Fringe benefits

Al Denelsbeck


While it is hot enough out there today to actually make the grass disturbingly warm, and potting soil seem to have been heated on a stove, there is still a small benefit to chasing frantic pollinators on spearmint flowers: you get to inhale the wonderful mint aroma.

Some small black & white wasps could be seen, in close approach, to have distinctively chartreuse eyes, but were disinclined to hold still long enough for me to capture these easily, so it took several tries. Seeing that they were circling the blooms, I picked a spot ahead of their apparent path and waited for them to ‘crest the hill’ and come into focus, which did eventually work. This is a Bicyrtes quadrifasciatus, which it seems might sometimes be referred to as a sand wasp – as with most arthropods, it’s safer to stick to the scientific name since the ‘common’ name is always subject to regional and colloquial variations. I can’t tell you how many species of arachnid I’ve seen confidently called a “garden spider.”

The mistake I made in my approach is that it shows only the head, and so you get no idea how the eyes are incongruous with the body coloration (or lack thereof.) The next one is slightly better, and gives an impression of shyness, perhaps, or surprise. What’s also interesting is that up close, the flowers betray their true coloration of white petals with just a splash of purple from the stigma (I think) – from a typical viewing distance, one gets the impression of very pale lavendar flowers.

Also note the background. Even this far out of focus and beyond the range of the flash set for macro work, the brick wall betrays its presence – this is one reason why I urge people to watch behind their subjects, regardless of depth-of-field.


Excuses, excuses

Al Denelsbeck

Some time back, I posted about an article published in Skeptic magazine regarding religion and violence. As I gave some indication then, discussions about the topic tend to be very superficial, and in a lot of cases deal with popular misconceptions and gross misrepresentations. Yet it’s a topic that, without a doubt, deserves a significant amount of attention, and serious attention at that. I am under no illusions that I am capable of delivering this, but I do want to present a couple of salient points.

Let’s start with the first, perhaps most common, misrepresentation. No one even slightly serious about the subject believes that religion is the sole cause of violence, or makes any attempt to imply this. Not even the most devout atheist believes that a world without religion would be peaceful and mellow – despite the statistics giving some support to this idea from countries that are largely secular (and suffer from much lower counts of violent crime.)

Nor does anyone with half a brain believe that religions specifically promote violence; this is far too much of an over-generalization to be supportable or even useful. Yet the topic is dismissed from discussion very often because of exactly this fallacy. “Nobody in my church ever hurt anyone,” or, “The Crusades were a long time ago,” or, “If you think christians are bad, how about the muslims?” are examples of the kind of thinking that we see far too often. Counter examples do not automatically dismiss (or ‘balance out,’ a ridiculous concept that is seen far too often) the numerous instances of violence with strong religious ties. If we take a specific incident of violence, such as an execution, and find another factor that may be a motivation, this is a perfectly legitimate examination of the issue, and in fact this is exactly what we should be looking for, in all fairness – such things could disprove the idea of religious violence. But this is not in any way related to circumstances where religious belief avoided or thwarted violence; it’s not reasonable to reduce the possibilities to either/or propositions, nor could religion ever be shown not to be capable of both. And as I said previously, since it is widely reckoned to be a force for good, there’s really nothing that can balance out any circumstance where it is not. Such occurrences are examples of abject failure.

So we come to an argument that often appears: humans have a tendency towards violence, so human nature is at fault more than religion. And to that, I will unreservedly agree. Yet, I want to maintain a proper perspective on such a thing, because this is the same as saying that guns deserve more credit for violent deaths than clubs. While a true statement, this does not absolve clubs of their status as weapons.

Humans do, unquestionably, have tendencies towards violence – we are not alone among species in this regard, but this is no excuse. There is some internal recognition that violence is necessary in some circumstances, and I only need to mention “invading army” or “marauding wolves” to demonstrate that there is indeed some purpose. And yes, this gets displaced very often, in everything from spectator sports like football, boxing, and wrestling, to fistfights over name-calling and traffic altercations. While the actual processes that provoke such (over)reactions are not specifically known, it is not hard to imagine that they did evolve to suit some useful functions. We are not helpless victims of evolved traits, but it does help to understand why we are prone to certain behaviors – this is an important distinction.

It is also worth noting that we generally have some distaste over the idea of humans as a violent species – we’re not proud of it, but ashamed instead, and this is also an internal trait. And this also serves a purpose, because “social” and “violent” don’t really go together, and we place a lot of emphasis on cooperation and community too. In fact, we tend to see the violence we engage in as defensive, much more often than not. That’s more acceptable, isn’t it?

In light of this, the original question becomes more along the lines of, “How often does religion exploit tendencies to be violent rather than tendencies to avoid violence?” Or, lest we put the cart before the horse, does it even do this?

It’s not enough, for instance, to take violent occurrences throughout history and find other potential motivations than religion, even if it’s a good start. One must also reasonably ask, “Why then does religion appear so often in such circumstances?” While religion is not by any stretch a common denominator in violent acts throughout history, it nevertheless appears with surprising frequency – it behooves us to ask why. Yes, it is entirely possible to be a coincidence or red herring, and the very tricky reality about such things is that every act of violence may have its own individual motivations; it’s not safe to just look for some other motivation that occurs more frequently than religion, because it may not exist even if/while religion remains blameless. But if religion is prominent in such things, there is some particular reason why. We cannot take such things as the Crusades and muslim extremism and dismiss them as irrelevant when they are inextricably linked, not just by the various chroniclers, but by the participants themselves. In other words, we cannot blame the witch hunts and inquisitions on bias from historians when we have direct evidence of religious influence from the hunters and inquisitors themselves. The Malleus Maleficarum was not created after the fact as propaganda, so dismissing religious influence in witch hunts is, to say the least, far more biased than considering it.

So let’s continue with this example. Malleus is not scriptural, nor even claimed as divinely inspired, so does it count as religious? Perhaps not – it is easy to argue that the subject matter is more the reflection of personal opinions and/or agendas, or simply misinterpretations, and so it shouldn’t be considered religious. Yet the subject matter, and the authority invoked within, most certainly are religious in both origin and nature. Had the book been about finding and exterminating alien mind control (or some other ‘possession’ not related to religion,) could it possibly have achieved the status that it did? How many people would have accepted it as a guide? And the very pertinent question: how many people could flay or burn someone alive if they did not believe in the righteousness and divine authority of their acts?

This is a very important factor to examine. Context means a lot in such investigations. In our society today, we are horrified at someone who would put their child to death over, for instance, uttering, “jesus christ be damned” – but this is cultural, not religious, because scripture actually condones such acts. But how does one determine the dividing line between the influences of a culture with religious roots, and religious thought itself? While there are lines in scripture about not suffering the presence of witches, there are also lines permitting only one kind of plant in the same furrow, and not trimming facial hair. Specific splinters of faiths, local churches and/or their leaders, and communities often determine which behaviors are given more weight than others. Is that still “religion”?

Again, we can compare this to other forms of influence, such as political movements and forms of tribalism/nationalism. In the cases where any of those have led to violence, such as the purges of Native Americans, Armenians, or Bosnians, we can see the influences of class consciousness and privilege, giving support to the idea that violence is justified by the view of the victim being “lesser” than the perpetrator, or in many cases a threat – get them before they get us, because they will. In such cases, religion may be only incidental as a motivator; perhaps providing the idea that someone who follows jesus or mohammed is “good” while everyone else, by default, is not. This may be almost indistinguishable from someone who is “aryan” or not – it’s not that it motivates anyone towards violence, only that it justifies extremism by changing the definition of good. We might broaden the scope, based on such observations, and consider that ideologies might be responsible for motivating or justifying violence – again, this isn’t an either/or thing, but can be one of many factors that contribute. And of course, religion gets no free ride here because religions are ideologies themselves; the best that could be said in such circumstances is that it is unfair to single them out. Yet some ideologies are actually motivations for good behavior too, so some finer distinction needs to be made.

We cannot ignore the authority angle, though. Scripture is touted and raised as the ultimate authority, and thus not subject to common ethical or social considerations. This is an interesting approach to ethics, in that it fulfills no purpose commonly attributed to ethics, which is to serve the community by valuing fairness, mutual support, and cooperation. Instead, it only invokes the self-proclaimed authority of scripture to wield by proxy the demands of an unquestionable (yet ethereal) superior – this does not fit any accepted definition of ‘community.’ Also notable is that such authority is wielded very often only for others; not all portions of scripture receive the same weight or attention. It takes a large group of people, as in a culture, to select and agree upon which bits are the unassailable word of god, and this is frequently treated more as mob rule than abject obeisance – whoever belongs to the church with the largest number of followers gets to enforce their views on others, often regardless of what religion anyone else might follow. Note, too, that the preferred portions of scripture, or entire denominations themselves, are not arrived upon in any manner we deem rational – most religions claim divine authority as their own, so such claims are not enough to distinguish judaism from islam, and in fact religion is chosen by what suits an individual’s desires best, in those few cases where it is not simply adopted blindly from parents or community. Once chosen, how often does it become the law that all others must follow, denying their choice?

Homophobia is, quite likely, a cultural thing, especially when we see how homosexuality is treated in other cultures. But violence against gays would likely be as sporadic as violence against any other ethnic or preference group without the idea of scriptural condemnation – in other words, it’s good to hate. In any given public forum, comments about homosexuality and atheism are exponentially more likely to reference religion; this can be ignored only through blind denial. At least prejudice against atheism might be explained by believing that it’s synonymous with immorality – the idea that religion, rather than society, dictates our morals is a common fallacy. Homophobia lacks any support at all save for obscure scriptural references, which number fewer than references against wealth or gluttony (the latter, at least, makes it somewhat ironic that here in North Carolina, the Fat Fuck State, we recently passed an amendment against same-sex marriages.) Given any method of determining the detriments to society, however, homosexuality falls completely in the clear, far behind alcohol, improper traffic lane usage, and bottled water. And even, it must be said, praying for recovery from illness.

The same lack of detriment can be found in such things as abortion and birth control, education in strong sciences such as evolution, and even the definition of ‘kosher’ foods. None of these have the slightest impact on community or fairness, nor do they have victims in any way, save for the personal affront end of things which, to be blunt, is not victimhood but mere whining. Yet even in our enlightened societies we’re expected to yield to the authority claimed, and in some current cultures, failure to do so does lead to violent reprisal. When a mob attacks an embassy and kills innocent people within over the actions of a redneck nitwit thousands of kilometers away, there is no motivation that can be claimed as benefiting society, and the only ‘ethics’ at work is the self-imposed privilege of the devout. Even when hurling about demands for respect, it must be noted that no respect is offered in return. Where do such class distinctions come from, if not from religion?

We can also look at many cases of wars and persecutions throughout history that had political and national motivations behind a religious façade – Northern Ireland and the Palestinian/Israeli conflicts come to mind. In many such cases, religion is not a motivation nor really justification, but a means of promoting a cause and provoking the populace towards extremism. The same might be said for the rampant idea within this country that ‘muslim’ directly equates with ‘terrorist,’ a fallacy knowingly fostered by presidential administrations (the George W. Bush administration, in case an example was needed, but that’s not the only one.) And while seemingly unrelated, we have the frequent appearance of incarcerated criminals who have ‘found god,’ and the errant (and enormously hypocritical) preachers who have ‘repented their sins.’ All of these rely on the idea that religion has a much higher standard than mere laws, and that it is accepted and unquestioned within a populace. The ability to wield these successfully can only come about if enough people abdicate rational considerations in favor of automatic responses and associations regarding religion. Is this the fault of religions, or merely a byproduct of their acceptance?

In examining the reasoning behind religious thought as a whole, the idea that religion merely exploits numerous natural tendencies within humans seems to have merit. Religion is not so much the ideologies of individual denominations as the culmination of several traits that we developed as a species, making us more susceptible and willing to accept the premises of the specific faiths. Thus, in how many cases can we say that religion has simply ‘fit the bill’ in describing or justifying the base instincts we might have towards violence itself, or tribalism, or self-preservation? Or, ignoring for the moment any claim of divine authority, should we even consider that the goals of most religions are to strengthen and support the community, and that religion is as much a victim of our internal motivations as those who are targeted by violence?

Perhaps the most interesting observation when considering all of this is that determining just how much blame religion deserves is irrelevant. Throughout, we can see that the culprit is usually a lack of rational consideration, the failure to have distinct ideas about community and firm goals about our interactions. We too often fail to recognize bigotry or self-imposed privilege for what it is, and don’t consider what is useful in either law or ethics (or for that matter, what the purposes of ethics and morals are in the first place.) We accept labels and assumptions that simplify decisions, such as ‘christian = good,’ and never consider that good already has a simple, easy-to-wield definition. And most especially, we let ourselves be drawn in by aspects that appease our egos at the expense of others. Religion does indeed exploit these, but so do many other approaches. By concentrating solely on religion, we may be guilty of not casting the net wide enough or, worse, treating a symptom and not the cause.

Free if you can get it to work

Al Denelsbeck

Unlike too many posts that I’ve seen in the past couple of years, there’s actually a good article on the idea of free will over at the Richard Dawkins Foundation site right now. Zeuglodon does a pretty good job of hashing out the various aspects of it, though I will admit you have to be on your toes to keep up – it’s not quite intended to be a beginner’s primer. I made a couple of comments myself, points I’d also covered in my previous posts on the subject and related (there will be links at bottom,) but more, what struck me is what I’m going to talk about in this post, which is why this is such a big deal in the first place.

Briefly: Everything that we know about the human body, about physics, about the entire universe tells us that everything that we do is a simple, predictable physical reaction, and there’s no evidence of anything else. Which means no supernaturality, no soul, and especially no “mind” or “self” outside of the squishy meatness of our brains, operating solely on known electrochemical properties. And this means that each decision we make, however capricious or arbitrary we try to be, could have been predicted given enough information (far more than we will ever be able to grasp or use, but there nonetheless.) Did you just thumb your nose at me in a gesture of defiance? Ha! Physics already knew you were going to do that, because the impact of these words on the screen could have resulted in no other course of action for you. All of that means that “free will” is a concept without application. Kind of.

First off, the problem that immediately arises (you might say that it’s inevitable) is that many people take this to mean that they’re automatons, or pawns, or drones, or that anything that they do doesn’t matter because it’s predestined. But this isn’t what it means at all. The processes in the brain that we consider our reasoning came from such predictable physics, and in fact rely on them. What takes place up there, our emotional reactions to outside stimuli, are partially based on the very structure of the brain itself, and partially based on the experiences that we’ve had in our lives, which is everything we’ve ever learned, and the weight that we gave them to build certain connections and connotations. So that the program that is running in our minds is one that undergoes constant changes due to both input and connections within. While the concept of “self” is often misunderstood or completely off base, it is composed of the experiences absolutely unique to us, and so go our thinking processes. Moreover, even though they might be predictable, since they are within the self-supporting network of neurons, we have no opportunity to dislike our decisions because the nature of decision-making in the brain also supports how we react to them – we will approve because its our brain. So there are no drones or pawns to be seen; it’s a democratic agreement on the paths we take.

Which still leads to the next common reaction, which is the despair over it not mattering – we have one road to take, and it’s defined by physics. This is almost certainly true, but it’s more of a reaction to what we have been conditioned to believe than anything else. First off, it’s always been that way, so discovering it now hasn’t changed jack shit. But more importantly, we are captives of physics no matter how we look at it, and most of it doesn’t bother us in the least. We need oxygen and protein, we will always have to deal with mass and gravity, we hear nothing without gases to propagate pressure waves, we see nothing without certain wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation. These are not choices available to us, and I doubt anyone has a problem with that – that’s just the way it is.

As I said in a previous post, there are other aspects of “predetermined” that we cope with too. Every book that we read has a fixed ending. Every place that we visit has distinctive geological properties, and will have them when we return. What makes us interested in these is simply that we don’t yet know what they are – in other words, it is not the idea that they are random or capricious, but only that we experience them. The same thing applies to our lives; while predictable, we still don’t know how they turn out, so we have to stay until the end anyway. But we get positive internal feedback from these experiences, so we enjoy them anyway.

That’s the one small key in all this: how we choose to interpret our lives, or what perspective we can take. Nothing has changed except our internal responses, our emotions, over the state of affairs. “Free will” wasn’t ever the answer; what it provided was the perspective that allowed us to be happier. Yet, it was in response to a drastic misunderstanding about the world anyway – that some exotic being had created it, and us, to be a certain way. Free will allowed us to escape being the pawns of a creator, and was later adopted to try and explain why a perfect being would create evil. All ridiculously outmoded concepts now.

As collections of chemical reactions with a belief in personal importance (self, ego, soul, whatever you want to call it,) we are driven to make an impact, and we can gain positive responses, “good feelings,” from our efforts to do so. Anyone that finds discomfort at the idea of inevitable physical pathways and properties has not lost anything, and has undergone no change except for their perception of how things are. The thing is, this perception is easy to change. The book does not accomplish anything by sitting on a shelf; it must be read. The computer program, while aimed towards a specific end result, will not reach it without running. And while anyone may have an inevitable path, they cannot know what it is until they take it. If you like, the “meaning” of life is not to choose a particular path, but to find out what it is.

That brings up another aspect of practically every free will discussion: if such things are inevitable, can we really prosecute criminals for their crimes? And the answer is, hell yes! We cannot forget the “input” portion of the program, and the idea that every new experience can alter the way we react to something (as it always has before.) The whole idea of a society with moral/ethical consequences is that it builds negative connotations regarding antisocial behavior, in not just the punished, but in everyone impacted by the punishment. While it is very easy to state that it was inevitable that a person did something that we consider bad, it is also inevitable that we do something in response to it. Problem solved? Good.

Every game has rules – that’s actually what makes them fun. The restrictions of any activity, whether due to a rulebook or physical laws, are what creates the challenge (and we, as a species, happen to like challenges, which might be a clue as to why the eradication of free will as a concept is so distressing to many.) We can experience the outcome of any activity and still find delight in it because, even if foregone, we didn’t know what it was. Getting hung up on whether we should retain our previous attitudes, despite knowing their flaws, is pointless. Even those that have no idea what free will entails or the philosophical dilemma therein can live their lives happily, which is a clue to the functionality of such philosophy (here’s another: there is none.) It was very likely inevitable that I type this; and it’s inevitable that you have some reaction to it. But neither of us know what it is.

*     *     *     *     *

See also:

Free Willy
What does it mean?
Denihilism

Back to the beginning

Al Denelsbeck

Since I had some business in Raleigh yesterday, I decided afterwards to go back to one of my old haunts, the head of the Neuse River where it spills from Falls Lake. I haven’t been back there in a while, but years ago when I started getting serious about photography, it was one of my routine shooting locations, probably helped by it being 11 kilometers (7 miles) away from where I lived at the time. Many of the first slides in my stock drawers come from there, and this image from my galleries. It was also where I took the images that netted my first sales, a fishing spider and water striders, and beyond that, it’s a fun place to explore – most especially if you wear shorts and wading sandals. Come to think of it, it probably inspired the website/business name too.

Wake County has decided to “improve” the area to make it more alluring to the general public, I suppose, and they did this by cutting through many of the trees to provide a “riverwalk,” or a paved and aproned area suitable for joggers and baby strollers and, of course, bearing no resemblance to anything natural anymore. I didn’t bother following this very far, since the day was hot and it was far from ideal shooting conditions, but I can say that the river remained invisible from this riverwalk in the areas that I was in. And since these were the most interesting areas, I located one of the old beaten paths that had truly followed the river and made my way down to the water.

I was, in fact, trying to duplicate the same position and angle seen in that linked page above when I spotted a great blue heron (Ardea herodias) surprisingly close. Herons can be funny – while they might typically maintain some distance from people, they seem to be able to habituate, not to humans, but to an area, and thus allow closer approaches therein. I found this often in Florida, where they would visit fishing docks in the hopes of snagging the fish used as bait, but wouldn’t let anyone within 40 meters out in the Everglades. Standing as I was in the Neuse River, in a bright white shirt and not trying to be quiet, I wasn’t subtle in any respect, but the heron was stalking the shallows just ten meters (30 feet) away.

This is the reason I will never own a photo backpack and heartily recommend against them. Switching lenses with such things usually requires taking them off and setting them down somewhere, something that isn’t going to happen in knee-deep water, while I was able to switch out the wide-angle lens for the telephoto zoom since they’re all in pouches on the main bag, which can be worn on a shoulder sling (as today) or on a beltpack (when I’m doing a less casual photo trip.) I had neglected a tripod because I had considered this “just a side trip,” and I really do know better, but I bumped up the ISO to help improve the shutter speeds for handholding a long lens. Simple rule: the more you magnify an image, the worse the effects of twitching the camera will be because you magnify them too, so your shutter speed needs to go shorter the longer you go in focal length (or the closer you get in macro) – the prevents the effect of camera motion from showing up in your images. With the conditions I was in this wasn’t going to help a lot, but it was better than nothing.

While doing this juggling, the heron watched me suspiciously and I tried to be subtle and casual. Finally, I raised the camera to my eye and… nothing. The batteries had chosen this moment to go dead. Now, I’m not that unprepared, and had a spare set – yes, I shoot routinely with the expanded grips that allow for extra batteries – but it did mean even more fumbling while my subject awaited nearby. Finally, I got my shit together and began stalking the heron. There were no trees or rocks nearby to brace against and improve my stability, so I had to wing it. Worse than that, somehow I had changed my digital settings to high-contrast, low saturation mode, which was pretty much the opposite of what conditions called for, and this is very noticeable to me since I have so many vivid slides from exactly this location. But at least the heron remained pretty mellow with my presence and wasn’t spooked by my strolling upriver for better light angles.

In fact, it actually drew closer on its own, as it found some tasty tidbits in the water plants closer to mid-stream. Or maybe it was simply showing off, because once it had speared a small fish, it displayed it quite distinctly for over a minute before swallowing and returning to the river’s edge. And I do mean spear – the lower beak passed clean through the fish. I have had the experience of handling injured herons, and the first thing that you do is immobilize that beak, since it can actually kill you if the heron takes a shot at your face (and it will.) In fact, I recommend grinder’s face shields, the clear full-face sheets, for anyone handling any of the waders.


Very few of the images that I took yesterday are going to make it into my stock, since even my standards are higher than what I got, but at least I have a little something to show for it. And I certainly saw a lot more of interest than anyone utilizing the walk nearby, as I remained hidden from them entirely by its distance from the actual river. But, if it keeps people from trashing or over-using what is still a neat shooting locale, I’m fine with that. They can enjoy the asphalt, and I’ll be in the rocky riverbeds.

The pieces come together

Al Denelsbeck

As I mentioned in the previous post, I’m in the middle of updating the galleries of the main website – don’t go rushing over there, since there’s nothing to be seen just yet; I’ll be uploading them all at once when everything’s ready. But among the changes, I’m adding more information to some of the older pics, and one of those is the image at left, of a previously unknown grasshopper found in Florida in 2000. I’d stopped alongside of Rt 41 (Tamiami Trail) in the Everglades to try and spot alligators, which I succeeded in, until they realized I was there (it took about .25 seconds) and they hurtled off the banks of the canal into the water and disappeared. As usual, I began examining the area to make sure that I wasn’t missing something else, and came across a cluster of these insects raiding a discarded soft drink cup. Some of the passing drivers might have thought I was a bit off, sprawled on my belly just off the roadside photographing weeds, but then again it was the Everglades, and it’s far from the strangest thing that takes place therein.

Now, it’s fairly easy to tell this is a small insect, and it went unidentified until last night when I tried again to scare up some mention of this strange coloration. Bugguide.net produced a match, and when I was reading the description I noticed the word “nymph.” That meant the adult probably had a different appearance, so I checked their other images.

Aha! Turns out that I had even more images of this species in my stock, and had in fact captured it on film on my previous trip, that time in the Audubon Society Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary. It’s an eastern lubber grasshopper (Romalea microptera,) pretty common in Florida.


This image is deceptive, since this was the largest specimen of this class of insect that I’ve ever found, roughly 8-10 cm (3-4 inches) in length and able to carry off chihuahuas. It’s encounters with such things that convince anyone visiting Florida that the state has some special property, stagnating in time from the late Jurassic or maybe just too much uranium, but more likely it’s simply a factor of being in the subtropics.

Then I checked another image I had, from earlier in the same trip, this time at a park somewhere on the Suwanee River. I had arrived in the predawn darkness to see what sunrise on the river would bring, and while that goal was trashed by a boring dawn, the trip back on the trail revealed a monster “locust” that I snagged for some pics. Note the coloration of this one, and realize that it’s in the transitional stage between nymph and adult coloration.


And yes, that’s my wrist that it’s perched on, because I really wanted to show the scale. This isn’t yet adult size – do you get the idea now?

The other thing that the morning light revealed was how many massive spiderwebs I’d walked under on the dark trail to the river. Up to two meters (six feet) across, they remain the largest webs I’ve ever seen and made me very glad I didn’t walk through one in the darkness, because I’m not sure I would have gotten free without William Shatner’s help. But when the grasshoppers get this big, so do the things that eat them I guess, and I’m probably not helping Florida tourism any, unless I’m reaching a lot of entomologists with these posts.

Just an observation

Al Denelsbeck2 Comments

The Girlfriend is the one who decides how the bathroom is laid out, and to an observant person, this becomes obvious. The wastebasket is positioned in such a way that it is virtually impossible to successfully land a bit of trash in it from any point in the room. While I could not care less about sports, I still possess enough Y-chromosomes to find actually walking up to a trash can and dropping something in it from directly above to be frustrating, way out of proportion to the effort involved. Which naturally means that I increase this effort by making the attempt to hit the basket from across the room anyway, almost invariably necessitating the retrieval of the failure. Women may not understand this, but men don’t understand purses, so that’s how it goes.

Anyway, it’s not news to anyone that it’s been extremely hot for the past few weeks, which means little to photograph and even less that I haven’t already featured. Most of the recent posts by others that I might have commented on I find I’ve already covered, in principle anyway. I have otherwise been concentrating on site updates which, while minor, still takes up time. So there really hasn’t been much to post.

For the time being, have a giant stag beetle (Lucanus elaphus,) and I’ll try to find something of interest soon.

What’s super about it?

Al Denelsbeck

While I’ve touched on this subject briefly before, I think it stands a better examination. The process of writing some of these posts has led to the contemplation of some of our cultural assumptions, and what’s become an interesting lesson from this is how useful it might be to contemplate words and ideas that we’ve taken for granted; in this case, it’s the word, “supernatural.”

The word tends to get used in different ways, but overall, it basically refers to something not beholden to the laws of nature, which we can probably take to mean the laws of physics. For example, we can see the supernatural in… um… well, nothing, really. In fact, some people tend to treat supernatural as indicating something that we can never find an example of, never witness, demonstrate, test, or measure. The problem with this usage is that it can be safely ignored, since it can never have any effect on us whatsoever and is thus useless. But no, wait, that’s not what was meant – miracles are supernatural in origin! You know, miracles such as strange coincidences or surviving extremely low odds, which really only demonstrates how badly people understand probability.

Taking a look at the source, however, we find that the word appeared not, as we might have expected, at about the same time as scriptural references to what we routinely consider supernatural, such as deities and demons and so on, but in the early 1500s. Curiously, this is when the period that we call the scientific revolution began, where the process of testing assumptions and demonstrating ‘natural’ laws gained great acceptance and proved to be more useful than appealing to priests. It is also the time when Europeans began to have significant contact with other cultures and found that there were a lot more origin stories than their own. Before this time, it was simply assumed that the judeo-christian scriptures were accurate portrayals of past history – there was nothing to be supernatural since everything was god’s plan. Even well before this period, when there were beliefs in multiple gods among the cultures that sprang from the Middle East, everything was still ‘created,’ even though the debate raged over which deity actually received credit. For the most part, people heard stories of distant lands but had direct experience only with their own villages, so the lack of miraculous occurrences meant little – they were probably taking place the next town over. Even today, with our instantaneous communications and abilities to check stories, we still have thousands of false claims bouncing around (mostly about Barack Obama’s parentage and policies) – it’s fatuous to think that no such stories were promoted centuries ago, and in fact, the folklore abounds with religious miracles and direct encounters with demons.

Also bear in mind that the primary sources of authority up until this time, and for some period afterwards, were the priestly classes. If anyone wanted to know why, they asked their religious leaders, and generally got answers that reinforced the church’s authority. Additionally, the structure of scientific thought was based on the Aristotelian philosophical idea that a premise was true if the reasoning supported it, a concept that was adapted to theology in such things as the Ontological and Cosmological Arguments, and still serves as theological support today. Some things yet remained a mystery; the peculiar motion of the planets, the unwarranted retribution of plagues, and the nature of evil were handwaved away as being above our station. But with the advent of empirical testing and observation, the nature of epistemology – how knowledge was obtained – changed significantly, as this new structure began to provide answers where nothing else had. Lots of them. And it has provided the basis of all scientific investigation ever since.

But as simple applications of mathematics and experimentation demonstrated that there was no ceiling over us and the earth was not unmoving in the center of things, as simple physical laws could be relied upon and even calculated to great accuracy, it was required to have a way of distinguishing all of this from the firmly held idea that god was calling the shots. The mass of cultural stories about the creation of the world and humankind, about the realms where angels lived and demons tormented, needed some way of holding sway in a world increasingly uncooperative in supporting them. In this time period arose the concept of ‘natural’ laws and ‘supernatural’ activity, which rescued the ancient cultural concepts of creation and an active deity from the necessity of demonstrating why we should believe in any such thing without some nice solid evidence. People don’t abandon their beliefs easily – it would mean admitting they’ve been wrong for a long time – and even though the concept of ‘supernatural’ was entirely new, it served to explain how scripture could be true without needing a damn thing to prove or support it.

Now, several centuries later, it is assumed to have been there all along, and is largely treated as a philosophical concept that was all hashed out long ago – no need to reinvent the wheel by examining how it appeared. Yet as indicated above, it is wielded in a wildly disparate manner to deny the idea that empiricism – knowledge based on firm, repeatable evidence – has been the only thing that has ever produced any results. Supernaturality remains embedded in our culture as a counterpoint to the basic, testable, dependable physical laws and properties that we use constantly, implying that every last thing that we do, from using a cell phone to landing rovers on Mars, is but one side of a two-sided reality, the other of which might be capable of anything; we’re just not permitted to know of it. And of course, this vast incorporeal realm is not only intelligent and purposeful, but kindly inclined towards us as well. The very existence of the word “supernatural,” and the implications therein, causes people to ignore the fact that they’re promoting the stories from a large number of bronze-age chroniclers who thought the whole world could be flooded and a tower could reach heaven.

Even more disturbing is how few people are willing to dismiss the concept as a pointless joke, and instead engage in discussions on how the complete lack of either evidence or effect should be considered ‘supernatural,’ rather than simply nonexistent. Those who forward the idea that the very age of the scriptural stories is reason enough to promote them as historical/factual tend to ignore the very same trait in every other creation account from every other culture worldwide. Such a comparison is exactly the kind of intellectual rigor that empiricism requires, and the reason why should be painfully obvious – if age was all that was necessary to establish scripture as factual, then we should be praying to anu or ra. Even if we desired to retain the Aristotelian method of rendering a sound premise without the need of supporting evidence, supernaturality fails to survive for the very reasons mentioned above, as well as for its relatively recent provenance. A specialized state of existence should certainly have been both evident and enumerated within the scripture, rather than having to be created out of thin air (a ha ha) when careful examination of our world and universe rendered so much of scripture grossly mistaken.

I can’t help but think that treating the word “supernatural” as decrepit as the idea of the River Lethe would help raise the bar on philosophical and theological discussions, since any such undertakings should remain based upon sound premises from the start. Rendering a formless plane of existence to salvage the inaccuracies of ancient writings is a child’s game, akin to the blobby naughty ghosts of the Family Circus, and just as inane.

Macro photography, part four: You can be excused…

Al Denelsbeck

… if you thought this was an ant. That’s really the whole idea.

I spotted one of these in one of my regular insect-hunting spots, but only got a single inadequate photo of it before it vanished under some leaves. Earlier today, I spotted it again – this time, venturing under the web tent shelter of a crab spider, who vacated quickly at the threat; of course, my camera was not in hand for this drama. But after fetching it and a bit of searching, I managed to locate it again, and with a little more playing around, captured it in a film can (look it up, it’s alongside “rotary telephone”) and brought it in for questioning a photo session.

“But what is it?” you ask impatiently. “It is one of the more interesting manifestations of natural selection,” I say, grandly yet vaguely, mostly just to piss you off some more. But it’s still true – this is a Peckhamia americana, otherwise known as an antlike jumping spider, and the camouflage is remarkable. I may have gone past countless examples of these guys, since they’re fairly small and it takes a sharp eye to catch the subtle differences as they tool along the leaves and vines. A little tip, which applies to many different aspects of nature photography: behavior is often a good indication that something is not what it seems. I’ve pointed out before that one can tell a Sphingidae moth that mimics a bumblebee apart from a real bee very easily, since the bee always lands on the flower and the moth does not. In the case of antlike jumping spiders, they tend to pause and search more than ants, who typically move very directly and without hesitation. You might think the eight legs of the spider against the ant’s six would be a giveaway, but it actually takes sharp eyes to pick up this trait quickly, and the spider often waves its two forelegs around like antennae anyway.



That’s a better view above, with another telltale, if you can get a close enough look. Ants, like the one at left, have a separate head on an articulated neck, while spiders have a combined head and torso called a cephalothorax, a great word to drop at parties. Plus those eyes are very indicative of jumping spiders – in fact, the eye layout is one way in which arachnologists tell the classes of spiders apart. But you’re probably more likely to be seeing such a critter from directly overhead, which means the eyes won’t be visible. So, another trait that may help is seeing the activity of the pedipalps, the extra little ‘legs’ that spiders have alongside their chelicerae (fangs.) These are often used to feel their way and can be seen drumming busily as the spider ventures onwards.

Now, another little thing to make your pursuit of photos a wee bit easier. While nice natural-looking settings can do a lot for your photos, most insects are not so cooperative that they’ll do what you say, pause, and pose as needed. In fact, I may be going out on a limb here, but I don’t think they ever do. If you’re quick, you can catch some shots on the fly, but in circumstances like this where you want photos of a particular hard-to-find subject, this could actually drag out the quest for decent photos, literally, over years. So, we can cheat a little, and create a very simple set, one that doesn’t allow our subjects too much opportunity to scamper off and hide. Behold the bug moat.

Yep, just a small cup of water, and something to hold a natural plant or branch upright in the center – I’ve used a couple of alligator clips here. The range that the arthropod can move is very limited, with few places to hide, and the water prevents an escape, or at least a quick one. The cup can even be moved for a better background, or rotated to take advantage of lighting conditions (as well as keeping your subject facing the camera.) Just keep leaves and branches away from the edges to help prevent escapes. By limiting the range and options of your subject, you can obtain better shots in a shorter period of time, and not tear your hair out in frustration unless you really want to (far be it from me.) This is hardly innovative, but sometimes it’s the simple things that make your tasks much easier.

Another thing that’s actually handy is just a business card or small piece of paper. With tiny insects or arachnids like this, it’s really not possible to grasp them, even with forceps of tweezers, so you slip something under them instead. My subject here, for some reason, thought my hand was much more interesting than any leaf or branch I presented, and twice I spent more time than I thought should have been necessary coaxing him off of me and onto a “setting.”

Going back to the antlike jumping spider, consider that the species arrived at this appearance over thousands of generations. Every time an individual spider was born looking just a little more like an ant, its natural predators (who found ants less tasty) tended to pass it over a little more often than the members of the same species who didn’t look like ants. So the ones that did gained reproductive advantage, simply by surviving a little bit longer, and those genetic tendencies passed along. Gradually, the spider took on a close resemblance to ants, a passive resistance to predation – some species even live in close proximity to ants and gain benefit from the ant colonies directly – near as I can tell, my subject here is not one of them, since I have seen none anywhere near the numerous ant colonies in the yard.

I’ll leave you with one last image, simply because I love the color cast in the eyes. The pedipalps are plainly visible here as the innermost ‘legs,’ but note the motion blur of the one midleg, which occurred despite the 1/200 second shutter speed I was using. Quick little bugger – which means you now know why I wanted to limit its movement. Overall length was perhaps 6mm – it didn’t seem inclined to hold still long enough for me to slide a scale alongside. When I figure out how to accomplish that more dependably, I’ll pass that along too.

[Insert topical, perhaps punnish title here]

Al Denelsbeck



Just thought I’d throw up an image in recognition of National Pollinator Week, even though I don’t know what qualifies as a national pollinator, except for perhaps an extremely busy bee.

Now, a word of advice: if you’re just getting started in macro photography, don’t pursue it if you have high blood pressure, anger management issues, or take offense at inanimate objects that nevertheless keep moving. Side effects may include swearing at insects and losing hair in clumps. See your doctor to find out if macro photography is right for you. Attempting to get images like the one above may mean a lot of missed tries, because of the short range of sharp focus, the constant motion of most pollinating insects, and the previously unnoticed breeze throwing the flowers about. Set focus, anticipate the shot, and trip the shutter just before your subject drops into focus. And remember, press the shutter, don’t jam it or squeeze it – don’t induce camera shake. It’s highly recommended that you use the fastest shutter speed you can achieve while still maintaining flash synchronization (I’ll talk about that more in a later post.)

Even with all that, expect to toss a lot of images. But don’t let your frustration blind you to choosing a good angle and background, and be flexible. I can honestly say that, for every time I chose a flower and waited patiently for an insect or hummingbird to fly into my prepared frame, it has never, ever been successful. Better to have lots of options and be able to reframe as needed.

Ah, what the hell, have another. It’s worth noting that neither of these was taken this week, or even close. We’ve passed peak season for most flowering plants here – we are now in wilt-and-burst-into-flames season. Happy summer!

Nothing lives forever

Al Denelsbeck

This is actually a combination of two post ideas I had, because I realized that the perspective discussed in one had direct bearing on the other. And then, while this was in draft form, another related item came up. Bear with me as we wend through it all.

Every once in a while I hear something about a culture dying out, or a language on the verge of disappearing because only three people speak it, and I simply cannot get worked up over it. You mean nobody will speak Blaghini anymore, or dance the Hahnhahnuman Laundry Dance ever again? That’s the way it goes, I guess.

I’m largely the same way with lost cultures that anthropologists attempt to piece together. While there might be something of interest in how past populations dealt with drought, for instance, these represent little more than puzzles. The likelihood of discovering something that could possibly impact our lives today is absurd in the extreme, and to be blunt, we know exactly where the lost culture went: nowhere. It’s more interesting to try and determine what happened to the dominant sauropods or early hominids, because these might give us a lot of insight into extinction events and competitive pressures, but what kind of clothes they wore (the hominids, anyway) is really nothing more than a curiosity.

Cultures are an aspect of populations, and represent what a majority of people in any particular division (tribe, geographic area, etc.) engage in. They change – it’s safe to say constantly – and former aspects are abandoned in favor of new, better practices. When some aspect of culture is disappearing forever, the only thing this says is that no one has a use for it anymore. This isn’t anything to decry, any more than discarding worn-out clothes is.

Undoubtedly, some of our concern over dying cultures comes from our emphasis on tradition, which doesn’t have much of a rational application to such things. Even if someone derives some value from tradition, it seems obvious that any culture that is vanishing hasn’t established enough of a traditional influence within today’s culture. And any language with a handful of speakers is no longer a language, but has become instead an in-game. For instance, anyone can make up new words for objects and concepts, but that’s not a language – the point of language is to communicate. Exclusive ‘languages’ are not communicative, but divisive instead.

Someone might argue the benefit of history, but in most cases that’s different from culture. History is not only events, but events that had significant impact on cultures, and may encompass what can be learned from the attitudes prevalent at the time. There have been no philosophical enclaves comparable to those of ancient Greece for thousands of years, but these are not ‘lost’ to us since we have copious records of such, and few feel any real need to dress as the philosophers did and speak in the languages of those times. We retained what was useful (and many parts that weren’t,) but do not regret the loss of cultural practices. Times change, and with them the cultures.

I imagine some might even feel remorse over the idea that something is gone forever, but this doesn’t survive the application of perspective. The food anyone ate last week is gone forever too – so what? Ah, but was it a really good meal? Wonderful – you have memories of it then, and perhaps the recipe or the address of the restaurant. But no one (sane) saves a portion of the meal to preserve forever. If it is not able to be eaten, then it is not food. And one person singing the ‘old songs’ is not preserving a culture, unless we can then call the personal actions of any individual a ‘culture’ as well. That’s not what the word means.

Now, here’s part two. There is an interesting correlation to our efforts to preserve endangered species, and to a lesser extent, native species against “invasive” species – I need to use the word “species” one more time in this sentence. There is a pretty significant amount of effort and funding (granted, usually donations) expended towards both of these efforts… but when viewed in the same perspective as that above, it raises the question of why?

Let me get this out of the way early: I’m a naturalist at heart, and conservationist, and environmentalist – none of the points I’m making come from the idea that I really don’t care about species or ecosystems, or have a typical kneejerk (emphasis on jerk) reaction to “treehuggers.” But it’s impossible to rationally deny that untold thousands of species have disappeared from this planet over the millennia – that’s the very basis of natural selection. It seems presumptuous to attempt to save a species from extinction, as if we not only have a special power, but a special insight as well. The desire to “save an animal” is most likely driven by empathy, and while it isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it bears asking just what exactly the point might be. Does it actually mean we’re trying to maintain a species in an environment that it no longer fits, believing that the entire concept of selection doesn’t or shouldn’t apply?

There’s also the concern of invasive species, which themselves have led to inordinate amounts of impact in areas with delicate and balanced ecological niches. Entire island populations have been decimated by the introduction of rats, cats, domesticated grazing animals, and the like. Kudzu strangles many other kinds of plants in the American southeast, and zebra mussels growing unchecked in lakes affect power production, shipping, and even food levels for other species. Witnessing the effects of these has made it clear that, especially in isolated and unique biosystems, small changes can have huge consequences.

The main school of thought on this, of course, is “don’t introduce or transport species,” and this is hard to argue with. Yet, there are two pertinent factors that I wish to point out. The first is that humans are hardly an alien species on this planet, so there isn’t anything that we do that can be considered “unnatural,” despite there being a very common attitude otherwise. And that ties in with the second factor, which is that species introduction is a fairly common occurrence throughout the history of life on this planet, up to and including the emergence of tetrapods from the seas 375 million years ago. Plate tectonics, floods and tsunamis, land bridges, icepacks, seeds carried by migratory birds, and many more besides, all contribute to the distribution of life on this planet. While rapid worldwide travel is something unique to Homo sapiens, all this really means is that species introduction has been accelerated by us – not that we are criminally responsible.

What all of this leads to is the question of just how responsible we should consider ourselves. Alone among the occupants of this planet, we can contemplate and predict (to some extent) the effect of both species introduction and extinctions. We are aware of the consequences of both, and often times the causes, and can sometimes prevent such from happening. But the keyword in there is ‘sometimes.’ Even if we had known the hazards of zebra mussels hitchhiking on ships, is there really anything we could do about it even now, much less a hundred or more years ago? Is it better to introduce grazing animals with our colonies for clothing and food, or hunt the native species to extinction for the same – or attempt to domesticate a native species to sustain a breeding program that meets our needs? Where this train of thought quickly leads is that we should probably just stay put, stabilize our own populations, and try not to change anything. Realistically of course, that’s not going to happen.

And what about species on the brink of extinction? There is much talk now that the money poured into panda programs is likely a wasted effort, and with such a small population in the wild as it is, their eventual disappearance isn’t likely to have significant effect – again, it may be occurring not through anything that we’ve done, but because pandas have not adapted to their environmental changes. Komodo dragons exist in a very narrow niche, which is essentially an accident waiting to happen. It is virtually guaranteed that such a species is not going to expand beyond a handful of isolated islands, and nature has a way of selecting against such precarious circumstances. Even if we developed a hugely successful breeding program, one devastating monsoon can eradicate the only place on the planet that they have to live within, which means either maintaining the species as a permanent captive, or introducing it into an area where it does not now live.

I’m not arguing for the cessation of efforts towards any of these goals, or indeed, for any particular approach; I’m just attempting to produce some introspection about our conservation activities, and the recognition of viable goals in the first place, with the problem of defining ‘viable’ in tow. We have a limited ability to be stewards, and some things are simply outside of our power to change. Now this attitude, coupled with the idea mentioned above that we and our actions are a natural part of this planet, seems to imply that we should simply make no effort whatsoever and take everything as it comes, but this ignores one crucial factor: that we can predict the consequences of our actions and possess the brains to alter our environment, to at least a small degree, in ways that are beneficial. That is also a natural part of us.

Life’s selection processes have a tendency to deal with issues such as overpopulation or susceptibility to certain environmental changes – but not in a particularly pleasant way. Starvation, fiercer competition, diseases promoted by overcrowding, radical new defenses among native species… the list is long and not kind. Moreover, we already know that very small changes can have a ripple effect throughout a biosystem. Draining a wetlands area to make housing for more people may take away the food sources of the smaller crustaceans, which are food sources for smaller fish, which are food sources for larger fish, that are our food sources. Overgrazing can increase soil erosion, which eradicates topsoil and the ability to grow anything, and exposes more rock which increases heat reflectivity into the atmosphere, which can promote more storm activity, and even cause frequent flooding in areas far removed from the overgrazed fields. While all of this is perfectly natural, it often isn’t something that we really want to cope with, and if we have the ability to prevent it, it’s undeniably stupid to avoid doing so.

Can we save the pandas? Quite possibly not – but we should be aware of what impact their disappearance might have. Is it crucial that the Galapágos remain as they are? It’s very hard to say, since we don’t know how much effect any species therein has on its environment. We can certainly choose to protect a particular endangered species, with the recognition that it may not be entirely within our power. We must also recognize that in some areas, such as the Amazon basin, our affluent first-world desires to prevent the extinction of a rare species may mean squat to indigenous people who are struggling to survive in a poverty-stricken agrarian economy. Protecting the red-eyed tree frogs may actually mean building a sustainable economic structure for their human neighbors, to reduce the demand for farmland, exportable lumber, and even charcoal. This is another demonstration of a ripple effect.

But most especially, if we aim to protect species, we need to protect their environment, and in many cases, this requires that we curb our own indulgent behavior as Homo sapiens. Ultimately, our aim should be zero population growth worldwide, as well as the effective resource and economic distribution – while this might be a very hard point to get across globally, it also has to start somewhere. It is entirely possible that the traits that we have, our unique perspective on the world and our self-importance within it, are things that nature may well select against, as we overextend ourselves beyond the resources available and go through rapid, nasty population declines. Or we can see this looming on the horizon and turn away, which it would be nice to believe is a useful function of our advanced brains.

The disappearance of species, like cultures, often happens on its own – but we can accomplish it far too easily ourselves for short-sighted and self-absorbed reasons, too. Nature selection may be harsh at times, but its selections are at least functional.

1 … 287 288 289 290 291 … 327