Atheism grows on campus

February 10, 2013 • 11:55 am

Just a quick but heartening note from the airport: a new article in Religion Dispatches, “Are atheists the new campus crusaders?”, discusses the growing influence of the secular movement on American college campuses. It highlights the Secular Student Alliance, but also mentions the Richard Dawkins Foundation, the Center for Inquiry, and the Secular Coalition for America.

Secular groups on college campuses are proliferating. The Ohio-based Secular Student Alliance, which a USA Today writer once called a “Godless Campus Crusade for Christ,” incorporated as a nonprofit in 2001. By 2007, 80 campus groups had affiliated with them, 100 by 2008, 174 by 2009, and today, there are 394 SSA student groups on campuses across the country. “We have been seeing rapid growth in the past couple of years, and it shows no sign of slowing down,” says Jesse Galef, communications director at SSA. “It used to be that we would go to campuses and encourage students to pass out flyers. Now, the students are coming to us almost faster than we can keep up with.”

Many of these organizations seem to engage in interfaith activities, which can be okay, I guess, but one is described which seems a bit, well, unseemly:

“We really encourage interfaith activities,” says Sarah Kaiser, field organizer at the Center For Inquiry, an international organization that promotes “science, reason, freedom of inquiry, and humanist values.” As a student, Kaiser was member of the Secular Alliance at the University of Indiana. Her group raised money for The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society through a “Send An Atheist To Church” tabling event. The atheists put out cups for each of the campus’ religious groups, and whichever cup raised the most money determined which church the atheists would attend as an interfaith educational activity.

The Muslim Student Union’s cup received the most donations, so the atheists attended mosque.

Now what is the point of that beyond agreeing to compromise your values to make money? Surely it won’t turn atheists towards Islam, and I’m not sure what kind of atheism/Muslim comity could result.

And the faithful are eager to argue that atheist organizations engage in some kind of “faith”:

At Stanford University, the Atheists, Humanists and Agnostics (AHA!) register with the Office For Religious Life, just like Cru  [JAC: the new name of the Campus Crusade for Christ, obviously coined to make it less scary], and are a member of Stanford Associated Religions.

“There are a lot of parallels with religious groups on campus,” says Ron Sanders, Cru’s missional team leader at Stanford.

“They have weekly meetings similar to ours, and give one another support, and they do social justice projects on campus and in the communities… I don’t know that they aren’t a faith group. They don’t have a faith in God, or in revelation or something like that, but they have faith in reason and in science, as I understand it, as a guide for human flourishing.”

No we dont have faith in reason and science in the same way as “Cru” members have faith in God. I see “faith” according to Walter Kaufmann’s definition: strong belief in propositions for which there is insufficient evidence to command the assent of every reasonable person. We have confidence in science because it has led us to provisional truths—it works. Cru doesn’t even know if there’s any God, or, if there is a divine presence, that it’s the Abrahamic god rather than the Hindu god, Yahweh, or Wotan.  And we use reason in the same way: it leads us to truth.  Revelation, dogma, and authority do not, for if they did there would be only one religion rather than thousands with their disparate and often conflicting doctrines.

I’m curious to see how readers feel about interfaith activities. I wouldn’t mind partnering with a liberal religious group to, say, rebuild homes for the poor, but I’d rather do it with fellow nonbelievers, for I see interfaith activities as giving some kind of credibility to the faithful, but not so much to us. It’s not going to change anybody’s minds, and we already know that some religious people can be nice. If you want to help people, there are plenty of secular organizations you can work or partner with.

The view of at least one student network seems at least a tad less compromising:

The Skeptics and Atheists Network at East Tennessee State University rather pointedly calls itself S.A.N.E.

“We do a lot of interfaith activities if they align with our humanist values, but the one thing we never compromise on is our right and responsibility to criticize bad ideas,” says Miller at ISSA. “When you assume a supernatural world, that is a train of thought that does not have a basis. When you start from that, you will automatically lead yourself to a bad idea.”

For the nonce, the value of secular student organizations is best construed not as a way to show the faithful that we are as nice and helpful as they are, but to give isolated secular people a community of support.  As I commented when arguing for people to use their real names when commenting on this site, it is often scary to “come out” as an atheist, but the more people who do it, the more closeted nonbelievers will emerge from the woodwork.

[Cody] Hashman at the Center For Inquiry says that some students come from homes and communities where they have to hide their secular identity, and secular student groups become an important community for them. “It has now become more acceptable for people to state that they are questioning or no longer religious” says Hashman. “We are dedicated to free inquiry and freedom of expression, and that can come off as abrasive, but we believe it necessary for a free and democratic society.”

Indeed. As I’ve found during this brief trip through the South, there are tons of atheists hidden among the faithful, like raisins of reason in a religious pudding.  Many atheists were once deeply religious and have had horrendous struggles, both with their families and friends and within their own heads, to reject God. (In contrast, atheists from the north more often seem to have been brought up in nonreligious homes, and haven’t had such a struggle.) Admitting your nonbelief, rejecting superstition and embracing reason, is like a nuclear chain reaction, and one day, when I’m no longer around, it will go critical—and America will no longer be held in the grip of faith.

Do your head in on Sunday: some amazing astronomical numbers

February 10, 2013 • 6:01 am

by Matthew Cobb

I know that many of you will be just chilling (or, in my case, ‘just’ marking exams), but I thought you might appreciate these two bits of mind-boggling numbers. The video is from The Guardian and explains very simply the kind of distances astronomers have to deal with, and how you can try to get your head round it (Warning: the presenter, Pete Edwards of Durham University, says you can’t do it.)

The information in the final third of the video – dealing with the number of galaxies in the amazing Hubble Deep Field image – is apparently out of date. Edwards says (5:00) that there are about 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (10 to the 19th power – I think I have that right; I counted on my fingers) stars in the visible universe. Which is a lot.

But according to a Daily Galaxy link from the excellent Milky Way Scientists that popped up in my Facebook this morning, data from the Very Large Telescope (amazing imaginations, these astronomers) in Chile suggest that the number could be bigger. MUCH bigger.

For a start, the initial estimate given by the Daily Galaxy is 3,000 times bigger than Edwards:

Here’s how astronomers breakout  the visible universe within 14 billion light years:

Superclusters in the visible universe = 10 million

Galaxy groups in the visible universe = 25 billion

Large galaxies in the visible universe = 350 billion

Dwarf galaxies in the visible universe = 7 trillion

Stars in the visible universe = 30 billion trillion  (3×10²²)

A new study suggests that 90% of the most distant (and therefore oldest) galaxies in the universe could be unseen, hidden by clouds of dust. That would mean that – assuming the same number of stars in each galaxy, and that older galaxies don’t deviate from this rule – that the number of stars in the visible universe would be 270 billion trillion or 2.7 x 10 to the power of 24).

I’ve probably slipped up somewhere in the maths. But my head hurts (Edwards was right – you can’t do it) and I have to go back to marking essays about the similarities and differences shown by the three classes of the Chelicerata. That at least I can understand.

A Rube Goldberg pancake machine

February 10, 2013 • 4:59 am

If you’re of a certain age (an age even bigger than mine, but I read old stuff), you’ll know about the amazing and amusing inventions—most of them imaginary—of cartoonist Reuben Garrett Lucius “Rube” Goldberg (1883 – 1970).  Here’s one example of his imaginary devices: an alarm clock triggered by the arrival of the early bird catching a worm:

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Nowadays a “Rube Goldberg” machine refers to any excessively complicated contraption that, in the end, performs a simple task.

Here’s a real Rube Goldberg machine: a pancake-making device, cooked up by the UK’s Happy Egg Company, that begins when a free-range hen lays an egg. The YouTube notes describe it:

The Pancake-omatic took a team of four design engineers more than 200 hours to construct and a further 100 to test. The device which will go on display at the Design Museum later this month, uses a wide selection of household objects including an old-style gramophone and an electric whisk and features a luxury nest throne for the hen to lay her egg in – we think it’s the best invention to eat the most delicious pancakes!

But see for yourself:

The Happy Egg Co.: building LOLz one egg at a time.

The orders of modern placental mammals originated after the extinction of the dinosaurs

February 9, 2013 • 2:46 pm

by Greg Mayer (Updates below.)

A new study just published in Science by Maureen O’Leary and colleagues examines the phylogeny of 40 fossil and 46 extant mammals based on a very large data set of morphological and molecular characters (the latter only from the living taxa). The study has gotten a fair amount of attention in the press, where it seems to have been misinterpreted; more on that later. First, let’s see what they were trying to do and what they found.

There are three major groups of mammals alive today: the egg-laying monotremes (the platypus and the echidnas), the marsupials (opossums, kangaroos, bandicoots, etc.: a few hundred species) and the placentals (cats, dogs, cattle, deer, and all the rest, including primates: several thousand species in about 18 orders in all). The placentals are the overwhelming majority of extant mammals, and dominate the mammalian fauna of all parts of the world except Australia, which has mostly marsupials. (There are a fair number of marsupials in South and Central America, but they are still outnumbered by placentals.)

In the fossil record, although basal placentals are known from the Cretaceous (some of these fossils are disputed, including by O’Leary et al., but all agree there were some), the great radiation of placental mammals did not occur until the early Cenozoic, after the extinction of the dinosaurs (at least those that had not evolved into birds) at the end of the Cretaceous, about 65 mya. Although the first two-thirds of mammalian history had occurred during the Mesozoic (the “Age of Reptiles”), they really broke out, biodiversity-wise, in the Cenozoic (the “Age of Mammals”).

There’s been considerable debate over whether the placental lineages that radiated in the Cenozoic arose just before the radiation (the “explosive model”), had existed since earlier in the Cretaceous but did not radiate until the Cenozoic (the “long-fuse model“), or had undergone considerable diversification in the Cretaceous (the “short-fuse model“). The latter model would require that the fossil record be seriously incomplete, but has been supported by various molecular phylogenetic studies that estimate various splits among the extant placentals to have occurred well before 65 mya.

Models of placental mammal radiation (Rose, 2006).
Models of placental mammal radiation (Rose, 2006).

The chief question O’Leary and colleagues addressed was which of these models is correct. To do so, they scored over 4000 morphological characters (including soft-tissue characters generally not scorable in fossils) and utilized 27 nuclear gene sequences to estimate the branching sequence. They then added in the known stratigraphic range of the fossils to get a phylogenetic tree (their Fig. 1) that looks very much like the explosive model above, except that the common ancestor of extant placentals (the “P” in the figure) occurred jut over the line, in the earliest Cenozoic rather than the Cretaceous, making it even a little bit more explosive-y. “Explosive it is, sir!”, as Apu on the Simpsons might have put it.

They make two further interesting inferences from their tree. First, they use their morphological data set to estimate what this earliest Cenozoic common ancestor of all placental mammals looked like. It looks like this:

Hypothetical early placental mammal (O'Leary et al., 2013).
Hypothetical early placental mammal (O’Leary et al., 2013).

With such a large data set this is interesting, but it does look pretty much like what people have long thought early placentals would look like. Remember, this is a hypothetical common ancestor, not a newly found fossil.

Second, because much of the breakup of the Mesozoic super-continents had occurred by the early Cenozoic, they infer that a lot of dispersal occurred in the placental radiation, and not just passive floating around on the drifting continental plates. The exact arrangement of lineages in the tree is also of interest, and will be discussed and debated by mammalogists. It’s not clear to me that a huge data set is necessarily an advantage in inferring this large scale phylogeny, because we don’t understand the dynamics of conservatism and lability of morphological characters in the way we do for genetic sequence data. Our understanding of the latter allows us to select genes and use methods of analysis appropriate for a particular question. Using thousands of morphological characters seems a bit too reminiscent of the old pheneticists’ hope that if they could score enough characters, “parametric overall similarity” could be known (phenetics didn’t pan out as hoped). I hasten to add that morphological characters are more difficult because they are more complex and more crucial to the organism, and consequently more interesting– indeed, what most biologists are really interested in– not because there is something wrong with studying morphology.

In the media, there has been considerable confusion about this study, in part because the distinction between mammals and placental mammals has not always been kept clear. The  New York Times initially led with the headline:

“Common Ancestor of Mammals Plucked from Obscurity”;

but, of course, the study is not about the common ancestor of mammals, but only placentals. And furthermore, there is no particular known fossil which is being identified as or compared to this placental common ancestor; the ancestor in the picture, as stressed here, is hypothetical. Yet, the Times article identifies Protungulatum as the ancestral placental, O’Leary et al. most definitely do not do do: they identify Protungulatum as a member of the lineage that gave rise to (most) hoofed mammals (i.e. quite far from the common ancestor of all placentals). Protungulatum is the oldest known member of the clade that includes all extant placentals, but that does not make it the common ancestor.

This misunderstanding has infected the news media, and spread widely. Gizmodo labels a picture of the hypothetical form (a version of the figure above) as Protungulatum, and states

This rat with way too many sharp teeth is your great x 4 x 10^6-grandmother. That’s what scientists have discovered after six years of research—the Protungulatum donnae is the common ancestor to all mammals, from humans to horses to lions.

This is pretty much completely wrong. And UPI labels the same figure as

An artist’s rendering of Protungulatum donnae,

which it isn’t at all. The Times, at least, subsequently changed its headline to

“Rat-Size Ancestor Said to Link Man and Beast”,

which is still pretty obscure, but not actually wrong. But the article retains its misstatements about Protungulatum (at least last I checked). The Times did correct another error. They had initially stated that only a single mammalian lineage had survived the end-Cretaceous extinction, but it is known that there were at least four surviving lineages (one monotreme, one marsupial, one placental, plus one multituberculate– a now extinct mammal group which survived the end-Cretaceous extinction, but died out in the Oligocene). The article has now been corrected to say that the study concludes only one placental mammal survived (which is indeed what its major conclusion is).

The article in the BBC was better, getting the headline right:

“Earliest placental mammal ancestor pinpointed”

and not mentioning Protungulatum at all. The BBC front page headline, however, was off:

“Earliest mammal ancestor pinpointed”.

For a mildly critical take on the study (not the news coverage) by a more molecularly oriented mammalogist, see Anne Yoder‘s Perspective in Science.

UPDATE. I had left the following comment out, because I thought I was saying it too often, but this paper really shouldn’t have been published in Science. There is much too much data, methods, analysis, and discussion left out of the paper because of Science‘s severe length limits. There are two online “supplements”, one at Science and another at morphobank.org. The one at Science is 132 pages long. The morphobank supplements are not organized as a file, so it’s hard to tell how much is there, but it’s a lot. Now some of this material (e.g. lists of which authors examined which specimens) need not be published, but it’s simply impossible to fully understand or critique the paper with out referring to a great deal of this material, which is not readily available to someone in possession of a copy of the paper. The authors have shortchanged themselves and their readers by publishing in such a venue. I was moved to add this update after an alert reader noted an error in my statement of the number of species included, and I had to pore though the supplements to verify the correct numbers because of ambiguous wording in the paper. I was able, while doing so, to confirm that the same extant 46 species were used for the genetic and morphological analyses. (And since I’m kvetching, I’ll note that the authors substitute the grotesque, poorly defined, and unnecessary word “phenomic” for “morphological” (or a similar word) throughout their paper.)

UPDATE 2. The errors in the media coverage do not stem from SUNY Stony Brook’s press release, which correctly summarizes the claims of the paper.

____________________________________________________________

O’Leary, M.A., et al. 2013. The placental mammal ancestor and the post-K-Pg radiation of  placentals. Science 339:662-667. (abstract)

Rose, K.D. 2006. The Beginning of the Age of Mammals. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore. (Google Books)

Yoder, A.D. 2013. Fossils versus clocks. Science 339:656-658. (abstract)

Tennessee man quits job when his tax form contains the Number of the Beast

February 9, 2013 • 10:50 am

From the Tennessean we see a remarkable instance of how strong a hold Scripture has on the South.

As we all know, 666 is The Number of the Beast, which I recently came across when I read Revelation. Here’s the sole  reference in the Bible (Revelation 13:18; King James Version):

18 Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.

There you go. The Wikipedia article (link above) notes that the number has a long-standing religious connection (in faiths other than Christianity as well), but may have orignated in the Bible as a symbol of the Roman emperor Nero:

Most scholars believe that the number of the beast equates to Emperor Nero, whose name in Greek when transliterated into Hebrew, retains the value of 666, whereas his Latin name transliterated into Hebrew, is 616. The “mark of the beast” is used to distinguish the beast’s followers. Revelation 13:17 says that the mark is “the name of the beast or the number of his name”. Because of this, it is widely thought among dispensationalists that the mark will be some future representation of the actual number 666. It has also been speculated that the “mark” may be an Imperial Roman seal, or the Emperor’s head on Roman coins.

Now meet Walter Slonopas, who prefers to be unemployed rather than have a Tax Number of the Beast. From The Tennesseean:

A Clarksville, Tenn., man says he quit his job last week in order to save his soul.

Walter Slonopas, 52, resigned as a maintenance worker at Contech Casting LLC in Clarksville after his W-2 tax form was stamped with the number 666.

The Bible calls 666 the “number of the beast,” and it’s often used as a symbol of the devil. Slonopas said that after getting the W-2, he could either go to work or go to hell.

“If you accept that number, you sell your soul to the devil,” he said.

Walter Slonopas and The Devil's Tax Form
Walter Slonopas and The Devil’s Tax Form. Why is he smiling?

. . . The number 666 has caused problems for at least one other worker in the past. In 2011, a factory worker from Georgia named Billy Hyatt sued his former employer after he was fired for refusing to wear a sticker with 666 on it. The sticker referred to the number of accident-free days he’d had on the job.

Slonopas, though, said he has no interest in suing anyone. All he wants is for his former employer to give him a new W-2 without a Satanic number on it. Otherwise, he said, he can’t file his taxes.

He shakes his head when asked if he’d go back to work for Contech, even if the company gives him a new W-2. That would send the message that he sold out his faith for money.

“God is worth more than money,” he said.

His wife, Anna, said the couple will be fine. She said God will take care of them. They live frugally and are currently house-sitting for their older son, who is in the military.

Well, you don’t get unemployment insurance if you quit your job, so we’ll see how providential God will be to the Slonopas family. But imagine the kind of mentality that would lead someone to act like this! Without religion, Slonopas would still have his job.

h/t: John Danley

William Lane Craig defends his ridiculous claim that animals don’t suffer

February 9, 2013 • 8:00 am

Last October I posted about theologian William Lane Craig’s ridiculous claim, made in a video debate with philosopher Stephen Law, that animals don’t perceive pain.  As Craig said then,

“Even though animals feel pain, they’re not aware of it.. . Even though your dog and cat may be in pain, it really isn’t aware that of being in pain, and therefore it doesn’t suffer as you would when you are in pain.”

And as I wrote at the time, this claim was motivated by Craig’s desperate attempt to explain away the problem of gratuitious suffering—in this case the suffering of animals:

The reason Craig and others argue that animals don’t suffer is because it eliminates one of the vexing aspects of the theological problem of evil (theodicy): why do innocent animals (who haven’t sinned) suffer? If you claim that they don’t suffer, that part of the problem goes away.

But of course to any person with rationality (a quality not much in evidence among Craig or his followers), the argument that animals feel but but aren’t aware of it is palpably ridiculous. As I noted:

But there’s no difference between feeling pain and being aware that you’re feeling pain. Pain is a “quale” (plural “qualia”)—a conscious and subjective sensation—which demands awareness, unless it’s simply a sensation that you have learned (or evolved) to avoid.  But if you’ve learned or evolved to avoid it because it’s unpleasant, then you are indeed aware of feeling pain! Finding a sensation unpleasant demands sufficient consciousness to experience qualia.

Does anyone here really think that mammals, for instance, aren’t aware of pain, and don’t suffer when they’re injured?

At any rate, a group of skeptics put together a video responding to Craig’s claim that animals aren’t aware of pain. Several biologists were interviewed, and agreed that all evidence points to the idea that animals feel pain.

Craig appears to have been butthurt by that response video, and made a new 22-minute podcast, which you can find here, in which he tries to defend his original claim. He now admits that animals do suffer pain, but they suffer differently from humans. Craig’s definition of “third-level” pain, which he argues is the way humans suffer, demands one form of consciousness: the awareness that “I am myself in pain.” (I’m not a philosopher, but I don’t think this is the only way one can be conscious.) This all rests on Craig’s claim that animals don’t have a frontal cortex that could mediate self-awareness.

Since, according to Craig, animals—Craig exempts primates—don’t have this form of consciousness, they don’t suffer as humans do, and therefore we shouldn’t worry that animal suffering is a problem for the existence of an omnipotent and omniscient God.

This argument, however, not only contradicts Craig’s previous claim, but, to any reasonable person—even a religious one—remains untenable.  Even if animals aren’t conscious of their individuality, they still suffer, and suffering hurts. It is unpleasant. Is there anyone who doubts that a benevolent God would be justified in exhibiting complete indifference to the suffering of (supposedly) nonconscious animals?

Listen to Craig’s podcast, and see how a crazy theologian can rationalize anything by judiciously redefining words and relying on distorted science.

As far as I know (and I may be wrong), this is the first time Craig has produced a podcast responding directly to internet criticism of his his views.

At any rate, the group that posted the first video contradicting Craig’s original claim has made a new video responding to Craig’s later podcast. Here it is:

It takes apart Craig’s “scientific” claims that animals don’t have self-awareness or a prefrontal cortex, as well as other stupid statements he made. One of the latter, which I find deeply offensive, is Craig’s assertion, “It almost seems as if some atheists would actually prefer that animals experience terrible suffering than to have to give up the objection to theism based on the problem of animal pain.”

No, Dr. Craig, animals do experience terrible suffering, and it does militate against the existence of a benevolent and omnipotent God.

What we see here are two things: the ridiculous lengths theologians go to when rationalizing the existence of gratuitous evil, and the fact that even evangelical Christians rely on science when trying to defend their views. In other words, they seek the clarity and assurance of science as a way to support their beliefs. Craig does not, you notice, argue that he has “faith” that animals aren’t aware of suffering. He relies on science (bad science, in his case) to support that claim. In the end theologians are jealous of science, for they are aware that it has greater authority than do their own ways of finding “truth”: dogma, authority, and revelation. Science does find truth, faith does not.

I almost wish Hinduism were true and that Craig could experience his next life as a feral cat in Mumbai. Maybe then he’d change his mind about whether animals experience suffering.

h/t: Philip

Caturday felid: students help paralyzed cat get around (and bonus photos of the cat with eyebrows)

February 9, 2013 • 4:53 am

Here’s a heartwarming story from Colorado: a tabby named Flipper had a twisted spine—a birth defect that paralyzed her rear legs. To save her from being euthanized, a local student robotics club designed a cat cart that enables her to get around like a normal cat.

A local news video (below) and a HuffPo piece (here) imply that Flipper is actually improving, and may regain use of her legs because the cart relieves pressure on her hips.

Kudos to the Blitz Robotic Club at Conifer High School, Conifer Colorado.

Langniappe: another two photos of Sam, the cat with eyebrows, from  the BuzFeed piece, “12 reasons why Sam, the cat with eyebrows, should be your new favorite cat” (the article has ten additional photos).

enhanced-buzz-7472-1359480530-5

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h/t: Justicar (for Flipper)

Snowball dances on

February 8, 2013 • 5:23 pm

I’m going to name Snowball as this website’s Official Cockatoo™, since one of our readers is his road manager and the bird is, after all, the first nonhuman animal ever shown to be capable of “dancing” (defined below).

I’ve just been sent a hot-off-the-camera video of Snowball dancing in various venues, including the 2009 World Science Festival, where he boogied with the entire panel of scientists there to discuss “Avian Einsteins” (that segment is between 1:55 and 2:42 of the following video). I must sadly reiterate that the WSF is partly sponsored by the odious Templeton Foundation.

He also appears in a Taco Bell Commercial.

Now Snowball is more than amusing, for he’s a scientific anomaly. Wikipedia explains:

Snowball (hatched c. 1996) is a male Eleonora Cockatoo, noted as being the first non-human animal conclusively demonstrated to be capable of beat induction— perceiving music and synchronizing his body movements to the beat (i.e.,dancing).

. . .In 2008, the YouTube clip featuring Snowball was brought to the attention of Drs. Aniruddh D. Patel and John R. Iversen of the Neurosciences Institute, La Jolla. In an interview with the New York Times, Dr. Patel stated that his ‘jaw hit the floor’ upon seeing the video, comparing the unlikely and contrary-to-accepted-wisdom nature of a cockatoo dancing to human music to that of a ‘dog reading a newspaper out loud’. Between January and May 2008, Patel led research to determine whether or not Snowball was, in fact truly synchronizing his body movements to the music (as opposed to simply mimicking or responding to visual clues from humans present in the room at the same time). Snowball’s favorite piece of music was played to him at several different tempos and his reactions recorded on video for later analysis. The results, published in the paper “Investigating the human-specificity of synchronization to music” showed that Snowball was capable of spontaneously dancing to human music and also that he could adjust his movements to match the tempo of the music (albeit to a limited extent), a behavior previously thought only to occur in humans.  [JAC: see references and links below; there are now three papers on Snowball.] This ability is believed to be unrelated to the male Eleonora Cockatoo’s natural courtship display, which is described as “simple and brief” and involves strutting towards the female with crest raised, whilst bobbing and swishing his head in a figure-eight movement and “uttering soft, chattering notes all the while”.

Adena Schachner and other scientists at Harvard University have also studied Snowball and reached conclusions which, broadly, endorse those of Dr. Patel. Schachner also identified that Alex, an African Grey Parrot famed for his intelligent use of language may have also shared the ability to ‘dance’, in addition to 33 other clips on YouTube showing animals moving in time to music.Patel has suggested that the capability of both humans and cockatoos to move synchronously to a rhythmic beat may be a “byproduct of a link between the auditory and motor parts of the brain” as a result of both species’ ability to learn and mimic sounds.

Here’s the original dancing Snowball video, which I believe I posted some time ago. It’s now up to 5.3 million views:

You can see Snowball dancing to Stevie Nicks here, read our bird’s story here, and learn about how Snowball was acquired here. Amazingly, he was a rescue bird, ditched by two previous owners before his current mom, Irena, adopted him. Snowball’s travails are now over, though: he has a loving home, many fans, and some commercial endorsements (I only hope the publicity doesn’t cause his crest to swell!).

h/t: Su

_____________

Patel, A. D.; Iversen, J. R.; Bregman, M. R.; Schulz, I., and Schulz, C. 2008. “Investigating the human-specificity of synchronization to music”. Proceedings of the 10th Intl. Conf. on Music Perception and Cognition (Causal Productions). Retrieved 2008-09-20.

Patel, A. D. et al. 2008.  Studying synchronization to a musical beat in nonhuman animals.Ann N Y Acad Sci. 2009 Jul;1169:459-69. doi: 10.1111/j.1749-6632.2009.04581.

Patel A. D. et al., 2009. Experimental Evidence for Synchronization to a Musical Beat in a Nonhuman Animal, Current Biology, doi:10.1016/j.cub.2009.03.038