Today, if anyone remembers, is Earth Day, and in its honor Google has made an animated Google Doodle. Be sure to click on the Sun.
Here’s a screenshot:
h/t: John
Earth Day doodle
April 22, 2013 • 8:49 am
My visit to Oakland Unversity and the Bat Zone
April 22, 2013 • 6:17 am
I had a lovely visit to Oakland University in Michigan, thanks largely to my host, Todd Shackleford, the students in evolutionary psychology, and the psychology honor association, which helped sponsor my visit.
Photos of seminars and academics aren’t very thrilling, but Oakland University has one standout attraction: Meadow Brook Hall, an 80-room mansion built by the widow of John Dodge. Yes, that’s the Dodge who gave his name to the automobile, and who became immensely wealthy. On his huge estate, which he donated to become the grounds of Oakland College, his widow (Matilda Dodge Wilson) built an 80-room Tudor Revival mansion that now serves as a conference center for the university.
It’s huge, especially considering that only two people lived there (the couple had no children), and one of the features is the elaborate brickwork in the chimneys, no two of which are alike.
After my seminar was over, and on the way to the airport, we stopped for a few hours in the Bat Zone, part of the Cranbrook Institute for Science. Part of the Institute is a building housing the Organization for Bat Conservation, run by Rob Mies and a staff of wonderful, caring assistants.
The OBC is there to house injured bats (and a few other critters) that couldn’t make it in the wild, do research on some of them (especially the vampire bats), and engage in outreach to dispel the bad image of this wonderful group of mammals.
Rob gave several of us a two-hour tour. We began with the non-bats, including this tame striped skunk (Mephitis mephitis), which was housed in a large cage with a sloth. It was descented, and so I was able to pick it up and cuddle it. Skunks make nice pets (I had one for six years): they can be litter-trained, are affectionate, and are complete omnivores. This one didn’t have the full white striping down his back.
Look at that adorable face!
One of America’s cutest rodents, the flying squirrel (probably the northern flying squirrel, Glaucomys sabrinus). They’re nocturnal, which explains their large liquid eyes, enhancing their cuteness.
As you probably know, they have large skin folds on their sides, which can be stretched out to help them glide from tree to tree. Rob demonstrates this here:
Here’s a photo from Wikipedia showing them in action, with the skin folds acting as airfoils. Notice that the tail is stuck out to act as an additional airfoil.
The flat, brushy tail, besides adding gliding capacity, also helps the animal to steer and acts as a brake when it’s about to land.
x got to feed grapes to a sloth; I believe this is the two-toed sloth (Choleopus spp.), but I’m sure a reader will correct me if I’m wrong.
An owl; again, I’m not sure of the species. Like most animals at the facility, it was injured and couldn’t be returned to the wild. The animals do get awesome care, though, as I saw for myself. They get good food, wonderful vet care, and lots of attention.
Two flying foxes, which are frugivorous (fruit-eating). It is amazing to me that mammals evolved the ability to fly by turning their forelimbs into wings. I don’t remember the species (I was too excited watching them and taking pictures and movies to record species names), but I’m sure a reader will enlighten me about this and the other unidentified species in this post.
Two beautiful golden flying foxes. Again, I need a species identification.
Some unidentified leaf-nosed bats who liked to hang out in a cylinder lined with mesh.
They take great care to make good noms for all the animals. The frugivorous bats get cut-up apples and bananas, and also drink weak green tea instead of water because it’s better for their health.
Fruit bat nomming a banana.
Many bats have harems, which means that other males are constantly trying to horn in on the alpha male. In such a case of male-male competition, it pays to produce lots of sperm, not only to service many females, but also to displace the sperm of previously-mating males who may engage in sneaky copulation.
Look at the testes on this fruit bat. That’s right: those are balls! This bat is well hung in both senses of the word.
A big brown bat (Eptesicus fuscus), an insectivore from North America. It’s so ugly that it’s cute. I have a wonderful movie, which I’ll post later, showing the use of a converter box that makes the ultrasonic echolocation “clicks” audible. This injured bat would click when it was moved, but not when held stationary in the hand.
Everybody’s go-to bat: the vampire bat. There are three species; this, I think, is the common vampire bat (Desmodus rotundus), which ranges from Mexico to South America. It makes its living, of course, by biting other creatures (this species specializes on mammals, making it a pest in cattle country) and lapping up the blood. The bats are reported to have a form of reciprocal altruism (regurgitating blood to each other, since a bat can’t live more than two days without a blood meal), and this colony contains uninjured animals whose social behavior is being studied by a friend of mine, Jerry Wilkinson at the University of Maryland.
This one shows the sharp teeth very nicely. Rob said that he once brought a bat on the Elle Degeneres Show (he appears on t.v. a lot), and it bit him on the hand when he was petting it. He quickly hid his hand so as not to gross out the viewers, but had to admit that the bat “got him.”
Here’s a vampire bat skeleton from Wikipedia, showing those fearsome incisors and canines:
A short National Geographic clip showing the vampire bats in action:
A bat in the hand is worth two in the cage. They’re not large, as you see, but they can inflict a painful bite, ergo the gloves.
Surprisingly, vampire bats can live a long time for a small mammal. There’s one bat in the facility which is more than twenty years old!
Here you can see one of the famous examples of “homology”: the use of similar structures for new evolutionary features. The hand of the ancestor has evolved into wing struts. The first finger has been converted into a clawed, protruding digit that helps the bats climb and walk, and the other three fingers support the wing. I count only four digits here, though some bats have five.
A generalized bat wing, showing how the ancestral digits have become claws and struts:
Wikipedia tells us how these creatures feed; I didn’t know they used their teeth as razors!
If there is fur on the skin of the host, the common vampire bat uses its canine and cheek teeth like a barber’s blades to shave away the hairs. The bat’s razor-sharp upper incisor teeth then make a 7mm long and 8mm deep cut. The upper incisors lack enamel, which keeps them permanently razor sharp.
The bat’s saliva, left in the victim’s resulting bite wound, has a key function in feeding from the wound. The saliva contains several compounds that prolong bleeding, such as anticoagulants that inhibit blood clotting, and compounds that prevent the constriction of blood vessels near the wound.
Here’s a short National Geographic movie showing the vampires in action on a pig (the narration is a bit cheesy):
The bats are fed with a “blood fountain,” similar to the devices travelling cat owners use to water their moggies. To make sure the blood is as clean as possible, the Bat Zone gets (cow) blood only from kosher or organic farms, ensuring that it’s as free of antibiotics as possible.
Here’s the friendly Rob Mies, director of the Organization for Bat Conservation and our tour guide. Many thanks to him for taking a few hours out of his busy day to show around a group of fascinated biologists. I’ll finish this post with a movie of Rob showing bats on television.
As I get time, I’ll post some of the bat movies I took, which includes Rob explaining what we’re seeing.
Monday felid
April 22, 2013 • 4:43 am
It’s going to be a long, hard week, so why not begin with a felid and a bit of good news? Reader Ant called my attention to a tweet from Earthpicks described as “Firefighter in Denmark rescues cat from burning house.The way he hugs cat and the expressions of cat says it all.”
Truefact!
Bats on tap
April 21, 2013 • 12:04 pm
I am currently editing my bat photos and choosing among the 40 bat movies I took at the Bat Zone facility at the Cranbrook Institute of Science in Michigan. With luck, I should be able to post some nice movies showing bat behavior, including their echolocation “clicks” made audible with a bat-o-meter. In the meantime, here’s a sociable quartet of flying foxes hanging in a bat cage (thanks to the genial boss, Rob Mies, we were allowed inside the cage):
The Ceiling Cat particle
April 21, 2013 • 10:28 am
An unpublished capture of a particle collision from CERN’s Large Hadron Collider:
h/t: List of X
Atheist Peter Higgs decries the name “God particle”
April 21, 2013 • 8:10 am
It’s time for everyone to stop calling the Higgs boson the “God Particle”. For one thing, it seems to have been publisher’s trick to boost sales of a physics book by Leon Lederman (here at UC) and Dick Teresi. As the Telegraph reports,
Lederman wrote in the book “God particle”: “This boson is so central to the state of physics today, so crucial to our final understanding of the structure of matter, yet so elusive, that I have given it a nickname: the God particle.
“Why God particle? The publisher wouldn’t let us call it the Goddamn particle, though that might be a more appropriate title, given its villainous nature and the expense it is causing.”
But Higgs himself doesn’t like this:
The 83-year-old scientist, who lives in Edinburgh, insisted the reference was not funny and was actually misleading.
He came up with the theory of a subatomic particle, since dubbed the Higgs boson, which would explain the mystery of how things have mass.
But the professor wants people to stop referring to it as the “God particle” because he does not believe the particle holding the physical fabric of the universe together is the work of one almighty creator.
According to Prof Higgs, the nickname actually started as a joke, adding that it was “not a very good one”.
It’s not surprising that a godless person (and future Nobel Laureate, I suspect) would be ticked off that the particle he predicted should get a name that smacks of divinity:
Prof Higgs, explained his distaste for the term in a BBC Scotland interview. He said: “First of all, I’m an atheist.
“The second thing is I know that name was a kind of joke and not a very good one. I think he shouldn’t have done that as it’s so misleading.”
I’ve been reading a lot about the Higgs boson, trying desperately to understand how a field can also be a particle, and how that field can give mass to other particles in the Standard Model of physics. But I suspect that this is one of those nonintuitive oddities of modern physics that will forever defy my understanding.
The “Islamophobia” canard revisited
April 21, 2013 • 5:14 am
Smelling blood, the media has spent the past two weeks attacking New Atheism, going so far as, in the case of Theo Hobson of The Spectator, to label Richard Dawkins as a “joke figure“, which he most certainly is not. Just two days ago, one Freddy Gray, Hobson’s colleague at the Spectator, piled on with a piece called “Dear Richard Dawkins, can you hear me?” The tenor of Gray’s piece can be summarized in a brief excerpt:
There’s no doubt, though, that Theo’s piece touched a nerve among the godless trolls of the web — just look at the comments section.
Doesn’t that remind you of Chris Mooney of The Intersection days? Whenever he said something incredibly stupid, and his readers responded with outrage and correctives, he blithely claimed victory, saying that he “must have touched a nerve.” It amuses me when the mere existence of pushback from your opponents is seen as evidence that what you said must have been right. Anyway, Gray goes on with an argument that’s familiar.
Theo must be on to something. The new atheist spring of the 2000s is wilting. Dawkins suddenly seems like a strange anachronism. In his place, a humbler and more honest atheism is emerging, led by brilliant minds like our very own Douglas Murray on one hand and Alain de Botton on the other. The new gentler atheism, also espoused by clever journalists such as Tanya Gold and Zoe Williams, admits the philosophical shortcomings of unbelief and recognises that religion has its merits. Amen.
I await breathlessly the asceent of de Botton, Murray, Gold, and Williams to the stature of Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris. Here, for instance, are the latest Amazon U.S. statistics on de Botton’s and Dawkins’s books:
de Botton, Religion for Atheists (paperback released Jan. 2013): Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #11,829 in Books
Dawkins, The God Delusion (paperback reprint released Jan. 2008): Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #612 in Books
Whoa! But I guess it’s only the “godless trolls” reading Dawkins, so these statistics cannot reflect his influence. I couldn’t find any books by Douglas Murray, Tanya Gold, or Zoe Williams about religion or atheism.
A lot of the recent atheist-bashing has involved Islamophobia. Critics of the invidious tenets of Islam are labeled as “racists,” which is, of course, just a way to make them shut up about Islam as its adherents continue to pillage, kill, and push their women into sacks and subservience. Fortunately, a few cooler heads have prevailed in the media, so that it’s not left just to people like Harris and me to dispel the “Islamophobia” canard.
One of these is Andrew Zak Williams of The New Statesman, who’s just written a nice piece called “New atheism should be able to criticize Islam without being accused of Islamophobia.” (subtitle: “The atheist community is right to pursue rational, civilised debate, and should be able to do so without being tarred as bigots.”
That subtitle says pretty much all, since the true “Islamophobes”—those who simply hate adherents of Muslims as people, and wish to deny them rights or discriminate against them legally—don’t include the New Atheists. But a few excerpts from Williams’s piece for your delectation, foremost of which is the fact that those who cry “Islamophobia” refuse to engage the atheist arguments against the perfidy of that faith:
Surely, rational discourse should be permitted to tiptoe cautiously along the hallowed corridors of the house of Islam without the guards frogmarching it out, bellowing allegations of racism and bigotry. Cannot we not agree that the real issue is whether the critiques of Islam proffered by today’s prominent atheists are correct? For instance, does Islam fall short when it comes to women’s rights? Does it trample free speech while enforcing its own precepts, by the sword if necessary? By all means, apologists may disagree with the likes of Harris and biologist Jerry Coyne. But what signal is sent by a refusal to permit the issues to be even debated?
One can dream up allegations about any religion that are so obscene that no beliver should be expected to respond. But take the suggestion that Islam has some way to go before it promotes gay rights beyond the level of a misnomer. Or that its holy book, taken literally, demands an embrace of violence and reprisals that wouldn’t be tolerated by any humanist ethos. [JAC: and let’s not forget about the subjugation of women].
These allegations, on their face, are wholly consistent with observation. What’s more, its tenets and precepts have real consequences and repercussions for all of us. What is it that leads apologists and liberal writers to nevertheless consider that Islam shouldn’t have to answer these charges, and that those who bring them are merely dressing their bigotry in a cloak of intellectualism? Biologist Jerry Coyne puts it this way:
“Critics of the New Atheists are free to take issue with their tone, but to dismiss them without addressing the substance of their arguments constitutes an implicit admission that they just might have a point.” [JAC note: Sadly, this quote isn’t from me, but from Michael Luciano, who said it a month ago in PolicyMic, where’s he’s the politics editor.] You can see his point. Plenty of Catholics, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Anglicans surely feel aggrieved when their god is put under the microscope and found to be the product of unintelligent design. They challenge both what is said and, increasingly these days, the way it’s said. But they hardly consider that their faith is immune from suitable criticism. For Islam to claim special treatment is to imply that it’s unable to withstand such analysis.
. . . We are under no compunction to pretend that the terrorist doesn’t exist any more than to deny the abundance of moderate Muslims. But the atheist community will not be bullied by lazy allegations of bigotry leveled against those who point that a religion that harbours such extremes has some explaining to do.
And it’s not just a handful of extremists, either: it’s the legions of “moderate” enablers who, through either intimidation or cowardice, refuse to decry their co-religionists. No surprise given that the penalty for apostasy is death, and you can be threatened for something as innocuous as publishing a cartoon or giving the wrong name to a teddy bear.
Williams finishes with a flourish:
And to resort to the tag “Islamophobia” is justified only if you adapt a bizarre definition of the word that is satisfied merely if the religion is held up to scrutiny, rather than its people being held up to prejudice.
But perhaps there’s another word for what today’s New Atheists have been saying. Maybe they’re just plain wrong.
Maybe.
But until civilised debate is permitted, perhaps we’ll never know.
I doubt that we’re wrong, since the evils committed in the name of Islam are palpable and numerous. And Williams isn’t wrong, either.
__________
UPDATE: Be sure to read the comment of Meg Shenitch, an administrator for The Thinking Atheist Facebook page, below the fold. It’s the page’s standard response to those who play the Islamophobia card.
A reader’s beautiful cat who lives in a beautiful place
April 21, 2013 • 4:33 am
Meet a beautiful cat whose photo was sent by a reader wishing to be identified only as “reader—one who very much enjoys your website.” Thanks, reader!
This is a lovely cat, and I have a weakness for black moggies, so I asked the reader to tell me a bit about it. Here’s the reply:
His name is Peck. When I moved to this farm it was overrun with over a dozen feral cats, many of them in bad shape. My daughter heroically nursed them to health, had them neutered, and placed them. Peck is one of four kittens she kept and they’re all doing well. I’m fortunate to live in a valley of surpassing beauty, teeming with wildlife. I’ve attached a few recent photos from the farm that you may like.
(Click all photos to enlarge.)
And here is Peck’s gorgeous home, with some other animal denizens. Unlike the reader, its location is not a secret:
It’s near Picabo, Idaho, in the drainage of Silver Creek, about 30 miles south of Sun Valley. This is high desert that’s well-watered by springs, which gives it an unusual, even exotic character. The Nature Conservancy’s Silver Creek Preserve is just across the highway.
Trumpeter swans:
And, as lagniappe, these pictures, described as “these Great Blue Herons had just copulated. I’ve attached photos of them in the act. This is something you don’t see every day.”
