Portrait of an apostate pastor

August 23, 2012 • 9:24 am

If you’re feeling down about being a nonbeliever, a big article in the New York Times Sunday magazine, “From Bible-belt pastor to atheist leader,” might cheer you up.  The piece, by Julie Glassberg, will be of intense interest to most of us, particularly because it mentions the influence of the New Atheists in converting believers to nonbelief, and the efficacy of Dan Dennett and Linda LaScola’s Clergy Project, an online community and support group for pastors who have lost their faith.

One of these former pastors, Jerry DeWitt of DeRidder, Louisiana, is the subject of Glassberg’s profile.  Once a a firebrand evangelical preacher who spoke in tongues, DeWitt lost his faith last year and since has been ostracized in his community, divorced by his wife, and is now contemplating living in his car.  So while the article will hearten you with the efficacy of New Atheism, it will depress you with the knowledge of how deeply religion still has its claws embedded in America’s Bible Belt.  And non-Americans may be surprised at how much ostracism one can experience as a public atheist in the south:

At the same time, DeWitt is something of a reality check for many atheists, whose principles rarely cost them more than the price of “The God Delusion” in paperback. DeWitt refuses to leave DeRidder, a place where religion, politics and family pride are indivisible. Six months after he was “outed” as an atheist he lost his job and his wife — both, he says, as a direct consequence. Only a handful of his 100-plus relatives from DeRidder still speak to him. When I visited him, in late June, his house was in foreclosure, and he was contemplating moving into his 2007 Chrysler PT Cruiser. This is the kind of environment where godlessness remains a real struggle and raises questions that could ramify across the rest of the country. Is the “new atheism” part of a much broader secularizing trend, like the one that started emptying out the churches in European towns and villages a century ago? Or is it just a ticket out of town?. .

DeWitt’s downfall began when he went to a talk by Richard Dawkins, had his picture taken with the man, and posted that picture on his Facebook page. DeWitt also changed his Facebook “religious views” notation to “secular humanist”:

It was his grandmother’s cousin, an 84-year-old woman he knew as Aunt Grace, who saw that page and outed him. Word spread quickly. On Dec. 1, his boss asked to meet him at a diner in town. Sitting at the table, the man took out two printouts from secular Web sites with DeWitt’s name on it. “He told me: ‘The Pentecostals who run the parish are not happy, and something’s got to be done,’ ”DeWitt recalled. “Half an hour later I was out of a job.” (His former boss did not respond to phone calls seeking comment.)

Almost at once, DeWitt became a pariah in DeRidder. His wife found herself ostracized in turn, and the marriage suffered. She moved out in June. He received a constant stream of hate messages — some threatening — and still does, more than seven months later. He played me a recent one he had saved on his cellphone as we ate lunch at a diner in town. “It’s just sickening to hear you try to turn people atheist,” a guttural voice intoned. It went on and on, telling DeWitt to go to hell in various ways. “I’m not going to sit around while you turn people against God,” the voice said at one point.

DeWitt, who remains in Louisiana, is a portrait in courage. That, along with the descriptions of growing unbelief in America, the efficacy of Dennett and LaScola’s Clergy Project, and the obvious influence of the New Atheists in areas as religion-soaked as Louisiana, should lift your spirits a bit.  This article is well worth reading.

Animal photo of the year: Lions at sunset

August 23, 2012 • 6:10 am

This picture, taken by Facebook friend Craig Packer on the Serengeti Plains, and reproduced with his permission, is one of the most stunning animal photos I’ve ever seen. Be sure to click on it twice to enlarge it. The lions are frozen like golden statues in the setting sun.

Packer, who works out of the University of Minnesota, has done classic studies of lions for years (many with his collaborator Anne Pusey), and wrote a wonderful book on his field work, Into Africa.

The journal Nature explains why science is, like religion, based on faith

August 23, 2012 • 5:08 am

I was frankly surprised to see the pages of Nature occupied by an extremely lame and pointless attempt to not only accommodate science and religion, but assert that religion is in some ways better.  The short essay, which at least by citation seems to have appeared in the print issue of the journal, is called “Sometimes science must give way to religion,” and was written by Daniel Sarewitz, described as “co-director of the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes at Arizona State University, [based] in Washington DC."

As far as I can tell, Sarewitz made a trip to Angkor Wat in Cambodia, saw the temples, and had an epiphany that led him to realize that both science and religion are based on faith, and that religion can answer the Big Questions that elude science.  This is based on the following statements:

  • “Visitors to the Angkor temples in Cambodia can find themselves overwhelmed with awe. When I visited the temples last month, I found myself pondering the Higgs boson — and the similarities between religion and science.”

The epiphany:

  • “The overwhelming scale of the temples, their architectural complexity, intricate and evocative ornamentation and natural setting combine to form a powerful sense of mystery and transcendence, of the fertility of the human imagination and ambition in a Universe whose enormity and logic evade comprehension.”

Yes, but one can get that feeling with secular buildings, too (although Sarewitz really needs to look up the meaning of the word “enormity”).  And does the size (not “enormity”) and logic of the universe really evade comprehension? It seems to me that we’ve made pretty good progress understanding the age, size, and workings of the universe.  What Sarewitz is really feeling here is what one can get from looking at the stars, at a cheetah in pursuit of a gazelle, or even at Notre Dame.  I call it awe, but it invokes in Sarewitz feelings that are numinous and spiritual. And, he goes on, science is not only impotent to invoke such feelings, but is just as irrational as faith (all bold emphases in his quotes are mine)

  • “Science is supposed to challenge this type of quasi-mystical subjective experience, to provide an antidote to it. The Higgs discovery, elucidating the constituents of existence itself, is even presented as a giant step towards the ultimate cure: a rational explanation for the Universe. That such scientific understanding provides a challenge to religion is an idea commonly heard from defenders of science, especially those in more militant atheist garb. Yet scientists who occupy that ground are often too slow to recognize the irrational bases of their own beliefs, and too quick to draw a line between the scientific and the irrational. Take, for example, how we come to know what science discovers. Most people, including most scientists, can acquire knowledge of the Higgs only through the metaphors and analogies that physicists and science writers use to try to explain phenomena that can only truly be characterized mathematically.”

What?  What is irrational about our own “beliefs” (I presume by “beliefs” he means “scientific facts”)? I thought that the Higgs boson was predicted mathematically, but detected experimentally, and through instruments, not via “metaphors and analogies.”

Then the whole essay breaks down, as Sarewtize denigrates the Higgs discovery simply because, in describing it, The New York Times used an analogy resembling something in Hindu cosmology:

  • “Here’s The New York Times: ‘The Higgs boson is the only manifestation of an invisible force field, a cosmic molasses that permeates space and imbues elementary particles with mass … Without the Higgs field, as it is known, or something like it, all elementary forms of matter would zoom around at the speed of light, flowing through our hands like moonlight.’ Fair enough. But why ‘a cosmic molasses’ and not, say, a ‘sea of milk’? The latter is the common translation of an episode in Hindu cosmology, represented on a spectacular bas-relief panel at Angkor Wat showing armies of gods and demons churning the ‘sea of milk’ to produce an elixir of immortality.

If you find the idea of a cosmic molasses that imparts mass to invisible elementary particles more convincing than a sea of milk that imparts immortality to the Hindu gods, then surely it’s not because one image is inherently more credible and more ‘scientific’ than the other. Both images sound a bit ridiculous. But people raised to believe that physicists are more reliable than Hindu priests will prefer molasses to milk. For those who cannot follow the mathematics, belief in the Higgs is an act of faith, not of rationality.”

I have read this four times and am still baffled.  The NY Times writer was using a simile, and it’s not even clear that the writer (Dennis Overbye) knew about the Hindu stuff: there’s certainly no reference to it in his article. But the scary part is what I’ve put in bold (it’s also highlighted in the side of Sarewitz’s column).  Trusting the consensus of scientific experts is not an act of “faith”, at least not in the way religion construes “faith”: belief in the absence of evidence.  All of us put our trust in areas of science where we have no expertise: the theory of relativity, the triplet nature of the genetic code (how many of us can recount the molecular biology that led to that conclusion?), or in even our willingness to accept medical treatments when we’re ignorant of their evidential basis.  That is not faith, but confidence—confidence that the community of scientists who do their research has policed each other sufficiently well to arrive at a solid consensus.  To equate that with religious faith is, to use Judge Jones’s terminology, “an act of breathtaking inanity.” The community of the faithful has arrived at no such consensus.What they’ve arrived at is a conflicting farrago of assertions that cannot be resolves.

What Sarewitz is doing here is using a bait-and-switch technique to equate the methods science and religion, thereby justifying the latter.  I would have expected this from a theologian, but not from someone writing in the pages of Nature. The equating of science and faith is, of course, the forte of the John Templeton Foundation, and it may not be irrelevant that Sarewitz was named a Templeton Research Fellow in 2007-2008.

In further aping the methods of theology, Sarewitz explains why religion can put us in touch with the Bigger Truths:

  • “Science advocates have been keen to claim that the Higgs discovery is important for everyone. Yet in practical terms, the Higgs is an incomprehensible abstraction, a partial solution to an extraordinarily rarified and perhaps always-incomplete intellectual puzzle.By contrast, the Angkor temples demonstrate how religion can offer an authentic personal encounter with the unknown. At Angkor, the genius of a long-vanished civilization, expressed across the centuries through its monuments, allows visitors to connect with things that lie beyond their knowing in a way that no journalistic or popular scientific account of the Higgs boson can.”

What, exactly, is an “authentic personal encounter with the unknown”? We know something about when and why the Angkor temples were built (a 12th century Hindu monument to Vishnu), so their provenance is hardly unknown. No, Sarewitz means that such encounters help people realize that there are “ways of knowing” beyond science:

  • Challenges to the cultural and political authority of science continue to rise from both ideological and religious directions. It is tempting to dismiss these as manifestations of ignorance or scientific illiteracy. But I believe instead that they help to show us why it will always be necessary to have ways of understanding our world beyond the scientifically rational.

So what, exactly, are those “ways of understanding” and what have they helped us understand? As is usual with such claims (heard far more often from theologians than atheists like Sarewitz), he doesn’t answer. Since he’s a nonbeliever, all I can guess is that he gets a warm and fuzzy feeling of awe from Angkor Wat that he doesn’t feel from the Higgs boson. But how in the world does that mean that science is based on faith, or that there are ways of knowing things that don’t rest on reason and observation? What are those things?

One is left with Sarewitz’s infuriating and meaningless final paragraph:

  • I am an atheist, and I fully recognize science’s indispensable role in advancing human prospects in ways both abstract and tangible. Yet, whereas the Higgs discovery gives me no access to insight about the mystery of existence, a walk through the magnificent temples of Angkor offers a glimpse of the unknowable and the inexplicable beyond the world of our experience.

I am sorry for Sarewitz if he doesn’t see the Higgs boson as the final piece in validating the Standard Model of particle physics, an amazing intellectual tour de force that gives many of us insights into the “mystery of existence”—the attempt to understand why things are the way they are. And the Higgs is a real answer, not a fake one.  The Higgs boson exists; God does not.

One gets the sense that Sarewitz is sad about this, and wishes there were a god.  But yet what is his last sentence but an expression of belief in something divine, something “unknowable and inexplicable beyond the world of our experience.” Is that not the expression of confidence in a spiritual world? How does he know that that unknowable stuff even exists? Yes, there are scientific questions that we might not be able to answer, but I have the feeling that that’s not what Sarewitz means.

The biggest unknowable and inexplicable mystery is why this drivel got published in one of the world’s premier scientific journals.

****

I also didn’t look at the readers’ comments until I’d written this post, for I didn’t want to be influenced by the reactions of others. Predictably, most of the commenters take Sarewitz apart. But Nicholas Beale, collaborator with the theologian John Polkinghorne, appears in one comment to claim that there is evidence for both Christianity and Islam.  Of course he doesn’t tell us what that evidence is, nor how one can have evidence for two faiths that make absolutely conflicting claims.

h/t: Steve

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Sarewitz, D. 2012. Sometimes science must give way to religion. Nature 488: 431 doi:10.1038/488431a

Fred Astaire Week: a guest post and “Puttin’ On the Ritz”

August 22, 2012 • 5:31 pm

I got re-energized about Fred Astaire—hence “Astaire Week”—through correspondence with my friend Latha Menon, who lives in Oxford, is pursuing a Ph.D in paleobiology, and is also the editor of the UK edition (Oxford University Press) of WEIT.  Her emails about Le Fred were so enthusiastic that I asked her to write a guest post, and she’s kindly obliged.  I’ve put at the bottom one of his finest dance sequences, from “Puttin’ On the Ritz,” and linked Latha’s discussion to a few of the videos she describes. You might not want to watch them yet, for I’ll be featuring a few in the week to come.

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Astaire: song and dance man, supreme artist

by Latha Menon

Ok, I’m the one to blame for inspiring Astaire Week on the Coyne blog.*  So, what’s so special about Fred Astaire?

I write as an unashamed fan. But I’m in excellent company. The most obvious point about Astaire has to be his supreme artistry as a dancer, praised in the most effusive terms by the likes of Balanchine, Baryshnikov, and Nureyev. Yet by all accounts he considered himself as a ‘song and dance man’, not a proponent of ‘high art’.

But such barriers are, after all, artificial. As a perfectionist famous for his intense concentration and hours of practice, constant striving for development and innovation, and, most importantly, performances that transcended effort and technical precision to achieve a sublime sense of ease, naturalness, and grace, he is, in my view, to be compared to any of the greatest classical dancers. These are the qualities of any true artist. The first and finest dancer of the silver screen, Astaire’s use of the new medium not only reached wide audiences but has enabled his influence to permeate dance for generations. It continues to do so.

There are the dance partners to be considered too, of course, and for many that means almost exclusively Ginger Rogers. Clearly they worked well on screen as a dance couple, and some of the most beautiful and tender pas de deux were performed with Rogers (my favourites include those performed to Cole Porter’s “Night and Day” from The Gay Divorcee, and Jerome Kern’s “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes” from Roberta). But I agree with those critics who view their success as mainly due to Rogers’s excellent acting rather than her dancing abilities. No matter. Rogers had spunk and style, she learned and improved, and the pairing worked. It’s hard to beat the charm of those ‘30s films.

Other partners, trained in dance, produced some fine performances in later films, and allowed the incorporation of new styles: think of Rita Hayworth’s Latin touches, Cyd Charisse and jazz ballet, not to mention the hard virtuosic glitter of Eleanor Powell’s ‘machine-gun’ tapping in “Begin the Beguine” (Broadway Melody of 1940). (Note that Astaire’s performance shows his fluid, whole body dancing style, even in the fastest tapping, while Powell’s approach is much more focused on the feet with some standard arm movement, to maximise speed.) And let’s not forget the elegance and style he gave to his least obliging partner – a hatrack.

But to see his full abilities just look at Fred’s solos: the use in his tap performances of overlays of different beat cycles and counterpoint (no wonder a parallel has been made with Bach), and sudden changes of rhythm; the extraordinary ability to incorporate and control props, most strikingly the use of a cane; and the use of combined drumming-tapping to produce complex sequences, for example to the Gershwins’ “Nice Work if You Can Get It”, in Damsel in Distress). (A fine choreographer himself, Astaire devised most of his early solo sequences, before collaborating increasingly and highly effectively with Hermes Pan; their depth of mutual understanding seems to have been extraordinary.) Perhaps the most striking of his solos, setting aside the clever transitions from face to face of a revolving room in Royal Wedding, is the angry, stylish, glass-breaking dance to Arlen and Mercer’s One For My Baby in The Sky’s The Limit. Real glass.

And then there was the singing. What a period the ‘30s and ‘40s seem to have been for songs – the standards of Kern, Berlin, the Gershwins among them. Many of the greats were written for Astaire (including “One For My Baby”).  And how he sang them! No crooner, he had a light voice but all his physical grace, charm, and musicality seems to have been poured into his singing, making him one of the most highly regarded interpreters of songs from this period.

And then there was the drumming and the ‘filthy piano’ playing (catch a bit of the jazz piano in the start of “I Won’t Dance: in Roberta). But I’ll stop there. Oh, except that I forgot to mention: it helps that he was kinda cute too.

*JAC: it’s a website!

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Thanks to Latha for the post. To complement it, here’s Astaire, in Blue Skies (1946), tapping up a storm and deftly wielding his cane to the Irving Berlin tune “Puttin’ on the Ritz.” To me this is one of Astaire’s best performances on film, and he was 47 years old. As we’ll see, he was going strong well into his fifties.

James Shapiro goes after natural selection again (twice) on HuffPo

August 22, 2012 • 11:13 am

I hate to give attention to my Chicago colleague James Shapiro’s bizarre ideas about evolution, which he publishes weekly on HuffPo rather than in peer-reviewed journals. His Big Idea is that natural selection has not only been overemphasized in evolution, but appears to play very little role at all.  Even though he’s spreading nonsense in a widely-read place, I don’t go after him very often, for he just uses my criticisms as the basis of yet another abstruse and incoherent post. Like the creationists whose ideas he appropriates, he resembles those toy rubber clowns that are impossible to knock down.  But once again, and for the last time, I wade into the fray. . .

In his post of August 12, “Does natural selection really explain what makes evolution succeed?” (his answer, of course, is “no”), Shapiro simply recycles some discredited arguments used by creationists against evolution. The upshot, which we’ve heard for decades, is the discredited idea that natural selection is not a creative process. I quote:

  • “Darwin modeled natural selection on artificial selection by humans. He ignored the inconvenient fact that human selection for altered traits has never generated a truly new organismal feature (e.g., a limb or an organ) or formed a new species. Selection only modifies existing characters. When humans wish to create new species, they use other means.”

This is the old canard that artificial selection doesn’t create “new features.”  His definition of a “new organismal feature” is, of course, one that hasn’t been generated by artificial selection, so it’s all tautological.  Of course we haven’t seen whole new organs or limbs arise in the short term, for people have been doing serious selection for only a few thousand years, and have not even tried to create new organs or limbs. But we can create a strain of flies with four wings, breeds of dogs that would be regarded as new genera if they were found in the fossil record, and whole new biochemical systems in bacteria.  Both Barry Hall and Rich Lenski, for example, have demonstrated the evolution of brand new biochemical pathways that have evolved to deal with new metabolic challenges. Now that is a “new organismal feature”!

Often new species are created by hybridization, but Shapiro forgets that that hybridization is often followed by either natural or artificial selection for increased interfertility of the new hybrid form, so it truly becomes an interbreeding population that characterizes a species.  And that, of course, gives a crucial role to selection, as it did in the experiments of Loren Rieseberg and his colleagues on hybrid sunflowers.

Finally, we have selected for increased reproductive isolation in the laboratory, showing that full speciation is possible via artificial selection. My own student Daniel did this, as did Bill Rice and William Salt in lab experiments on Drosophila, which in effect created—by artificial selection—new species from a single original species.

What Shapiro fails to offer is an alternative mechanism for the origin of those features of organism that appear “designed”?  Was it God?  What turned an artiodactyl like Indohyus into a whale—a transition that is fully documented in the fossil record?  Was it simply the “self-organization of the genome” that somehow fortuitously moved the nostrils atop the head, turned the front limbs into flippers, got rid of the hair and external ears, and wrought many other morphological and internal changes? How exactly did this happen, Dr. Shapiro? Might natural selection have played a role? Or was it “spontaneous genome organization,” whatever that means?

  • “Unlike most followers, Darwin acknowledged later that significant, sudden changes could occur in a fundamentally different way. He wrote about ‘… variations which seem to us in our ignorance to arise spontaneously. It appears that I formerly underrated the frequency and value of these latter forms of variation, as leading to permanent modifications of structure independently of natural selection’ (Origin of Species, 6th edition, Chapter XV, p. 395, emphasis added). So a way to rephrase my question is to ask: Have we learned since 1859 about processes that can lead to organism change “independently of natural selection?” The answer is overwhelmingly positive.Two fields principally illuminated the basic mechanisms of heredity and variation:
    • cytogenetics (the study of chromosome behavior in heredity using both genetic and microscopic methods) and
    • molecular genetics (using DNA analysis to identify the nature of genome change).”

Neither of these_though they can lead to organism change (i.e. “mutation”)—can also produce adaptation.  As always, Shapiro is ducking the whole question of how organisms acquire those features that make them thrive in their environments.

If he’s going to respond to this post at HuffPo, which he will, here’s a challenge for him: what role, precisely, do you think natural selection plays in evolution—especially the kind of evolution that produces the “adaptive” features that so excite our wonder? How on earth do cytogenetics or molecular genetics alone explain the transformation of fish into tetrapods, deerlike animals into whales, or account for cryptic coloration, mimicry, and adaptive behaviors? They can’t, for there has to be some process that winnows out the variation that arises.  That process is natural selection. How did the ancestral marsupial produce descendants like marsupial “flying squirrels” and “moles” in Australia that look very much like placental mammals? Did that have anything to do with natural selection? If not, explain how you think it happened.

Shapiro’s latest post, “Cell mergers and the evolution of new life forms: symbiogenesis rather than selection,” is just about as bad.  Here he merely reprises Lynn Margulis’s argument that symbiosis was important in evolution: both mitochondria and chloroplasts (which respectively produce energy and photosynthesis), were the result of ancestral cells taking up and using symbiotic bacteria.  And yes, that’s correct, and was a huge contribution of Margulis.

The problem for Shapiro, as it was for Margulis, is that they went on to suggest think that symbiosis is a replacement for natural selection.  It isn’t.  In fact, symbiosis occurs hand-in-hand with natural selection, because following the origin of an organism like a lichen or a chloroplast-containing cell via symbiosis, one finds natural selection acting on the “combination” organism, modifying both components. In fact, neither chloroplasts nor mitochondria can survive on their own outside of cells: both have been modified by natural selection to become part of an integrated and adapted cell. It is the whole vehicle—the symbiotic combination organism—that undergoes selection, with the best combinations leaving more offspring.  In fact, Shapiro unwittingly alludes to this when he says this:

In all these cases, there is active DNA transfer between genome compartments. Typically, DNA sequences travel from the organelle genomes to the nuclear genome. Thus, the nucleus actually encodes most of the proteins in each of its organelles, even though they have their own genomes and protein synthesis machinery.

Restructuring of both nuclear and organelle genomes is an important aspect of evolution. Some groups of organisms are actually identified by the organization of their mitochondrial DNA.

Yes, and how does that “active DNA transfer” happen? It’s because those cells that best reapportion the genomes between “host” and “symbiont” DNA leave more offspring.  And that’s natural selection.

I wouldn’t go after Shapiro except that he spews this anti-evolutionary nonsense at HuffPo, and naive readers might get the impression that biologists are beginning to doubt that natural selection is important.  Well, as far as evolutionary biologists regard adaptations, it is: natural selection is the only game in town.

Yes, we now know of a whole host of new mechanisms to generate genetic variation, including symbiosis and the ingestion of DNA from distantly related species. But to produce adaptation, something has to winnow out the wheat from the chaff: those variants that reduce reproduction from those that enhance it.  And that’s natural selection.  There is no alternative, and Shapiro, despite his endless series of “blogs,” has never suggested one.  His never-ending attacks on natural selection and neo-Darwinian evolution should be an embarrassment to HuffPo, which will apparently publish anything since they don’t have to pay for it; but they’re also an embarrassment to me, for Shapiro works at my university and, in my view, his writings impugn our reputation for excellence in evolutionary biology.

So again, I tender my challenge: tell us, Dr. Shapiro: you’re always banging on about new sources of genetic variation, but you never seem quite able to tell us how that variation is translated into adaptive evolution. If it’s not natural selection, what is it?

You need this shirt

August 22, 2012 • 8:36 am

Busted Tees is having a shirt sale for the next 6 hours, and every tee-shirt is 12.99 or less. But today’s special is very special: it’s this one, which I have. It’s only eleven bucks, and comes in both men’s and women’s sizes. For all of them, use the coupon code BACK2SCHOOL2012.

This is, of course, a parody of the classic Che Guevara shirt and Cuban motto.

There are all kinds of science-related shirts and others that might tickle your fancy.  I particularly like “unicorn on the cob.”

Mass migration of stingrays

August 22, 2012 • 6:20 am

The redoubtable Matthew Cobb has called my attention to several posts on a phenomenon that’s new to me: a mass annual migration of stingrays—in this case the cownose ray Rhinoptera bonasus, found in the Atlantic and Caribbean.  This species forages in groups, largely on clams and oysters. According to the Florida Museum of Natural History, their migrations also involve huge populations.

This pelagic species is also sometimes found in inshore waters. For the most part, this species is known for its migrations to different parts of the ocean (oceanodromous). The environments in which they are found include brackish and marine habitats. They are found at depths to 72 feet (22 m). They are gregarious and make long migrations. The cownose ray population is believed to be increasing in numbers. The migration patterns, in the Atlantic, include a northward movement in the late spring and southward movements in the late fall. Southbound migration has been observed to contain larger schools than the northbound migration. Smith and Merriner (1987) believe that the changes in water temperature, coupled with sun orientation, may initiate seasonal mass migration.

They also suggest that the southward migration might be influenced by solar orientation while the northward migration might be influenced by water temperature cooling below 22ºC, but further studies are needed to confirm this. The migratory congregation, thus far, has not been linked to feeding or premigratory mating activity.

One of these mass movements was witnessed by amateur photographer Sandra Critelli who, on Yacht Forums, described a migrating group (herd?) surrounding her boat and took some amazing photos:

Her account:

Gliding silently beneath the waves, they turned vast areas of blue water to gold off the northern tip of the Yucatan Peninsula. Sandra Critelli, an amateur photographer, stumbled across the phenomenon while looking for whalesharks.
She said: ‘It was an unreal image, very difficult to describe. The surface of the water was covered by warm and different shades of gold and looked like a bed of autumn leaves gently moved by the wind.

‘It’s hard to say exactly how many there were, but in the range of a few thousand’

‘We were surrounded by them without seeing the edge of the school and we could see many under the water surface too. I feel very fortunate I was there in the right place at the right time to experience nature at its best’

The website adds:

Measuring up to 7ft (2.1 meters) from wing-tip to wing-tip, Golden rays are also more prosaically known as cow nose rays.

They have long, pointed pectoral fins that separate into two lobes in front of their high-domed heads and give them a cow-like appearance. Despite having poisonous stingers, they are known to be shy and non-threatening when in large schools.

The population in the Gulf of Mexico migrates, in schools of as many as 10,000, clockwise from western Florida to the Yucatan .

Another photo by Critelli:

Here’s a swell photo from SuckMyHalo on tumblr:

And, from Environmental graffita, an image of a group of rays (cownoses?) and a whale shark:

Image by “skye underwater”

A video of migrating cownoses (you’ll have to endure “Wonderful World” by Louis Armstrong unless you turn off the sound):

And, from the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, run by my own alma mater, The College of William & Mary, here’s a cownose in an aquarium eating oysters:

Pass the lemon, please.

The TSA does it again

August 22, 2012 • 4:50 am

Lately my experience with TSA officials in the U.S. has not been pleasant. Besides being groped and goosed, I’ve been yelled at and generally treated like a worm in the security lines. (This is not unique to me: everyone gets mistreated.) My theory is that the people hired to police airline security have generally been powerless individuals then thrust suddently into a position of power that allows them to order anybody around.  Perhaps, dissatisfied with their own lives, they take it out on everyone else. Or maybe they’re just mean.

Granted, I’ve met some nice ones, but generally they are unfriendly, haughty, and officious.  This impression was confirmed when, via a ‘tweet’ broadcast by Jennifer Ouelette,  I learned about the plight of one Arijit Guha, who I’m guessing from the name is of Indian descent.  Four days ago, Guha tried to board a Delta Airlines flight at the Buffalo/Niagra airport in New York, heading back to Phoenix after his grandfather’s funeral. Guha’s fatal mistake was wearing a tee shirt designed by Cory Doctorow—a shirt that made fun of airline security theater. Here it is from Doctorow’s post on boingboing:

Srs mistake!  Guha tells the story on his own website. Delta officials asked him to change his shirt because it made airline officials and passengers “uncomfortable.” Guha then fell into the clutches of the TSA itself, was subject to multiple interrogations with some pretty ludicrous questions. Finally, after being told he could board the plane after all, was kicked off with his wife, rebooked for the next day, and forced to overnight at his own expense. As Guha tells it:

Soon afterwards, once the boarding process had commenced, the Delta supervisor pulled me aside again — this time accompanied by not only three TSA agents, but also multiple Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority transit police. I was questioned some more and my wife was also pulled out of line for additional questioning and screening. Our bags were searched, my shirt was photographed, we were asked multiple questions about the cause of our visit, how often we make it to western NY, and our drivers’ license numbers were taken and radioed in for what seemed to be a quick background check.

At this point, the TSA agents appeared satisfied we had nothing suspicious in our luggage and that we posed no threat. However, the Delta supervisor informed us the pilot had decided, regardless of the outcome of the multiple TSA screenings and my willingness to change shirts, that due to the discomfort my shirt has caused, my wife and I would not be allowed to board the aircraft. Passengers on the plane supposedly felt uncomfortable with my very presence on the flight. And the Delta manager went out of his way to point out that he wholeheartedly agreed with the pilot’s decision.

I was stunned. “You’re f—— kidding me,” I said in response. I pushed for an explanation of why the pilot was willing to overrule/ignore the judgment of the trained security officers. “Why can’t I board? What’s the concern?,” I asked.

His response left me even more stunned: “Just use your imagination.”

Note that Guha had been thoroughly searched and questioned, his luggage was ransacked, and he certainly posed no threat. What he was guilty of was making the other passengers uncomfortable—and apparently not being Caucasian.  A fellow with brown skin wearing a provocative tee-shirt.

And his nightmare wasn’t over:

Having been booted from our flight, the transit police now began to aggressively question us. At one point, I was asked where my brother lives (he was the one who gifted me the shirt). A bit surprised by the irrelevant question, I paused for a moment before answering.

“You had to think about that one. How come?,” she asked. I explained he recently moved. “Where’d he move from?” “Michigan,” I respond. “Michigan, what’s that?,” she says. At this point, the main TSA agent who’d questioned me earlier interjected: “He said ‘Michigan’.” Unable to withhold my snark, I responded with an eye-rolling sneer: “You’ve never heard of Michigan?”

This response did not please her partner, a transit cop named Mark. Mark grabbed his walkie-talkie and alerted his supervisor and proceeded to request that he be granted permission to question me further in a private room. His justification?: “First he hesitated, then he gave a stupid answer.” Michigan, my friends, is a stupid answer.

And then, he decided to drop any façade of fair treatment: the veil was lifted, this was about who I was and how I looked: “And he looks foreign.”

It gets more complicated—convoluted in fact—but Guha finally made it home. But first they made him get sniffed by dogs and then booked him on a flight the next morning without paying for an overnight stay.  Did I mention that he’s undergoing treatment for stage IV colon cancer, and opted for a manual screening because he wears a colostomy bag and is afraid of extra radiation?

What bothers me about all this is that we passengers seem to have no recourse to this kind of treatment by the TSA. Delta Airlines and the TSA should apologize to Guha and his wife and issue a public apology. Further, Delta should reimburse him for his expenses and give him at least one free flight.

There will be no chance of that, nor TSA won’t change any of its procedures, much less rebuke the offending agents. Delta, too, needs to clean up its act. I never fly that airline anyway, simply because I don’t like them, but now I’ve vowed to avoid them forever.  If passengers get “offended” by an innocuous teeshirt, too bad for them.  It’s not a violation of the law, nor, I doubt, of airline policy—it’s a political statement, and a rather unoffensive one.

At the end, Guha asks readers to complain; he gives multiple addresses but I’ll list only one:

Write to Delta, their CEO, to the Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority Transit Police, and to the feds who are in charge of ensuring that passengers do not have their civil rights violated.

Demand justice. Maintaining the safety of the flying public should not mean the abrogation of civil rights of dark-skinned passengers.

(Our flight was Delta #1176, BUF to ATL, August 18, 2012)

I’ve complained to Delta, ad asked for a response, but my hope are not high.  Any updates, I presume, will be on Guha’s website. 

God, I hate the TSA.  And as for Delta, I’ll take my business elsewhere.

UPDATE: If you want to read a report on the failures of the TSA, you can download a Congressional report from May at this link.