Why are dog breeds so variable compared to cat breeds?

October 2, 2014 • 12:53 pm

This is a question for readers to answer. I have my own theories, but I want to hear yours.

Dog breeds (I’ll spell out “dog” this one time) are of course tremendously more variable than breeds of cats. It doesn’t matter what trait you pick: behavior, color, skeletal configuration, size, and so on—dogs are more variable across breeds than are cats. To take one example, using just weight: cat breeds vary only about threefold, from the 6-pound Singapura to the 20-pound Maine Coon. But among dogs, the range is 90-fold, from the 2-pound Chi*ua*ua to the 180-pound Mastiff.

(In nature, however, the situation is reversed. There are roughly equal numbers of wild felid and canid species—38 of the former and 36 of the latter—and each has been diversifying for roughly the same amount of time. Yet the size range among wild felid species is 173-fold—from the 3.5-pound rusty spotted cat to the 605-pound tiger—while the size range of wild canids is only 34-fold, from the 2.5-pound fennec to the 85-pound gray wolf.)

There’s a reason I gave you those facts, which may bear on the answer to your question.  Again, WHY ARE DOG BREEDS SO MUCH MORE DIFFERENT FROM EACH OTHER THAN ARE CAT BREEDS?

Be complete in your answer, and be aware of questions that may be raised to counter facile assertions.

I will pick the best answer, and the award will be a Jerry Coyne the Cat Keychain, a very rare item (I have only three):

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This is a high-quality thick plastic-laminated image, with my namesake cat (as an adorable kitten) shown on both sides, getting a belly rub from his foster mother Gayle Ferguson. The prize guarantees a frisson of pleasure every time you use your keys.

Leave your answer below; contest closes at 6 p.m. Chicago time this coming Sunday (October 5).

NYT readers agree that doubt is an essential part of faith

October 2, 2014 • 10:17 am

In yesterday’s paper edition of the New York Times, the “letters” section highlights four responses to Julia Baird’s Sept. 25 op-ed,“Doubt as a sign of faith” (my post on here essay is here). Baird’s thesis, taking off from the Archbishop of Canterbury’s recent admission that sometimes he doubted God’s existence (but not Jesus’s), was that doubt is not a weakness of religious faith, but a strength. Remember Barid’s words?:

Just as courage is persisting in the face of fear, so faith is persisting in the presence of doubt. Faith becomes then a commitment, a practice and a pact that is usually sustained by belief. But doubt is not just a roiling, or a vulnerability; it can also be a strength. Doubt acknowledges our own limitations and confirms — or challenges — fundamental beliefs, and is not a detractor of belief but a crucial part of it.

As I noted, the problem is that there is no good way to resolve religous doubt except to either embrace it and become an atheist or, more usually, to convince yourself based on wish-thinking that you were right all along. It eludes me how going through a “darkness of the soul” somehow can strengthen you in your faith. That’s just not rational—not unless you find a gleam of evidence somewhere in the darkness. And if you return to faith after having your doubts, you are discarding intellectual honesty for emotional security.

So one would think that among the four letters to the NYT editor there might be at least one dissenter, one person who says that doubt is a strength of the intellect, but not a virtue of faith. But one would think wrong. All four letters agree with Baird, extolling the virtue of doubt.

Just three samples of the madness:

Julia Baird is wise to remind us that Christ himself experienced doubt and darkness on the cross when he cried out, “My God, why have you forsaken me?” This cry has long confounded Christendom, but it should not because if Christ was to experience all that is human, he also had to experience spiritual doubt and darkness, a perplexing irony for he who said, “I am the light of the world.”

As for the archbishop of Canterbury: how poignantly real and human to admit and embrace his own doubt. Only a man who identifies with the whole of our humanity, its light and its shadow, could muster the humility and courage to reveal his own spiritual landscape.

How many of us would be so willing to lay bare our inner selves?

ROBERT WALDRON
Boston, Sept. 26, 2014

The writer is the author of books about Christianity.

Courage? Is the Archbishop now hedging his public sermons or prayers: “Dear God (if you exist). . .” And if Christ had to experience “all that is human,” then he’d have to have sex, too, which I don’t think is mentioned in Scripture.

*****

Even the most faithful have doubts about their faith. If one does not, he or she is either a fool or a liar.

In my case it came as a crushing blow, even though I was a priest chaplain with the 101st Airborne in Vietnam. I was always afraid that some bullet had my name on it. Once when we were in a firefight and the Marine point man was wounded, the medic shamed me into crawling up with him to help the man. In spite of fear, I followed him. When we were halfway there, a bullet blew the medic’s head off.

Covered with his blood, I lost my faith. How could a loving God do this to such a good man? I crawled to the Marine, lifted him onto my shoulders, stood up and carried him down. I had hoped that the enemy would kill me because I had nothing more to live for.

A priest without faith is like wine without grapes. I made it, and all thought I was courageous. Not so. I wanted to die. Later I came to belief again, but that is another story.

A situation can be shocking and so traumatic that we can go beyond doubt to atheism. But doubt there was, even for a priest.

PETER J. RIGA
Houston, Sept. 27, 2014

After that, he should have become an atheist for good. Finally:

****

Julia Baird’s article reminds me of something that Dr. Leonard Kravitz, one of my rabbinical school professors at Hebrew Union College in New York, used to say to his students: “Certainty doesn’t make you correct. Certainty makes you certain.”

(Rabbi) STEVEN FOLBERG
Austin, Tex., Sept. 26, 2014

Dr. Kravitz was right. But belief in something for which there is no evidence makes you not admirable, but credulous.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that the Times didn’t publish any letters saying that perhaps having doubts means that you’re believing in something that might not be true. After all, it’s not kosher to publicly criticize religion, even in the “letters” column of a liberal newspaper.

Colbert on Jindal: A black mark on Brown University

October 2, 2014 • 7:31 am

by Greg Mayer

On Monday night’s episode of his show, Stephen Colbert sarcastically endorsed Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal in the 2016 presidential race, lauding him as a “down-home guy who’s learned to stop learning.” Jindal is best known for his disastrous 2009 response to Obama’s address to Congress, and his pushing of creationism in Louisiana schools (covered at WEIT here, here, here, here, and here). At a Christian Science Monitor Breakfast in September, a reporter asked Jindal his views on evolution. Jindal obstinately refused to answer, repeatedly stating his support for local control of education, despite that not being any part of the question he was asked. Colbert elaborated on Jindal’s mantra of local control, proposing that on one Galapagos island, finches have longer beaks because they evolved to eat fruit, while on another island, “the beaks were shorter because Jesus”.

Screen shot from the Colbert Report, 30 September 2014.
Screen shot from the Colbert Report, 30 September 2014. Note the short beaks.

(I could not get the video to embed, so click here to see it; evolution part begins about 3:20.)

Jindal began his evasions with what is now becoming a standard line– the “I’m not a scientist” gambit, which paradoxically seems to enable the claimant to be bold and unconstrained in their beliefs, rather than humble. But when Jindal says he’s not a biologist, Colbert points out that Jindal holds an honors degree in biology from Brown University! My friends and colleagues at Brown—which include the indefatigable proponent of science and foe of creationism Ken Miller—have some explaining to do! Ironically, earlier this year Jindal suggested Obama sue Harvard for having failed to educate him properly. But it seems that if anyone has cause to complain of what their education did for them, it’s Jindal. (In fairness to Brown, I must note Michael Shermer’s thesis that smart people (which Jindal believes he is one of) are better at rationalizing away the evidence in order to maintain their preexisting prejudices; so, it might not be Brown’s fault that Jindal either doesn’t really know much, or suppresses his knowledge for the sake of his political career.)

Colbert, however, is quite taken with Jindal’s “impressive retreat from knowledge”, and his efforts to make sure others aren’t “handicapped by knowledge”. And, he points out, “there’s a lot more science he [Jindal] can run away from.”

If Jindal’s public floundering on the question wasn’t enough, Jindal replied to Colbert with a series of inept tweets, filled with non sequiturs, what one supposes are flat attempts at humor, and the claim to be ripping pages out of books, which I think he wants us to think is satirical, but seems perilously close to what we might actually expect him to do. Like a dog returning to its vomit, he plunges, Maru-like, back into the box, becoming yet further entangled. Not to mention all the traffic he’s driving to Colbert’s site.

Readers’ wildlife photographs

October 2, 2014 • 5:27 am

Reader Rick Wayne from Madison, Wisconsin sent us a series of red-tailed hawks (Buteo jamaicensis), their family, and their tail (his captions):

A family of redtails has been nesting across the street from Soil Science for a couple of years now. I happened to catch one of the adults (female? they’re so various that I have a hard time telling) at quite short range disassembling a squirrel. Given your affection for the latter, I won’t link the video, I’ll just say that single-framing it with my kids was very instructive about internal squirrel anatomy (“Wait, is that a stomach or a lung?” “Definitely a lung.”)

Of course I filled up my memory card and, while frantically trying to figure out what to delete on it, the hawk decided it had had enough attention, gathered the much-flatter remains in its talons, and majestically flapped away. So I missed the real money shot.

The next day, my 500mm and I happened to catch some action at the nest.
What’s interesting about these guys is that they’re such urban predators; by no means tame, they still mostly ignore the crowds of people and vehicles teeming around their den and just go on being foxes. The fellow in charge of the Allen Centennial Gardens has noted that his lagomorph problem has been sharply reduced this season.
The “donut bokeh” of the mirror lens really stands out in the background of this one.

beakfull

What? Oh, you mean this spine?

posed

NOM NOM NOM!

inverted

Adults on the wing within a few hundred meters of the nest:

dad_and_mom

Here’s what all the squirrel-disassembling was about:

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Nobody argues with Mom:

RWK53300

But one must occasionally get a good flap in while she’s gone.

RWK53273

My wife captions this one “I am SO TOTALLY NOT drunk, man!”

scratchin3

After I sent you the May email [photos below sent Sept. 16], I returned to the nest site — heck, it’s right across the street from my office! — for more images as the chicks grew up:

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RWK54224 copy

RWK54281 copy

Rick also put up video of the two hawk chicks, titled “In Which Our Hero Mistakes His Sister’s Foot for A Piece of Squirrel.“

Good morning!

October 2, 2014 • 4:46 am

The two greatest female pop voices (not singers) of our time belong to Karen Carpenter and Barbra Streisand. I’ve featured Karen many times (she was a heartthrob), but not such much La Streisand.

Streisand, of course, had a much better oeuvre of songs, but you shouldn’t turn your nose up at Carpenter’s talents on non-schlocky songs, like “Little Girl Blue.” Here’s one of my favorites from Barbra, one that really shows off her ability to belt without sounding dreadful (viz., the musical travesty Lea Michele). It may be due to those t.v. programs featuring competitions between amateur singers (“America’s Got Top Vocal Talents” or the like), but belting seems to be the vocal style du jour. Most singers can’t do it well.

“All I Ask of You,” is, of course, from the 1986 Andrew Lloyd Webber musical “The Phantom of the Opera” (music by Weber, lyrics by Charles Hart). Originally recorded by Sarah Brightman and Cliff Richard, it was released by Streisand, in a much superior rendition, in 1988. It’s this one, which misspells her name at the beginning.