Creationism in Crisis - Killer Whales Exibit 'Uniquely Human' Behaviour

A killer whale in the Salish Sea is observed harassing a porpoise, a behavior that has long perplexed scientists. A study from Wild Orca and UC Davis’ SeaDoc Society investigates what may be behind it.

Photo credit: Wild Orca

Why Are Killer Whales Harassing and Killing Porpoises Without Eating Them? | UC Davis

A pod of Southern Resident orcas

Photo: NOAA Fisheries.

The problem creationists have with trying to cling to a counter-factual superstition like theirs is that so many facts run counter to it. To normal people, that might be considered a good reason to reassess their opinions and drop those shown to be at odds with the facts and form some based on reality instead.

Not so creationists. To a creationist, the thought of being wrong is an existential threat which, if allowed to develop, would destroy their entire world view which has them at the centre of a specially created universe, the creator of which holds them in high regard. Dropping this childish belief would mean they don't feel as important as they think they are and would maybe have to think the unthinkable - a universe which doesn't have them at the centre of it and eventual oblivion in which the world continues to exist and function without them in it or able to observe it from a privileged position.

The Salish Sea. Location for the study.

All my recent blog posts, especially the 'Creationism in Crisis' series, have shown instances where scientific research has revealed facts which refute basic creationist articles of faith and cult dogmas, and this one is no exception. It deals with a core dogma - that humans were a special creation, created in some material way differently to all other life forms, to which they bear no relationship.

Traditionally, creationists cite examples of how humans are unique, having characteristics shared by no other species - ignoring the fact that that pretty much defines a species and the same case can be made for every other species. One of these is of course another creationist sacred cow - humans have social ethics and a conscience, which creationist dogma asserts could only have come from their particular creator god - the same god whom they believe inflicted a mass genocide on Earth and creates parasites, apparently.

Explaining social ethics, or pr-social behaviour, and a conscience which motivates pro-social behaviour, rewarded by endorphins, is not difficult for science to explain as the result of gene-meme co-evolution in a cooperative species that could not survive as individuals without the support of a social group.

And, to reinforce that, we now have evidence of pro-social behaviour and human-like activities in another species - the orca or killer whale.

At least, that's the explanation for an observed change in behaviour of a pod of orca in the Salish Sea, described in a paper published, open access, in Marine Mammal Science. The investigating team was co-led by Deborah Giles of Wild Orca and Sarah Teman of the SeaDoc Society, a program of University of California Davis (UCDavis) School of Veterinary Medicine.

First a little background on the Southern Resident killer whales, the subject of the study:

Creationism in Crisis - How Humans Evolved to Live in Cold Climates

Creationism in Crisis

How Humans Evolved to Live in Cold Climates

Most humans haven't evolved to cope with the cold, yet we dominate northern climates – here's why

Turku, Finland in Winter

Jarmo Piironem/Eyem/Getty Images

With the exception of only a few, relatively minor, changes to our genome, such as loss of skin pigmentation and changes to hair and eye colour, and the ingression of Neanderthal and Denisovan genes, non-African humans differ little from the first Homo sapiens to venture out of Africa, where they had evolved as a tropical species. Today, humans are the only Great Ape to live outside of the tropics.

And yet we have managed to live in northern climates with shorter days in winter and sub-zero temperatures in which the earliest members of our species would probably not survive a night without special measures.

With our physical and physiological makeup differing so little from our African forebears, what has enabled us to survive in these hostile conditions to which we were so mal adapted? The answer is that an additional layer of evolution is operating alongside genetic evolution - memetic, or cultural, evolution - so-called gene-meme co-evolution.

Memetic evolution has taken us from the bands of hunter-gatherers huddled round a campfire and sheltering in caves and rock overhangs, to a modern urbanised, hi-tec species living in centrally heated buildings or dressing in warm clothing and entirely dependent on science and technology for our survival. Put us naked out in the open on a cold winter night and few of us would survive, let alone thrive, and survival without cloths and shelter would be impossible on the arctic tundra even in summer.

In the following article, reprinted from The Conversation, Laura Buck, Lecturer in Evolutionary Anthropology, and Kyoko Yamaguchi, Senior Lecturer in Human Genetics, both of Liverpool John Moores University, explain how we and our cousin species, the Neanderthals adapted to the very non-African conditions they found themselves in.

The article has been reformatted for stylistic consistency; the original can be read here.

Cultural Evolution - In Chimpanzees

Chimpanzee stone tool diversity | Max-Planck-Gesellschaft

Female chimpanzee cracking Panda oleosa nuts using a granodiorite hammerstone on a wooden (panda tree root) anvil.

© Liran Samuni, Taï Chimpanzee Project

Archaeologist and primatologists from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany, have discovered cultural differences between different groups of chimpanzees.

Ask any Creationist and they'll assure you that the fact that humans have developed art, music and architecture, to name just a few of our cultural developments, is evidence that there is something very special about humans, showing that we were specially created separate from the rest of 'creation' and given these 'gifts' to enable us to have 'dominion over the planet - which was provided for our benefit.

The problem with that argument from personal incredulity and wishful thinking, is that humans are far from being the only species to have cultures, albeit, our cultural developments of language and writing, combined with our ability to learn and recall facts, and to pass them on to our children, has enabled us to build on out innate ability to form cultural groups, to build advanced cultures. The difference is one of magnitude, not presence/absence. The analogy is with the elephant’s trunk, which is an example of variation on the same basic body plan, and so evidence of common ancestry, not special creation of elephants, although that analogy is probably too subtle for the simple binary thinking of Creationists.

The fact that our cultures have much in common with each other but vary considerably between different geographical groups is evidence of the evolutionary process involved in building those cultures. Sometimes, these cultural variations are very subtle, but most people who have been to other countries will be aware of them, especially with food, drink and language, and with little differences between driving behaviour, as I once showed with a blog post about the difference in driving customs between the UK and Naples, in Italy.

Driving Ethical Evolution

What the scientists at the Max Planck Institute have discovered is that chimpanzees not only use stone tools as hammers to open nuts, but that the stone tool preferred varies between different social groups.

As the Max Planck Institute news release explains:

Evolution News - How Humans Evolved to Get Along With Neighbours

Shared grooming among bonobos is indicative of their group dynamics, which includes tolerance and cooperation.

Photo: Martin Surbeck

Bonobos’ tolerant, peaceful group relationships paved way for human peacemaking – Harvard Gazette

Despite our long history of often religiously-inspired wars, and divisions into mutually-hostile camps, humans are actually quite good at getting along with neighbouring social groups, and peace-making is generally considered a noble activity, while war-mongering is generally despised.

In this respect we much more closely resemble the peaceable bonobos with whom we share 99% of our genes, than the equally closely related chimpanzees.

Not surprisingly, because it is an innate human trait, early Christians tried to claim credit for the idea that peace-making is a skill to be admired, with "Blessed are the peace-makers". The pity is, because they only saw things in selfish terms, they made it look like something only worth doing for a personal reward and not for the greater social good, because it leads to greater human happiness. Ironically, with peace-making featuring in their Beatitudes (Matthew 5:9), it may well be the result of evolution and an indication of our common ancestry with the bonobo.

But how did we get this way?

Malevolent Designer News - How a Parasite is Designed to Make its Host Commit Suicide

The life cycle of the hairworm After hatching in the water, hairworm larvae parasitize aquatic insects and form a cyst in the hosts’ body cavity. After the aquatic insect has grown wings, the hairworm is transported from an aquatic environment to a terrestrial environment. If the aquatic insect is consumed by a mantid, the hairworm grows inside the mantid’s body until it reaches maturity and causes its host to enter the water. Once the mantid is in the water, the hairworm escapes back into the aquatic environment to reproduce, and its lifecycle ends.

Parasites manipulate praying mantis’s polarized-light perception, causing it to jump into water. | Research at Kobe

Readers of my popular, illustrated book, The Malevolent Designer: Why Nature's God is not Good will already be familiar with several examples of a parasite turning its host into an automaton, where the host is manipulated by the parasite to behave in ways beneficial to the parasite but detrimental to the host, often resulting in the death of its victim.

In fact, viewed as a memetic mind virus, religions which encourage and inspire self-sacrifice can be seen as examples of this manipulative mind-control too. They do nothing to enhance the wellbeing of their victim in this respect and serve only to benefit the religion that induces this behaviour, using the cultural assumptions that self-sacrifice for a cause is to be admired and indicates the validity of the religion that induces it.

This example, discovered by researchers at Kobe University, is yet another to be added to that long list. They have discovered how a nematode or hairworm manipulates the behaviour a praying mantis host to jump into water where the hairworm can escape from its body and produce larvae which infect the aquatic larval stage of flying insects, in response to polarized light reflected off the surface of water.

As the Kobe University News release explains, the biological background to this is:

How Religions Cause Divisions

'Healing' crystals

Photo credit: Hasan Can Devsir/Unsplash (CC-BY)

Pagan 'metaphysical' shops navigate threats from Christian critics

An example here of how religion divides communities through bigotry and intolerance and by reacting to competition in the market place of gullible fools to exploit.

In fact, the latter could be seen as an example of how religions control their victims in order to prevent hybridization with other wackadoodle cults, in the same way genes control diverging gene pools to set up barriers to hybridization and so cause speciation to go to completion. Religions are acting like meme pools in a Darwinian competition, and so tending to cause divisions and barriers to social peace and harmony.

This example is that of Heron Michelle, a purveyor of 'pagan metaphysical' objects such as crystals, jewellery and herbs allegedly with mystical properties, from a shop, The Sojourner Whole Earth Provisions, in Uptown Greenville, North Carolina. She and her shop have attracted the hostile attention of the local fundamentalist Christians. Ironically, the trouble came to a head after a festival on the last day of April, ostensibly organized to bring the whole community together following the Covid-19 lockdown.

As part of the festival, Heron set up a table outside her shop and offered to do tarot readings for anyone interested in that sort of thing. Fairly soon though, she had a visit from two young men dressed in identical green t-shirts who wanted to 'share the Gospel of Jesus' with her. She explained that she already knew about Jesus and had been baptised into three different Christian faiths but found none of them 'took'. She now believes she has found the 'love that Jesus was trying to bring to the world' outside of Christianity. She also told them that in her faith, proselytizing was regarded as a cardinal sin.

After patronising her with more preaching, the pair eventually left to re-join their large group who had been moving through the festival talking to other shop keepers and festival-goers, trying to win recruits for their cult. Afraid of what was going to happen next, Heron folded up her table and stopped offering tarot readings.

After the festival was over, things turned ugly and menacing. The entire green t-shirted mob of fundamentalists turned up outside her shop physically blocking the entrance and standing and staring at her through the windows.

This is not the first time that Heron has faced crowds of hostile Christians. When she first opened her shop in 2008, the local church organized a boycott and a crowd of women vandalized her shop by paining crosses on the windows. They then stood outside chanting about demons.

In 2017, Philip Brown, a local street preacher who travels around preaching through a bullhorn and harassing other metaphysical stores, set up outside her shop and began preaching, so she engaged him in a discussion about the Gospels. It was soon obvious that she knew them better than he did. Nevertheless he posted his recording of his 'work for Jesus' on You Tube.

According to this report in Religion News Service, these attacks by fundamentalist Christians on metaphysical stores are commonplace:

Vandalism, protests, harassment and regular proselytizing are not uncommon for metaphysical shops. In 2010, Rondell Gonzalez, the owner of Pye’Wackets, south of Anchorage, Alaska, found a 7-foot cross attached to her store’s sign. In 2015, someone tossed a gasoline bomb through the storefront window at Shooting for the Moon Spiritual Development Center, in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. (It failed to explode, and the attackers were never identified.)

In Minnesota in 2016, metaphysical shop owner Bonnie Gurney filed a cease-and-desist order to stop a local woman from posting protests on her store’s social media page, publicly burning store fliers, blocking the shop entrance and harassing patrons, telling them to “repent.” In 2019, a newly opened metaphysical shop in Staunton, Virginia, was shut down, reportedly after the property owner belatedly realized his renter was a metaphysical shop.

Clearly, fundamentalists who go to these lengths to suppress any alternative superstitions, have something to fear from them. Their own faith in the truth of their beliefs must be on shaky ground for them to fear alternative views. It's not just Atheists whom they fear but anyone who might put them in danger of wondering if they could be wrong.

This was found, in a piece of research by Cory L Cook, Florette Cohen and Sheldon Solomon, published in the journal Social Psychology and Personality Science, entitled What If They’re Right About the Afterlife? Evidence of the Role of Existential Threat on Anti-Atheist Prejudice. Human knowledge of death gives ris to:

...potentially paralyzing terror that is assuaged by embracing cultural worldviews that provide a sense that one is a valuable participant in a meaningful universe.

Anything which might cause a believer in one of these worldviews carries the risk that their terror will reassert itself, so hostility to other religions is a simple matter of terror management in response to an existential threat. In their research, which focussed on the relationship between believers and Atheists, the authors found that thinking about death made the believers more hostile to Atheism and thinking about Atheism made them more aware of the issue of death. It seems that any other set of ideas that don't include some sort of hope of survival after death, is an existential threat to fundamentalist Christians and evokes the same terror management response.

As these attacks on alternative metaphysical beliefs show, it's not just Atheists who attract the hostile attention of fundamentalist Christians. The worst thing you can do to a fundamentalist is make them wonder if they could be wrong and the response is often aggression. This is why they have developed all manner of mental gymnastics for rejecting any evidence, or logical reasoning you can offer them that might cause them to have self-doubt, and why they are so susceptible to frauds and charlatans who sell them cosy platitudes and disinformation intended to reinforce their cosy certainties and comforting freedom from their terror of death.

This tendency, in Christianity especially, to build barriers to shut out alternative ideas and to divide society up into mutually hostile camps, each distrusting the others, has resulted in over 30,000 different Christian churches in the USA alone.

Truly a house built on sand and a faith standing on the shaky ground of absent evidence and a book full of internal inconsistences and contradictions. No wonder so many fundamentalist Christians are also gun nuts, opposed to any restrictions on their right to carry weapons of mass destruction. And no wonder the USA with its very large evangelical Christian population is also the most violent, divided and intolerant of all developed economies, in contrast to the countries of Europe with their large and growing populations of non-believers and rapidly falling numbers of believers.

In Darwinian terms, what these cultural memeplexes are doing is ensuring their survival in the human meme pool by rigorously excluding any potential rivals for the human resource they all depend on and preventing any dilution of their dogmas with which they recruit and retain members who are themselves looking for a means to manage their potentially paralyzing fear of death.

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Evolution News - Great Tits Have Evolved Flexible Cultures

Great tits (Parus major) can change their culture to become more efficient

Great tits change their traditions for the better | University of Konstanz

How arrogant we once were, before science taught us humility!

When I was young, back in the 1950s, we assumed us humans were exceptional in so many ways that justified believing we must be a special creation with a special purpose, being blessed with so many unique abilities. Human exceptionalism justified so much about religion and our relationship with the rest of nature and the world, which we assumed had been created solely for our benefit to be used as we saw fit. There was even an account in our book of self-justificatory origin myths that related how and why everything was created this way - "And God gave Man dominion..."

But that was in the days before we knew any better. Now we know otherwise.

• We used to think we were the only 'thinking' beings, now we know that many other species can think and solve problems.
• We used to think we were the only beings with intelligence enough to make and use tools, now we know many other species also shape and use tools.
• We used to think we were the only beings with ethics and moral codes, now we know several other species are also empathetic and know the difference between right and wrong in context.
• We used to think we were the only beings with a sense of self, now we know many other species are self-aware and have a conceptual map of their environment with them at the centre of it.
• We used to think we were the only beings with cultures, now we know that other species also form cultures which they inherit from their parents and peers.

And, that latter assumption has just taken another blow with the news that a group of researchers at the University of Konstanz and Max Planck Institute for Animal Behavior in Germany have found that birds are able to change their culture to become more efficient. As the University of Konstanz press release explains:

Cultural Evolution and Wood Pigeons

Common wood pigeon, Columba palumbus

I'm sitting in my garden enjoying a beautiful sunny summer day with a light breeze. About ten feet to my right is a tangle of buddleia and ceanothus with a vine and a wisteria twinging up through it, having outgrown their pergola. In the centre of this tangle is a wood pigeon's nest. A couple of wood pigeons are strutting about not six feet from me.

Outside my front door, in a tangle of Clematis montanum and making a right mess of my outside lamp and the ground beneath, is another wood pigeon's nest. The first clutch of young having flown about a week ago, they already seem to be sitting on a second clutch of two eggs. Always two and always one male and one female - a 'pigeon pair'.

According to the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO), wood pigeons, Columba palumbus, are now competing with blue tits and blackbirds for the top spot as Britain's commonest garden bird. Something has changed radically in the behaviour of wood pigeons over the last ten to twenty years.

Human Societies Evolved Gods

Complex societies gave birth to big gods - CSH

Locations of the 30 sampled regions on the world map, labelled according to precolonial evidence of moralizing gods.

Source: Seshat: Global History Databank | Nature

An international research team has investigated the role of "big gods" in the rise of complex societies and, not surprisingly, have found an evolutionary relationship between the two.

The slightly surprising thing was though that their findings show it was not as previously thought - that "big gods" are the cause of the evolution of complex societies, but are a consequence of them.

Gods, it seems are the product of human cultural evolution.

Even Educated Bees Do It!

The buff-tailed bumblebee, Bombus terrestris.

Source: Wikipedia

Associative Mechanisms Allow for Social Learning and Cultural Transmission of String Pulling in an Insect | PLOS Biology

It's now well known that humans are not the only species capable of learning new skills and passing these on to others.

Despite the old religious-based view of humans as having a unique intelligence not seen in other animals, and thus standing us apart from the rest of 'creation', like tool construction and use and the ability to solve problems, learning and culture are now being seen in a whole range of other animals. Until now though, this had been confined mostly to vertebrates and almost exclusively to mammals and birds.

Intelligently Evolving Elephants

Genetic connectivity across marginal habitats: the elephants of the Namib Desert - Ecology and Evolution.

The importance of intelligent, memetic evolution, as opposed to genetic evolution, is being increasingly recognised especially in sentient species. Groups of sentient animals can appear to be a different species based on lifestyle, habitat, social organisation, etc and yet be genetically almost indistinguishable. Pods of killer whales, for example, may have very different hunting strategies and occupy different parts of the ocean but differ only from other pods by culture.

Genghis Khan And Gene-Meme Co-Evolution

Genghis Khan. Unknown artist.

Genghis Khan's genetic legacy has competition : Nature News & Comment.

A technical paper published a few days ago in the European Journal of Human Genetics shows how, at least in humans, genes can increase in frequency in a population not necessarily because they represent an adaptive advantage in their own right but because they are bound to other replicators, such as cultural memes, which give them an advantage. This linkage may be entirely due to chance.

For example, a culture which is hierarchical and expansionist, and especially where sons inherit the power, authority and privilege of their fathers, may facilitate the spread of genes carried by powerful men, especially where power gives access to females and comes with a higher standard of living so children are more likely to survive. The actual genes benefiting from this may be completely unremarkable.

This paper found that it was possible to identify a number of clusters of particular haplotype of the Y-chromosome (only carried by males and so indicating the male inheritance line). By counting the number of mutations in a given region of the Y-chromosome and assuming a regular mutation rate, it was possible to estimate the time when this variant arose in human evolutionary history. By assuming that the geographical location where most diversity was found was close to the place where the variant originated it was possible to estimate a likely place where this variant arose.

Martyrdom And Mind Viruses

Martyrdom of St Stephen

One man's heroic martyr is another man's deluded fool or misguided idiot who probably deserved what he got.

I wrote yesterday about how the Charlie Hebdo murders in Paris were the effects of mind control by viral memeplexes we call religion, which take control of human minds and convert them into machines for replicating not humans or human cultural ideas, but of the religion virus, just as a genetic virus can take control of a cell's DNA replicating mechanism and convert it to a machine for making viruses.

The characteristic of these viruses, memetic or genetic, is that the host has only a utilitarian value to the parasite and so is disposable once its usefulness has passed.

An especially powerful mechanism often used by the religion virus is to kill the host in such a manner as to impress the minds of its other carriers, or at least render them less susceptible to resistance. This is of course to turn the victim into a 'martyr' where their disposal can be presented as some great act of heroism rather than the act of an automaton being controlled by a mind virus. The notion of martyrdom is of course already present in the human meme pool in the form of

Religion Kills People

A particularly malignant form of the religion virus hit Paris yesterday when three infected individuals, directed by the virus, tried to suppress criticism of it by killing people who made fun of it. This especially virulent strain of the Islam memetic virus, which can control the mind and actions of its victims, making them do things which no sane person would normally do, is reaching epidemic proportions in parts of the world, especially in the Middle East where the population has suffered from various form of it for centuries.

Like other forms of the religion family of memetic viruses, Islam is normally passed on to children when they are at their most susceptible to infection so in many parts of the world, infection rates can reach almost 100% of the population.

The human infant is almost unique in nature being sentient, keen to learn and understand the world around him or her, having good memory recall and having a long childhood. To avoid the danger of overly-curious and sceptical but naive children being easy prey for predators, humans evolved childhood gullibility so parents could teach children almost anything quickly and without the children doubting them. So, for example, children told by their parents to keep away from the water hole where there were crocodiles didn't go to check for themselves.

Chimps Have Fashions Too

A group-specific arbitrary tradition in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) - Online First - Springer

Ever since Richard Dawkins coined the term, 'meme' in The Selfish Gene we have known that cultures, like genomes, are passed on through the generations by replicators which can gradually change over time and which can be subject to selection pressures, just like genes and combinations of genes. The difference is that memes are inherited after birth and so, unlike genes, we can change them and chose which to accept and which to reject. We can also chose which to pass on and which to allow to be consigned to history.

How Evolution Changed Our Minds

American-born primatologist Alison Jolly, who sadly died on 6th February in Lewes, East Sussex, UK, was a Visiting Scientist at the University of Sussex and was instrumental in changing our view both about the role of social interaction in evolution and the role of gender in group leadership.

She was the first to report that females are dominant in some primate species, an observation based on her study of lemurs in Madagascar, where, unlike prosimians in the rest of the world, they have evolved in the absence of true monkeys to fill the niche occupied by true monkeys elsewhere. We now know that many primate groups are led by females, not males, so there is nothing inherently male about the ability to dominate and lead a group.

To A Mouse

I had a brief encounter with a mouse the other day. Not one quite so dramatic as Burns' - it's a long while now since I followed a horse-drawn plough. In fact, to be strictly accurate, it's a long while now since I saw a horse-drawn plough. They even had them-there tractor things when I was a child.

No. My encounter was a lot more mundane.

Every morning I feed my birdies - a flock of (mostly) wood-pigeons, collared doves, starlings, house sparrows and other assorted birds in season - at the bird table and various feeders we have in the back garden. I buy the mixed birdseed in 20 Kg. sacks along with bags of dried meal worms and peanuts and store it in our garden shed.

To a Mouse

(Written by Robert Burns in Gallowegian dialect supposedly after he had turned over the nest of a field mouse with his plough. This poem illustrates Burns' tolerance to all creatures and his innate humanity.)

Wee, sleekit, cowran, tim'rous beastie,
O, what a panic's in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty,
Wi' bickering brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an' chase thee,
Wi' murd'ring pattle!

I'm truly sorry Man's dominion
Has broken Nature's social union,
An' justifies that ill opinion,
Which makes thee startle,
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,
An' fellow-mortal!

I doubt na, whyles, but thou may thieve;
What then? poor beastie, thou maun live!
A daimen-icker in a thrave 'S a sma' request:
I'll get a blessin wi' the lave,
An' never miss't!

Thy wee-bit housie, too, in ruin!
It's silly wa's the win's are strewin!
An' naething, now, to big a new ane,
O' foggage green!
An' bleak December's winds ensuin,
Baith snell an' keen!

Thou saw the fields laid bare an' wast,
An' weary Winter comin fast,
An' cozie here, beneath the blast,
Thou thought to dwell,
Till crash! the cruel coulter past
Out thro' thy cell.

That wee-bit heap o' leaves an' stibble,
Has cost thee monie a weary nibble!
Now thou's turn'd out, for a' thy trouble,
But house or hald.
To thole the Winter's sleety dribble,
An' cranreuch cauld!

But Mousie, thou are no thy-lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men,
Gang aft agley,
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promis'd joy!

Still, thou art blest, compar'd wi' me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But Och! I backward cast my e'e,
On prospects drear!
An' forward, tho' I canna see,
I guess an' fear!

Robert Burns, 1785

I used to just stand the sacks of seed in the shed and fill a small container to take to the bird table until a family of mice set up home in the shed and learned to chew holes in the sacks, so I bought a plastic dustbin with a clip-on lid in which I also keep a plastic bucket to take seed, mealworms, peanuts and scoop to the garden in. Initially I felt a little bad about locking their food away and use to put a little seed and a few peanuts out for the mice but I decided it was best to wean them off their increasing welfare dependency and encourage them to earn an honest living.

A couple of days ago though, one little mouse had decided to use its entrepreneurial initiative and, when my back was turned and the lid was off, had had jumped or fallen into the deep plastic bin - with smooth sides.

My initial surprise was to discover that there were still mice in the shed. The mouse's initial surprise was to see the bottom of a large, black plastic bucket begin to descend, followed quickly by a large pair of eye and a human voice saying, "Hello! Okay! Let's see you get yourself out of there then!"

Isn't it interesting how quickly mice get over that initial panic and, after running round the perimeter of the bin three times, stop, look up, sit back on their haunches and wash their face.

So, what to do now then? In times gone by I would have thought nothing of picking it up by the tail and giving its head a quick flick against a wall then chucking it to the nearest cat or onto the compost heap. Maybe I'm getting soft or maybe I just appreciate living things a little better. Whatever, I decided to let nature take its course and do a little experiment. How would the mouse get itself out of an impossible situation?

Maybe it didn't appreciate the situation fully but my little mouse just picked up a sunflower seed and proceeded to take out the kernel and eat it. Maybe it needed some energy.

Of course, given a practically unlimited supply of food in comparison to its size, and not needing water beyond what they can get from their food, even dry seeds, the mouse wasn't actually in any real danger. It could have lived its entire life in that bin so maybe its risk assessment was a little different to what mine would have been. Never-the-less, my little mouse did try to climb up the sides a few times, then it tried jumping - as though its ability to jump about four inches was going to be enough to get to the top, about 30 inches away. But it was obviously worth a try - yer gets owt for nowt!

So I thought, let's see how intelligent you are. How quickly can you learn to climb a piece of garden string?

So I pulled out a length of string from one of those balls of green garden twine which was standing on the rack next to the food bin, and let it hang loosely down to the surface of the seed.

1. Mouse finds string and starts to climb. String is loose and stretches out so mouse makes no progress and gives up.
2. Mouse tries again and pulls string to make it tight then starts to climb it. Falls off.
3. Mouse tries again and climbs string until it can reach the rim of the smooth plastic bin with its front feet. Lets go with its hind feet but loses grip and slips back into the bin.
4. Mouse climbs up above the rim of the bin so its hind feet can stand on it. Walks round the rim of the bin a short distance then hops onto the rack, washes its face, and disappears.

In four steps the mouse had learned progressively by trial and error, and had got itself out of the bin.

What we had there was an interesting interaction in terms of genes and memes.

The mouse found itself in a predicament brought about because it exists in an environment in which I exist and in which the meme for enjoying nature and wanting to attract birds into my garden exists. The mouse genes had produced an animal which needs to feed and which actively looks for food, using a whole range of senses and abilities, not least of which is curiosity and an ability to discover by trial and error.

It survived because I have a mixture of memes and genes which make me interested in wildlife and an appreciation that they, like us, are the end-products of an incredible evolutionary process in which every one of our ancestors survived, that to end that gene-line would bring to a halt a process which started three and a half billion years ago and which has never yet failed, and an understanding that the simple fact of sharing our history and having ancestors in common with all living things gives us a connectedness and a kinship with it which is truly inspiring and deeply spiritual.

And the mouse had genes which allowed it to make an intelligent assessment of its situation, plan an escape strategy and improve its technique by trial and error whilst learning from its mistakes and keeping its objective in sight. With a little help from its friend.

And I spent a magical twenty minutes or so enjoying an interaction with a wee, sleekit, cowran, tim'rous beastie.

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The Darwin Creationist Award 2013 - Nominations

Announcing the coveted Darwin Creationist Award 2013!

Stand by for another summer of glorious moronitude as creationists struggle to put a coherent thought into words or wrestle with the intricacies of basic science, logic and joined-up thinking, as they try to convince the world that their ignorant stupidity and Bronze-Age superstition trumps anything which science has to offer.

The Darwin Creationist Award, like its illustrious bigger brother, the Darwin Award, which is awarded annually to the person who, by their utter inept stupidity has contributed positively to human evolution by removing their genes from the gene-pool, is awarded to the Creationist who similarly has done most to remove the meme of creationism from the human meme-pool. Self-sacrifice is not required for this award. All it takes is a tweet, blog, Facebook or other on-line comment, illustrating the utter moronic stupidity it takes to be fooled by professional Creationist charlatans and frauds, so making people think twice before falling for it themselves.

Ear Worm Crosses The Species Barrier

Outside near my garden right now is a male Blackbird in a beech tree announcing to the blackbird world, and particularly to any spare females, that this is his territory and he is available. He has been there every day for about two weeks or more singing variations of his repertoire of musical phrases and cadences and competing with the Gold finch's babbling silver trickle of notes and Great tit's piping in the same tree. (A typical Blackbird song on this RSPB site).

European Blackbirds are noted for incorporating musical phrases into their song and extemporising on them. This particular one seems to have a snatch of a song by Robert Burns called Ye Banks and Braes which is ironic really because the phrase it keeps singing is the tune to the lines "Thou'll break my heart, thou warbling bird, That wantons thro' the flowering thorn!"

Ye Banks and Braes

Ye banks and braes o' bonnie Doon,

How can ye bloom sae fresh and fair?
How can ye chant, ye little birds,
And I sae weary, fu' o' care!
Thou'll break my heart, thou warbling bird,
That wantons thro' the flowering thorn!
Thou minds me o' departed joys,
Departed, never to return.
Aft hae I rov'd by bonnie Doon

To see the rose and woodbine twine;
And ilka bird sang o' its luve,
And fondly sae did I o' mine;
Wi' lightsome heart I pu'd a rose,
Fu' sweet upon its thorny tree!
And my fause luver stole my rose -
But, ah! he left the thorn wi' me.

Robert Burns

Maybe it's just a coincidence and that it my brain's ability to recognise patterns which is working, but what we have here is an example of a meme or ear worm. It's something every successful pop tune writer tries to achieve - a phrase you keep playing over and over in your mind.

This Blackbird has pulled off the neat trick of passing a meme across the species barrier so my mind now keeps singing "Thou'll break my heart, though warbling bird...". A meme is of course a unit of cultural inheritance; in this case a musical phrase which interprets in the context of my British cultural background and my personal development as a song by Burns, complete with the Galawegian Scottish dialect words with phrases like "And I sae weary, fu' o' care!" and "And ilka bird sang o' its luve, And fondly sae did I o' mine; Wi' lightsome heart I pu'd a rose, Fu' sweet upon its thorny tree!"

In the context of the Blackbird's culture of course, that same meme has a totally different meaning understood only truly by another Blackbird.

This is the exact analogy of how genes only have meaning in the context of the environment in which they are expressed and by which the information in them is translated into meanings. This is a point which Creationist pseudo-scientists either don't understand or deliberately obscure when they claim that no new information can arise from mutation (which is nonsensical anyway) when what is important is not the information but what that information means in the context of the environment in which it expresses. Even with no change in information, an environmental change can produce a change in the meaning if that information and so an evolutionary change in the species carrying it.

The importance of the cultural context of memes is also illustrated in a blog I wrote a few days ago about cultural bias in which I presented some common 'proofs' of the existence of the locally popular god and the truth of different holy books with 'proofs' which only work on people with a pre-exiting belief in those gods and holy books. To people from other cultures, the fallacy of those 'proofs' is laughably obvious because it is quite simply devoid of an rational meaning.

It is because the interaction between the genotype and the environment produces the phenotype and the environment selects in favour of fitness to survive in that environment, that species look as though they were made for that environment. They were. They were made by the environment itself.

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Is Religion A Mind Virus?

Look at the lovely viruses!

Ever since Richard Dawkins introduced the idea of memes in The Selfish Gene people have speculated on the nature of religion when seen as a memeplex. There are two ways to view the religion memeplex:

1. Is it a meme which has evolved within the human cultural memome (the memetic equivalent of the genetic genome) because it conveys benefits to the carrier and is thus differentially selected for in the evolution of cultures
2. It like a virus in that it conveys no benefit to the carrier and may even be harmful but it subverts the replication mechanism and converts the host to a machine for producing viruses.