Check Six

Yes, I know, a requiem is a song, or a mass, done in remembrance of a lost loved one. This is neither a song, nor a mass, nor a someone, but it is most certainly a remembrance.

On Saturday, May 31st, my daughter’s pet chicken, Yolk, was killed by what was most likely a dog whose owners were not responsible enough to keep it on their own property. And while I could rant on for a good long time about that rather sickening injustice, I’ll attempt to take the high road and write about Yolk instead.

Many would think that a chicken was an odd choice for a pet. Initially, I was one of them. She was one of a dozen or so chickens that my daughter, my son, and my wife raised from chicks while we lived in Oregon. Yolk, whom my daughter named, bonded to her, which is not all that unusual for young birds when they’re held and interacted with as much as Yolk and her other chicks were interacted with by my kids.

But Yolk was special. As she grew, and as my daughter continued to play with her, hold her, stroke her comb or her waddles, feed her mulberries as they fell from the tree (giving Yolk a dark purple beard that lasted the rest of the summer) their bond grew. Yolk was her pet, her friend, an animal that she loved like no other. During the Oregon winter, when it rained and rained and then rained some more, she would go outside and find Yolk, zipping the docile hen gently into her own jacket and ride around with her on her tricycle, a smile from ear to ear. Yolk loved it all. Yolk would ride around the backyard with her, chase her, eat from her hand or just sit, contently in my daughter’s lap. Such was the bond between my daughter and Yolk that when we decided to relocate back to Michigan, some 2300 miles by car, Yolk would make the trip with us, spending part of her time in a cat carrier between the kids in the backseat, and part of her time looking out the window from my daughter’s lap, watching the countryside roll by. She never so much as complained, and laid eggs for all but the first day of the trip east. It was a sight to behold.

When we finally dropped anchor in Michigan, we set up a temporary enclosure for her where we were staying while we shopped around for a house. Many times it was just Yolk and I hanging out while my wife and kids went out to do things. I would keep an eye on her while she wandered around, scratching and pecking away. We became, dare I say it, close.

At the end of October we were finally in our own home. The weather was changing, Fall was in full swing with Winter close on its heels and we had no coop on our property to house Yolk in. So she moved into a corner of our garage along with another adopted hen name Star that we had gotten from my brother-in-law. So now Yolk had a companion to share the frigid northern Michigan winter days and nights. All winter long they would hang out in the garage or go through the doggy door in the side to scratch around a bit in the snow. As ever, my daughter was there to take care of her, letting her out in the mornings, feeding her, and just seeing her whenever she could. I became the guy that put them in their “coop” at night because they would always fly up to a shelf and try and roost there and I was the only one tall enough to reach them. Every night, all winter long, I’d go out and snag each one from roosting shelf and put them in there cage where they were covered and could roost without worry. I griped about it, having to go out in the cold and get them down, but I’d still do it. It became a ritual and I saw Yolk and put her safely away almost every single night. As Winter thawed and the grass made a reappearance, Yolk and Star could finally be seen wandering in our too-big yard, snapping up the first insects of the season.

The coop came next, a place that Yolk and her soon to be expanded flock would be able to call their own. But make no mistake about it, this was to be Yolk’s coop, her flock of chickens. She was the queen, the bird we’d taken such great care of on our trek across country, my daughter’s true pet/friend. So after much sweat and toil, with the coop inhabitable but not quite finished, we moved Yolk and Star in a mere week ago. They loved it. It took all of one night for them to retrain themselves from always heading back to the garage to roosting in the coop. Yolkie had a new home — her home, and she was settling in.

On this past Saturday it had started off as a beautiful day. Sunny but a bit cool, damp from the evening’s rain. Spring had been a fickle beast this year, alternatively teasing us with what was to come only to blast us again with hints of the past Winter, and as the morning wore on the day seemed to cool a bit and a wind picked up. Clouds rolled in and the day that had begun with such promise began to turn gray. My wife and I had been digging fence-post holes all morning, only half-paying attention to the chickens scratching on the hillside above the pasture. By eleven we were getting ready to leave for a few hours to attend a home-schooling picnic so we could actually begin meeting people around where we live. We put the cats in the house, a strange thing for us to do before we were to leave, and left the chickens to themselves.

The afternoon passed quickly at the picnic, the day grew cold and windy and the sky wore a blanket of gray when we finally, reluctantly, pulled ourselves away from the adults we were enjoying talking with and the kids our kids were enjoying playing with. The conversation was buoyant on the ride home, the kids talking of who they had played with and my wife and I remarking on how nice it was to have an adult conversation with someone for a change. A couple of quick stops at some garage sales and we were turning into our long, winding driveway. We were home.

Home is place of safety. Or comfort. A place that you return to feel better when things are not well, or a place to go and celebrate all that is good. It is not a place you expect to find sadness and pain. It is not a place where you expect to lose a loved-one.

The first thing my wife and I saw were the feathers. They had scattered and drifted down the low rise to the west of our drive. Just what I was looking at did not immediately register until my eyes followed the feathers up the hill and their color became apparent. And there she was. Yolky. Laying on her side at the top of the hill. A single muttered word of “No” escaped from my wife’s lips before we were both out of the truck and up the hill though I knew as soon as I saw her laying there unmoving that we were too late. Yolky, the chicken we had loved and cared for, the one chicken that we had brought with us out of twenty when we left Oregon, the chicken that my daughter loved like no other, was dead.

My kids both saw her on the hill before my wife and I were even halfway there and if I live to be a thousand years old I will never, ever, forget those sounds of anguish. My wife went to Yolky and I went back to the truck and gathered my daughter in my arms. She was absolutely beside herself with grief and I held her, listened to her pleas, listened to her asking me why, screaming how unfair it was. I just listened to her say “Yolky, my Yolky” over and over and over again.

I sat down in the front seat with her cradled in one arm and brought my son into the other as they both sobbed. There was little I could do but hold them. Her Yolky was gone — forever gone — and my heart broke for her, for my son, for my wife, and for Yolky. It was obvious that she had struggled against her attacker, there were four separate areas of feathers where she’d tried to make good her escape before finally succumbing on the hilltop. It was wrong. It was unfair. It was too soon, she was only two years old and chickens can live a long time with loving care. It was so many things my mind went from one to the other in painful lurches. At some point, my mind settled on anger and the injustice of what had happened — it seemed the easiest place for me to be at that time. Railing against the dog that likely took her down, picturing the animal in my mind as being the one we’d seen wandering around our remote neighborhood three or four times in the past. I railed against myself and my wife as parents, for not putting Yolky away in her new coop while we gone, against myself for not leaving when my wife first said we had to leave instead of talking with another dad for ten more minutes. So many little things done one way or another that might have led to a different outcome. Of course you know differently, you know not to go down that path because that’s where madness lay, but still you do. Because when you see your daughter stroking the claw of her poor Yolky while your wife cradles her lifeless form in her lap, you’d do anything in your power to have it all undone.

At some point there were no more tears to be shed by my kids or my wife. The kids wanted me to read to them to take their minds off what had happened and I did so, subdued and sad myself, but that’s what they wanted to do. My wife and I asked if they wanted to help us bury Yolky and they didn’t, so we went down and buried her behind her new coop. When it was done, I went up past the house and to the hill and proceeded to pick up her feathers that still lay scattered across the grass. The wind made my task difficult, blowing them around and snatching them from the container I was trying to put them in and I cursed the weather, the sky, the ground, the dog, anything I could think of bore my impotent wrath. My words disappeared on the wind doing nothing, not even making me feel better, but still they came. Finally, the anger spent, and with only a fraction of Yolky’s feathers picked up, I bent to the task. It was a little over an hour later that I’d finally snatched the last one from the grass, and all the evidence of the struggle had been erased. The hill was just green grass waving in the wind then, just as it had been when we’d left so many hours before. Order, at least in that small part of our world, had been restored.

It wasn’t until Sunday night, after the kids were asleep, when I saw a picture of my daughter and Yolky, when I saw my daughter’s smile as she held her beloved chicken, that I finally broke down. I felt so bad for my little girl, so bad that she’d been robbed of her pet, so frustrated at the impotence I felt over Yolky’s loss that all I could do was cry. The sight of the picture caught me off guard, and the emotions came in waves and waves that night and when it was over I was raw and spent, angry and sad.

And so I sit here today and write this to try and clear my head. There is a hole right now, the same sort of hole that people feel when they lose a dog, or a cat, or any other beloved animal that has been such a integral part of their family. Maybe this wasn’t such a requiem after all. It’s too soon to look back wistfully on the times that my daughter shared with Yolky, too soon to see her in all of the many pictures, too soon to see all of my daughter’s smiles that were because of Yolky. In time something more meaningful and less harsh will be written, something that can bring out more of what Yolky really meant to my daughter, and our entire family.

But that time is not now.

Goodbye Yolky. You will be missed.

Greatly.

Those of you who have read this blog from the get-go know that my wife and I raise alpacas. We currently have four of them. Our most notable incident with them to date was the escape of one of our females on the third day after we got her. Those interested in reading about that ordeal can click here for the sordid tale.

As livestock go they’re pretty low-maintenance. Occassionally though, they require a bit more and at times it happens at night. Last nigh was such a night. Below the fold you’ll find out why…

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I thought about waiting to write this follow-up on the off chance that I’d get another comment or two on the first post, but since I know this blog has no traffic the odds of another comment coming in are slim. So I’m posting this now.

I received an interesting, and entirely civil, comment from Stan regarding my earlier post on arguments for being a Vegan and animal cruelty. He says:

…it isn’t the slaughter that is the problem, it is their condition of living prior to slaughter. Also, I don’t believe that we are biologically designed to eat them (http://www.vegsource.com/articles2/hunter_gatherer.htm), so we are really just doing it for “fun” which is pretty cruel, and that sort of thing is virtually non-existant in nature. Much plant life, on the other hand, requires consumption by animals in order to propogate.

I won’t get into the health issues or environmental aspects of animal agriculture, which you seem to be aware of, and yes all agriculture has its problems, but we could reduce grain farming by somewhere in the neighborhood of 50% if it weren’t required for animal consumption (more 70% of all grains are grown for animal agriculture, which is very inefficient BTW).

I agree with the second half and disagree with the first.

The article linked to in the comment is very interesting, but it only discusses our evolutionary heritage up to, at the latest, 60,000 years ago. The point of the article is that man was not a hunter, as most theories peg us as, but instead we were gatherers, essentially a slightly more bipedal and intelligent version of the apes we’d descended from. Which I don’t necessarily disagree with. The kicker is that we are not Australopithecus afarensis, which is the species the research focues solely on. We’re Home sapiens, descended from Homo erectus, and the biological and fossil and anthropological evidence is convincing that we did indeed evolve, for a multitude of reasons, into hunters and gatherers. And it really doesn’t matter that we were unable to systematically consume animal protein until fire and tools became prevalent, the fact is that we did. We are able to consume, and process, cooked meat and raw meat (at least in some forms) and we have been doing it for thousands and thousands of years. And we did it to supplement our consumption of plants, which we’ d been consuming for far longer.

Which, basically is my point. We’re a predator, whether its on plants or animals, we’re an apex predator that has codified to the exterme the methods by which we attack and consume our prey. And we’ve been doing this for thousands of years. So while I think one can choose to believe that Australopithecus afarensis was a vegetarian, which I think it was, and that that means we aren’t meant to consume meat, you’d be mistaken to do so. The bottom line is that we evolved into ominvores that hunted systematically and consumed animal prey on our way to becoming Home sapiens for a whole host of evolutionary reasons, not the least of which is that animals provided a reservoir of nutrition for man in regions where agriculture was either seasonal or very difficult.

I think Stan’s point, and the point of the animal cruelty argument in general, is as he says the living conditions “…prior to the slaughter.” As I stated in the my earlier post, factory farming is a nasty business. Obviously animals do not “thrive” in a factory farming situation (hence the use of antibiotics and other medicines/chemicals necessary to keep them healthy), I’m not arguing that. What I’m arguing is that there are plenty of alternatives where the cow you’re about to consume is as happy as, well, a cow can be, thinking life is grand as it chews its cud in an open field, and then “wham” it’s dead. Which is much the same as the gazelle, chewing on some grass when “wham” a lioness explodes from the weeds and crushes its windpipe. It’s the natural state of things. It’s still the same predator/prey relationship that has been exercised since one single-celled bacterium slurped up another way back “in the day.” Being against factory farming does not need to make anyone a vegetarian let alone a vegan because there’s plenty of alternative methods of gaining access to animal protein.

As for the plant life needing to be consumed in order to propogate, some plant life needs certain parts of the plant to be consumed in order to propagate, not the entire plant. That’s how fruit evolved. The fruit was meant to be consumed and then the seeds dropped somewhere away from the parent plant by the animal that consumed it. The plant that bore the fruit wasn’t consumed, i.e. killed, in order for it to propogate. That would be a very risky means of propogation for a plant and I’m not sure I know of one where the entire plant needed to be consumed in order for its offspring to live on somewhere else, but if there’s an example out there I’d love to see it. So while we do consume parts of plants that are menat to be consumed, like fruit, there’s also far more plants that we either consume the roots of the plants, or the parts of the plant that the plant needs to survive. We’re killing a highly evolved organism that differs from animals essentially only by the fact that they aren’t motile, they reproduce differently and we can’t teach them to fetch the paper. If the first thing you learned about a new plant was that it could warn its neighbor plants that it was not only under attack by something, but also what it was attacking it, and that its neighbors responded in such a fashion that when what was attacking the first plant could no longer attack its neighbors, you’d probably surmise that it was intelligent. (And while I’m not arguing that the plant is intelligent, or conscious, I’m simply saying that on the surface one could certainly anthropomorphosize that it was “acting” intelligently.) Would you still consume it if it was edible? Sure you would. And there’s a number of plants that chemically communicate in just that fashion but we either cut them down to make a house, or burn them to keep warm (or cook our recently killed animal prey) or consume them for food. And no one says a word about the cruelty of it all. It’s a double standard, and I’m not trying to be facitious. I just don’t think it’s fair to cry foul about killing and eating animals when we don’t cry foul for the plants. Both end up just as dead.

We don’t cry foul though because as humans, we choose what traits and what organisms we anthropomorphosize and it’s far easier to do that with a sad-eyed cow, or a reasonably smart pig than it is for a corn stalk growing out in the middle of Nebraska (right Jill?). If we’d have done that back when we had to bring the mammoth down or see our family or clan starve in the heart of winter, Stan and I wouldn’t be having this debate today. Or maybe we would, we’d just all be living where there’s lots of trees and it’s warm year round. Which, come to think of it, wouldn’t all that bad, except for the 6 - 10% of us that would fall prey to the predators of the region like Australopithecus afarensis did.

Lastly, I agree completely with the second half of Stan’s comment. The grain farming, even the amount of methane gas produced, would be reduced if we reduced the amount that was consumed by the animals we feed it to on the large scale farms. There’s plenty to dislike about the way we do agriculture, but I’m not sure, nor have I done much in the way of researching the alternative methods that we could use to feed the population of the planet. If we replace grains used to feed prey animals isn’t that then replaced by mono-cultured crops of things like rice and soy? Is that necessarily a good thing?

My only point, I guess, in all of this rambling is that you can try and persuade me to be a Vegan on a number of grounds, but being cruel to animals isn’t one of them. You can argue all you want against factory farming, but that doesn’t necessarily have to drive you to Veganism (again, is that even a word?). We’ve developed evolutionarily to be omnivores and there’s lots of ways one can be an omnivore and still be respectul of animals.

And thanks to Stan for the reasonable, intelligent reply. It’s not entirely fair that I get to blather on at length about this while he’s more or less constrained to the comment box. If he or anyone else care to carry-on the conversation via email, I can be reached at orca989ATyahooDOTcom (replace the ‘at’ and ‘dot’ with their respective symbols).

Now I’m goint to go eat a burger — with a whole grain bun, tomatoes, lettuce, onion, and a side of potato fries. An omnivore’s delight.

I like Vegans. I have friends who are Vegans and Vegetarians. I am still an ominvore. I can see why someone would want to be a Vegan/Vegetarian for health reasons. There is plenty of evidence that concentrated animal protein is both hard to digest, can be high in fat and cholesterol, etc., etc. Eating meat, a lot of it, is bad for you.

Fine. That’s where the argument for being a Vegan or a Vegetarian should stop. But it doesn’t. Typically, the argument continues on to include something involving animal cruelty. And that’s where I have my first hang-up with Veganism (if that’s even a word).

Oh I’ll admit that the factory farms for beef and poultry are not pretty. Those animals are born and raised to be food and their short existance here on this earth probably does not meet what most average people would consider to be the ideal (which is part of the problem, but more on that later). Once they are “ready” they are euthanized as quickly as possible and then butchered. It’s not pretty, it’s bloody and nasty and ugly. But it ultimately yields food so it’s a brutish means to an end. Many think it cruel and despise it.

But why exactly? Let’s compare the above to the way Nature works. Let’s, for example, look at the way a lioness takes down a gazelle in Africa. The gazelle is stalked, chased, knocked down, clawed, chased again, knocked down again, and then finally has its throat crushed by powerful jaws and sharp teeth and it dies a slow painful death by suffocation. Some, though not too many, are lucky and get their neck snapped and go instantly. But what a way to go! Hunted and pursued, your herd mates fleeing and leaving you to die, your body sliced open and then your throat finally smashed in the jaws of your predator.

Now think about who went in a more “humane” manner. In fact, take any animal who is not an apex predator and compare they way they die to the way an animal is dispatched on a farm when that animal is to be used for food. There is no comparison. In every single instance the animal being killed for food is probably in pain for a lot less time than the prairie dog that just got picked off by a hawk or the field mouse being toyed with by your house cat.

So that’s why the animal cruelty tack doesn’t hold up. It’s logically inconsistent. It’s simply a by-product of our anthropomorphosizing about animals and our misconstrued ideas about what we consider idyllic about Nature and the natural state of things. Nature is not idyllic. It’s anything but. It’s nasty, it’s brutish, it’s “…red in tooth and claw.” The food chain is relentless and if you’re not an apex predator you’re someone else’s potential meal. That can’t be fun. What is idyllic about standing around, munching grass with one eye always on the weeds and one eye on your baby or your herdmates? Everyday you face the potential of death and dismemberment. That is not idyllic, that’s a warzone. And I’m not saying being raised and ultimately slaughtered on a factory farm is idyllic either. What I’m saying is that neither of them are. We, as humans, with our cognitive abilities and our self-awareness and our capacity for empathy are the only ones who care about what might be idyllic or not. The gazelle doesn’t. The cow doesn’t. They don’t know any different. Humans are far more kind to their prey, at least their animal prey, than that animal’s natural predator would ever be. And the end result is the same — they’re food for something, either us or a wolf or a hawk or a lion.

So “saving the animals” from factory farming or from consumption by humans in order to make the animals’ lives better doesn’t work as an argument for Veganism. Any animal subject to becoming an appetizer on a moment’s notice is not looking for you to make thier lives better, they’re looking for you to make them a pet. That would be the only “improvement” they might take notice of, but it’s doubtful they’d ever recognize the favor you did for them. Why? Because they’re animals. They simply don’t know any different. Sending cows back to an undomesticated life would not make them happier, it would make them a meal for something else (and arguably do irrepairable harm to the environment, just take a look at the damage done by feral pigs and you’ll have an idea).

My other hang-up with Veganism has to do with plants. Where’s their advocate in all this? I’m serious. They’re certainly alive. They reproduce. They evolve. They can’t move, so people automatically ascribe to them a certain primitiveness, placing them further back on the evolutionary tree. But’s that’s purely misconception. Plants are among the most sophisticated and highly evolved creatures on this planet. They have been shown to communicate in a rudimentary way amont their own species, they have intimate relationships with the ecosystem around them, arguably more intimate the the animals that we so adore. In fact there is no ecosystem without plants. So where is the advocate for them? Why are they not afforded the same protection or luxuries that the cow is? They are factory farmed, they are sliced and diced and rolled and processed until they aren’t even recognizable any more. A large number of them are eaten alive for crying out loud. I can’t think of anything in the western diet that is eaten alive that isn’t a vegetable. At least the animals are dead before we consume them. Not so for the plants.

So what is the difference between a plant and an animal in the Vegan’s eyes? Why is it any more right to eat a mono-cultured industrially farmed plant (like soy) than it is to eat an indutrially farmed cow? (Or alternatively, what’s the difference between an organically grown plant and an organically fed free-range cow?)

Here’s what the answer to that question should be: nothing. There is no difference. They are both highly evolved, living, breeding organisms. An industrially farmed or organically farmed plant is as much out of it’s natural element, it’s “idyllic” state, as a cow on an industrial farm or walking free-range is.

Face it, the slaughter is everywhere. It’s just a question of what’s being slaughtered. Which is why the only truly valid argument for being a Vegan is because it might, arguably, be healthier than an omnivorous diet. Of course there’s the people who don’t like the taste of meat or the texture, stuff like that. But my point is that the argument for people being Vegan because they want to save the cows (or other farmed animal) just doesn’t make sense. So please, stop making it.

P.S. This should not be construed as a defense of factory farming, a practice which I’m not a big fan of. Factory farming, especially of livestock, but also of plants, has significant environmental impacts beyond the impact on the organism being farmed. But for nearly every factory farmed product there is an alternative, small farm, organically grown product that can be substituted for it. So even being against factory farming is no reason to not eat meat, it’s only a reason to be against factory farming.

There’s so many people out there with an axe to grind against evolution that in order to pick one to try and refute you may as well pull one of their names from a hat. But in this case, we have a nationally syndicted radio host and prominent conservative blogger linking to one of the worst attempts to go after evolution that I’ve seen in a long time.

Doug TenNepal, according to Wikipedia, “…is an American musician, animator, Eisner Award-winning artist and film maker.” Given the list of things he’s worked on, there’s no doubt he’s very, very good at what he does (Earthworm Jim was awesome and I say that with all sincerity). But we can’t all be good at everything, as his post attacking an article about a new fish-to-tetrapod transitional fossil shows.

And really, what better way to discredit science and the evidence for a theory than to attack that paragon of scientific reporting known as the The New York Times. Not Nature. Not Science. Not any of the major scientific journals dedicated to the field in question. Not even the actual paper discussing the discovery. Instead he chooses a poorly reported account in The New York Times. This can be considered the same as me questioning the validity of quantum mechanics by criticizing its representation in a Calvin and Hobbes comic strip (in which many a quantum concept was batted around).

Doug starts out with a whopper of an opening, one so stunningly wrong it more or less invalidates the remainder of his post.

…wait a minute, you’re telling me that scientists have been preaching Godless evolution all this time without a legit fish-to-tetrapod missing link?! Well what were you using all this time on the fossil tree, science fiction? Luckily, no gap is so great between species that can make some scientists lose their faith in a dogmatic fundamentalist allegience to Materialist Darwinism.

Wow, two slams in one paragraph. Doug plays the canard that most looking to “debunk” evolution try. There are gaps in the fossil records, there are gaps here, there’s a lack of understanding there, ergo evolutionary theory is invalid, or at least major parts of it are. And those that still think the “Materialist Darwinism” is the best explanation for the evidence at hand are operating purely on faith. Kettle meet pot.

His inference is that evolution is more or less a series of hand-waving exercises involving mirrors, smoke, and a big drink of kool-aid. That because we don’t have a fossil showing a clear and distinct transition between each and every species that the theory falls apart, and most certainly should not be taught. And he also has noticed that it’s “Godless.”

Well first, yep, we don’t have a fossil distinctly showing every transition at every stage. But we do have many fossils showing transtions, and as a result the theory of evolution allows for the forumlation of a prediction (as any good theory does) that there should be a fossil, in about this time range, that would show the traits that this one does. And we found one. Now what would have really been a sticker is if the fossil had been found in the wrong time period, either much earlier or much later. That certainly would have given people pause and created more questions than it answered. But that’s not what happened. This fossil butresses the theory and proves the hypothesis. That’s how science works. You would think if Doug were truly looking critically at evolution this would be an example that would begin to go some ways towards addressing his concerns with the theory. It does not.

Second, evolution is a “Godless” theory. Yep, got us again. That’s also the way science works Doug. You cannot make appeals to external, supernatural authorities to explain how the natural world works. So evolution has been and always will be “Godless.” You’d probably also be interested to note that chemistry, physics, cellular biology, oceanography, marine biology and geology, just to name a few other fields of science, are also “Godless.” Any comment on the validity of those disciplines and whether they should be taught in our schools? Evolution is just as valid a theory as the those that underpin physics or chemistry or geology. There are unanswered questions in every field and evolution is no exception. It is, however, ground in the same principles of discovery that those other fields are and it is therefore science. Just because there are gaps does not invalidate the phylogenetic tree. I would concede that science textbooks could do a better job of conveying the uncertainties (depending on grade level and the maturity of the student involved in the study) and we should not tell the students not to look at this part of the tree because “here there be dragons.” The questions should be highlighted, the gaps studied.

That is not, however, any sort of endorsement for ID. When ID starts publishing positive, predictive theories which generate testable hypotheses we’ll talk. ID would be far better suited to switching their energy expenditure to practical research and away from defending themselves and implementing their Wedge Document. There’s always hope I suppose.

Unfortunately, Doug didn’t stop with his opening paragraph. Undaunted, he continues to fisk the NYT article, sometimes a paragraph at a time, sometimes a sentence at a time. I’d fisk his post, but then I’d be fisking a fisk and it really wouldn’t make sense unless I reproduced his entire post here, so I’ll just highlight one more astounding piece of his that must be commented on:

Here’s why this whole fish-thing is gay. You can’t know that the fins are limbs in the making or if the fins are fully functional and perfectly complete as is. It’s also really suspect that an entire arm system would be evolving at the same time. Does a fish fin that has 10% progress in the digits, wrists, elbows and shoulders really have an advantage over his peers to help him get his genes into the next generation? If I have 10% of a shark tail growing out of my butt have I gained a swimming advantage? How about 1% of a shark fin? I’m sorry but this kind of Darwinism is just self-evidently dumb.

Where to start. First, of course the fins aren’t “limbs in the making,” that doesn’t even make sense. The fins are fins, but they have changed via mutation from the fins of the organism’s predecessors in such a way that they begin to resemble what we, as the observing humans, have defined as “limbs” of tetrapods. The only reason we can say that they resemble the limbs of tetrapods is because we’ve seen tetrapods from farther up the phylogenetic tree that show what a “limb” in a tetrapod ultimately ends up looking like. The Tiktaalik wasn’t floating there in some pre-historic swamp thinking that it needed to start working on limbs so that it or its ancestors might someday break the mirror-like surface of its world and explore the great unknown. I mean come on. His question as to whether a fish fin having “10% progress towards digits, wrist…” having an advantage over his peers is answered simply by the fact that because this organism succeeded in successfully reproducing for a very long period of time, having limbs obviously provided a benefit, or at worse, no net deteriment. But since tetrapods become such a prevalent body plan, both in aquatic and terrestrial niches, it is pretty safe to say that those limbs did indeed provide a survival benefit. When he wonders whether having only 10% of a shark tail would give him a swimming advantage is all but pointless. Who knows? The only way it would confer an advantage was if swimming made him more likely in his current environment to survive. Given that he’s a land dwelling mammal who sits at a desk all day, I think it’s safe to say that no, his 10% of a shark tail does him little good. But since it also wouldn’t be more likely to get him eaten by the paper shredder, the odds of him passing along this odd mutation to his children would actually be quite high. Perhaps in a post-apocalyptic Water World (at least as envisioned by Kevin Costner), Doug’s offspring would indeed be handed a survival advantage the rest of us sorely lacked. But then that’s exactly how evolution works. A mutation that seems pointless at some point can become distinctly advantageous at some future point. Doug provided his own example demonstrating the theory he so dislikes. Oh the irony.

Beyond that point, the rest of his post spirals off into a rant against those whom he perceives are attacking him and people like him for his religious beliefs, the NYT and scientists in particular. To feel so persecuted while enjoying the status of a majority faith in this country has always baffled me and will probably continue to do so. Those who see the evidence before us and conclude that evolution is the best mechanism for explaining that evidence are not out to make a huge army of “Godless” minions. We are, however, more than willing to defend against blatant falsehoods and outright distortions, like his post.

If Doug chooses to believe, despite the wealth of evidence to the contrary, that evolution is some faith-based cult of people using the scientific method to draw conclusions about how organisms changed and adapted over time, there’s probably little I or anyone else could say that would sway him. The least he could do, before lashing out, would be to get the facts that the science is operating on and argue against those rather than draw his own straw men up and knock them down with his attempted rhetorical wit.

And as an immediate follow-up to the post below, I should mention that the last two squadrons of F-14’s returned from Iraq on March 10th and have been retired. Arguably one of the most popular military aircraft with pilots and with the general public now officially no longer flies for the country of its birth. A sad day for those who flew them and for those who wanted to.

Sniff.

They are being replaced with additional F-18E/F Super Hornets, an aircraft designed from the outset to be multi-role (air-to-air/air-to-ground), with far more sophisticated avionics and requiring only an aircrew of one instead of the two needed in the F-14.

For a good overview of the Tomcat you can check out its wikipedia entry here.

And for my money there was simply no better squadron than the old VF-84 Jolly Rogers, before they went all low-vis with their paint scheme. The black vertical stabilizers with the skull and crossbones and the yellow tips were as good as it got in my opinion. Here’s a great example (from the above wikipedia article):

So long to the Tomcats.

This has been a long time coming, but since I still get a number of hits on this site from people searching for “what does check six mean” and the like, I figured I’d finally post on what “check six” actually does mean.

In short, it means look behind you, as in “check your six ‘o clock” where 12 noon would be looking straigh-ahead with 3 ‘o clock to your right and 9 ‘o clock to your left. It’s basically a term that arose from air combat, though exactly when and how I’m not sure (though I’d put money on it originiating during the early aerial dogfighting of World War I). As you would expect, having someone directly behind you in a dogfight is a bad position to find yourself in. Hence you are supposed to always “check your six” or to shorten it even more for communication over radio channels, “check six.”

Why did I chose that title for my blog? I suppose because back in the eighties I had wanted to fly for the Navy. As you can guess that never worked out. The result of that desire though was an acquired knowledge of things military and especially things Navy and aerial. In other words, I was a jet fighter groupie of sorts, and I took to phrases like “check six” and “target rich environment” even before “Top Gun” came along and made every young adolescent high-school age male want to fly F-14’s and ride crotch-rockets into the California sunset. To show you what a jet-dork I was even before “Top Gun,” I had wanted to fly the F-14 because of it’s (at the time) superior airframe design with swing wings, it’s ability to track 24 targets and attack up to six of them at the same time at a theoretical range of almost 120 miles with a full load of six AIM-54 Phoenix missles. Which were fire-and-forget by the way (at least in the terminal part of thier attack profile which took them up to a very high altitude where they would then nose-over and dive on their assigned targets at incredible speed and under the guidance of their own radar). And I just pulled all of that from memory nearly 25 years after I first learned about it. Honest, I googled none of that. And I bet if you do you’ll find that I’m right. I’m not bragging, just showing you what I spent my youth learning about. Which, I suppose, would explain why I was such a dateless wonder all through high school.

So with that little trip down memory lane you’ve learned what “check six” means and why it’s the name of my blog and why I had so few dates in high school.

I’ve done my educational duty for the day. You’re welcome.

Scientists in Italy have successfully melded living brain neurons onto a microprocessor:

They used special proteins found in the brain to glue brain cells, called neurons, onto the chip. However, the proteins acted as more than just a simple adhesive.

“They also provided the link between ionic channels of the neurons and semiconductor material in a way that neural electrical signals could be passed to the silicon chip,” said study team member Stefano Vassanelli from the University of Padua in Italy.

The proteins allowed the neuro-chip’s electronic components and its living cells to communicate with each other. Electrical signals from neurons were recorded using the chip’s transistors, while the chip’s capacitors were used to stimulate the neurons.

Red pill or blue?

I will admit the I took a rather strong disliking to Bode Miller during these recently completed Winter Olympics. In this I’m not alone. He seemed like an undedicated slacker, someone who had a lot of talent and put none of it to use. Or so I was led to believe. I don’t downhill ski, nor do I follow the sport in the least. But everyone was saying he was the best, had a good chance at sweeping his events, etc., etc., etc. Turns out he didn’t finish two of them and medalled in none. Why this frosted me and so many others did cross my mind but not in any serious fashion.

And then I read this. And I have to admit it made a lot of sense. And while most of us probably wouldn’t admit it, this sums a majority of us all too well:

You are not like Cal Ripken Jr. You aren’t that dedicated, you aren’t that intense, and you care about your job a whole lot less. Ripken might be your favorite player of the past 25 years, but the two of you have almost nothing in common. In fact, I bet there are many days when you wish you could just take a suitcase of money to Australia, drop out of society, grow out you hair and smoke cannabis all afternoon while having sex with whoever you felt like. In fact, if you had the chance, you’d probably do it tomorrow. But you know what? I bet you also think Ricky Williams is despicable.

Sound familiar? OK, maybe not all of that above but you get the point.

Regardless of your view on Bode Miller, winning, competitiveness and the like, read the whole thing and give it a bit of thought. It’s worth it.

Some pretty amazing chalk drawings done on sidewalks around the world. They are dependant, for the most part, on viewing from a certain angle and the effect is even more enhanced when you’re looking at it as a photograph. All in all, pretty amazing work.

(Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan)

In keeping with my science theme from the last post, there’s this simply amazing discovery: scientists have confirmed that dolphins don’t seem quite so bright when they’re not in the water:

“The dolphins were incapable of recognizing and repeating simple gestures,” said study co-author Dr. Scott Lindell. “Their non-verbal communications were limited to a rapid constriction and expansion of the blowhole, various incomprehensible fin motions, and heavy tremors while they lay prone on the lab table.”

Perhaps the most interesting result was that their ability to use echo-location to navigate was rendered useless.

“The military has claimed great success in training these mammals, utilizing their echolocation skills to detect mines that have been placed underwater,” said Lindell, who conducted a similar experiment in a concrete parking lot. “We were unable to replicate this finding ourselves.”

Lindell added: “In most cases, the dolphins succeeded in finding land mines only when we placed them directly on top of the mines.”

They were also unable to…

…display novel behaviors, use a map to pinpoint their location on campus (spatial reasoning), or complete a simple obstacle course and wall climb.

I mean come on! They can’t even do a wall climb?!

Read the whole thing. Maybe that large dolphin brain isn’t being used all that well after all. Leave it to The Onion to break such important scientific discoveries. You’d think Nature would have been all over this…

And yes, I know it’s satire, I’m not as dumb as I look.

I’ve always been very interested in quantum mechanics. It’s something that I’ve done a fair amount of reading on it, and while I don’t profess to understand absolutely everything that I’ve read, I’d like to thing I have an above-average understanding of the material for a lay-person.

With that said, this little story from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign caused my brain to emit a sound like the engine of a 50 year Yugo with no oil.

Apparently they’ve constructed a non-running quantum computer that still generates answers:

They send a photon into a system of mirrors and other optical devices, which included a set of components that run a simple database search by changing the properties of the photon.

The new design includes a quantum trick called the Zeno effect. Repeated measurements stop the photon from entering the actual program, but allow its quantum nature to flirt with the program’s components - so it can become gradually altered even though it never actually passes through.

Got that?

Yeah, me too.

I would be terribly remiss to not link to this article by Charles Krauthammer, a conservative op-ed columnist, regarding Intelligent Design and whether it should be taught in public schools.

I’ve written a lot about this particular debate, but this particular piece is so spot on that it needs to be read. It’s worth the few minutes it’ll take to do it.

I’ve had this long post written and saved and edited for months now, almost from back when this blog was created. I haven’t published it because it just wasn’t conveying my point correctly. And then comes this post, from Dispatches from the Culture Wars (a great blog by the way) which basically sums up one of the points I was trying to make, which is basically this: science, specifically evolution, does not precluded belief in or the existance of, a supernatural power.

ID was created in direct response to what was perceived to be the materialistic naturalism of evolution. A sense that evolution was attempting to supplant the theistic notions with those of the purely natural. There were no miracles, there was no God. But evolutionary biology doesn’t and hasn’t done that at all. Or at least it had never explicity set out to do that. People were always free to interpret evolutionary theory as they saw fit philosophically. In other words, the facts are the facts, whether those facts help reinforce your belief in God or not is entirely up to you. You can draw your own philosophical conclusions from the science, but the scientific conclusions don’t change. That’s the key, philosophy is not science, and vice-versa. Just because evolution, and all science for that matter, deals with the laws of nature doesn’t mean that it somehow precludes the existance of the supernatural.

…evolution is “naturalistic” in the exact same sense in which the germ theory of disease, the kinetic theory of gasses, or plumbing are naturalistic. It does not rule out the possible existence of anything supernatural, including the existence of God, it merely proceeds on the working assumption that the world behaves consistently within the parameters of natural law without disruption.

So you really can have your cake and eat it too. To sum up:

It is a mistake to conflate a scientific theory with the philosophical inferences one can draw from it…Richard Dawkins infers support for his atheism from evolutionary theory, while Ken Miller infers support for his Christianity from evolutionary theory, but those are both non-scientific inferences and are not a part of evolutionary theory itself.

The science holds regardless of your theistic viewpoint. It really is that simple. The Catholic Church seems to see it this way, more or less. Fundamentalists, of any religious stripe, seem to either be incapable of or simply don’t want to see it like that. As a result we end up with the nonsense in Dover, PA. or worse, the travesty in Kansas where the Kansas State School Board REDEFINED the defintion of science so that science is “…no longer limited to the search for natural explanations of phenomena.” All so they can get their particular philosophical viewpoint, i.e. creationism, taught in the public school science classes there.

What a shame. Science is difficult enough to grasp without muddying the waters with vague notions about whether something like transitional fossils prove or disprove the existance of God. The long and the short of it is that it does neither, and that’s where it should be left. Theistic or atheistic crusades have no business in the science classroom. Leave the philosophy to the philosphy and religion classes, where it belongs.

Or it appers He will when he gets wind of the fact that they dumped all eight of the Republican school board members, who had voted in favor of Intelligent Design, for eight Democratic school board members who will likely reverse the ID decision whose trial just wrapped up in court last week.

Or at least that’s what Pat Robertson is saying.

“I’d like to say to the good citizens of Dover: If there is a disaster in your area, don’t turn to God. You just rejected him from your city.”

The intellectual vacuity of this guy is simply beyond comprehension. And to think that the White House consults with this guy on things like judicial nominees. Please. First he calls for the assassination of Hugo Chavez, the sitting president of Venezuela (there’s a Christian sentiment), and now this.

And as all good public figures do when their initial comments are taken to mean exactly what it was they said, he issued a clarification, which didn’t help much. He said:

“God is tolerant and loving, but we can’t keep sticking our finger in his eye forever,” Robertson said. “If they have future problems in Dover, I recommend they call on Charles Darwin. Maybe he can help them.”

It’s a shame that someone with as much exposure as he has, with a TV show and his ministry, has so little upstairs that he spouts off nonsense like this. Dover did not vote God out of their city. I’m sure Dover is still as faithful and church-going as they have always been. Dover did take a stand for the education of their children and did take a stand for sound science. Neither of those things are exclusive of a belief in God. Why does someone like Robertson constantly take such an either or approach to things?

When Dover starts burning Churches let me know. Until then, I doubt they will have been forsaken by a just and loving God for simply saying that science is science and not religion. Somehow I think God would understand that.

I fix bugs for a living. Well, actually, I go through two phases in my job. First I write the bugs, then I spend a sometimes inordinate amount of time going back through and fixing them. They are always there, no matter how careful I am, or think I am. I’ve never written a sizable bug-free program, and anyone who tells you otherwise is talking out of an orifice not normally used for conversation. At least not in civil circles.

Fortunately, my bugs are innocuous. The software that I write has no life or death implications, it’s not responsible for getting anyone from point A to point B with any degree of accuracy, etc. My bugs are annoying to users, but they haven’t killed anyone. I haven’t blown up any multi-million dollar space program gadgets or defrauded anyone out of their retirement with any of my bugs.

The same cannot be said for a few other bugs in my industry however. This Wired story covers the most notorious of those bugs, and some of them are pretty damn nasty. If ever you needed a sanity check regarding the profession of programming and how fraught with the potential for serious mishap it can be, the bugs this article discusses provides it.

A DBA I worked with in Michigan always relayed a saying to me that he had heard at a conference he had attended. At that conference the speaker asked his audience of programmers if thier program was an airplane how many of them would be willing to fly in it. Something like four hands went up in an audience of 200 people.

That about sums it up.

The Vatican has issued a “stout” defense of Charles Darwin and evolution and is critical of fundamentalists who literally interpret the creation story found in Genesis, according to an Austrailian newspaper. Here’s the link.

In a word, wow.