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.
Reader Stephen Barnard sent some bird photos from Idaho. First a kildeer (Charadrius vociferus). Click to enlarge.
His notes about the next two pics:
Mallards (Anas platyrhynchos) and a Great Blue Heron (Ardea herodias) . I’m surprised the mallard hen let the chicks get so close to the heron. They’re vicious and would eat a duckling like a snack.
A: What are you doing there?
Hili: Manhunting.
Ja: Co tam robisz?
Hili: Poluję na człowieki.
Tomorrow’s a holiday in the U.S.: Independence Day. But Professor Ceiling Cat must polish up his book for submission on July 9, and until then there will be no rest for the professorial felid.
But to get the holiday started on the right foot for those Americans with normal lives, let’s have . . . a CAT. And a SQUIRREL, too!
What’s going on here?
h/t: Andrzej
We’ve had some bad storms here lately, and I’ve been able to watch the lightning from my balcony. Sometimes the lightning is so heavy that the skies seem lit up almost constantly.
But on June 30 we had a real Midwestern corker, one that yielded an amazing video showing a simultaneous lightning strike on Chicago’s three tallest buildings. The details are given at Colossal:
Even by Chicago standards the weather here in the midwestern U.S. has been bizarre and extreme lately. We’ve seen giant walls of fog caused in part by a bitterly cold winter that chilled Lake Michigan, and numerous lightning storms that last for hours. Local videographer Craig Shimala was filming a timelapse of a derecho from his home this week when he managed to capture a triple lightning strike on Chicago’s three tallest buildings: Willis Tower, Trump Tower and the John Hancock Building. Even more incredibly, he filmed the same occurence almost four years ago to the day back in 2010.
Here’s the time-lapse Vimeo video, which is stunning (go to the original site to see it big):
The photographer’s notes:
Gear used. Canon 7D with 8mm fisheye lens, 50mm lens, 17-40mm and a GoPro Hero2
Music: Ocean Death by Baths (soundcloud.com/anticon/baths-ocean-death)
You can see Shimala’s video of an identical triple strike on June 23, 2010 here.
And here’s a photo of the recent triple strike:
h/t: George
There are some intriguing new interactive maps of the UK by DataShine that show you which cities of the country, and which parts of those cities, are most and least religious, and where in each place the various faiths are more common.
The site is a bit slow today, but you can see places divided up not only by degree of belief in, say, Christianity, but in Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, and so on. You can do this for a number of cities (Leeds, Cardiff, Manchester, Liverpool, etc.) and also see the cities divided by language, ethnic group, country of birth, and so on.
Here, for example, are where the Jews of London live, with red being almost none, and the darkest blue being over 3%. I have no idea what this means, for I thought they all lived in Golders Green. (Click to enlarge):
And here are the Muslims, with read again being almost none, and blue being over 29%:
I don’t know how to interpret these, though UK readers will have a better understanding, but it’s clear that cities do have enclaves divided by faith.
The Guardian has a separate piece highlighting Britain’s most atheistic cities, which include Brighton, Norwich, Bristol, and Nottingham. And, of course, Andrew Brown has something to say about that at the Guardian in a piece called “Religion is a toxic brand in some UK cities—but it’s not about atheism.”
As usual, it’s barely coherent. He rabbits on, for instance, about how Muslims live in the East End, and British politicians have to take that into account rather than assuming that London is like Islington, with no Muslims and hardly any believers at all. The point is lost on me.
Brown does, however, take the opportunity to make his usual feints at atheism, to wit (my emphasis):
Oliver O’Brien and James Cheshire’s extraordinary and illuminating heatmaps of Britain’s religious fervour look as if they have a lesson for people interested in religion, and this is that it is fading over large sections of the country. The overall tone is pale pink at best and often completely cyanotic blue.
Looked at more closely, though, and one lesson to emerge is the absolute centrality of religion in today’s politics. The cities where ‘religion’ is the most completely toxic brand – Brighton and Norwich to name two – are also those where green politics are likely to be strongest, and where a strong sense of ethical obligation to the world and to humanity is easiest to appeal to. This may not be theistic, and it certainly isn’t arranged around the worship of one Father God – but it’s not atheist either. A distrust of ‘religion’ often goes alongside a strong belief in ‘spirituality’ and an interest in alternatives.
I barely understood the second paragraph, until I realized that the “most toxic brand of religion” is actually nonbelief. I’m not sure where he gets his data about cities like Brighton and Norwich being places where ethical obligation is most easily invoked. But what I’m pretty sure of is that he’s simply making stuff up about those least religious places being highly spiritual rather than atheist. Unless I’m mistaken, Brown’s trying to make a virtue out of necessity—the UK’s increasing secularism—and claiming that the secularism is actually spirituality rather than atheism. And he sees “the absolute centrality of religion” because he construes nonbelief as “religion.”
Maybe I’m misinterpreting Brown, and I don’t want to spend a lot of time on his piece (not his blog, but a regular column); for the man is low-hanging fruit. And, if I don’t miss my guess, the low-hanging fruit is rotting.
h/t: Coel
Sadly, there’s none, but there are two big games tomorrow and another two on Saturday:
Saturday:
In the meantime, reader Daniel sent me this video of “Neymar vs. Messi.” Neymar dives whenever he gets a chance; Messi, when tackled, may stumble a bit but keeps on going. He’s not a drama llama.
I hate diving.
Hili’s predecessor, the wise but now-deceased tabby cat Pia, used to annoy Andrzej by sticking her whiskers in his ears when he was sleeping. We’ve now discovered that chimps show a related behavior: sticking grass stems in their ears for no good reason.
A new paper in Animal Cognition by Edwin van Leeuwen et al. documents this finding, although its significance is, to me at least, unclear. We already knew that chimps show social imitation of behaviors, like fishing termites from their mounds using a masticated grass stem, or making sponges out of chewed-up leaves to soak up water to drink. The new result here is social learning of a behavior with no clear adaptive significance.
van Leeuwen report this social learning in a captive colony of orphaned chimps in Zambia. In one colony, a chimp named Julie began sticking pieces of grass in her ears for no apparent reason, and then engaging in her normal activities with the grass hanging out of her head. From the paper:
“Grass-in-ear behaviour” (henceforth “GIEB”) was first documented in 2010 when the first author observed one female chimpanzee (Julie) repeatedly putting a stiff, straw-like blade of grass in one or both of her ears. She left the grass hanging out of her ear(s) during subsequent behaviour such as grooming, playing, and resting (Figs. 1, 2 and Online Resource 1); the behaviour served no discernible purpose.
Here are some photos and captions from the paper:
Besides this behavior having no known function, it is clearly passed on socially, beginning with one chimp and then spreading to eight of the twelve others in the troop (two of these did it only once). The authors conclude that, because the behavior wasn’t seen in three of the other four isolated troops in the same area (well, it was one time), “ecological factors were not determiners of the prevalence of this behavior.” Well, that’s true, though perhaps the behavior might have had some connection with ecology (parasite removal?). But I highly doubt that.
The behavior is simply an example, I think, of chimps showing social learning of stupid things. It reminds me of my own youthful behavior when I learned to stick a pair of long soda straws up my nostrils and walk around saying, “Look—I’m a walrus!” Perhaps there’s a decorative element here, and chimps feel that grass hanging out of their ears makes them feel and look attractive, but that’s a stretch. It seems to be simply a spandrel of the social learning that we already know exists in this species.
The authors’ conclusion doesn’t say much, but hey, it’s something you can publish, and is a new result:
Regardless of the precise mechanism underlying the behavioural diffusion, our observations importantly show that chimpanzees spontaneously copy arbitrary behaviour from their group members. In line with Hobaiter and Byrne (2010), we interpret our data as reflecting chimpanzees’ proclivity to actively investigate and learn from group members’ behaviours in order to obtain biologically relevant information. The fact that these behaviours can be arbitrary and outlast the originator speaks to the cultural potential of chimpanzees.
h/t: Ant
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van Leeuwen, E. C., K. Cronin, et al. (2014). “A group-specific arbitrary tradition in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes).” Animal Cognition DO – 10.1007/s10071-014-0766-8: 1-5 LA – English.