Today’s New York Times gives a good review to Hugh Raffles’s new book, Insectopedia, an encyclopedia comprising mini-essays about insects.  Raffles is, of all things, a professor of anthropology at The New School in New York, and has written extensively on insect/human interactions and tropical nature.

The review mentions one intriguing observation: the presence of tons of insects in the air overhead.  My students often wonder, when I’m teaching biogeography, how long-distance migration of insects and spiders takes place, since remote oceanic islands often harbor a lot of endemic arthropods whose ancestors must have come from mainlands.  I talk a bit about this in WEIT (which I don‘t assign to my students), but here’s more detail from the review of Raffles’s book:

First, that square mile over Louisiana in “Air.” In 1926, P. A. Glick, a scientist from the federal Division of Cotton Insect Investigations, and colleagues from the Department of Agriculture, among others, counted about 25 million to 36 million insects, including a ballooning spider they found flying at 15,000 feet, “probably the highest elevation at which any specimen has ever been taken.” (A Boeing transatlantic passenger jet flies at an average of 35,000 to 40,000 feet.) We know how the Boeing gets up there, but the spider’s launch is an aeronautical feat unequaled by aerospace engineers. Here’s how Mr. Raffles describes what Mr. Glick observed: the spiders “not only climb up to an exposed site (a twig or a flower, for instance), stand on tiptoe, raise their abdomen, test the atmosphere, throw out silk filaments, and launch themselves into the blue, all free legs spread eagled, but they also use their bodies and their silk to control their descent and the location of their landing.” His own sense of wonder is infectious: “Thirty-six million little animals flying unseen above one square mile of countryside? The heavens opened.”

Here’s a nice video of spider ballooning and the intrepid biophysicist who studies it.

Walt Whitman:

A noiseless patient spider

I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated,

Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,

It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,

Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

Okay, you know what he’s going to say, but hey, it’s Hitchens!  In his weekly column at Slate, Hitch takes on the Catholic Church’s systematic cover-up of child abuse. He places a lot of blame at the door of to-be-Pope Joseph Ratzinger:

Very much more serious is the role of Joseph Ratzinger, before the church decided to make him supreme leader, in obstructing justice on a global scale. After his promotion to cardinal, he was put in charge of the so-called “Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith” (formerly known as the Inquisition). In 2001, Pope John Paul II placed this department in charge of the investigation of child rape and torture by Catholic priests. In May of that year, Ratzinger issued a confidential letter to every bishop. In it, he reminded them of the extreme gravity of a certain crime. But that crime was the reporting of the rape and torture. The accusations, intoned Ratzinger, were only treatable within the church’s own exclusive jurisdiction. Any sharing of the evidence with legal authorities or the press was utterly forbidden. Charges were to be investigated “in the most secretive way … restrained by a perpetual silence … and everyone … is to observe the strictest secret which is commonly regarded as a secret of the Holy Office … under the penalty of excommunication.” (My italics). Nobody has yet been excommunicated for the rape and torture of children, but exposing the offense could get you into serious trouble. And this is the church that warns us against moral relativism! (See, for more on this appalling document, two reports in the London Observer of April 24, 2005, by Jamie Doward.) . .

. . . The Roman Catholic Church is headed by a mediocre Bavarian bureaucrat once tasked with the concealment of the foulest iniquity, whose ineptitude in that job now shows him to us as a man personally and professionally responsible for enabling a filthy wave of crime. Ratzinger himself may be banal, but his whole career has the stench of evil—a clinging and systematic evil that is beyond the power of exorcism to dispel. What is needed is not medieval incantation but the application of justice—and speedily at that.

Can blame be laid, too, at the door of religion?  I think so.  After all, these crimes are due to a combination of faith-based moral sanctity, inspiring parents to turn their children over to priests for guidance and education, and the twisted Church policies of celibacy and sexual repressiveness, which undoubtedly promoted sexual predation.  Sure, members of other institutions have engaged in child abuse, and sometimes the abusers have been protected, but never on this scale.

Faitheists often cite Catholicism as one of those “benign” faiths.  The sickening conspiracy of silence promoted by Church officials doesn’t look so benign to me.

UPDATE:  Father Peter Hullerman, whom Ratzinger reassigned to a new parish after he was convicted by a German court for child abuse (see Hitchens’s piece), has just been suspended.

This week the Guardian is running a series on “What can Darwin teach us about morality?”

Michael Ruse is the first to answer, and he’s pretty much on good behavior, asserting that morality comes not from God, but from natural selection:

Morality then is not something handed down to Moses on Mount Sinai. It is something forged in the struggle for existence and reproduction, something fashioned by natural selection. It is as much a natural human adaptation as our ears or noses or teeth or penises or vaginas.

Well, let’s put aside the fact that we simply don’t know how much of human morality was built by selection. It seems likely that at least part of our moral instinct evolved in our ancestors, but really, we don’t know that for sure, and we don’t know how much of morality originated that way versus how much were cultural conventions that help us get along.  Perhaps it’s better not to rely so much on natural selection, and to simply point out that most people’s morality can’t come from God, because most people accept a concept of good that is prior to God.  That means that there must be sources of morality more important than religion.

Nevertheless, at least Ruse—for this week—isn’t catering to the faithful.

I said that there are no grounds for being good. It doesn’t follow that you should be bad. Indeed, there are those – and I am one – who argue that only by recognising the death of God can we possibly do that which we should, and behave properly to our fellow humans and perhaps save the planet that we all share. We can give up all of that nonsense about women and gay people being inferior, about fertilised ova being human beings, and about the earth being ours to exploit and destroy.

I agree completely.  What I don’t get, though, is that Ruse has written several books about, and has harped on, the continuing viability of religion, and how it must stand by side with science as a valid “magisterium.”  So what does Ruse mean by “recognizing the death of God”?  Is he really telling Christians, whom he’s repeatedly schmoozed, that “your God is dead. Defunct.  He’s an ex-god.  Bereft of life, he rests in peace“? Well, maybe, in view of the above, it’s petty to quibble about Ruse’s alarmingly ambivalent attitude toward faith.

But I do fault Ruse for the end of his piece, in which he simply can’t resist getting in a slap at the new atheists.

God is dead. The new atheists think that that is a significant finding. In this, as in just about everything else, they are completely mistaken. God is dead. Morality has no foundation. Long live morality. Thank goodness!

Of course it’s significant that “God is dead,” if by that he means that religion is relaxing its hold on the minds of Americans, or people in general.  That’s highly significant. And, anyway, the mention of new atheists here is completely gratuitous.

Ruse’s behavior lately almost has a Tourette-like component. No matter what he’s discussing, at unpredictable intervals, and at inappropriate times, he suddenly feels compelled to shout “New Atheists are BAD!!!” I’m starting to think that his dislike of Harris, Hitchens, and Dawkins stems from a deep-seated jealousy of their literary success.  This theory is supported by Ruse’s first statement in this video.

Russell Blackford has a mini-essay in the Guardian series later this week (see his reaction to Ruse’s answer here).

h/t: Russell Blackford

This may be a portent of global warming: a new paper in the bird journal Oikos, based on 46 (!) years of research, shows that migratory birds in the U.S. are getting smaller over time.

One of the generalizations about biogeography that I teach my students is “Bergmann’s Rule,” the observation that within species of mammals and birds, populations from more northerly locations have larger body sizes than those from further south.  This has classically been attributed to selection to conserve heat: if you’re twice as large (in terms of doubling every linear dimension), you increase your body volume by a factor of 2³, or 8.  Thus the amount of heat you generate, which is based on body mass, increases eightfold.  Body surface area, however, is proportional to the square of linear dimension, and doubling that would increase surface area by 4.  Thus, by doubling body size, the ratio of heat lost/heat produced would be halved (4/8). In other words, by getting bigger, you conserve heat more efficiently.

This, at least, is the explanation we give students when describing Bergmann’s rule.

But there’s a problem with this explanation.  Bergmann’s rule holds not only for endotherms (warm-blooded animals like birds and mammals), but also for ectotherms—cold-blooded creatures like insects and amphibians, who don’t generate their own body heat.  In one of my old papers, for instance, I that found Bergmann’s rule was scrupulously obeyed by fruit flies.

Another problem is that we don’t know whether a pattern of more northerly populations being larger reflects true evolutionary change (evolved body-size differences attributed to genetic differences), a developmental response to temperature (you get bigger if you’re born and grow up in a cold climate), or both.  In fruit flies, I found that both factors were at work, but certainly there had been some evolutionary change within the species I studied (Drosophila melanogaster).  But it’s unclear why, for a fly, it’s good to evolve a bigger body in a colder climate. They don’t have to conserve body heat.

In the Oikos paper, van Burkirk et al. combined bird data collected since 1961 at the Powdermill Nature Reserve in Pennsylvania.  Birds were trapped during spring and fall migrations (local residents were trapped, too) and were measured for weight, “fat score,” and “wing chord,” a measure of wing size.  In toto, they measured nearly half a million birds from 102 species.

Upshot: most of the species got smaller over the 46 years of study.

Of 65 species breeding in the study area, 51 got smaller as measured by body mass  Of 83 species caught migrating north during the spring, 60 got smaller.  And of 75 species caught migrating south in fall, 66 got smaller.  All of these trends over time were statistically significant. For the birds that bred locally, and hence for which local temperature could be measured, the decline in mass was significantly correlated with an increase in temperature. This of course reflects the fact that temperature has been going up since 1961.

The decline in body mass wasn’t large: for spring migrants, for example, mass decreased only 1.3% over 46 years.  However, this is a fairly large change over evolutionary time.  The thing is, we don’t know if this change, even if related to temperature, is due to evolution of the birds (genes for smaller body size have replaced those for larger size), developmental change (birds simply grew up smaller as their environment got hotter) or both.  This could be tested by rearing the offspring of birds under constant laboratory conditions, but that would be onerous. The rather small decrease in mass means that very large laboratory samples would be needed to detect such a small change.  And it’s no picnic to rear wild birds of even a single species in captivity, much less the dozens and dozens it would take to see if the change of mass over time is an evolutionary change.

While these differences might reflect declining “conditions” in the birds’ habitats (i.e., less food), the authors address this by looking at population densities at the birds’ breeding grounds.  Presumably bad conditions should be reflected in lower densities. But they found no association between bird density and bird body size.

Regardless of whether the birds’ change in body size reflects genetic change, developmental plasticity, or both, it does indicate that organisms have responded to a long-term increase in temperature. The authors don’t say a lot about global warming, but do raise the issue at the very end of the paper:

Of course, we have long known that evolved changes are an inevitable consequence of almost any human activity that modifies the environment and thereby influences the selective regime experienced by organisms. Classic examples include adaptation to urbanization and contaminated soils (Bradshaw and Jain 1966, Partecke and Gwinner 2007). Similar responses to climate change may be on-going and widespread;whether they will prove to be adequate remains to be seen. Particularly salient and sobering, however, should current trends continue unabated, is the immense biological scope and geographic scale of changes that are taking place compared with the limited information and resources we presently have for measuring, understanding and mitigating those changes.

h/t: Matthew Cobb

_______

van Buskirk, J., R. S. Mulvihill and R. C. Leberman.  2010.  Declining body sizes in North American birds associated with climate change.  Oikos, early view doi: 10.1111/j.1600-0706.2009.18349.x

Coyne, J. A., and E. Beecham. 1987. Heritability of two morphological characters within and among natural populations of Drosophila melanogaster. Genetics 117:727-737 (couldn’t resist).

I’m scheduled to be on the Thom Hartmann show this Tuesday (hour two) to talk about—God help me—homeschooling.   They’re making a Skype connection, so I guess there’s some video, too, which you can watch on the website.

Not really knowing who Thom Hartmann is (I rarely listen to radio), I Googled him and found this on Wikipedia:

In 2008 and 2009, Talkers Magazine named Hartmann the tenth most important talk show host in America, defining him as most important progressive host (the nine above Hartmann being conservatives).

What does that mean? Given Obama’s election, there can’t be that many conservatives in the US compared to liberals. Do conservatives listen to the radio more often?  I guess, given this imbalance, it’s good that I don’t listen to radio.

The Guardian‘s resident moron, Andrew Brown, has outdone himself this week, publishing a column designed to put “Catholic child abuse in proportion.”  It’s a disgusting and self-serving piece of faitheistic tripe, and its underlying message is this: those people who attack the Catholic church for systematic child abuse are really anti-Catholic bigots.  After all, claims Brown, the Church was no worse than other abusers.

He’s too cagey to say this outright, but raises the questions (which he doesn’t answer directly) at the outset:

But was the Catholic church unfairly singled out? Aren’t all children vulnerable to exploitation, especially when they are poor and unwanted?

After noting the statistic that about 4% of American priests and deacons abused children, and giving some perfunctory tut-tutting, Brown gets to his point:

This is vile, but whether it is more vile than the record of any other profession is not obvious. The concentration on boys makes the Catholic pattern of abuse stand out; what makes it so shocking is that parents trusted their children with priests. They stood in for the parents. But this isn’t all that different from the pattern in the wider world, either, where the vast majority of abuse comes from within families. The other point that makes the Catholic abuse is that it is nowadays very widely reported. It may be the best reported crime in the world: that, too tends to skew perceptions.There are, however, some fragments of figures from the outside world suggesting that not many professions do better. . .

And he asks again:

So why the concentration on Catholic priests and brothers? Perhaps I am unduly cynical, but I believe that all institutions attempt to cover up institutional wrongdoing although the Roman Catholic church has had a higher opinion of itself than most, and thus a greater tendency to lie about these things.

His point is obvious.  Why the concentration on Catholic priest and brothers?  Because, Brown implies, those accusations come from those who are simply anti-Catholics.  And, in the end, he assures us that all is now well:

Certainly the safeguards against paedophilia in the priesthood are now among the tightest in the world. That won’t stop a steady trickle of scandals; but I think that objectively your child is less likely to be abused by a Catholic or Anglican priest in the west today than by the members of almost any other profession.

I beg to differ with Brown’s implicit conclusion.  The concentration on Catholic priests and brothers comes from the shocking institutionalization of that abuse: the consistent efforts of Church officials, who knew full well about the abuse, to cover it up and, sometimes, simply transfer abusers to new places.  Yes, other professions sometimes cover up child abuse, but not, I think, on such a massive scale.  I am not aware of this kind of cover-up being endemic to American public schools, for example.

And what Brown fails to grasp is that the abuse is doubly shocking because it was committed by those priests to whom parents not only entrusted their children, but entrusted them to inculcate in those children a sense of morality.  The outrage comes from seeing that those who were supposed to serve as role models—as paragons of morality—systematically abused that trust in the most heinous ways.  And perhaps the Church’s ridiculous policy of celibacy contributed to this abuse.

Fortunately, Brown’s commenters—as usual—take him apart.  It must be disheartening for the Resident Moron to watch, week after week, as his readers chew his tuchus to pieces.  Maybe the Guardian keeps him on because his continuing idiocy promotes traffic on their website.  But really, how can a reputable paper tolerate such witless garbage?  Do the editors have any notion of what should pass for decent commentary?

Some say that it’s kitteh abuse to raise a cat as an atheist—to brainwash it into rejecting Ceiling Cat, Basement Cat, and any of the supercatual notions that give comfort to felids.  Indeed, even the term “atheist cat” could be construed as a form of abuse.  Nevertheless, today we have one of these on tap, number two in our series of atheist cats.

It’s Lydia, the cat of blogger, feminist, author, atheist, and all-around troublemaker Greta Christina and her wife.  Greta has a very nice blog, which I’ve highlighted before (today’s entry features her other cat, Violet).   She also wrote one of the best series of articles on atheism that I’ve ever read.  You can find them here, and if you haven’t read them, do so immediately.

Lydia is pictured getting a belleh rub from Greta’s trophy wife (her description) Ingrid.  Greta describes the situation:

From her adoring upside-down gaze, and from the sweet trustfulness with which she is letting her belleh be rubbed, you’d think Lydia was being photographed here in a rare moment of special feline/ human affection. You’d be wrong. Lydia is a belleh-rub tramp. Anyone, anytime, anywhere: that’s her motto.

Lydia was originally Ingrid’s cat but is now both of ours; Ingrid’s had her for about 13 years. She’s a New York native and San Francisco transplant. She’s also Exhibit A in a theory our vet had: that smart cats tend to be the aloof and cranky ones, and the dim cats tend to be the sweet ones. Lydia is definitely in the “sweet but dim” category. She knows how to work the belleh-rub action, though.

Today’s bonus is a sad arthritic cat (from Sick Cats):

The Texas School Board approves a new social studies curriculum, described by the New York Times as “stressing the role of Christianity in American history and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light.”

You can find the standards here.  Have a gander if you have time.  Here’s a screenshot of page 7 of the new high school standards:

Figure 1.  God bless America Texas

The Texas Freedom Network is an organization devoted to opposing the religious, right-wing hijacking of politics and education in Texas.  You can read the latest on the curriculum wars at their TFN Insider website, and a summary of the issues here.