Smokey the cat, as loud as a 747: Now with video and audio!

March 29, 2011 • 3:22 pm

by Matthew Cobb

The BBC website reports the case of Smokey, a cat whose owner, Mrs Adams, claims that her pet is the noisiest cat in the world. Indeed, the claim is that she is sixteen times louder than your average cat, @ 73dB, which allegedly makes her as loud as a 747. They don’t explain quite how close they placed the mike, but Ray Meadham from Northampton College said “The recording equipment we used to record Smokey’s purr included a Rode microphone, Logic music software and a category 1 sound meter which measures decibels – it’s the same equipment music professionals use.”

Smokey the cat
Smokey thinking about purring but not quite sure what the camera is

Smokey will be submitted to that definitive journal of all things extreme, the Guinness Book of Records. But in the best tradition of 17th century science, they already had some reliable witnesses: “Daventry MP Chris Heaton-Harris, veterinary nurse Kaye James, Diana Johnson from Cats Protection, and British Airways captain Alisdair Tait.”

Smokey the cat
Smokey with her owner. This is a silent photo.

[EDIT] Reader CarlosT, in comment #10 below posted this link to a UK TV news item, which includes the sound of Smokey! “To me, the cat sounds like an owl” he says.  Smokey’s been recorded at 85 decibels, equivalent to a pneumatic drill operating 50 feet away.

This is what a normal cat sounds like: this is Ollie, who scandalously scratched Jerry’s nose when he came to visit a couple of years ago. You have to listen closely.

Life living on death: part 2

March 29, 2011 • 6:39 am

About ten days ago I posted a lovely video by Sam (Samantha) Taylor-Wood showing the time-lapse decay of a dead hare. There was also a peach in it, which remained unsullied while the hare turned into a maggot laden stew. Today we have the complementary video: what happens to a basket of fruit over time.  You might be surprised.

I think she kept the Drosophila away.

Talks in Maryland

March 28, 2011 • 8:02 pm

It was a very long day here at College Park, but it was great being back where I got my first academic job nearly thirty years ago.  I hadn’t returned since I moved to Chicago in 1986, so it was fun to revisit my old windowless office and see the few colleagues I had that still remain.

I gave two talks.  Over at Snail’s Tails, Aydin Orstan reports on the first one, the scientific seminar on my fly research (there’s a picture, too).

The evening talk, which involved the evidence for evolution as well as some religion-criticizing and atheism-promotion, was fun, with the predictable pushback questions from faitheists.  I got to meet the estimable Jason Rosenhouse (the good J. R.!), who drove three hours from his home to meet me.  He was younger than I imagined.

The most frequent question, given that I emphasized religion’s deleterious effects on not only the acceptance of evolution but on numerous other aspects of human life (you know the drill) was this: how do you know that a world full of atheists would better than the religious world we have now?  More than one person wondered whether there’s simply an innate evil side to human nature that finds expression in religion, but would find equal expression in a world of atheists.

My answer involved the a-religious societies (e.g. Denmark, Sweden) that seem socially healthier than religious countries like America and Iran, as well as the palpable fact that religion gives people an excuse to behave immorally—which they don’t see as immorality because they’re acting according to religious dogma. I mentioned Hitchens’s challenge: “Name one moral action performed by a believer that could not have been done by a nonbeliever,” followed by his ancillary challenge: “Name one immoral action that could only have been performed by a believer.”  There are no good answers to the first challenge, but many to the second.  Now you can argue that believers perform a larger number of moral actions than nonbelievers (I believe there are some data about the faithful donating more to charity), but these must be offset by the larger number of religiously-inspired evil acts.

The belief that a world of atheism would be as bad or worse than the religious world we now inhabit seems widespread but insupportable.  Would atheists throw acid in the faces of Afghani schoolgirls?  Or prohibit people from using condoms?  Or stone women for adultery?  Or torture children with thoughts of eternal hellfire for masturbating?  Why on earth would they?  Or, would those atheists simply commit alternative but equally awful deeds?

I’m with Steven Weinberg’s notion that “With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil—that takes religion.” That’s a bit of an exaggeration, but there’s little doubt that when you think you have God-given truth, and are enforcing what you see as divine command, you can do terrible things that you would never even consider as an unbeliever.

Bertrand Russell and expert opinion

March 28, 2011 • 12:41 pm

by Greg Mayer

Jerry has posted a few times (here, here, and here) about a paper in Nature by Nowak, Tarnita and Wilson which claims that kin selection is a concept of little or no value. Several critiques of this paper are now in press in Nature, including one by Abbot et al., of which Jerry is a coauthor, along with 136 others. In mentioning his paper here at WEIT, Jerry wrote

The list of authors and their institutions, which occupies two pages of the three-page letter, reads like a Who’s Who of social evolution.  It’s telling that nearly every major figure in the field lined up against Nowak et al.

WEIT reader Dr. I. Needtob Athe commented on this that

I’m confident that you’re on the right side of this dispute, but still, that argument is uncomfortably reminiscent of an infamous book titled “Hundert Autoren gegen Einstein” (Hundred authors against Einstein) [1931.]

The commenter implies that the number of people supporting a proposition is not an argument in its favor, which logically, of course, it isn’t. It’s the well-known logical fallacy of argumentum ad populum. As Jerry rightly pointed out, that doesn’t mean the proposition is wrong, either (which commenters humorously denoted the argumetum contra populum or argumentum nonpopulum).

The more interesting issue to my mind though is that there is a pragmatics, as well as a logic, of argument. Most of what we hold to be well supported propositions are based not on arguments or evidence directly examined by us, but are based on evidence or experience of others.

I’ve never been to London. If pressed, though, I could put together a pretty good case for its existence. Much of my case would depend upon the use of expert or reliable sources. While logically such arguments do not compel assent, they are nonetheless valuable, and provide a pragmatic guide to assessing claims.  Bertrand Russell, I think, got the pragmatics of assessing expert opinion right in Let the People Think (1941):

(1) that when the experts are agreed, the opposite opinion cannot be held to be certain; (2) thet when they are not agreed, no opinion can be regarded as certain by a non-expert; and (3) that when they all hold that no sufficient grounds for a positive opinion exist, the ordinary man would do well to suspend his judgment.

Bertrand Russell from Wikipedia.

Note that Russell advises us on how to apportion our doubt, rather than our belief– a pragmatics of skepticism, rather than belief.

We must also ask who is an expert. Maria Reichenbach, in an introduction to her husband, Hans Reichenbach‘s, The Theory of Relativity and A Priori Knowledge (U. Cal Press, 1965), writes of 100 Autoren gegen Einstein this way:

In contrast to philosophers sympathetic to Einstein’s ideas were philosophers of the more speculative bend who tried to refute his theory. A collection of articles pretending to disprove the theory of relativity is entitled  100 Autoren gegen Einstein. The tenor and content of these “contributions” sound unbelievable if not intentionally funny from our present viewpoint.

So, the hundred authors are not physicists, but mostly philosophers. But expertise in one area does not necessarily translate into expertise in all (think William Shockley).

The take home message then is not that Jerry and 136 other evolutionary biologists are right by virtue of their numbers; but rather that the fact that (nearly) all experts agree means that we cannot hold the contrary view  (that of Nowak et al.) to be certain.

_________________________________________________________

Abbot, P. et al. 2011. Inclusive fitness theory and eusociality. Nature 471: in press. (abstract only)

Nowak, M. A., C. E. Tarnita and E. O. Wilson.  2010.  The evolution of eusociality.  Nature 466: 1057-1062. (abstract only)

Playful cervids

March 28, 2011 • 11:41 am

by Matthew Cobb

Here’s a great video of an elk calf playing in a puddle. I noticed it on someone’s FB wall this morning, but it appears to have been on Youtube for around 18 months. I couldn’t trace the original posting of it, so don’t know who to credit The most frequently viewed version has a soundtrack with a Brandenburg Concerto on it, which was rather odd. I prefer this silent version.

If the number of similar Youtube videos are anything to go by, this is not an unusual behaviour. Here’s Picnic, a tame deer:

And here are some fawns doing similar silly things:

Apart from going “ahhh, how cute!” we have to ask ourselves the question: what is the advantage (if any) of this behaviour> Is it simply play? Presumably so, as animal “play” is generally performed by young individuals and is thought to be a form of learning to behave in particular ways. and on this (extremely small!) sample, it would appear to be an immature behaviour. Is it related to puddles? That is, do baby deer do the same thing on dry patches of earth? If not, what is it about water that they are learning? Estimating depth? I’m afraid I don’t buy the “they’re just having fun” argument, no matter how much it looks like that. Even when they play with a sprinkler, like in this scene from an Alaskan’s back yard (we don’t get things like this in Manchester!):

Hoffmann debate continues

March 28, 2011 • 4:38 am

Last week I posted on Jacques Berlinerblau and R. Joseph Hoffmann’s attacks on Gnu Atheists, both accusing Gnus of being not only politically ineffective and clueless, but also completely ignorant about the history of atheism.  Over at Butterflies and Wheels, a post by Ophelia Benson has inspired a lively discussion, with Hoffmann defending his accusations and everybody else piling on.  I’ve contributed a bit, too.  It’s heartening to see the quality of argument produced by fellow atheists.

Hoffmann continues to maintain, in the face of the facts, that Gnus have had no success in promoting atheism.  He waves his credentials and makes a familiar last-ditch argument by those beleaguered:

And btw, my field is history of religion, and my reputation in that area confers at least as much right to be taken seriously as Mr Coyne’s. The ferocity and insecurity of the responses I have received strongly indicates that there was something worth…mentioning.

Does this remind readers of The Intersection of a similar defense: “I must have struck a nerve”?  There are, of course, other reasons besides nerve-striking for fierce responses to such an arrogant accusation.

In better news, I petted baby pigs and lambs this weekend.

 

Another rabbi embarrasses me

March 27, 2011 • 5:34 am

You might remember Rabbi Adam Jacobs, who proved God by using the god-of-the-gaps argument with respect to the origin of life. That, in turn, led to the appearance on this site of another rabbi, Moshe Averick, who apparently thinks that the origin of life by natural means was impossible since the first fossil organisms we have were already cyanobacteria.  Averick demonstrated remarkable tenacity at “debating” by simply holding on to his original position, like a dog with his teeth in the postman’s leg.

The whole thing taught me a lesson: Jews can be just as willfully misguided about evolution as Christians like William Dembski or Michael Behe.

Adam Jacobs is back again, embarrassing me (and all atheistic Jews) with another PuffHo piece,  “Atheism’s odd relationship with morality.”  The relationship, of course, is that if you’re an atheist and think that free will is illusory, you have no reason to be moral:

What difference could it possibly make what one random collection of electrons does to another? He harbors some subjective notion that things ought not be done that way? Well tough darts. It boils down to his meaningless assertion vs. their equally meaningless one. Furthermore, if there is no such thing as free will, then what sense does it make to blame anyone for any action whatsoever? “I felt like it” or “I couldn’t help myself” should be considered perfectly reasonable defenses to any “wrong-doing.” In fact, the most sensible and logically consistent outgrowth of the atheist worldview should be permission to get for one’s self whatever one’s heart desires at any moment (assuming that you can get away with it).

He goes on to justify racism as the natural outgrowth of Darwinism:

Furthermore, doesn’t Darwinism suggest that certain groups within a given population will develop beneficial mutations, essentially making them “better” than other groups? It would seem that racism would again be a natural conclusion of this worldview — quite unlike the theistic approach which would suggest that people have intrinsic value do to their creation in the “image of God.”

I don’t want to sound like Berlinerblau and Hoffmann, but I do recommend that the good rabbi do a bit of reading. That would include Steve Pinker’s chapter on punishment and determinism in The Blank Slate, where he sees the true value of punishment as deterrence: an environmental intervention that deterministically controls people’s willingness to commit crimes.  The value of punishment, as well as milder sanctions like shunning and disapprobabion, are independent of whether or not we have free will (and I don’t believe we do, at least in the conventional sense of a “ghost in the brain”).

And maybe Jacobs would like to read some of the many books, starting with Frans de Waal, on how morality might be at least partially evolved in our species—an adaptation that enabled us to live in cohesive groups.   Evolved morality, buttressed by universal social strictures, may well explain the feeling (emphasized by Marc Hauser) that many moral strictures feel innate—that we often have a gut response rather than a reasoned one about why things are right or wrong. (This holds, for example, for moral dilemmas like the trolley problem. If you haven’t read about that one, do so, for it’s fascinating.)

Perhaps this gut response is what Francis Collins means by “The Moral Law”: our innate sense of right and wrong.  And Jacobs, like Collins, thinks that there can be only one source for this law—God (well, Collins might append Jebus as well).  Jacobs:

At the end of the day, the reason that I can agree with many of the moral assertions that these atheists make is because they are not truly outgrowths of their purported philosophies, but rather of mine. I would suspect that the great majority of the atheistic understanding of morality comes directly or indirectly from what is commonly referred to as the Judeo-Christian ethic.

Maybe I should also recommend that Jacobs read Plato, who pointed out four hundred years before purported Christ that “piety” (for this you can read “morality”) cannot issue directly from the gods, since if gods loved impiety (read “immorality”) we would not adhere to their will. This shows that we have standards for morality independent of what gods dictate. Many later philosophers also noted this dilemma.

The conclusion that morality cannot come from gods seems so obvious to me that I’m baffled why people like Collins and Jacobs believe otherwise.  Well, maybe Jacobs just believes that morality doesn’t necessarily come from God, but that religion itself buttresses morality.  And in some cases it does, though I much prefer a morality that comes from secular reason than one associated with a despotic sky-father.  For one thing, religion also buttresses immorality. Some people’s “Judeo-Christian ethics” foster discrimination against gays and women, prohibit condoms and many types of sex, and completely condemn abortion, even when the mother’s life is in danger. (I often wonder what people would think about abortion were there no religion.)

Other religions’ “ethics” call for killing apostates or those who draw the Prophet, stoning adulterers, and killing “witches”.   None of these horrific acts are part of the secular ethics espoused by atheists.

Finally, has the Rabbi noticed that his own holy book, the Old Testament, sanctions a lot of actions that we’d consider immoral today, like genocide, stoning for violating the Sabbath, and death for homosexual acts?  If we are to do god’s will, why not that will?

I’m pretty sure that Rabbi Jacobs, like nearly all Christians and Jews, picks and chooses his Biblically-based ethics.  Why? Because he has an innate sense of what actions are right or wrong, or because he doesn’t think that god’s expressed will comports with modern secular reason and “well being.”

Those, by the way, are also the sources of atheist ethics.

Let us not confuse the idea that ethics come from god with the observation that ethics are promoted by religions. The first notion is wholly false, the second only partly true.

Happy birthday, Richard

March 26, 2011 • 1:42 pm

Professor Dawkins has reached the first day of his eighth decade, and let’s wish him many more good years. For the years he has had, I’m grateful for his

  • Being the most lucid and engrossing popular writer on evolution, thereby teaching a huge number of people about the supreme achievement of the human intellect: the true story of where we—and by “we” I mean every species—came from;
  • Inspiring many younger people, including me, to become evolutionary biologists, thus giving him a widely extended academic phenotype;
  • Having publicized and popularized the gene-centered view of evolution, which, though under attack by some ambitious miscreants, is still standing tall; and
  • Becoming through numerous writings and appearances the world’s most famous activist for atheism—thereby giving thousands of people the courage to go public with their godlessness.

Any one of these would be enough for a lifetime, but he’s done all that and more. I’m proud to call him my friend.

Instead of just saying, “Happy birthday,” why don’t we tell him how he influenced us?

How can you top this for fame?