The First Amendment v. the Ten Commandments

August 27, 2010 • 6:44 am

Congressional hearings for a nominated Supreme Court justice have become a sham.  I remember watching John Roberts wriggle like an eel, desperate to avoid giving anybody the impression that he might decide the law with a conservative bias.  But we all knew he would, and he has.  Elena Kagan isn’t exempt: she once argued that potential justices should be fairly open at their Senate vetting, but she changed her mind when she was in the hot seat.

For some years the conservative majority of the Court has systematically enforced a reactionary agenda on our country. What’s almost as disingenuous as the Senate hearings is watching the conservative justices try to sneak Christianity into our government, all the while pretending that the rationale is, after all, purely secular.

Yesterday, Linda Greenhouse, the Supreme Court watchdog for the New York Times, reported on the case of McCreary County v. American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky. The case involves two Kentucky counties where courthouses displayed the Ten Commandments. Five years ago the Supreme Court upheld a lower court finding that these displays violated the Constitution’s establishment clause.  But the vote was only 5-4, and now it’s very likely the vote would go the other way.  And the McCreary case is back again. Greenhouse discusses the issues, and the very real possibility that the Court, by allowing the displays, would chip away at the wall between church and state in America.

Fig. 1.  The McCreary County display.  As Greenhouse reports, “Faced with a lawsuit, they retooled the display to make the Commandments part of a bigger collection of documents, most of which happened to be religiously oriented, including the national motto, “In God We Trust,” and a statement by Abraham Lincoln that “the Bible is the best gift God has ever given to man.”

Too see how the majority might rule this time, have a look at how, in his 2005 dissent, Antonin Scalia argued that the government is indeed entitled to favor religion over nonreligion:

Nor have the views of our people on this matter significantly changed. Presidents continue to conclude the Presidential oath with the words “so help me God.” Our legislatures, state and national, continue to open their sessions with prayer led by official chaplains. The sessions of this Court continue to open with the prayer “God save the United States and this Honorable Court.” Invocation of the Almighty by our public figures, at all levels of government, remains commonplace. Our coinage bears the motto “IN GOD WE TRUST.” And our Pledge of Allegiance contains the acknowledgment that we are a Nation “under God.” As one of our Supreme Court opinions rightly observed, “We are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being.” Zorach v. Clauson, 343 U.S. 306, 313 (1952), repeated with approval in Lynch v. Donnelly, 465 U.S. 668, 675 (1984); Marsh, 463 U.S., at 792; Abington Township, supra, at 213.     With all of this reality (and much more) staring it in the face, how can the Court possibly assert that “ ‘the First Amendment mandates governmental neutrality between … religion and nonreligion,’ ” ante, at 11, and that “[m]anifesting a purpose to favor . . . adherence to religion generally,” ante, at 12, is unconstitutional? Who says so? . . .

Historical practices thus demonstrate that there is a distance between the acknowledgment of a single Creator and the establishment of a religion. The former is, as Marsh v. Chambers put it, “a tolerable acknowledgment of beliefs widely held among the people of this country.” Id., at 792. The three most popular religions in the United States, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam–which combined account for 97.7% of all believers–are monotheistic. See U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Bureau of Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2004—2005, p. 55 (124th ed. 2004) (Table No. 67). All of them, moreover (Islam included), believe that the Ten Commandments were given by God to Moses, and are divine prescriptions for a virtuous life. See 13 Encyclopedia of Religion 9074 (2d ed. 2005); The Qur’an 104 (M. Haleem trans. 2004). Publicly honoring the Ten Commandments is thus indistinguishable, insofar as discriminating against other religions is concerned, from publicly honoring God. Both practices are recognized across such a broad and diverse range of the population—from Christians to Muslims—that they cannot be reasonably understood as a government endorsement of a particular religious viewpoint.

I really do believe that religion is on the wane in America, and that this process is helped along by public pronouncements of atheism and criticisms of religion. But religion won’t go gentle into this good fight.  Cases like McCreary are part of religious America’s pushback against what they see as a fatal erosion of values.

Peregrine Friday: a farewell to falcons

August 27, 2010 • 5:02 am

Today brings us to the end of Peregrine Week, celebrating one of evolution’s marvels.  I’ve bought new binoculars just to see these birds—there are over a dozen pairs in Chicago, some right here on campus—and I’ll be watching the nests come spring.  And if you’ve liked the excerpts from J. A. Baker’s The Peregrine, by all means buy the book.

Here’s a video of a peregrine repeatedly dive-bombing a flock of starlings.  Notice how during the attack they stay together as a group; this is almost certainly for protection.  A falcon can’t simply dive into a big flock of starlings, hoping to catch one—that would be suicide.  It has to single out one bird and go for it.  And that’s hard when all the birds are so thickly massed together.  Note too how the birds seem to move as a unit.

The huge flocks of starlings that form in the evening, and are often seen in Britain, are called murmurations.  They can number in the hundreds of thousands.  The video below explains some theories about why these huge flocks form, but one of the biggest mysteries is how so many birds can move together so quickly, changing direction almost instantly.  You’d think that if each bird followed its neighbor, a flock could change direction no more quickly than the sum of individual reaction times of the birds across the diameter.  But it’s much quicker than that.  Do the birds follow birds on the periphery of the flock rather than their neighbors?  Who decides to change direction?  This is an unsolved problem in animal behavior.

Below we see a huge murmuration of starlings in England, near Oxford.  I’ve had the privilege of seeing this once in my life: near St. Andrews in Scotland.  It’s an aurora borealis of birds!

The recovery of the peregrine falcon, once on the verge of extinction, is one of the great success stories of conservation. This video tells you a bit about it.

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[The hawk] returned an hour later, and perched in an apple tree at the edge of open ploughland.  I sat and watched him from thirty yards, away from all cover.  After two minutes of uneasy glaring, he flew straight at me as though intending to attack.  He swept up into the wind before he reached me, and hovered twenty feet over my head, looking down.  I felt as a mouse must feel, crouching unconcealed in shallow grass, cringing and hoping.  The hawk’s keen-bladed face seemed horribly close.  The glazed inhuman eyes—so foreign and remote—swivelled like brown globes in the long sockets of the moustachial bars. The badger-colored face was vivid and sharp against the sky.  I could not look away from the crushing light of those eyes, from the impaling horn of that curved bill. Many birds are snared in the tightening loop of his gaze.  They turn their heads towards him as they die. He returned to the tree, unsatisfied, and I left him alone for a while.

–J. A. Baker, The Peregrine

Darwin wrong—again??

August 26, 2010 • 7:38 am

You may have seen a small flurry of reports this week about a science paper showing that “Darwin was wrong.”  The paper wasn’t a creationist or ID screed, however—it was a paper in a good science journal (Biology Letters) by a crack team of paleontologists from the UK and Canada (Sarda Sahney, Michael Benton, and Paul Ferry). What did the paper say? Did it really show that Darwin was wrong? I’m here to answer your questions.

What did the paper say? It reported a correlation in the fossil record between the number of tetrapods (four-legged vertebrates) existing at different times and the number of ecological ” modes of life” those species adopted, all over the 400-million-year period since vertebrates colonized the land.  To be exact, it divided up that time period into 66 sub-periods, and in each sub-period the authors totted up the number of tetrapod families that were represented by fossils and the number of modes of life they adopted.  Here’s the time plot showing that, as the families diversified exponentially over this period, so did the number of modes of life adopted, with the changes almost in lockstep:

What do they mean by a “mode of life”? The authors defined a “mode of life” as the ecology of a species that fit into one of three body size categories (length less than 15 cm, between 15 and 150 cm, and greater than 150 cm), one of 16 diet categories (browser, nectar, molluscs, carrion, and so on), and one of 6 habitat categories (marine, arboreal, subterranean, and so on).  This gave 288 potential modes of life (3 x 16 x 6), only 75 of which were actually seen.

If you simply plot, among all 66 time periods, a graph of the number of families existing at a given time with the number of modes of life they occupied during that period, you see a very tight correlation:

What does this correlation mean? The authors interpret the tight fit between biodiversity (number of families) and ecological diversity (number of modes of life seen among those families) to mean that what drove tetrapod diversity over this period was open niche space: ecological opportunities that had not yet been realized.  They oppose this to another explanation that, they say, their data did not support: diversification was driven not by the availability of ecological space, but by competitiion.  The competition theory would, say the authors, predict that as organisms began to lose elbow room, they would simply subdivide their already-occupied “modes of life” into finer ones.  If competition drove diversification, then, you wouldn’t see such a tight correlation between modes of life and diversity.

Is this interpretation correct? I’m not so sure.  The problem is that it might not be possible to separate the “force” of competition from the selective pressure to occupy new niches.  After all, animals may be driven to adopt new modes of life by competition itself.  The occupation of the land by ancestral fish may, for example, have been the result of selection to reduce competition for prey by finding a nice new place with lots of prey (insects) and fewer competititors.  I don’t think that showing a correlation between “modes of life” and “number of families” tells us that competition did not play a big role in driving that diversity.  In other words, I am not convinced that, at least from the fossil data, you can separate competition from ecological opportunity.

Also, it’s possible that some of the correlation is an artifact.  It may be—and I’m not sure of this because I’m not a paleobiologist—that different taxonomic families are partially recognized by large differences in characters like body size and adaptations to diet or habitat.  In that case you only get a new family when there’s a sufficiently large difference in what we’d recognize as a “mode of life.”  This would be true regardless of the evolutionary force driving the difference.  And to the extent that this is the case, it devalues the correlation as a way to recognize process.

This doesn’t mean the paper is bad. Far from it—it’s a very good (and laborious!) correlation between ecology and diversity, and the correlations between them do demand explanation.  I’m just not sure if the authors’ answer is the right one.

Where did the “Darwin was wrong” stuff come from? It comes from the notion that Darwin saw competition as a major cause of ecological diversity.  There is some justification for this: in The Origin, for example, the only figure (the famous “tree of life”) shows an increase in diversity over time, with Darwin attributing this to competition between species for niche space.  His “principle of divergence” maintained that organisms inhabiting a small area would always be competing with each other, and would benefit by seizing on slightly different niches to reduce that competition.  A grass, for example, might inhabit soils of different moisture content to avoid competing for space with other grasses.

We shouldn’t think, though, that Darwin saw competition as the overweening force in promoting biological diversity.  In The Origin he adduces other factors, including simple adaptation to physical factors (“a plant on the edge of a desert is said to struggle for life against the drought”), and to biotic features like predators and parasites.  I think that Darwin may have seen biotic factors as a whole (which include but are not limited to competition), as important drivers of diversity, and emphasized them so that his readers would see that natural selection didn’t solely promote responses to the physical, non-biotic environment.

So did the paper show that Darwin was wrong? Hardly.  As I said above, I don’t think the authors ruled out competition as an important force in ecological diversity.  Indeed, you could almost construe the data as supporting Darwin, who emphasized throughout The Origin that the more different species were, the better their chances of leaving descendants. (See pp. 111-125 of the first edition of The Origin for this view.)  He emphasizes, for instance, that plants have a better chance of invading a new area if they were already quite different from the species that were already there.

But of course Darwin was wrong about many things. Nobody pretends that the man was a god, or omniscient.  He was dead wrong, for instance, about genetics.  We know a lot more about biology now than we did in Darwin’s time, and we can see that his ideas were often incomplete or incorrect.  So it’s bizarre to see every modern discovery through a lens of either supporting or refuting his ideas.  If we did that, every paper in genetics could be sold to science journalists as showing that Darwin was wrong about inheritance!  We’ve moved on. It’s amazing how right Darwin was—that’s one of the reasons he’s a hero to many of us—but, like all scientists, his ideas get supplanted and revised.

Why did the press sell the paper this way? Hype, pure and simple.  A paper on taxonomic diversity over time gets a lot more interest if it can be said to disprove Darwin. I suppose there’s some residual anti-evolution or anti-Darwin sentiment in all this.  Here are some of the headlines about the Sahney et al. paper:

BBC:

Montreal Gazette:

Slate:

And, of course, the good old HuffPo:

Who’s responsible for this hype? I’d like to think it was just the press, for they always love a controversy.  But I’m curious how all these different journalists managed to hit on the same Darwin-was-wrong hook.  Are a lot of science journalists really conversant enough with Darwin to immediately and independently see a Biology Letters paper as refuting his ideas? Well, maybe one of them did it and was copied by the others.  But I wonder whether the authors, or the authors’ universities, or even the journal, issued a press release that sold the paper as a “Darwin refuter.” I posted a query to this effect on Sahney’s website (she’s the first author), but my query hasn’t show up.

__________

Sahney, S., M. J. Benton, and P. A. Ferry.  2010.  Links between global taxonomic diversity, ecological diversity and the expansion of vertebrates on land.  Biology Letters 6:544-547.  doi:10.1098/rsbl.2009.1024

h/t: David Reznick, for Darwin discussion

Peregrine Thursday

August 26, 2010 • 5:33 am

Peregrines have several techniques for killing on the wing.  The first involves bashing into a bird with the feet clenched into “fists,” knocking it out of the air (and perhaps out in general).  The peregrine then retrieves the bird on the ground.   In the second, the classic “stoop” kill, it swoops down on its prey from above, grasping it with its terrible talons.  If the bird is small this can kill it immediately.  If it doesn’t the peregrine takes the bird to ground and finishes the kill, usually with a bite that breaks its neck.  Like all members of the falcon family, the peregrine has a special adaptation for breaking necks—the tomial tooth, a sharp projection on the upper beak that can sever spinal cords with a single nip:

A birdy colleague of mine pointed out that while a bite with the tomial tooth may paralyze the prey, it may not kill it, so that the prey could be plucked and eaten while still alive.

Finally, for large birds like ducks, there’s a danger of swooping in from above, since the large, flapping wings of the prey could cause an accident.  But the peregrine can take these birds from below, which means flying upside down at the moment it grabs the bird.  Large prey taken this way may not be killed in the air; they’re taken to ground and dispatched there.

Here’s a peregrine using the “bash” technique on a much larger red-tailed hawk (Buteo jamaicensis) that it sees as a threat to its young.  I’m not sure what happened after the hawk was bashed from the air; it may very well have died.

And here’s a peregrine coming back to its trainer at high speed.  The landing is a bit awkward!

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Near the brook a heron lay in frozen stubble.  Its wings were stuck to the ground by frost, and the mandibles of its bill were frozen together.  Its eyes were open and living, the rest of it was dead.  All was dead but the fear of man.  As I approached I could see its whole body craving into flight. But it could not fly.  I gave it peace, and saw the agonised sunlight of its eyes slowly heal with cloud.

No pain, no death, is more terrible to a wild creature than its fear of man. A red-throated diver, sodden and obscene with oil, able to move only its head, will push itself out from the sea-wall with its bill if you reach down to it as it floats like a log in the tide.  A poisoned crow, gaping and helplessly floundering in the grass, bright yellow foam bubbling from its throat, will dash itself up again and again on to the descending wall of air, if you try to catch it.  A rabbit, inflated and foul with myxomatosis, just a twitching pulse bleating in a bladder of bones and fur, will feel the vibration of your footstep and will look for you with bulging, sightless eyes.  Then it will drag itself away into a bush, trembling with fear.

We are the killers. We stink of death. We carry it with us.  It sticks to us like frost.  We cannot tear it away.

—J. A. Baker, The Peregrine

Francis Collins is stunned

August 25, 2010 • 3:20 pm

Francis Collins is appalled by the new decision of a federal judge to enforce a moratorium on federally-funded research using stem cells derived from human embryos. In the interim, the NIH has to stop considering and supporting such research.  The Scientist reports:

“Frankly, I was stunned, as was virtually everyone here at NIH, by the judicial decision yesterday,” he said. “This decision has the potential to do serious damage to one of the most promising areas of biomedical research, and just at the time when we were really gaining momentum. . . “If this decision stands,” Collins said, “very promising research on human diseases on which we need new insights and new options will not get done. Screening for new drugs using hESCs, a very promising way to discover new compounds, will stop. Researchers, who have been so energized by the opportunities made available over the last year, will likely grow discouraged, maybe move on to other countries or other fields of research. We will lose the momentum.”

He continued: “This is one of the most exciting areas of the broad array of engines of discovery that NIH supports. This decision has just poured sand into that engine of discovery.”

Well, it’s good of Collins to defend a line of research that, by using excess frozen embryos that would be discarded anyway, has enormous potential to alleviate the suffering of live, unfrozen people.  I applaud him for standing up for research versus superstition.  But he surely must realize that the strongest opposition to that research comes from his own confrères: conservative Christians wielding the very same “moral law” that they all see as given by God.  I’d like to hear why Collins considers his understanding of The Divine Moral Law better than that other people.

h/t: Hempenstein

Should religion get a pass?

August 25, 2010 • 6:28 am

I’m beginning to see posts on various skeptical/rationalist/atheist websites arguing—or implying—that religion should be immune from the kind of critical scrutiny we give to other superstitions. The latest, “A rational approach to irrationality” by Quinn O’Neill, appeared two days ago at 3 Quarks Daily.  Apart from her making the usual “we’re-alienating-our-allies-with-our-stridency” argument (it references Phil Plait’s DBAD talk), she takes an unusual tack:  telling skeptics to lay off religion because our goal of maximizing rationality is misguided.  We should instead be trying to maximize well being, and that may involve accepting our fellows’ delusions. (Sam Harris take note!)

It might seem, given these benefits, that improving rationality would improve well-being.  But irrationality has its perks.  Delusions can provide comfort.  They can give us confidence, hope, or a sense of purpose.  Superstitions can improve athletic performance, and psychics and astrologers can help people deal with the discomfort of not knowing what the future holds.  The most rational objective, then, is not necessarily to have everyone be completely rational but rational to the extent that optimizes well-being.

If we are to be rational and scientific, we ought to appreciate the value of diversity and the role of evolution in shaping our minds.  We are predisposed to delusional thinking because our brains have evolved this way; it was evolutionarily advantageous.  It is human nature to be somewhat delusional.  To expect people to be perfectly rational is to ask us to defy our own nature.  It isn’t reasonable.

This sounds suspiciously like the let’s-not-take-grandma’s-comfort-from-her argument, gilded a bit with the naturalistic fallacy.  We may also have evolved to be sexist and xenophobic, but that doesn’t mean that we should give up trying to extirpate racism and sexism from our world. After all, by asking people to stop disliking foreigners, or those of different races, we may be asking them to defy their own nature.

Further, most of us, I think, aren’t interested in rooting out irrationality for its own sake.  Few of us want to tell grandma, on her deathbed, that she’s not going to sing in the choir invisible—she’s worm food.  We want to eliminate irrationality in proportion to its malign effects.  Astrology?  Yawn.  UFO abduction? Another yawn.  Yetis?  zzzzzz . . . .Homeopathy?  Here irrationality has some bad effects, and is worth fighting.  Ditto with HIV denial, global-warming denial, and opposition to vaccination.

And religion?  It’s harmful more often than we may think.  Take a faith that is common and often seen as benign:  Catholicism.  One in five Americans is a Catholic; we have nearly 70 million of them in the U.S.  Surely that faith does no harm!  But the Catholic church promulgates doctrines that foster the subjugation of women, the opposition to condom use to eliminate AIDS or control overpopulation, and the sexual exploitation of children. (Many Catholics, of course, oppose these things, but you can’t deny that Catholic dogma itself has malign effects.)  And how many children does the Church warp, often for life, with its threats of eternal damnation for masturbating or cursing?

And of course religion in general has multiple bad effects.  It promotes hatred, wars, oppression of women, and persecution of gays. It instills people with deep sexual guilt and psychological torment about hell and heaven.  It instills a morality that opposes rational goals like saving the environment, advancing medical research (e.g., the new stem-cell prohibitions), and eliminating AIDS.  It makes people mutilate the genitals of their daughters, fly airplanes into buildings, burn “witches,” and throw acid in the faces of schoolgirls.  And of course, it has the pernicious (but less severe) effect of fighting things like the teaching of evolution.

If all religious people were like Quakers, who don’t engage in invidious social action, warp their children, or try to impose a God-given morality on their rest of us, I doubt that many of us would be so vociferous in opposing faith.  But of course for O’Neill, who doesn’t mention the bad effects of religion, all faiths are like the Quakers.  And, she insists, we must respect them:

Personal and vitriolic attacks on religious individuals are also inconsistent with religious freedom.  If we value religious freedom, respect for people’s right to hold irrational beliefs is in order (so long as the beliefs don’t infringe on the rights of others).  Respecting freedom of religion means accepting the fact that not everyone will freely choose our worldview.  If we encourage people to think for themselves, we must accept that others will come to different conclusions.

And besides, irrationality promotes art, music, and literature!

But just as we need scientists and other professionals who have a proclivity for reason and empiricism, we need artists and people who feel their way through the world.  Such people may be better able to create great works of art that move us on a non-rational level.  We are emotional animals; people who understand this aspect of our nature well have much to contribute.

Now we get to the DBAD argument:

However, the response of self-proclaimed rational people to irrationality can also be harmful.  Anyone who’s been around the blogosphere knows that skeptics and atheists can be nasty.  The frustration and anger that underlies the vitriol is understandable, but the nastiness is probably counterproductive.  As Bad Astronomer, Phil Plait, points out in a recent talk, few skeptics have arrived at their convictions as a result of verbal abuse.

There is little evidence to suggest that verbal abuse is an effective persuasion tactic when it comes to irrational thinking.  It might lead some to reject their irrational views, but it’s more likely to cause people to cling to their views more tightly.  It can also reinforce the view that atheists are morally bankrupt jerks.  Verbal abuse, being damaging to self-esteem and having little empirical support, is a hypocritical choice of persuasion tactic for people who claim to base their views on evidence.

Note that O’Neill, like Plait, doesn’t give a shred of evidence for the ubiquity of “verbal abuse.”  (In the comments on her piece, one person mentions the harsh tone of some Pharyngula commenters.)  And she simply takes for granted that our “attacks” are counterproductive.  There’s no evidence for that, either.  Do let us remember, as Richard Dawkins pointed out on this site, that much of our criticism is an attempt not to influence the objects of our opprobrium, but third parties who are listening in and may be more open minded.

Likewise, O’Neill suggests that, in fighting creationism in the public schools, we should not do it by attacking religion. (But really, who does that?).  Rather, we should try to encourage religious instruction at home:

Yet, direct attacks on religion are threatening to religious people and may lead to more aggressive efforts to influence the curriculum.  Perhaps a more effective approach than attacking religion directly would be to encourage parents to share their religion with their children at home or at their respective places of worship.  After all, religious leaders would be best able to provide this type of instruction.

But she directly contradicts herself by arguing that parents shouldn‘t “share their religion with their children at home,” because it brainwashes the kids:

Religious freedom means that individuals have the right to embrace religious beliefs of their own choosing.  It doesn’t mean that parents have the right to systematically indoctrinate their children into their own religion.  On the contrary, it means that their children also have the right to choose their own religious views when they reach the age of reason.  Systematic religious indoctrination that restricts exposure to alternative worldviews limits this freedom.

In the end, O’Neill calls for moderation:

No one is completely rational or completely irrational, but there are people who tend to extremes.  The battle over religion and rationality is one that is fought most viciously by people who are strongly polarized on their respective sides.  The battle, however, is more likely to be won by moderates.

Our potential to improve human well-being ultimately lies not in our ability to maximize rationality, but in our ability to understand human nature and value people with different worldviews.  Success will be most likely if atheists and religious moderates unite for a common goal; not the eradication of religion, but a securely secular society that optimizes well-being and respects our most cherished freedoms.

P.Z. Myers has characterized this as the CTA (“crazy town approach”): “squatting in between those on the side of reason and evidence and those worshipping superstition and myth is not a better place. It just means you’re halfway to crazy town.”  Of course we should try to understand those with different world views.  But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t criticize them.  That’s what freedom of speech is all about: free discussion will lead us more surely to the truth.  And even if we can’t change the minds of the faithful, we might influence those observers who are on the fence—especially the next generation.

Although O’Neill begins by discussing forms of “comforting” irrationality like going to psychics or astrologers, it’s clear that her real interest is in protecting faith.  Like Plait, she seems to feel that we should go easier on religion than on other forms of superstition. But why? It can’t be that religion is less harmful than equally false beliefs in astrology, UFO abduction, or faked moon landings.  Anyone with two neurons to rub together knows that religious superstition does far more harm than these.  No, it can’t be that religion is the most benign of superstitions. In the end, the arguments to go easy on religion all boil down to this claim: it’s the most common form of superstition.  It’s useless to attack it because it’s ubiquitous and entrenched, and we’ll only alienate people if we try. This is the only explanation for why those who can work up such a sweat about creationism in the public schools are so quick to defend faith in general.

But I need hardly point out one lesson of history:  the ubiquity of bad beliefs does not make them immune to change.

Peregrine Wednesday

August 25, 2010 • 5:02 am

What gets many people excited about peregrines is the stoop: the high-speed vertical dive, with wings pressed close to the body, that they use to attack prey from above.  As we saw yesterday, this can exceed 200 mph when the bird is dropped from a high-altitude balloon, though it’s unlikely those speeds are attained in normal hunting.  Today we have two videos of the behavior that makes peregrines the top guns of the animal world.

A little owl’s legs are surprisingly thick and powerful for so small a bird.  They look slightly hairy, like an animal’s legs.  The whole bird looks completely out of proportion when perching, like a two-legged head.  One must try not to be anthropomorphic, yet it cannot be denied that little owls are very funny to watch.  In flight, they are just owls, but at rest they seem to be natural clowns.  They do not know it, of course. And that makes them much funner, for they always appear indignant, outraged, brimming over with choler.  There is nothing funny about their sharp claws and rending beak.  They are killers. That is what they are for.  But whenever I see one close, in a tree, I laugh aloud.

–J. A. Baker, The Peregrine