New species before our eyes?

From Wired.com, could English birdfeeders inadvertently cause a speciation event?

Central European blackcap warblers that spend the winter in the birdfeeder-rich United Kingdom are on a different evolutionary trajectory than those that migrate to Spain. The population hasn’t yet split into two species, but it’s headed in that direction.

“This is reproductive isolation, the first step of speciation,” said Martin Schaefer, a University of Freiburg evolutionary biologist.

*snip*

About 30 percent of blackcaps from southern Germany and Austria now migrate to the United Kingdom, shaving 360 miles from their traditional, 1,000-mile Mediterranean voyage. Because they’ve less distance to travel, they tend to arrive home first in the summertime and to live in prime forest-edge spots. All this makes the U.K. migrants more likely to mate with each other than with their old-fashioned brethren.

Schaefer says he doubts that birdfeeders will be around long enough to complete the task, but it's a fascinating prospect nonetheless.

Friday photo

Old Faithful, January 2002

A quiet evening in the dead of winter. If you're not into hordes of tourists - and who is, besides the accountants? - it's a wonderful time to be in Yellowstone.

In which I agree with a creationist

Hard to believe, but I just read a creationist's letter-to-the-editor in which I agree with several of the writer's claims. In particular, these two:

I contend that some of the things Mr. Bowers says the church knows nothing about are actually part of the church's core theology.

and

And if evolution has been proven true, then I must have been living under a rock somewhere, because I heard none of this "conclusive proof" that Mr. Bowers refers to.

Nothing to argue with there.

Those medical decisions ...

Apparently, this can happen in Canada, too: small-minded bureaucrats making medical decisions, instead of your competent doctor. As you can probably predict, it's not a government denying health care - it's the hack at the insurance company.

A Quebec woman on long-term sick leave is fighting to have her benefits reinstated after her employer's insurance company cut them, she says, because of photos posted on Facebook ....

She said her insurance agent described several pictures Blanchard posted on the popular social networking site, including ones showing her having a good time at a Chippendales bar show, at her birthday party and on a sun holiday — evidence that she is no longer depressed, Manulife said.

There's no indication that any medical professional was consulted before deciding to cut off benefits. Anyone competent in mental health could have told them that depression is episodic, or that a depressed person will put on a good face at times, or try to have fun even when it takes an effort. I can't imagine a doctor would try to make a clinical diagnosis based on a handful of photographs, especially non-representative party pics. But then, a doctor doesn't have a financial incentive to deny treatment.

Oh, just to make it creepier: Blanchard claims that she posted those photos under private settings, meaning they were supposed to be visible only to people she had approved. If that's true, every Facebook user ought to be asking how an insurance company managed to get access to them.

[via ars technica]

God agrees with me. He's pretty smart that way.

From Not Exactly Rocket Science, via Pharyngula:

For many religious people, the popular question "What would Jesus do?" is essentially the same as "What would I do?" That's the message from an intriguing and controversial new study by Nicholas Epley from the University of Chicago. Through a combination of surveys, psychological manipulation and brain-scanning, he has found that when religious Americans try to infer the will of God, they mainly draw on their own personal beliefs.

* snip *

The brain scans found the same thing, particularly in a region called the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) that's been linked to self-referential thinking. The mPFC is more active when we think about our own mindsets than those of others. Epley found that it was similarly abuzz when the recruits thought about their own attitude or God's, but lower when they considered the average American.

I was going to make a quip about the research appearing in the Journal of Unsurprising Results, but I honestly find that last bit rather startling. According to Epley, people use a different part of the brain to infer what other people are thinking, but use the very same part of the brain to reflect on either their own thoughts or their inference about God. That would seem to suggest that creating God in one's own image isn't just an act of bad faith; it could be exceedingly difficult to avoid.