Everybody Tebow!

December 13, 2011 • 12:33 pm

It was inevitable: someone’s created a website showing people “Tebowing” (i.e., dropping to one knee and putting your head on your hand in prayer).  There is Tebowing in the snow, in front of the Taj Mahal, and even at the feet of Santa Claus.

But reader Douglas E. has contributed a Tebow just for this site.  It’s his son-in-law, Jonathan M, Tebowing in front of the DMZ at the border between North and South Korea. I’m told that Jonathan was worried about getting shot.

I found a picture of another form of Tebowing created by reader Sigmund at his site Sneer Review: it shows what Tebow would look like if God really did care about football. 

If you want to Tebow in some interesting place, send your picture to me and we’ll see whose is best.  There may be a prize.

Reader photo: man bonds with rabbit

December 13, 2011 • 9:33 am

When I asked readers to send me photos they’d taken of animals (I’ll take plants, too!), I didn’t expect such a big response.  I have about seven really great emails with pictures, and will put up the photos in the next couple of weeks.  I wanted to show this one first because the story behind it is so touching. It’s about reader Dave Ricks and a cottontail rabbit (this is probably Sylvilagus floridanus, the Eastern cottontail).

Dave’s photo and backstory (click the photo to enlarge, click again to make it really big):

A few summers ago, I took this photo of a cottontail doe in my backyard. She was cleverly sunning herself under a hole in a hedge that let the sunlight through.

My camera was a little Sony DSC-T30 point-and-shoot shirt-pocket camera. Getting a good light level was tricky, since the camera meters automatically. My subject was patient while I figured out a way to do it. I set the camera to meter the light on the center of the image, and I swung the camera left and right, between the background being dark and her being bright. As this made the whole image get lighter and darker, I took a few photos to catch a decent overall level. She’s not exactly in the center of the photo because of that.

For me to be this close for this photo, I had built a relationship with her that spring and summer by spending time around her physically. I would talk to myself so she knew I wasn’t a predator stalking her, and I would keep my hips and shoulders pointed away from her. The afternoon when I moved this close for this photo, I could tell when she was feeling comfortable when she let her eyes squint for the sun and she let her body relax and her hips poke up through her fur. But she still has one ear rotated toward me, and her other ear rotated behind her.

This was the first cottontail I had a relationship with.  Sometimes she would walk right up to me,which would totally freak me out, so my photos of those encounters are off-center and blurry! By the way, I never fed her, so her attraction to me was purely social and playful.

I knew her for two years as an adult, so I imagine she lived three years total. She raised at least one litter, outside my bedroom window the spring after this summer photo.

I played trumpet for her once.  While she was facing me, I moved my trumpet to my face and played a single note softly, then I moved the trumpet away.  She stopped and paid attention. Then I played a simple scale of notes separated by me putting the trumpet to my face for each note and pulling the trumpet away after each note so she could see the sound she was hearing was me using the trumpet.  She didn’t get tense like it was scary, just a new experience.  When I was done, she went back to what she was doing.

In my experience, cottontails are social and curious, so they can feel attracted to us, and I believe they enjoy the sounds of our voices talking.  But their personalities vary, and of course they’re always being watchful about being cornered or caught, so I’ve only had one other relationship with a cottontail this trusting and friendly with me.

I feel lucky I knew her.  Our time together was an experience I can’t reproduce—I treasure it for what it was.

Lungfish nearly walk, shed light on the invasion of land

December 13, 2011 • 6:14 am

The conventional wisdom about how our tetrapod ancestors invaded land (“tetrapods” are four-footed land animals that include birds, mammals, reptiles, and amphibians) was that the evolution of limbs with digits occurred about the same time as the the walking gait evolved, perhaps when a lobe-finned fish (“sarcopterygian”) like Tiktaalik began frequenting shallow waters.  Those ancestors might have propped themselves up in the shallows, and eventually made forays onto land for food, creating selection pressures on both morphology and behavior to move about on the land.  As this scenario goes, the typical land-animal leg with toes evolved along with the typical land-animal gait, which is an alternation of fore- and hindlimbs that push off the ground.

This scenario may have to be revised, though, in light of a new paper by Heather King and colleagues in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. What they found is that the closest living relative of tetrapods, the lungfish, seem to have a precursor of the alternating-limb gait and the ability to push off the ground, even though they don’t venture onto land.  And this suggests that the common ancestor of lungfish and modern tetrapods, which lived about 400 million years ago, was “preadapted” or “exadapted” to walk.  That is, that ancestor might have had its own adapted form of movement that could be co-opted for walking when its descendants invaded land.  It’s a gait-first, limb-next hypothesis.

King and her colleagues, who work in the building right next to mine, studied the movement of one of the rare remaining lungfish, Protopterus annectens. It’s from Africa, and looks like this:

Protopterus annectens

The lungfish were filmed from various angles as they moved about in water tanks and, surprisingly, the researchers found what for all the world looks like the precursor of a tetrapod-like gait.  The lungfish “walk” along the substrate using their pelvic fins (the evolutionary source of hindlimbs) as the sole source of locomotion. (They didn’t “walk” on their front, or pectoral fins, which are the ancestors of forelimbs in tetrapods.) Moreover, they were capable of raising themselves above the bottom of the tank with their pelvic fins.

All this is shown in four movies in the paper’s supplementary material. I’ve provided the links below along with the author’s descriptions. Movies 3 and 4 (especially 4) clearly show the beast lifting itself off the substrate with its pelvic fins.

Movie 1:  This movie shows the lungfish Protopterus annectens locomoting underwater in ventral view. Note that the pelvic fins alternate, and the pectoral fins do not move rhythmically. This movie corresponds to Figs. 1A and 2 A and C. Each square of the grid in this movie is 1 cm.

Movie 2:  This movie shows the lungfish P. annectens locomoting underwater in ventral view. Note that the pelvic fins begin by alternating, then make a discrete transition to a synchronous gait. This movie corresponds to Figs. 1B and 2 B and D. Each square of the grid in this movie is 1 cm.

Movie 3:  This movie shows the lungfish P. annectens locomoting underwater in simultaneous lateral and ventral views. In lateral view, the lifting of the body is evident, as is the range of motion of the pelvic fin, including movement in front of and above the articulation with the body. Each square of the grid in this movie is 1 cm.

Movie 4:  This movie shows the lungfish P. annectens locomoting underwater in simultaneous lateral and ventral views. Here we show an example of theeffectiveness of the pelvic fins in lifting the body. Each square of the grid in this video is 1 cm.

While we don’t know whether other lungfish do this, nor whether this condition was present in the common ancestor of lungfish and tetrapods, it’s tempting to speculate that the alternating-gait was present in this ancestor and then became coopted for walking when its descendants developed sturdy limbs with digits. Or, as the authors note, “That P. annectens uses its paired appendages for substrate-associated locomotion provides evidence for this trait arising in sarcopterygians before the evolution of tetrapods, and before the evolution of digited limbs.”

This finding also casts doubt on some previous work: the discovery of fossil trackways from the Devonian—”footprints” that have been interpreted as some of the earliest evidence for tetrapod locomotion on land.  Here’s one of them, the Valentia Island trackway from Ireland:

Since trackways like this lack unambiguous evidence for digits, the authors consider their status as evidence for tetrapod locomotion “now open to question.” They could have been made by lungfish/tetrapod ancestors, perhaps creatures like lungfish.  Obviously, these conclusions are tentative and subject to revision when more fossils are found.

If you want an in-depth look at how these results fit into the historical context of work on the evolution of land-dwelling animals, Carl Zimmer has a nice piece at The Loom, “A long walk to land.”  Zimmer, of course, has been writing about the water-land transition for a long time, most notably in his excellent book At the Water’s Edge : Fish with Fingers, Whales with Legs, and How Life Came Ashore but Then Went Back to Sea.

h/t: Matthew Cobb

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King, H. M., N. H. Shubin, M. L. Coates and M. E. Hale. 2011.  Behavioral evidence for the evoluton of walking and bounding before terrestriality in sarcopterygian fishes. Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA. Published online, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1118669109.

Three ways of looking at a blackbird

December 13, 2011 • 4:20 am

One of the most beautiful of the Beatles’ songs, not about birds but about civil rights.

1. Crosby, Stills and Nash (they’re older and plumper now, and Stills’s voice isn’t what it was, but they can still harmonize)

2. Sarah McLachlan

3. and the composer, Paul McCartney

From Wikipedia:

McCartney explained on PBS’s Great Performances (Paul McCartney: Chaos and Creation at Abbey Road), aired in 2006, that the guitar accompaniment for “Blackbird” was inspired by J.S. Bach’s Bourrée in E minor, a well known lute piece, often played on the classical guitar. As children, he and George Harrison tried to learn Bourrée as a “show off” piece. The Bourrée is distinguished by melody and bass notes played simultaneously on the upper and lower strings. McCartney adapted a segment of the Bourrée (reharmonized into the original’s relative major key of G) as the opening of “Blackbird,” and carried the musical idea throughout the song.

God helps Broncos defeat the Bears

December 13, 2011 • 4:03 am

Because Jesus is on the side of the Denver Broncos football team, they once again pulled out a last-minute victory, kicking a field goal in overtime to beat our Chicago Bears 13-10.  The Broncos got the extra time they needed to win when Chicago running back Marion Barber ran out of bounds, stopping the clock.

And for those who argued that Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow doesn’t think that God helps bring victory to him and his team,  listen to what he said about Barber’s out-of-bounds run:

“I might have thanked the Lord when he did that. I mean, we probably would have had 10 seconds if he stayed inbounds, but it was just special.”

and

“If you believe, unbelievable things can sometimes be possible.”

I guess that if you don’t believe, such things aren’t possible.

Reader photo: Snowy owl

December 12, 2011 • 3:28 pm

Reader Tom C. sent me this photo of a Snowy owl (Bubo scandiacus), taken on Wolfe Island, Ontario (just north of Kingston) on December 7. This is either a female or a young bird, as adult males lack scalloping on the feathers.

It’s gorgeous, no? I’ve seen exactly one of these in my life: on Plum Island in Massachusetts, when I was in graduate school.

If you have a good wildlife photo, send it along. I can’t promise to use it, but if it’s good I’ll consider it.

Here’s a National Geographic video of a male snowy owl hunting for lemmings (around the clock) for his brood.  The web pages I’ve read suggest that only the male hunts while the female stays on the nest. Oh, and they mate for life.

Baggini discovers that the faithful really believe that stuff

December 12, 2011 • 10:52 am

It’s painful but ultimately rewarding to read Julian Baggini’s continuing series of essays on religion that appear in the Guardian.  For a long time we’ve known him as a fierce critic of New Atheism, but now he seems to be discovering that many contentions of the Gnus are right after all.  If he’s intellectually honest, it’s only a matter of time before he becomes one of us.

His latest piece, “The myth that religion is more about practice than belief,” takes up the anti-Gnu criticism that religious people don’t really believe the official doctrines of their faith—they just go to church to socialize, engage in communal works, or enjoy the potted lilies and stained glass. To suss this out, Baggini did an informal verbal survey of 141 churchgoers in Bristol and combined that with an online survey of 767 more (he’s summarized the results at another site).  He fully realizes that this isn’t a proper random sample, even of churchgoers.

Nevertheless, he found some results that surprised him. The biggest one?

So what is the headline finding? It is that whatever some might say about religion being more about practice than belief, more praxis than dogma, more about the moral insight of mythos than the factual claims of logos, the vast majority of churchgoing Christians appear to believe orthodox doctrine at pretty much face value. They believe that Jesus is divine, not simply an exceptional human being; that his resurrection was a real, bodily one; that he performed miracles no human being ever could; that he needed to die on the cross so that our sins could be forgiven; and that Jesus is the only way to eternal life. On many of these issues, a significant minority are uncertain but in all cases it is only a small minority who actively disagree, or even just tend to disagree. As for the main reason they go to church, it is not for reflection, spiritual guidance or to be part of a community, but overwhelmingly in order to worship God.

To his credit, he uses this finding to defend the Gnus, and defend them strongly:

This is, I think, a firm riposte to those who dismiss atheists, especially the “new” variety, as being fixated on the literal beliefs associated with religion rather than ethos or practice. It suggests that they are not attacking straw men when they criticise religion for promoting superstitious and supernatural beliefs. Yes, I know you can define “supernatural” in such a way that turning water into wine isn’t supernatural after all, but when atheists use this word, their argument is not based on an unjustified linguistic or metaphysical stipulation. They are simply pointing out that religions maintain that things happen which cannot be explained simply in terms of physical laws and human agency, and on this it appears most churchgoers agree. . .

It seems to me that these results, if truly indicative of what people actually believe, are highly significant for the present debate about religion. The challenge to the likes of Karen Armstrong – which I’d love to hear her response to – is to accept that when they claim religion isn’t really about literal belief, they are advocating a view about how religion ought to be in its best form which just doesn’t describe the reality on the ground. They are defending an ideal of religion, a possibility that is not the normal actuality.

I’m surprised that Baggini is surprised.  For at least in America, even the merest acquaintance with the average churchgoer—as opposed to religious intellectuals and academics, who are almost atheists anyway—shows that there are certain bedrock doctrines that are non-negotiable.  Even smart dudes like Andrew Sullivan can’t help but believe in the divinity of Jesus.  But maybe this is more of a surprise in the UK.  Baggini’s results, which have been replicated by more systematic surveys in the US (e.g., here and here) show that “sophisticated” theologians by no means express the beliefs of other adherents to their faith.

Over at Choice in Dying, Eric MacDonald has a deeper take on Baggini’s results. His title is (for Eric), a tad snarky: “I could have told him that”, but the content is enriched by MacDonald’s own years as an Anglican priest.

I have said it often enough already, but this is how, in my experience, most Christians understand faith. My own attempts to move away from this into more liberal, indeed, more radical revisions of faith in order to make sense of faith in the modern world, while to some degree successful, and actually more attractive to some people’s  more radical understandings of faith, the place of the Bible in determining faith, and the obvious marginalisation of some “believers” because of their inability to accept orthodox ways of understanding both Bible and creed, was of central importance to the core membership of the parish in which I worked. One of these put it quite succinctly when she said that I would not be there forever, and she was prepared to tolerate my radical take on faith, but she knew what she believed, and was quite confident that the next Rector would be more on her side than on mine . . .

Atheists like Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett, to take only the Four Horsemen, who take religion as centring in belief, not in practice and metaphor, are spot on the money for most religious believers. Academic theology, as I have reason to know, having for years tried to convince people that they didn’t need to believe that the Bible is the unspotted word of God, or that things like the resurrection or the other miracles of Jesus must be taken as supernatural events, simply has no purchase at the level of the ordinary believer.

And he gets in a few licks at those infuriating theologians like John Haught:

The point might be put a bit clearer. Academic theologians, to be at all credible in the academic community, cannot speak or write about their subject as ordinary, simple believers. Theology, as an academic discipline, must at least be intelligible to others in the academy. That it fails even in this is neither here nor there. People like John Haught and Keith Ward are trying very hard to place their “discipline” in the context of other academic disciplines, and so they must adhere to some, at least, of the canons of scholarship.

Academic imperatives, however, have no locus standi at the level of ordinary belief, which is why so many who emerge from theological schools find their own understanding of faith at complete variance with the understanding of the people they go out into the parishes to serve. They either adapt to that circumstance, and learn to temper their academic learning with the faith as the people they serve understand it, or they try to introduce new ways of looking at faith to the people. The latter is often the path not taken, because it requires a deftness and a fairly quick reason that many people simply do not possess, and if you cannot make it seem as though, with all the revisions you are proposing, there is still something recognisable as the faith of old, you will get nowhere, and will end up in conflict with the very people on whose goodwill you depend for your daily bread.

Or daily wafer. That’s a simple statement, but it’s absolutely true.  Theologians will object simply because obfuscation and rationalization is their way of life, but not for a minute should we think that academic theology has any substance.  I’ve read more than my share now, and it’s all just fancy words without content, much like having a meringue when you’re expecting a meal.  Eric ends with a ringing paragraph:

The gnu atheists are right to continue to drive their wedges between belief and practice, for, while moral practice — concern for justice and the relief of suffering — can stand on its own, belief is now, with all the challenges of science and the obvious benefits of secularity, an orphan, with no visible means of support.

Maybe it’s time for us to start really believing those Christians, Jews, and Muslims who tell us what they believe. And we should demand of theologians some evidence that their interpretation of scripture is both correct and representative of their coreligionists.

h/t: Grania Spingies

‘

Darwin’s orchid: film of the missing pollinator

December 12, 2011 • 9:47 am

In a comment on last week’s post on orchids, reader André Schuiteman, whose team discovered the first night-blooming orchid described in that post, calls our attention to a remarkable film showing a different orchid, Angraecum sesquipedale (“Darwin’s orchid), being pollinated by the long-tongued moth, presumably Xanthopan morgani.  It’s a rare sight indeed since pollination occurs only at night.  Remember that Darwin, confronted by this flower with its remarkably long nectar spur, theorized that there must be a moth in the forest whose tongue was long enough to reach the nectar (that has to happen to effect pollination, since the moth’s body has to contact the orchid flower itself).  This moth was finally discovered in 1903.

The video was made in Madagascar by a friend of mine, Phil DeVries from the University of New Orleans, a remarkable—and, as you’ll see, intrepid—naturalist, and author of the two-volume Butterflies of Costa Rica and their Natural History.

 It’s really lovely to see how excited Phil gets when he finally sees the pollination.  Those are the juicy moments that every naturalist lives for.