Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Grania here.
Today there are special greetings from Dobrzyn (including from Cyrus) to mark the zenith of Koynezaa.
A: What are you going to give Jerry for his birthday?
Hili: What else? My picture with him wearing his shirt with my image on it. Happy birthday, Jerry!
In Polish:
Ja: Co dasz Jerremu na jego urodziny?
Hili: Jak to co? Moje zdjęcie z nim w jego koszuli z moim wizerunkiem.
Happy birthday, Jerry!
It’s already my birthday in India, though if I wished to stay a year younger for a few more hours, I could claim that the relevant location is not here but Chicago. Regardless, it’s my party and I’ll post what I want to. Here, courtesy of reader Michael, are some ravenous kittens let in at feeding time:
Note: I’m informed by Grania that she wrote a very short post about this lapsed pastor on December 26, but her treatment, based on Hemant Mehta’s fund-raising for the guy, is considerably different from mine below, so I’m going to post this anyway.
*****
A pastor losing his faith and leaving the church is not a new story, but publicizing it in a major, as National Public Radio (NPR) did yesterday with a lapsed Seventh-Day Adventist pastor, is. And there’s been more publicity with Dan Dennett and Linda LaScola’s “Clergy Project,” which provides an internet “halfway house” in which preachers who are either doubters or are leaving their church can communicate privately with one another. (I’ve previously written about LaScola’s and Dennett’s book, Caught in the Pulpit: Leaving Belief Behind.)
The NPR precis of its 4.5-minute program on pastor Ryan Bell is reproduced in its entirety below (you can listen to the show here by clicking on “Listen to the Story”). The thing is that the short pieces elicited, as of this morning in India, 1815 comments!
I’ve highlighted my favorite bit at the end.
Now normally you wouldn’t think this kind of story would prompt such emotional reactions from readers, but it fits with my theory that America is slowly losing faith, and the number of doubters are increasing. Many will become “nones” (those without a formal church affiliation), others will go onto agnosticism or atheism, but the majority are still afflicted with confirmation bias, desperately seeking signs or evidence that there really is a God.
Before you look at the readers’ comments on this fairly tame piece, see if you can guess which bits got people riled up:
At the start of 2014, former Seventh-Day Adventist pastor Ryan Bell made an unusual New Year’s resolution: to live for one year without God. This, reflecting his own loss of faith. He kept a blog documenting his journey and has a documentary crew following him.
After a year, Bell tells NPR’s Arun Rath, “I’ve looked at the majority of the arguments that I’ve been able to find for the existence of God and on the question of God’s existence or not, I have to say I don’t find there to be a convincing case in my view.
“I don’t think that God exists. I think that makes the most sense of the evidence that I have and my experience. But I don’t think that’s necessarily the most interesting thing about me.”
Today, Bell has a new job at PATH, an organization dedicated to helping the homeless.
“It’s, I think, an expression of really the part of me that hasn’t changed. I’m still the same person deep down that I was before. I care about justice and equality and I want to see opportunities spread more evenly in our society,” Bell says.
Bell says he still feels like atheism is “an awkward fit,” and also feels uncomfortable around his former Christian friends who are adjusting to his new views.
One of his biggest lessons from the year is “that people very much value certainty and knowing and are uncomfortable saying that they don’t know.”
Now he thinks certainty is a bit overrated.
“I think before I wanted a closer relationship to God and today I just want a closer relationship with reality,” Bell says.
Note, too, that Bell’s statement about why he’s helping the homeless, “”It’s, I think, an expression of really the part of me that hasn’t changed. I’m still the same person deep down that I was before. I care about justice and equality and I want to see opportunities spread more evenly in our society,” gives a lie to the claim that one’s “purpose” comes from God. Clearly, for this man, it came from his innate concern for humanity and had nothing to do with a divine being.
I think that, unless you’re a believer, you’ll be heartened by the comments, especially since that they’re at soft-on-faith NPR. Yes, there’s an occasional Jesus-lover, but many are like this:
h/t: Eli
by Greg Mayer
Biology of the Reptilia, the 22 volume, 13,800 page, 150+ contributor, magnum opus of the late Carl Gans is now online, thanks to the efforts of the Gans Collections and Charitable Fund, a private foundation run by Carl’s family and colleagues. Carl inaugurated the series in 1969, with the last in 2010, the year after Carl’s death. In the tradition of the great German-language compendia, the series sought to compile all of the scientific knowledge about reptiles. The 22 volumes consist of 9 on morphology, 5 on physiology (including much on physiological ecology), 3 on neurology, 2 on ecology, 2 on development, and a final volume of bibliography. Carl had wanted even more to be included, but the series is a tremendous achievement, a monument to his editorial skill and sagacity, and to the breadth of his knowledge, interests, and influences. It is fabulous to have the full text available online.
An appreciation of Gans and the series is given in the foreword to the final volume by Harry Greene, and the preface by Kraig Adler is also invaluable as an appreciation of the series and its accomplishments. I knew Carl through our association with the Museum of Comparative Zoology, where we both did our doctoral work (Carl completing his in the year I was born!). Volumes in the series were fairly expensive, and I have only 4: one of my favorite volumes in the series, the one above (signed by Carl himself); another favorite, volume 16 on ecology; and two others. I have not been able to get a copy of one of my other favorite volumes, volume 7, on ecology.
The online version provides a convenient table of contents to the full series, and a very useful comprehensive index. Each volume is rendered as a series of single-page-per-pdf files. You can advance or go back a page at a time, or jump to a particular page by entering its number in a box. Searches can be done within pages using control-f. On my computer, the number typed into the box cannot actually be seen (the box is too small– the text of the numerals extends out the upper margin, so only a tiny part of the foot of the number can be seen). I’m not sure if this is browser or computer specific, or something they can fix at the site. The page-by-page pdfs means that it is not possible to download a pdf of an entire article (except by doing it one page at a time). With five different publishers over the years, three of them for-profit, this was probably a necessary compromise to get the full text online. So, the online version will most conveniently be used for onscreen reading.
When Matthew emailed me that the complete text was online, I emailed him back
I didn’t know– this is fabulous! Just last night I was thinking, “Man I wish I had the volume on the squamate skull.”
Well, now I can read the volume on the squamate skull, and it really is fabulous.
h/t Matthew Cobb
I’ve managed to download my photos up to today’s batch, but posting them here is interminably slow. What I’ll do, then, is just show you what I had to eat today when I took the bus into Central Delhi for shopping, and the animals I saw along the way.
First, of course, the noms, which I had at one of my favorite restaurants in central Delhi (Connaught Place): the Vega restaurant in the Alka Hotel. It’s upscale vegetarian, absolutely scrumptious, and the place makes a great thali, which is what you’ll see in the second photo.
First course: a tasty savoury tomato broth served with a glass of sweetened and spiced buttermilk. (Note: the food photos aren’t sharp because I took them hand-held without flash, it was dark, and the exposure time was about a quarter of a second.)
The main meal is a thali: a typical Indian meal served on a flat metal tray (the thali itself) containing numerous portions of different dishes served in metal bowls called katoris. In the center is your starch: usually breads in northern India and rice in Bengal and the south. It’s all-you-can-eat: servers come by regularly asking you if you want this or that katori refilled.
Here are the dishes in this thali, starting at 1 pm and going clockwise: a dahi vada, a southern Indian lentil dumpling in a slightly sweetened yogurt sauce; dal (lentils); sag paneer (spinach with Indian cheese cubes); stewed tomatoes in a spicy sauce; mattar paneer (peas in tomato sauce, again with cheese cubes); above that katori is a pakora (fried vegetable fritter); at nine o’clock is a gulab jamun, a deep-fried sweet in syrup that is part of dessert; fruits with spices and a bit of salt; tomato, lime, and onion garnish; and, in the center, three kinds of bread, including a crisp papadum (they offered me rice, too). As I said, you can get refills on everything but the sweet.
As always in India, I ate it with my hands—or rather the right hand only, for reasons that will be familiar to those who travel in this land. You use the bread to scoop up the other stuff. It’s a bit messier if you have rice!
And the best part for me of the thali at the Vega: a village-style kulfi—Indian ice cream made in small, hand-thrown clay pots (sealed with a strip of dough), and frozen by being agitated in a bath of ice, water, and salt. It’s flavored with cardamon and other spices, has a slightly granular texture, and to me is the world’s best frozen dessert—aside from the burnt-sugar ice cream at Christina’s in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This kulfi is scooped out of the clay pot with a sturdy sliver of bamboo.
Walking to the bus I saw three species of animals all together. Can you identify them? (Don’t overlook the mammal.)
How about this bird?
The campus at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), where I’m staying, is a large patch of forest surrounded by urban Delhi. But it’s big enough to harbor substantial wildlife, including the parrots above, two species of deer (including the sambar), and the species shown below, which, though blurry, is not introduced—it’s native to this area. These are real endemic peacocks, and they (like the deer) play hob with my host’s garden. It’s hard to photograph them as they don’t appear often and they’re quite skittish. But I’m told the males do fly up pretty high and perch on branches.
This guy’s tail looks a bit frayed; I doubt he’ll be getting lucky any time soon:
Finally, another blurry songster, which I’m sure some readers can identify but to me is just “another brown bird.” It could be the same species shown three photos above. Enlighten me!
by Matthew Cobb
This from Oonagh Keating on Tw*tter:
https://twitter.com/Okeating/status/549207858102145024/photo/1
It looks as if, due to the extreme slowness of internet here, I won’t be able to put up my snaps of India until I return to Chicago. I’m sorry that I can’t document my travels as they occur, but promise to do so post mortem. Bear with me.
My cache of readers’ wildlife photos is back in Chicago, but we can have three today since stalwart Stephen Barnard in Idaho sent one picture of a red-tailed hawk (Buteo jamaicensis):
. . . and reader Tim Anderson sent two photos. The first shows a weird Australian bird that, while out of focus, is presented because it includes a recipe:
The Scrub Turkey (Alectura lathami) is a megapode inhabiting Eastern Australian rainforests. It is protected. It builds a nest up to five metres across and a metre high. It will do so in your living room if you let it.
How To Cook A Scrub Turkey
Place scrub turkey in forty-four gallon drum
Place brick in drum with scrub turkey
Fill drum with water
Boil till brick is soft
Throw away scrub turkey
Eat brick
The second is a herp:
This elegant beasty is an adult Eastern Water Dragon (Intellagama lesueurii) out sunning itself in the Brisbane Botanic Gardens. They grow up to a metre in length and are arboreal members of the agamid family of lizards.
