There were a number of reasons that led me to choose my current place of residence.  Primary among them was the view of the Speed River and its thin strip of woodland habitat, where Osprey would come to fish and the songs of Red-winged Blackbirds and Yellow Warblers would sometimes trickle across the noisy street (important for someone accustomed to far more rural accommodations).  But another reason was its front-row seat to the late summer roosts at Silvercreek Park, and the spectacular natural display that accompanies it.

They begin to gather as early as July — blackbirds, grackles and starlings, though mostly the latter.  Sometimes several hours before dusk, hundreds of birds will appear on the hydro pylons, whistling and squabbling and socializing.  As summer wears on and the days grow shorter, the birds arrive later and later, taking available of as much foraging time as possible before returning to the evening roost.

By October, their numbers have climbed from hundreds into thousands.  They swarm about the pylons like insects, jostling for position on they hydro lines as each seeks to keep a well-defined buffer zone between themselves and their neighbours.  Large flocks rise up again and again and swirl in the skies above.  The noise becomes deafening.  Sometimes, a Cooper’s Hawk will cruise through, contributing to the mass unrest among the birds.

And then, quite suddenly, the entire flock will rise thunderously into the air.  The thousands of little black birds now become a single liquid organism, banking and flowing, splitting off and merging.  It’s an awe-inspiring and complicated pattern, and researchers have spent a lot of time attempting to model the behaviour.  As it turns out, you can closely simulate the dynamics of a starling flock by making each individual entitiy follow three simple rules:

1. Keep a minimum distance between yourself and your immediate neighbours (don’t run into anyone).
2. Match your speed to your immediate neighbours (keep up with everyone).
3. Constantly try to manoeuvre yourself into the perceived centre of the flock (protect yourself from predators).

It’s not clear why starlings perform these massive aerial displays outside of the breeding season.  The socializing that occurs at large roosts may be of immense benefit to individual birds — a bird that did not feed well that day could follow more successful birds out the next morning to a food source, and you are statistically less likely to be picked off by predators during the night when there are thousands of other potential targets all around you.  But the displays themselves (sometimes lasting until well after sundown) remain a mystery.  And when they are over, the entire flock spirals down into the trees, and all at once the roost becomes still and silent.  As if nothing had happened at all.

I don’t know why they do it, but I’m glad to able to witness this incredible phenomenon every evening.

I had to share this animation, taken from a press release made by NASA this morning, and YouTube’d by the ever-awesome Phil Plait (who has a great blog post about it here).  It’s an exceptionally clear and powerful illustration of just what that high-tech toy known as the Kepler Space Telescope is doing way up there in orbit.  Kepler was only just launched in March, and this data is the result of a quick test of her abilities on a previously discovered planetary system — specifially, the roughly Jupiter-sized planet known as HAT-P-7b, which is so close to its own star that it completes an orbit in a mere 2.2 days.  Measuring the exceedingly miniscule changes in the brightness of a distant star sounds like an awfully difficult means of inferring the existance of extra-solar planets (and it is!), but the animation does a spectacular job of illustrating just what the results mean.  The first big drop in brightness shown is the planet transiting its star.  The second is, amazingly, the star occulting the planet.  And the remaining fluctuations?  Those are the phases of HAT-P-7b as it orbits — just like the amount of light we see reflected off the Moon changes as it goes from new moon to full to new again!

This data shows that Kepler will be sensitive enough to detect Earth-sized planets, once her planet seeking begins in earnest.  Most of the over 350 known extrasolar planets are broiling gas giants, but little rocky planets like ours are predicted to be more numerous.  They’re out there, and Kepler will find them.

And once we do … then what?

We can use what we know about a star to determine where its habitable zone is — that Goldilocks region of not-too-hot and not-too-cold needed for liquid water to be present.  We can determine approximately how old the system is, and thus whether or not there’s been enough time for life to evolve.  And once we have a good candidate, we can do something like what LCROSS (Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite) did last week when it turned its instruments to Earth:

LCROSS: Near-infrared spectrum of Earth (NASA).

LCROSS: UV/Visible spectrum of Earth (NASA).

Yes, it’s more graphs. No shiny animation to accompany them this time, but this is still pretty cool.  These are measurements taken by LCROSS’s spectrometers, showing the spectra of our planet’s reflected light.  There’s lots of methane (CH₄), and ozone (O₃), and carbon dioxide (CO₂), and other things you can find on plenty of lifeless planets.  But there’s also oxygen gas (O₂), which is something you generally don’t find unless there’s some process continually producing it.  Oxygen is unstable, and it gets eaten up pretty quickly by various chemical processes, but here on Earth we have organisms to replenish it. Which brings us to something else showing up in this spectral analysis — a signature that could be attributed to the large amount of vegetation that covers the Earth’s surface.

This is why science is just so damn cool.

From January 6 to February 3, 1979, the Voyager I spacecraft covered a distance of 27 million kilometers during its approach of Jupiter.  A selection of photos from this period, taken at the same longitude each Jovian rotation (about once every ten hours) was assembled into a time-lapse animation by the folks back on Earth (click to watch):

Voyager I approaches Jupiter (NASA).

We’re accustomed to seeing photos of Jupiter as a beautiful but silent orb, and yet here it is, chaotic and tumultuous: a living planet, with gushing arteries of atmospheric clouds surrounding the swirling vortex of the Great Red Spot (a massive storm system several times larger than the Earth itself).

Voyager I and her sister ship, Voyager II, are still out there, thirty years later.  Still talking to us.  Still travelling.  What would you see, if you had an eternity to wander the vastness of space?

Can you see us?

Photo: NASA

The Earth, as a tiny pale dot caught in a shaft of scattered sunlight as seen from the Voyager I spacecraft, at a distance of six billion kilometers away.

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam … There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.
– Carl Sagan, 1996

A common criticism of evolutionary theory by those who seek to discredit it is that its selective mechanism of ’survival of the fittest’ inevitably leads to racism and eugenics.  Darwin was a passionate opponent of slavery (which he referred to as “that greatest curse on Earth”), and he applied his theory to demonstrate that all human beings were of one species and one ancestry — countering prevalent opinions about differing origins and racial superiority.  Nonetheless, evolution denialists continue to make attempts to tar evolution by associating it with various eugenic policies and rationalizations.

The Nazis did not target the Jews because, upon examining the Theory of Evolution, it became evident to them that Jews were ‘less evolved,’ and hence inferior. The idea is patently ridiculous, and you’d require a very twisted, backward and ignorant understanding of both history and natural selection to argue such.  Darwin’s explanation was distorted and abused for this purpose, as was the rest of the mythology invented to justify the Nazis’ Final Solution to an appalling question.

To suggest that the Theory of Evolution, with it’s catchphrase of ’survival of the fittest,’ is an argument for eugenics is bogus.  If, in spite of fierce competition for resources in an unforgiving environment, human beings still managed to acquire traits like compassion and cooperation, then natural selection becomes a very good reason to defend these qualities.  Behavioural traits with such obvious disadvantages to a tooth-and-nail survivalist must endow their possessor with a far greater reward if it is to persist in populations.

And yet, even if one could find no support from natural selection for such ideas, it really wouldn’t matter in the slightest.  One should not look to natural processes for guidance on the subject of ethics.  Is in no way implies ought, and it certainly doesn’t imply mandate.  Cannibalism, infanticide and incest were observed in nature long before Darwin came along, but such observations did not then cause these behaviours to become rampant in human society.  We need not (and should not) make the limitations of natural selection our own.

I spent my Sunday afternoon vegging out and watching TED talks videos.  For those of you not familiar with it, TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) is an annual conference of ideas, and has featured the likes of Stephen Pinker, Brian Greene, Al Gore, Stephen Hawking and many other fascinating thinkers and doers.  Participants are invited to give an 18 minute talk on an idea that they feel needs to be shared, and videos of these talks are available to freely view and distribute from the TED website.

Here’s one of my favourites, from the 2008 conference:  Joshua Klein on the impressive intelligence of the common crow, and the inventive way in which he put that intelligence to good use for the benefit of both human and bird.

Photo: MBARI

Wow.  Now I know what my reef tank’s been missing.

The Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) has just released images of this incredibly bizarre fish, which looks as though it were flown in from Yugopotamia.  And yes, that’s a transparent head.  This deep water species is able to swivel its barrel-shaped eyes upward and peer through that soft dome, giving it a nice wide field of view while remaining otherwise stationary.

Swing on over to the MBARI site for some video footage.

Homage to Archaeopteryx: perhaps the world's most famous fossil.

I’m watching an episode of House, where our delightfully snarky protagonist is having a conversation with Thirteen regarding his atheism:

“Where’s the fun in that?” asks Thirteen.  “A finite, un-mysterious universe…”

“It’s not about fun,” House replies.  “It’s about the truth.”

He’s right, of course.  A true skeptic (in the correct, non-pejorative sense) is not concerned with the reality he wants; it’s the reality that presents itself that matters.  But Thirteen’s objection touches on a quality commonly ascribed to a world that operates only by natural law: a world without mysteries, without wonder, and whose most intricate mechanisms, once deciphered, render it dry and uninspiring.

2M1207b orbiting the brown dwarf 2M1207: one of the first candidate extrasolar planets to be directly observed. Photo: Wikipedia Commons

Yann Martel, in his Life of Pi, is highly dismissive of agnostics, deeming them unworthy of consideration.  “To choose doubt as a philosophy of life,” says Pi, the protagonist, “is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.”  (I have issues with this very critical misunderstanding of what agnosticism is, but that is a rant for another day.)  However, the real argument that Martel is trying to put forth is one that allows us to consciously choose to accept a theistic world view, even when it does not follow from what we have observed.  When faced with two possible explanations where the correct one cannot be known, why should you not select the more fabulous of the two?  The allegory here, of course, is the quest for faith in the face of reason.  To equate faith with the better story, however, is a matter of perspective.

Engineering by AI: A tiny space antennae designed through genetic programming. Photo: NASA

The natural world provides us with explanations that none of us could have predicted, and that exhibit a complexity that we may never be able to get our heads around.  Religious explanations of our world — however they may contribute to spiritual wellbeing — are comparatively simple.  You can become lost in the task of contemplating the infinite (whether it be physical or metaphysical in nature), but reality holds far more mysteries than this.

The scientifically minded are portrayed as without awe or an open mind, who describe the world in a dry, unimaginative and precise vocabulary.  Which is odd, because none of us feel this way.  Nearly every day I’ll be watching a report or reading an article or catching up on my favourite science blog and find myself saying, “Now that’s cool!”  The simplistic explanations of theism and the supernatural that some would hoist on reality are at best not an explanation at all, and they deny the world its intricacy, its complexity and its elegance.  We have discovered things that turn common sense completely on its ear, that no one had the creativity to even imagine, and it is fascinating.  And we can discover these new things for all of eternity.

Elysia chlorotica, a sea slug that captures solar energy by stealing both chloroplasts and genes from the algae it eats. Photo: PNAS

So here’s to those who don’t halt at a proclamation, who move beyond to seek out reality and the wonder of the universe.  And to those whose discoveries will always give me another reason to pause and marvel at the miraculous thing that is our world.

Happy Darwin Day!