivers flowing north into the Bass Strait below 400 metres (1,300 ft) above sea level, and is listed as an endangered species on the IUCN Red List. The specific epithet gouldi commemorates the Australian naturalist John Gould.
A. gouldi is very long-lived, surviving for up to 40 years. Their main predators are humans, platypus, river blackfish and rakali.
Here’s a photo. The crayfish looks bigger than it is because it’s foreshortened, but still, look at its size compared to the man’s hands. That’s a big crustacean!:
You can read about the decline of this animal at The Australian(note, you can go there only once without paying). It’s time for the Tasmanians to put some serious effort into saving this animal, and to stop eating it! Here’s a video:
If you’ve read the Old Testament, a grueling task that I actually accomplished, you’ll know about the many genocides ordered by Yahweh. Many were the tribes slain by the Israelits on God’s command, including, besides the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites. Theologians have spent a lot of time trying to justify why God wiped out innocent children (and even animals), and of course they’ve succeeded. Today we’ll occupy ourselves with the wholesale slaughter of the Canaanites, described in Deuteronomy 7:1-2 and 20:16-18.
As God said in Deuteronomy 20:16, “But of the cities of these peoples which the Lord your God gives you as an inheritance, you shall let nothing that breathes remain alive. . ” That could imply that not only were all the Canaanites (including women and children) slaughtered en masse, but so were their animals. Or at least so some theologians have argued, forcing them to then justify why God would commit genocide of animals. But theologians are up to the task!
First, here are a few explanations for the mass slaughter of humans:
Reader John sent me this video made by the disgraced (just out of prison for tax evasion and other crimes) but still active young-earth creationist Kent Hovind. While the 35-minute video includes Hovind’s usual blather about evolution and creationism, the reader wanted us to see Hovind’s justification for the Canaanite genocide. His/her email:
“Dr.” Kent Hovind has recently been released from prison and is back online, answering emails from the public in a daily Youtube broadcast.
In his November 5th 2015 video, he put his own spin–the most monstrous I’ve yet encountered–on the fictional Yahweh’s proclivity for genocide: apparently, mass murder of the Canaanites by Yahweh’s servant Joshua was a necessary public health response to the population’s bestiality-induced infectious disease burden! According to Hovind, the extermination of the Canaanites, innocent children included, can be considered entirely analogous to a physician prescribing an antibiotic to eradicate bacterial infection!
Imagine if you or Richard Dawkins or Peter Singer said such a thing!
The relevant excerpt of the video–amongst a half-hour of inane blather–begins at 6:30 minutes in:
The following is my [John’s] transcript (verbatim by intention, or, at least, as close to verbatim as I can manage):
“As far as God telling ’em to wipe out the Midianites, well, there were nations that were so full of diseases and things like that … that God said, “Yes, they need to all be wiped out, especially, like, the Canaanites in that land”. God told Joshua, “When you go into the land, utterly annihilate them! Kill ’em all!” Well, one of the things the Canaanites did was sex with animals, and had all kinds of diseases … and … and … just endemic in the civilization, and God said, “Wipe ’em all out!” No different than a doctor saying, “Take this pill that’s gonna kill every bacteria [sic], even the little baby ones that haven’t done anything wrong. Yeah, we’re gonna kill ’em all, ’cause if you leave onebehind or one resistant one behind, the disease can come back with a vengeance!”
Well, Hovind isn’t the only one to justify the murder of all the Canaanites, including their children AND the animals that they had sex with. William Lane Craig famously justified the human genocide; you can see some of his disgusting apologetics here. An excerpt:
So the problem isn’t that God ended the Canaanites’ lives. The problem is that He commanded the Israeli soldiers to end them. Isn’t that like commanding someone to commit murder? No, it’s not. Rather, since our moral duties are determined by God’s commands, it is commanding someone to do something which, in the absence of a divine command, would have been murder. The act was morally obligatory for the Israeli soldiers in virtue of God’s command, even though, had they undertaken it on their on initiative, it would have been wrong.
On divine command theory, then, God has the right to command an act, which, in the absence of a divine command, would have been sin, but which is now morally obligatory in virtue of that command.
. . . By setting such strong, harsh dichotomies God taught Israel that any assimilation to pagan idolatry is intolerable. It was His way of preserving Israel’s spiritual health and posterity. God knew that if these Canaanite children were allowed to live, they would spell the undoing of Israel. The killing of the Canaanite children not only served to prevent assimilation to Canaanite identity but also served as a shattering, tangible illustration of Israel’s being set exclusively apart for God.
Moreover, if we believe, as I do, that God’s grace is extended to those who die in infancy or as small children, the death of these children was actually their salvation. We are so wedded to an earthly, naturalistic perspective that we forget that those who die are happy to quit this earth for heaven’s incomparable joy. Therefore, God does these children no wrong in taking their lives.
Talk about making a virtue of necessity! The children had to die because God said so, because they’d grow up to worship pagan idols and so had to be extirpated, and because it wasn’t so bad after all because the children would reap their reward in Heaven. (Why, I wonder, would these children even go to Heaven, since that’s not an Old-Testament concept?) It is a fact universally acknowledged that there is no act of cruelty that cannot be justified by theologians as an aspect of God’s beneficence. Craig’s apologetics are monstrous.
But why destroy the Canaanites’ animals, too: the passive and probably unwilling victims of bestiality? Well, Clay Jones, Associate Professor of Christian Apologetics at Biola University, has explained that away on his website:
The Lord ordered that those who have sex with animals should be put to death along with the animal (Lev. 20:15). Atheist Richard Dawkins objects that it adds “injury to insult” that “the unfortunate beast is to be killed too.” ([Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (New York: Houghton, 2006),248.]) But, what Dawkins and others don’t grasp is that only the depraved would want to have animals around who were used to having sex with humans.
Jones goes on to describe a story by Robert Yerkes about a female gorilla who tried to press her genitals against his feet, and intimates that she had either had sex with a human or, if she hadn’t but might have in principle (although there were no gorillas in the Mideast), she’d be even more sexually demanding. That would be not only “embarrassing,” but even dangerous! And that’s why the Canaanites’ animals had to die—they were rape victims who became sluttish. It was honor killing! Jones:
Now the objection could be made that some of the animals may not have been subject to such abuse, but that’s not something that an Israelite would be able to know. Thus they all had to die.
Major takeaway: sometimes beings innocent of committing sin can be harmed and corrupted by others who misuse their free will, as seems to be the case with animals involved in bestiality. It is a tragedy that these animals had to be killed but that’s one of the big lessons about sin: Sinful beings can hurt the innocent sometimes permanently.
Can you imagine a grown person being paid to utter such idiocy? But such is theology: the post hoc rationalization of things you want to believe. The argument that God killed the Canaanites’ animals because the poor beasts were sexually abused is simply an example of theologians making stuff up. After all, we don’t even know (if the Bible were true) that the animals were even killed. And the argument is no sillier than Edward Feser’s claim that dogs and cats won’t be admitted to Heaven.
The proper response to such arguments is not respect, but mockery.
Apropos of the last post, here’s a 32-minute video of psychologist Jonathan Haidt lecturing as part of the William F. Buckley program at—of all places—Yale University, where the Halloween Costume Fracas just occurred. (Haidt also went to Yale as an undergraduate.)
He’s playing two opposing roles: as representatives of both “Coddling University” and “Strengthening University”, characterizing the discussion we’ve been having about “student psychological safety” versus “free speech.”
This is a clever way to make one’s points, for it’s clear which side Haidt is on, although some (including me) might find the talk a bit heavy-handed. Still, given the political climate among students at universities like Yale, I think it’s pretty brave of Haidt to give a talk like this.
As always, readers’ opinions are welcomed in the comments.
Two days ago I posted about the Halloween-costume fracas at Yale University, describing how a married couple who were “housemasters” (heads of one of the intra-university colleges) were vilified by students after the woman, Erika Christakis, wrote a thoughtful and temperate email questioning the policing of Halloween costumes. Students not only wrote petitions decrying Christakis’s email, but called for the resignation of her and her husband Nicholas. Nicholas himself was verbally assaulted by students when he went out on the quad to discuss issues with them.
I stand by my criticism of the students’ call for the Christakises resignation, and feel that the treatment of this couple was execrable. However, I’ve learned that there may be a lot more to the students’ anger than simply emails about Halloween costumes, at least if you trust the post of Aaron Lewis, a senior at Yale writing at his website at Medium.com. In his own report, “What’s really going on at Yale?“, Lewis describes a history of racism at Yale, which has, over the years, fueled the anger of black and minority students. These include swastikas drawn on a college dorm last year, and a report, which I remember from January, of a black graduate student being treated shamefully by University police after being mistaken for a burglary suspect.
Lewis claims, and I think this is true, that Yale’s President Peter Salovey has been slow to react to this situation despite the fact that Jonathan Holloway, Yale’s first black Dean of Students, reacted more quickly and met for hours with students.
I wanted to bring this up because the situation may be more complicated than it looks. As I said, there was no call for the students to go after the Christakises, no matter how marginalized they feel. But their explosion of anger might reflect more than just a few emails from University administrators. I do want to note, though, that Lewis’s own report emphasizes not just racism, but students feeling “psychologically unsafe”. He describes one incident that has garnered a lot of press:
Many people (especially women of color) said they feel physically and psychologically unsafe here. Just last weekend, several women said they were turned away from a social event at SAE because it was for “white girls only.” Some people have tried to turn this into a debate about what exactly happened at the door of SAE on Halloween. But that’s not the point. For students of color, the incident is a symbol of the kind of racism that they deal with far too often on this campus.
That incident, which is reprehensible if it happened, is actually subject to some dispute, at least according to the Daily Beast. (However, widespread racism of the ΣAE fraternity at other schools is not.) But Lewis claims that the truth of this report is irrelevant, for it’s a “symbol of racism.” That it might be—if it did happen. But in this narrative, let’s not say that the truth doesn’t matter. As for students feeling physically and psychologically unsafe, well, if they feel physically unsafe because of threats or a climate of harassment, that’s a serious issue that should be recitified. But feeling psychologically unsafe is a completely different issue. “Psychological safety” is rapidly becoming a euphemism on American campuses for “Not having one’s ideas challenged.”
Lewis ends by emphasizing not just racism, but the “safety” issue again:
I hope it’s obvious now that Yale students are concerned about far more than just an email or a frat party. In the petty debates about these two specific incidents, people have lost sight of the larger issue: systemic racism on campus. There’s absolutely no reason why we can’t acknowledge both the value of free speech and the reality of the prejudice that students of color face every day. It saddens me that this has gotten to the point where people feel like they have to take sides. We should all strive for a future where, at the very least, people feel physically safe and confident in their own humanity. Let’s focus on the goals we share, not the unproductive debates that divide us.
Claims of endemic racism at Yale are serious, and should be investigated by the University. The administration needs to respond quickly, and if there are violations of the law or personal harassment, the University should take action. But I’m dubious about statement like this: “There’s absolutely no reason why we can’t acknowledge both the value of free speech and the reality of the prejudice that students of color face every day.” Such statements are often used to suppress truly free speech: the speech that others find offensive but that’s not illegal. After all, some debates, including the one about Halloween costumes, are valuable and productive, and trying to suppress any debate is inimical to the mission of a great university like Yale.
In about half an hour I’ll put up a video by Jonathan Haidt that underscores the dichtomy between free speech and “safe spaces” that is plaguing American universities.
I feel music coming on this week; but I suspect it will be an eclectic mix. Here’s a classic song from the 1940s.
“Why don’t you do right?” started life as a song called “Weed-smoker’s dream,” recorded in 1936 by the Harlem Hamfats (not from Harlem, but Chicago; you can hear the original version here). It then was rewritten to its present form in 1941 by Hamfats member Joseph McCoy. You can hear that blues-y version, recorded by Lil Green, here. It clearly influenced Peggy Lee’s later cover.
As Wikipedia notes:
The song has its roots in blues music and originally dealt with a marijuana smoker reminiscing about lost financial opportunities. As it was rewritten, it takes on the perspective of the female partner, who chastises her man for his irresponsible ways and admonishes him to:
Why don’t you do right, like some other men do?
Get out of here and get me some money too.
But the most famous version was recorded by Peggy Lee fronting Benny Goodman’s band in 1942 (original recording here). The live version shown below is from the 1943 wartime movie “Stage Door Canteen“, which I must watch (the whole movie, full of musicians, is on YouTube). Lee’s vocals are about as blues-y and sultry as they come, and Benny Goodman, does a superb solo. Who would have thought that a Jewish boy from Chicago would become the best jazz clarinetist ever?
You might remember that this song was also sung by Jessica Rabbit, a performance that poleaxed the private eye Bob Hoskins in the movie “Who Killed Roger Rabbit?” (go here to see that version).
