Friday natural history: death in the garden

July 8, 2011 • 5:20 am

Reader Ray Perrins, from England, sent me a photo he took in his garden.  It shows the fascinating natural history—and natural drama—that can be found even in your own back yard.  I should add that what Ray didn’t mention, but is very obvious in the photo, is that this hoverfly is almost certainly a Batesian mimic of a bee. (“Batesian mimicry” is the phenomenon in which an edible, tasty species evolves to resemble a dangerous or distasteful species that predators have learned to avoid.) Indeed, this resemblance is probably why hoverflies are sometimes called “droneflies.”

As you occasionally publish readers’ photos, I thought I would submit the attached. It isn’t a raptor or kitteh but I hope you enjoy it, even if it doesn’t make your blog err website.

It is of a flower crab spider nomming a hoverfly (possibly Eristalis tenax looking at the wing veination). For completeness the flower is a white lilac (Syringa).

I thought it might be of interest as it shows that there is fascinating biology to be seen, even if you don’t live in the Mauritius. I took this photo in my back garden in the village of Cheddar in the South West of England, and what a wonderfully camouflaged ambush predator! One of my friends called it “beautifully sinister”, which sums it up pretty well. I took the photo with a cheap (less than £100) digital camera, which also shows what can be done if you take loads of photos and then shift through for the best ones.

Links for more information on what I think is the right species of spider, Misumena vatia from the Natural History Museum:  http://www.nhm.ac.uk/nature-online/life/insects-spiders/bug-forum/?q=node/182

They can apparently change colour (slowly) to match the flower they are on.

Dublin panel: Women atheist activists

July 8, 2011 • 5:17 am

UPDATE:  Paula Kirby has posted a long comment here explaining her position.

_____________

Here is a video from the World Atheist Convention held in Dublin in early June; the theme was “Women Atheist Activists.”  Thanks to Grania Spingies, an officer with Atheist Ireland, who sent me the link.

The introduction is by Grania, and the other panelists are

Grania emailed me her take on the panel, and kindly allowed me to put it here:
What makes this panel interesting is that everyone on it is female, an atheist and and activist, but each in a different way.  They also represent different nationalities (although all are Caucasian): USA, UK, Irish-UK and Australian.  All of them are positive about being an activist (in whatever form it takes for them) and none of them seemed to think that there was a serious case of sexism in the atheist community.  All of them were very aware of sexism in society but mostly felt that they had not suffered any negative experiences in the atheist community. Tanya in particular put forward some useful ideas on encouraging women to get involved in whatever capacity they might find interesting. Paula stressed that she realised that her experience did not entitle her to speak for “everyone”; this is a point that is maybe missed by people who use personal anecdotes to color an entire community.  Bobbie talked a bit about the history of atheist activism in the States, which she said was dominated by women at one stage. That was interesting too. I think that a lot of people don’t know much about that—they do tend to think that atheism started in 2006.  Anne-Marie Waters is a tireless campaigner against Sharia Law because of what it does to women in those communities in the UK that use it. She is not an atheist campaigner, but a campaigner who happens to be atheist.

The video is much better than others I’ve seen from meetings, for it was filmed and produced by a professional.

I am proud of my readers, the general lack of rancor on my site, and the ability to discuss issues in the reasoned way that is the ideal of atheism (not always realized, of course!).  I hope the comments for this thread, too, will be polite and—more important—to the point.  Please, no name-calling or comments about issues not relevant to this panel. And one other request:  please don’t comment on this panel or its issues unless you’ve watched the whole video.  With the questions at the end, it’s a bit over an hour long (so no comments for at least an hour after I post this, plz.).

UPDATE: If you want to talk about Elevator Guy, Rebecca Watson, or Richard Dawkins, or anything that’s been hashed to death in other places, please do that on one of the many other sites where flame wars are going on.  I won’t have them here.

Thanks to Grania and Atheist Ireland!

Who has free will?

July 7, 2011 • 2:23 pm

I’ve been gone most of the day, and am only now beginning to catch up with the many good comments about free will.  I knew that I wouldn’t get broad agreement (or even much agreement) on my contracausal notion of free will, but I do think that the advances of science have forced people to rethink and redefine “free will.”  I’ll be back in action tomorrow, but for the nonce I’d like to pose this question:

To those who think that “free will” resides entirely in the making of choices, even if in some sense those choices are determined, please respond to this:

How many species other than humans have free will? Do cats have it? How about birds?  Mice? 

Animals, after all, appear to make decisions the same way we do.  Anybody who has cats knows this: at naptime they appear to consider their options for a sleeping spot, and when faced with a human about to open a door, they seem to ponder whether to come in or not.  When a female sage grouse approaches a lek of males, frantically displaying to get her attention, she appears to choose which male to mate with.  How neurologically simple must a species be before we stop saying that it makes choices?

Ergo, I’d like to know peoples’ own concept of “free will” (if, indeed, they think it’s a coherent concept), and then, according to that notion, a judgment about whether the facility is limited to humans (Dan Dennett, as I recall, thinks it is).

And I promise not to post on the topic again for at least a month.

John Horgan responds, defends wishful thinking in science

July 7, 2011 • 6:01 am

On June 25 I took issue with a piece by Scientific American columnist John Horgan.  Horgan attacked biological determinism on the grounds that it was both wrong (empirically and morally!) and robbed us of free will:

Biological determinism is a blight on science. It implies that the way things are is the way they must be. We have less choice in how we live our lives than we think we do. This position is wrong, both empirically and morally.

I responded that truth is truth, and that Horgan’s view that all biological determinism—including studies of evolutionary psychology—is “pseudoscientific ideology,” is simply silly.  Clearly at least some of our modern behaviors—most notably sexual behavior—reflect selection pressures on our ancestors.

At any rate, Horgan has responded to my critique on his website, in a piece called “In defense of wishful thinking.”  Horgan’s defense is this:  “Actually, science itself demonstrates that our hopes and fears about reality often shape it.”

He gives some examples of how “hopes and fears about reality” change our behavior:

  • The placebo effect: if patients think a pill or spray will work, even if it’s completely inert, it will work to some degree.
  • Denigrating ethnicity or gender adversely effects the performance of members of the maligned groups.  Women do better on math tests when they’re told in advance that both men and women score equally well on such tests.
  • Students who believe that “wars are inevitable because human beings are naturally aggressive” tend to be less involved in disarmament and antiwar activities.  (Horgan uses this result to argue against the idea that war stems from the innate aggression of males. I agree with Horgan in part, for war doesn’t necessarily reflect individual aggression, but the machinations and ambitions of politicians—and many soldiers are conscripted unwillingly.)  Nevertheless, evolved male aggression is a viable hypothesis, supported by evidence that the hormones associated with human “maleness” induce aggressive behavior.  It’s also a reasonable hypothesis that this connection was created by natural selection in our distant past.  We may not like this, but that doesn’t falsify it a priori.
  • Denying free will has adverse consequences.  As Horgan notes,

A recent experiment shows that belief in free will has measurable consequences. The psychologists Kathleen Vohs and Jonathan Schooler asked subjects to read a passage by Francis Crick , co-discoverer of the double helix, that casts doubt on free will. Crick wrote in The Astonishing Hypothesis (Charles Schribner’s Sons, 1993) that “although we appear to have free will, in fact, our choices have already been predetermined for us and we cannot change that.” Subjects who read this passage were more likely to cheat on a test than control subjects who read a passage about brain science that did not mention free will. Mere exposure to the idea that we are not really responsible for our actions, it seems, can make us behave badly.

Note: most of these students probably conceive of free will as a “ghost in the machine,” not in the way that most compatibilist philosophers conceive of it.

To me, none of these assertions pose the slightest problem for biological determinism.  Let us first dispose of the “problem” that scientific truths may sometimes induce adverse behavior.  That may be the case, but empirically-determined truths do that all the time.  A woman who gets proof that her spouse is cheating may poison him, but that doesn’t change the facts.  We always must worry about the consequences of scientific truths, but let us not argue that things are less likely to be true because of their consequences.  I know that I am going to die, and I really don’t like that truth, but it doesn’t make me deny the fact or embrace the notion of an afterlife.

More important, biological determinism reflects not just our genetic endowment, but our environments (both physical and social), and the interactions between our genes and our environments.  As a biological determinist, I believe that these factors completely explain our behaviors.  All of the observations mentioned above above are simply environmental interventions that affect our behaviors.  That they do so is not an argument against biological determinism, any more telling than the argument that when you hit someone on the head, he becomes unconscious.

Horgan then takes up “free will” again.  (I’ve previously given my notion of free will, which involves our ability to really make choices; that is, rerun a situation and you could just as well have chosen otherwise.)  Horgan, however, ascribes to Dennett’s notion of free will, one that I’ve previously discussed:

(Horgan): This finding supports a sensible defense of free will mounted by the philosopher Daniel Dennett in his 2003 book  Freedom Evolves (Viking Adult, 2003). Dennett argues, first, that free will is “not what tradition declares it to be: a God-like power to exempt oneself from the causal fabric of the physical world.” Free will, he contends, is an emergent property of the brain, like consciousness, that allows us to perceive, mull over and act on choices; in fact, choice, or even freedom, are reasonable synonyms for free will. Dennett calls free will “an evolved creation of human activity and beliefs” that humanity acquired recently as a consequence of language and culture as well as consciousness. Our free will grows along with our knowledge, material well-being and political freedom. Dennett’s most subtle, profound point is that free will is both an “objective phenomenon” and dependent on our belief in and perception of it.

In other words, the more we value and believe in free will, freedom and choices, the more we actually have. This is both wishful thinking and an objective, empirical truth. Wishful thinking works!

I do like Dennett’s pithy definition of “traditional” free will, but I’m not on board with either Dan’s solution or Horgan’s agreement with it.  What they are saying is that the mere appearance of choice (an appearance that Dennett sees as reaching its acme, via evolution, in the complex ruminations of the human brain) is the same as “free will.” (As I remember Dan’s discussion in Freedom Evolves, he doesn’t think that any animals have free will.)

To be frank, I regard these conceptions of free will as attempts to evade the depressing fact that we really don’t make choices—that, with perhaps some quantum-induced but irrelevant exceptions—our choices have already been made before we think we’ve made them. (There is, of course, some neurological evidence for this.)  Yes, if you define free will as the appearance of choice—that a woman stands before a gelato counter and appears to ruminate about which flavor she wants—and that human choice involves more complex “calculations” than that of, say, a bacterium (“Hmm. . . . I had the lemon last week.  I’ll try the blackcurrant now”), then yes, we have free will.  But that’s a definitional ploy, meant to keep us from thinking about the inescapable fact that such decisions are “made” long before we think we make them, and to preserve the status of humans as unique and morally responsible animals.

Horgan’s assertion that the more we think we have free will, the more free will we have, is simply wrong.  We don’t have free will, at least not in the way everyone thinks we do.  We are biologically determined creatures, with “biology” conceived broadly as “genes  + environments + gene/environment interactions). Our brains—and therefore our choices—are as biologically determined as are our livers or kidneys.  The appearance of choice is no more “real choice” than the “appearance” of a Western movie town, with its thin storefront facades buttressed from behind, is identical to a real town.   Biological determinism is a fact, and Horgan should deal with it.  But let no one think that biological determinism means that our behavior isn’t influenced by our environments.

A facade: the exterior of the Cleaver house, where Beaver, June, Ward, and Wally supposedly lived.

Name the hawk

July 7, 2011 • 4:39 am

UPDATE #3:  Peter has taken yet another picture of the hawk engaged in strange behavior that looks like play.  He describes this in this comment below, and I’ve added a photo to the bottom of this post.

UPDATE #2:  I am informed by the bird expert in our department that this is a juvenile Cooper’s Hawk, Accipiter cooperii.  Based on this and my reading of the comments, I’ll call it that until convinced otherwise.  Thanks to all for weighing in!

UPDATE: I’ve provided a new picture from Peter below plus his added commentary:

I didn’t imagine that my picture of the hawk in our maple tree would initiate a blizzard of comments!  I wasn’t trying to “stump the WEIT reader” — I just wanted to share the nice photo, but I’m not a birder so I couldn’t tell you what species it is.

For the curious, the picture was taken yesterday, and the hawk resides in the Hawkeye State, Iowa.  Here’s another shot, which shows more of the body.  My guess is it’s a Cooper’s hawk.  It’s likely a juvenile, since there are at least two of them in the neighborhood (who call back and forth constantly), making me think they are nest-mates.

You also asked what kind of camera I used — it’s a Canon SX30IS, which is neither expensive nor fancy, but it has a nice 30x lens and further digital magnification up to the 140x which I used for the first picture.

____________

No, there are no prizes, but neither I nor the alert reader (Peter N) who took this picture knows what this is.  I am 100% sure, though, that within an hour it will be identified.  The reader gives this information:

This is one of a family of hawks (I don’t know what species) that lives in our neighborhood.  I took this picture through my kitchen window this morning — bird was about 60 feet away, on a branch about 30 up.

The reader lives in the United States.

________

Updated photo by Peter, showing what he described in the comment below.  He adds that “The sinister shadow in the foreground is, of course, our (strictly indoor) cat, Gus, dreaming of what might have been.”

 

OMG: a three-ton wombat!

July 6, 2011 • 9:55 am

According to both The Daily Mail and The Telegraph, Australian paleontologists digging in Queensland have found the fossil of a 14-foot-long, 3-ton wombat.  It’s in the genus Diprotodon.  The Telegraph reports:

The diprotodon, about the size of a rhinoceros, was found on a remote cattle station in an area rich in the remains of prehistoric megafauna. The discovery of a virtually complete fossil makes it one of Australia’s most significant prehistoric discoveries.

“It was the biggest of them all – the biggest marsupial that ever lived on any continent,” one of the researchers, Professor Sue Hand, a palaeontologist at the University of New South Wales, told Australian Geographic.

How big was it? Bigger than this:

The skeleton, unlike others in the genus, was remarkably complete.  Here’s the excavation (photo from the Daily Mail):

According to the BBC, these were browsers who fed on trees and shrubs.  Their dentition surely shows that—look at these teeth! (photo from Wikipedia):

There are various theories explaining their extinction, including climate and, most intriguingly, predation by humans. That idea is based on one bone that appears to have been pierced by a spear.  The beasts also went extinct about the same time humans arrived in Australia: roughly 55,000 years ago.

Antony Flew and his famous atheist article

July 6, 2011 • 7:07 am

In my recent post on why I was reading theology,  commenter Gavin Phillipson called my attention to a very short article by Antony Flew.  Many of you know that Flew, who died last year at 87, was a British philosopher famous for his defense of atheism.  Later in life he appeared to renounce this stand, publishing a book, There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind, announcing that he was a theist. There is some dispute about whether Flew’s mental faculties were degenerating at the time, but from what I’ve read his mind seemed sound enough to attest to the genuineness of his “conversion.”

At any rate, Gavin noted that Flew’s piece, “Theology and Falsification”, was perhaps the most widely-read bit of philosophy in the latter twentieth century (the link also has a short account by Flew, written in 200o, describing its reception and the circumstances of its composition (it was first published in a book in 1955).  The piece itself is short enough that I’m reprinting it below; you can find it widely distributed on the internet.

I’m actually surprised that this piece, which is quite good (albeit written in academic-speak) was so popular, for what it says seems self evident.  The entire content can be succinctly expressed in Flew’s last sentence: “What would have to occur or to have occurred to constitute for you a disproof of the love of, or of the existence of, God?”  His point is that there is nothing, and that therefore the “God hypothesis” cannot be, as Flew puts it, an assertion “that such and such is the case”—the “case” being that God not only exists but is a loving being.

I’ve made precisely the same point many times (but without Flew’s philosophical panache or credibility) as in this New Republic article:

Most scientists can tell you what observations would convince them of God’s existence, but I have never met a religious person who could tell me what would disprove it. And what could possibly convince people to abandon their belief that the deity is, as Giberson asserts, good, loving, and just? If the Holocaust cannot do it, then nothing will.

Little did I know that I was walking in the footsteps of a famous philosophical Popperian!  But it seems to me that you needn’t be an Einstein to realize that if you take “the God hypothesis” as an existence claim, then the complete resistance of its supporters to entertaining notions of disproof renders that hypothesis unworthy of consideration.

Perhaps some readers can explain to me why the piece was so famous and influential.  Flew gives his take in the preface:

At the time when the paper from which ‘Theology and Falsification’ was distilled was presented to the Socratic Club its discussions about God were tending to become sterile confrontations between Logical Positivists, claiming that what pretend to be assertions about God are in truth utterances, without literal significance, and the various opponents of Logical Positivists, who found that conclusion unconscionable. I wanted to set these discussions off onto new and hopefully more fruitful lines.

Perhaps, but were philosophers so blinkered at that time by their adherence to logical positivism or its negation that they didn’t realize the simple fact that existence claims require evidence?  Or, as Hitchens says, “What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.”

Theology and Falsification

Let us begin with a parable. It is a parable developed from a tale told by John Wisdom in his haunting and revelatory article ‘Gods’.[1] Once upon a time two explorers came upon a clearing in the jungle. In the clearing were growing many flowers and many weeds. One explorer says, “some gardener must tend this plot.” The other disagrees, “There is no gardener.” So they pitch their tents and set a watch. No gardener is ever seen. “But perhaps he is an invisible gardener.” So they, set up a barbed-wire fence. They electrify it. They patrol with bloodhounds. (For they remember how H.G. Wells’s The Invisible Man could be both smelt and touched though he could not he seen.) But no shrieks ever suggest that some intruder has received a shock. No movements of the wire ever betray an invisible climber. The bloodhounds never give cry. Yet still the Believer is not convinced. “But there is a gardener, invisible, intangible, insensible to electric shocks, a gardener who has no scent and makes no sound, a gardener who comes secretly to look after the garden which he loves.” At last the Sceptic despairs, “But what remains of your original assertion? Just how does what you call an invisible, intangible, eternally elusive gardener differ from an imaginary gardener or even from no gardener at all?”

In this parable we can see how what starts as an assertion that something exists or that there is some analogy between certain complexes of phenomena, may be reduced step by step to an altogether different status, to an expression perhaps of a ‘picture preference’.[2] The Sceptic says there is no gardener. The Believer says there is a gardener (but invisible, etc.) One man talks about sexual behaviour. Another man prefers to talk of Aphrodite (but knows that there is not really a superhuman person additional to, and somehow responsible for, all sexual phenomena).[3] The process of qualification may be checked at any point before the original assertion is completely withdrawn and something of that first assertion will remain (Tautology). Mr. Wells’s invisible man could not, admittedly, be seen, but in all other respects he was a man like the rest of us. But though the process of qualification may be, and of course usually is, checked in time, it is not always judiciously so halted. Someone may dissipate his assertion completely without noticing that he has done so. A fine brash hypothesis may thus be killed by inches, the death by a thousand qualifications.

And in this, it seems to me, lies the peculiar danger, the endemic evil, of theological utterance. Take such utterances as “God has a plan,” “God created the world,” “God loves us as a father loves his children.” They look at first sight very much like assertions, vast cosmological assertions. Of course, this is no sure sign that they either are, or are intended to be assertions. But let us confine ourselves to the cases where those who utter such sentences intend them to express assertions. (Merely remarking parenthetically, that those who intend or interpret such utterances as crypto-commands, expressions of wishes, disguised ejaculations, concealed ethics, or as anything else but assertions, are unlikely to succeed in making them either properly orthodox or practically effective.)

Now to assert that such and such is the case is necessarily equivalent to denying that such and such is not the case.[4] Suppose then that we are in doubt as to what someone who gives vent to an utterance is asserting, or suppose that, more radically, we are sceptical as to whether he is really asserting anything at all, one way of trying to understand (or perhaps it will be to expose) his utterance is to attempt to find what he would regard as counting against, or as being incompatible with, its truth. For if the utterance is indeed an assertion, it will necessarily be equivalent to a denial of the negation of that assertion.[5] And anything which would count against the assertion, or which would induce the speaker to withdraw it and to admit that it had been mistaken, must be part of (or the whole of) the meaning of the negation of that assertion. And to know the meaning of the negation of an assertion, is near as makes no matter, to know the meaning of that assertion. And if there is nothing which a putative assertion denies then there is nothing which it asserts either; and so it is not really an assertion. When the Sceptic in the parable asked the Believer, “just how does what you call an invisible, intangible, eternally elusive gardener differ from an imaginary gardener or even from no gardener at all?” he was suggesting that the Believer’s earlier statement had been so eroded by qualification that it was no longer an assertion at all.

Now it often seems to people who are not religious as if there was no conceivable event or series of events the occurrence of which would be admitted by sophisticated religious people to be a sufficient reason for conceding “There wasn’t a God after all” or “God does not really love us then.” Someone tells us that God loves us as a father loves his children. We are reassured. But then we see a child dying of inoperable cancer of the throat. His earthly father is driven frantic in his efforts to help, but his Heavenly Father reveals no obvious sign of concern. Some qualification is made — God’s love is “not a merely human love” or it is “an inscrutable love,” perhaps — and we realise that such sufferings are quite compatible with the truth of the assertion that “God loves us as a father (but, of course, …).” We are reassured again. But then perhaps we ask: what is this assurance of God’s (appropriately qualified) love worth, what is this apparent guarantee really a guarantee against? Just what would have to happen not merely (morally and wrongly) to tempt but also (logically and rightly) to entitle us to say “God does not love us” or even “God does not exist”? I therefore put to the succeeding symposiasts the simple central questions, “What would have to occur or to have occurred to constitute for you a disproof of the love of, or of the existence of, God?”

See also Sorry to Disappoint, but I’m Still an Atheist!.

[1] Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1944-5, reprinted as Chap. X of Antony Flew, ed., Essays in Logic and Language, First Series (Blackwell, 1951), and in Wisdom’s own Philosophy and Psychoanalysis (Blackwell, 1953).

[2] Cf. J. Wisdom, “Other Minds,” Mind, 1940; reprinted in his Other Minds (Blackwell, 1952).

[3] Cf. Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, II, 655-60.

Hic siquis mare Neptunurn Cereremque vocare

Constituet fruges et Bacchi nomine abuti

Mavolat quam laticis proprium proferre vocamen

Concedamus ut hic terrarum dictitet orbem

Esse deum matrem dum vera re tamen ipse

Religione animum turpi contingere parcat.

[Translation: “Here if anyone decides to call the sea Neptune, and corn Ceres and to misapply the name of Bacchus rather than the title that is proper to that liquor, let us allow him to dub the round world Mother of the Gods, so long as he forebears in reality to infect his mind with base superstition.”]

[4] For those who prefer symbolism: p = ~~p.

[5] For by simply negating p we get p: ~~p = p.

Kitteh contest: Leo and Curaca

July 6, 2011 • 5:24 am

Jonathan Losos, whom I saw at the Evolution 2011 meetings, submitted his cats Leo and Jake (Leo has since gone to Ceiling Cat). Losos, as some of you know, is a evolutionary ecologist, a professor at Harvard University, and Curator of Herpetology at the Museum of Comparative Zoology.  He’s also author of the definitive book on the lizard genus Anolis, Lizards in an Evolutionary Tree: Ecology and Adaptive Radiation of Anoles.  (Anolis contains the little green chameleon, A. carolinensis, that many of us had as kids.)  It’s not surprising, then, that both of Jon’s photos contain reptiles as well as kittehs.

What more could a reptile enthusiast want? Both Leo (the Abyssinian) and Curaca (the Missouri Alley) were rescue cats. Curaca was saved from poisoning by a mean restauranteur in St. Louis’s Central West End, whereas Leo was obtained from the clutches of a veterinarian who had lost interest in the runt-of-the-litter once he had sold Leo’s normal-sized littermates. Both grew into fine, worldly and affectionate cats (and we miss Leo dearly). One attribute we never expected is that the pair were first rate herpetol-o-cats. When we lived in the St. Louis suburb of University City, the cats started bringing in Line Snakes (Tropidoclonion lineatum), which we had not known lived in the area. Often, Leo would bring in a snake and drop it on the hardwood floor. Usually, the snake would wrap itself in circular coils, and then Leo would proceed to bat it around “air hockey” style as the snake would glide easily and quickly across the smooth floor surface, Leo hot in pursuit. At other times, the snakes would show up-alive and unharmed-throughout the house. Once, my wife let out a scream of surprise when, while making the bed in the morning, one fell out of the sheets. Alerted to the presence of these serpents in our local environs, I endeavored to return them to their homes, but never could figure out where the cats were finding them.

And here’s Leo with a very large snake:

It’s a boa constrictor. Owned by my brother-in-law, who raised it from a baby. Jake was 8.5 feet long. So, not really a risk, because Jake’s business end was 8.5 feet away, and I was standing by if Jake so much as turned in that direction (which he didn’t); but, for the record, I’m sure he could have made a meal of Leo if he had the inclination and give a chance. We thought it would be interesting to see what Jake would do if we put him in the lawn, given that he’d never been outside of a house, except on my brother-in-law’s shoulder. He acted like he was born to it, and just went slithering along. This was in our front yard, and passing cars came to a screeching halt when they saw a large snake in the yard. I should say, we were snake-sitting when my sister and bro-in-law went on a long trip, perhaps their honeymoon (don’t quite recall the details).