Weiner on immortality

In tomorrow’s New York Times book section, Abraham Verghese reviews Jonathan Weiner’s new book, Long For This World. It’s about the science of ageing, dealing with the physiological, genetic, and evolutionary aspects (there’s a NYT podcast/interview here). The book is apparently centered around gerontologist Aubrey de Grey.

It’s a positive review, which is good.   As a science journalist, Weiner is up there with Carl Zimmer as someone who really grasps the science he’s writing about, though Weiner’s prose sometimes shades, as is common in science journalism, towards the purple.

I did a double take when I first read this excerpt:

Yet evolution has equipped us with bodies and instincts designed only to get us to a reproductive age and not beyond. “We get old because our ancestors died young,” Weiner writes. “We get old because old age had so little weight in the scales of evolution; because there were never enough Old Ones around to count for much in the scales.”

But then I realized that what Weiner means by “getting old” is not an increase in years, but the phenomenon of senescence—those changes in the body that occur with ageing.  He’s apparently referring to two evolutionary theories of senescence: we fall apart because mutations that make us fall apart were never selected against in our ancestors, who had a limited life span (the “mutation accumulation” theory); and the idea that natural selection might have promoted the accumulation of mutations that trade off increased reproduction when you’re young with degeneration when you’re old (the “antagonistic pleiotropy” theory).  In both cases a high mortality in ancestors (due to disease, accidents, malnutrition and the like) could favor the evolution of senescence in descendants.

I must say that it’s not much consolation to realize that the aches and pains that start afflicting us around age 35 are the byproducts of natural selection.

Caturday felid: the missing lynx

An email from a reader, complete with new pictures of cute wild cats, prompted me to throw this week’s spotlight on the Canada lynx.

There are four species in the genus Lynx, two of which (the Canada lynx, L. canadensis, and the bobcat, L. rufus) occur in North America. The bobcat—once lumped with the Canada lynx in a single species—is far more common in the U.S.  Most Canada lynx live farther north, where they prey on snowshoe hares and other mammals. (The tandem and regular oscillations of lynx and hare abundance, with a cycle of about ten years, is a famous story in ecology, and as far as I know, is still unexplained.)  Like most wild cats, they’re shy and solitary, so their biology is not terribly well understood.

Both American lynxes are medium-sized cats (20-30 lb) with tufted ears, very short tails (hence the name “bobcat”), huge paws (which, as you’ll see in the video below, act as snowshoes in winter), and a bushy mane around the jowls that gives them a regal and leonine appearance:

Peter Vickery, a biologist at the University of Maine, kindly agreed to share his story (and the three following photos) about surveying the Canada lynx in his state:

I was invited by the Maine Dept. of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife and USFWS researchers to join them looking for Canada Lynx dens in northern Maine.  The Lynx Team (MDIFW and USFWS) has been studying lynx in northern Maine for 11 years, documenting breeding and productivity, survivorship, and habitat use.

To determine productivity, the Team has put radio collars on a number of females. If the females are denning, their movements become very limited in May and early June.  When the general area of a potential den is identified, several members of the Team try and locate the female using receivers.  One member then goes in slowly to search for the den.  This often requires a game of approach and departure.  Once the team member gets reasonably close, the female lynx often moves off.  The researcher then moves off and the lynx returns.  By doing this several times and carefully following the female’s movements, the researcher can get a pretty good idea of the search area and then the slow process of working through dense regenerating clearcuts begins.

My impression and conversations with Team members indicate that dens are nearly always in regenerating clearcuts or heavy brushy blowdowns.  Lynx clearly use clearcuts as denning habitat, presumably because the hare densities are high and nearby, and the dense cover provides excellent shelter for a den.  The industrial forest in northern Maine appears to provide plenty of early successional habitat for hare and lynx.

On the day I joined the Team in mid-June, we failed to find a den in the morning because that particular female moved about in an irregular fashion and it was impossible to pinpoint a potential den site.  We tried a careful sweep and found old den sites but it may have been that the female had moved the kits, as they often do once the kits are old enough to move.

The second den search was successful, as you can see.  The Team uses medical gloves as they take a variety of measurements before the kits are returned to the den.  The Team then monitors the female’s movements to make sure she returns to the den.  The Team has never had a case of den abandonment.  Sometimes the females are close enough, within 4 meters, to observe the Team handling the litter but they are usually some 30 – 50 meters from the den while the Team is present.  I’m guessing the female does a huge amount of licking once she returns!  Despite efforts to minimize human contact, there must be some foreign smell that a diligent mother would want to remove.

It appears that 2010 is a pretty good year for lynx productivity in Maine.  Litters this year are in the 2 – 3 kit range where a few years previously some females didn’t have any offspring.  Litter sizes were larger earlier in the study.  Not surprisingly, the number of kits is very closely linked to hare densities.  I can attest to reasonable hare numbers this year as I saw well over 150 animals on a 60 mile evening drive along the wood roads the night I left the Lynx Team.

The Lynx Team follows the family in the winter once there is snow on the ground.  Because the adult female has a collar, the Team can find where they cross a wood road and then back track to determine how many young are still with the female.  I was impressed that this was an effective way to monitor kit survivorship through the first winter.  The Team always back tracks so they don’t interfere with the animals.  Females separate from the young lynx as the new breeding season approaches in early spring.

Regrettably, this is the last year of the study.  It’s clear they have gathered an enormous amount of important information relating to productivity and habitat use.

I was very grateful to accompany the Maine Lynx Team and was enormously impressed with their skill, perseverance, and care for the rare animals they were studying.  This was a very dedicated and caring group of field biologists!  It was a privilege to join them.

Here’s Peter with one of the babies:

I’ll close with one of the most impressive wildlife pictures I’ve ever seen:  a lynx catching a snowshoe hare, photographed by Robert Walch for the Time-Life book The World’s Wild Places: The American North Woods (1972).  Look at the size of those paws!

And two lynx videos.  The first is the classic duel between lynx and snowshoe hare:

And here’s a seriously peeved lynx. The book Wild Cats of the World reports that these beasts make a variety of sounds, some of them completely unexpected.  This one (which may be a bobcat) seems to be growling and bleating at the same time.

h/t: Peter Vickery, Scott Hedges

An early felid

If I could get this at Starbucks, I might drink their overpriced macchiatos.

Please, sir, can I have some moar?

We’re doing it rong (again)

To mark the 85th anniversary of the Scopes monkey trial (it ended on July 21, 1925), the History News Network commissioned two essays on public acceptance of evolution.  One, by evolutionary biologist David Reznick (University of California, Riverside), highlights the failure of evolutionists to increase public acceptance of evolution.  I share his frustration. What do we do? Some of us think that the numbers won’t budge until we break the chain that anchors evolution denial: religion.

The other essay, “A humanist’s reflections on evolutionary biology,” is by Everett Hamner, a professor of English and journalism at Western Illinois University. It’s an annoying piece ripped straight from the pages of the accommodationist playbook.  Instead of seeing the solution as removing the obstruction, Hamner faults scientists and academics.  It’s as if traffic has been stopped by a huge rock in the middle of the road, and Hamner wants us to resurface the highway. Here are his suggestions (in italics) about what we need to do:

• Carefully distinguish between science and scientism. . . . My students smell scientism:  the assumption that since the natural order of things can be productively examined via objective, empirical means, there can be nothing outside science’s purview. . . .And thus more recently the New Atheism represented by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens has marketed a reductive determinism in the name of science, in the process occluding the scientific method’s openness to change, unpredictability, nuance, and variety.  Keeping this difference sharp is critical to productive discussions.

It’s strange, but I’ve been teaching evolution for nearly thirty years, and I’ve never claimed in class—though I do believe it—that anything worth knowing and sharing about the world must be found out and verified by reason and empirical examination.  Nor have I seen any other teachers of evolution bring up the issue. I seriously doubt that scientism is the major reason why kids reject evolution. In fact, only somebody who is seriously blinkered could believe this.  The elephant in the room is, of course, what they learn at home.

But if a student came to me after class and asked about the relationship between science and “other ways of knowing,” I’d sure as hell tell her what I thought and ask her to defend the view that, say, dogma and revelation were valid ways of finding out things. (I did this with a graduate student just this month.)  College is a place where you learn to examine and defend your ideas, and I thank god that my own professors constantly challenged my views.  As a student, I spent many hours wrestling with professors’ objections to my ideas and my essays.  It was a struggle, but a good one.

There’s more than acceptance of evolution at stake, too.  Let’s remember what Sam Harris said: “Doubt about evolution is merely a symptom of an underlying problem; the problem is faith itself—conviction without sufficient reason, hope mistaken for knowledge, bad ideas protected from good ones, good ideas occluded by bad ones, wishful thinking elevated to a principle of salvation, etc.”

• Humanize Darwin and other scientists. It is well known in advertising that a white lab coat raises an actress’s credibility with many viewers.  For all its prestige, though, this symbol also connotes an objectification that treats patients as statistics.  The wearer may become a trustworthy paragon of knowledge, but she may also seem to embody creaturely hubris in the face of divine will. . . Darwin was no saint, but neither was he the ardently anti-religious man that much propaganda imagines.  Sensing his complexity helps many students begin to take his ideas seriously.

By all means let’s show students movies like Creation, and put a human face on science. It is, after all, a human enterprise. But let’s not pretend that Darwin was in any sense religious.  True, he wasn’t “ardently anti-religious,” but it’s pretty clear that both his studies and the death of his daughter Annie effaced whatever vestige of theism he retained.  Should we also tell the students about his famous passage on ichneumon wasps? It has been demonstrated over and over again that studying evolution shakes people’s faith.  We needn’t (and shouldn’t!) promote that in the classroom, but we shouldn’t try to prevent it, either.

• Question bifurcations of the religious and the secular. If our culture fails to distinguish between science and scientism, it is prone to distinguish too absolutely between the religious and the secular.  This is only comfortable.  We bracket politics and religion from polite conversation, letting us pretend our ideas about race, gender, and other topics proceed from the purportedly neutral standpoint of secularism.  But where is this secular no-place?  Isn’t what counts as secular defined in relation to particular traditions and practices we call religious, and vice versa?  The boundaries here are hardly unyielding:  our “secular” friends express religious devotion to sporting events and national defense, while “religious” ones routinely champion popular media and political parties.
  

When I read stuff like this, the words of Orwell come to mind: “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.”  Where is this secular no-place? It is, Dr. Hamner, the place where material processes do their thing in a material universe.  It’s the place where we find things out by looking at the evidence rather than superstition.

Conflating science and superstition seems to be Hamner’s shtick, and maybe this is okay in his world of lit-crit where there is opinion and no truth, but I absolutely insist that the distinction is real and that it’s our job to preserve it.  How can we get students to accept science if we pretend that it elides seamlessly into faith?

• Cultivate more careful readings of scriptures, not their dismissal. Blanket statements about the Bible and other scriptures remain frequent in our culture, even among academics.  A still-common assumption among those outside religious studies is that the purpose of discussing Genesis or the Gospels is either to do theology or to debunk it . . .Too often Americans refuse to read from the library we call the Bible with as much attention to genre, historical context, and intertextual relationships as they extend to popular fiction, news radio, and Facebook postings. . . When people grasp the differences in purpose between the Bible, the Qur’an, and The Origin of Species, major stumbling blocks on the path to consilience begin to dissolve.

Yes, by all means let’s teach students (but not in science class!) the history of the Bible and the Qur’an. But what on earth should we say is their purpose?  Are we going to play theologian and tell students that the stories of the Bible and Qur’an are just metaphors? If so, which parts are fictitious, and which historical?

It’s the position of accommodationists like those at BioLogos and the National Center for Science Education that there is a way to read the Bible that doesn’t conflict with evolution. And yes, there is, but is it the place of secular (oops) academics to tell people that this is the correct way to read the Bible?  Are we supposed to tell students how to interpret their sacred documents?  I for one want no part of such a messy business. In fact, it’s truly bizarre that some atheists are invested in pushing particular brands of theology.

At the end, Hamner recommends some books on science and religion, and you can bet that The God Delusion isn’t among them.

I’m getting weary of people like Hamner telling us that what we’re doing is counterproductive.  Where is their evidence?  There is none.  There used to be  a single anecdote, that of “Tom Johnson” (aka “Exhibit A”), but of course that went up in smoke.  Now there is nothing but unsupported assertion. Against this we can set a pile of stories about the effectiveness of forthright atheism in weaning people from their faith and promoting acceptance of evolution.  Granted, these are case studies, but there are lots of them, and until people like Hamner give us an equal number of anecdotes about how atheistic evolutionists, or wrongheaded teachers who push “scientism,” have set people against Darwin, I’ll keep doing my thing.

h/t: NCSE, where these essays are highlighted

Grammar police

Two solecisms have recently appeared on this site, one of them in the Hitchens interview highlighted today:

“Just desserts”: This is wrong.  The phrase does not refer to getting a sweet reward.  The correct phrase is just deserts, meaning “something that is deserved” or, as the OED says, “the becoming worthy of recompense, i.e., of reward or punishment, according to the good or ill of character of conduct.”

“Tow the line”:  Oy gewalt! I see this all the time, and it’s dead wrong. The phrase is not meant to evoke tugging on a rope.  The correct usage is toe the line, and refers to keeping your toes up against a mark but not going over it, as in the start of a race.

Feel free to contribute those mistakes that most irk you, making sure that—for our mutual edification—you give the correct usage as well.

Space pix

As reported in today’s New York Times, the National Air and Space Museum is having an exhibit of photographs of our solar system by NASA and other agencies.  Some pictures have been colorized or represent composites (the artist is Michael Benson), but they’re not phony. In fact, they’re stunning.

Captions taken from the Smithsonian website:

Erupting into space. An 86-mile-high volcanic plume explodes above the horizon of Jupiter’s moon Io. The plume is erupting over a caldera (volcanic depression), named Pillan Patera, after a South American god of thunder, fire, and volcanoes.  Galileo, June 28, 1997.

Uranus and its rings. This remarkable picture shows the very faint rings of Uranus, which were discovered in 1977. Extremely dark, they may be made of innumerable countless fragments of water ice containing radiation-altered organic material. Uranus was the first planet discovered that was unknown to ancient astronomers. It was first sighted in 1781 by British astronomer William Herschel, using a homemade 15-centimeter telescope.  Voyager, January 24, 1986.

Europa and the great red spot. Europa (upper right) is slightly smaller than Earth’s Moon. Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, a vast cyclonic storm system about two times the size of Earth, is surrounded by other oval storms and banded clouds. Multi-frame mosaic.  Voyager 1, March 3, 1979

Jupiter, the largest planet. The Great Red Spot, a cyclonic storm system that has been raging for hundreds of years, is clearly visible in this portrait of Jupiter. Multi-frame mosaic.  Cassini, December 29, 2000

An erupting prominence. Prominences are huge clouds of relatively cool, dense plasma suspended in the Sun’s hot, thin corona. Like this large, twirling prominence, they can sometimes erupt and escape the Sun’s atmosphere.  SOHO, January 18, 2000

Interview with Hitchens

If you’re interested in Christopher Hitchens’s new memoir, Hitch-22, but don’t want to plow through the whole thing, you could do worse than to read his interview with Hugh Hewitt.  It reads a bit rough in places (it’s the transcript of a radio interview, and I can’t find the podcast), but it’s as good a summary of the book as I’ve seen.

There are also a few tidbits that don’t appear in the book, like this:

HH: I’ve got so much to ask, but with so little time, I’ve tasked you. So I’m just going to ask you about Obama. Has he disappointed you greatly, a little bit, or not at all?

CH: Quite a bit. He just seems to believe, it was same watching him with Netanyahu this week, as if all this can be resolved, you know, man to man, these are just misunderstandings that can be ironed out by people of goodwill. He doesn’t seem to have the concept of radical conflicts of interest at all.

HH: And so you expect him to fail in a reelection campaign?

CH: I don’t know how I’d make myself a strong case for his being reelected.

Crikey! Yes, Obama has seemed pusillanimous at times, but he’s helped congress pass a healthcare bill, a banking bill, and they’re working on campaign reform—all against the “we-have-no-platform-but-opposition” Republicans. I’d say that’s pretty good.  Now if he’d only realize that our struggles in Afghanistan and Iraq are futile, and bring the troops home.

We all know that Hitch isn’t well, and he talks about his illness. It’s depressing, but he seems stoic:

HH: Now Christopher, since we last spoke, your illness you disclosed on the web, and people will want to know off the bat how you are doing, and how your treatment is going.

CH: Oh well, I have, in case people are just tuning in, I have cancer in my esophagus, which has I think spread a little to my lymph nodes as well. And I’m two weeks into the chemotherapy course. So I feel pretty weak, and my voice isn’t what it was, but that’s supposed to be a good sign in that the amount of poison I’m taking is presumably working on the bad stuff as well as the good stuff. And this morning, I found that my hair was beginning to come out in the shower, which is a bit demoralizing, I have to say, even though it’s the least of it.

. . .

HH: Now I want to go to the other…

CH:  In fact, if I had a wish, if what I’ve got turns out to be terminal, I wouldn’t mind my last act being an interview with him [the most evil man in the world], followed by a nasty surprise. That would be, I’d feel then I was dying in a good cause.

HH: How much time are you spending on that thought, Christopher Hitchens?

CH: As little as I can, because it’s morbid and mock heroic.

HH: All right. I want to…

CH: But it avoids the boring thought that one is suffering, in effect, for no reason. I mean, I’m not suffering in a good cause, or witnessing for any, you know, great idea or anything or principle. It’s just boring.

HH: The number of people I’m sure who are praying for you, including people who come up to me and ask me to tell you that, people like Joseph Timothy Cook, how are you responding to them, given your famous atheism?

CH: Well look, I mean, I think that prayer and holy water, and things like that are all fine. They don’t do any good, but they don’t necessarily do any harm. It’s touching to be thought of in that way. It makes up for those who tell me that I’ve got my just desserts. It’s, I’m afraid to say it’s almost as well-founded an idea. I mean, I don’t, they don’t know whether prayer will work, and they don’t know whether I’ve come by this because I’m a sinner.

. . .

HH: And the audience would love to know, what are you going to work on next during your treatment, and how are you going to conduct yourself in the course of a long sort of chemotherapy?

CH: Well, I’m just hoping I won’t be as exhausted in the next phase as I am now. It’s been very nice talking to you. I hope I haven’t sounded too weary, and, by the way, it’s been less of an effort than I feared, but it’s quite an effort now even for me to read anything very demanding. So I’m going to have to husband what I’ve got for a bit, and perhaps not make any too grand claims about what I intend to do.

I’m leaving out all the biographical stuff.  If you haven’t read Hitch-22, and don’t plan to, go read about Hitchens’s choice of the most evil man in the world, his take on Bob Dylan and the Mamas and the Papas, his so-called alcoholism, his parents, the Middle East, Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis and, of course, Iraq.

And get well, comrade.

Vacation reading from Nature

Today’s Nature has its annual list of  “vacation books” recommended by various luminaries.  Annoyingly, the online site doesn’t say who suggested each book (they’re in order at the top, though), so I’ll tell you here.

Piracy, recommended by Stephen Shapin

The Arsenic Century, W. F. Bynum

The Rational Optimist, Michael Shermer (I heard Ridley talk about his book at the Hay Festival; it seems to claim that everything in the world is getting better, and that science will solve all our problems)

Stumbling on Happiness, Nicky Clayton

Elegance in Science, Serge Daan

The Lysenko Effect, Hans von Storch

The Curse of the Mogul, Li Gong

Merchants of Doubt, David Orr

Composed: A Memoir, Daniel Levitin (the memoir is by Roseanne Cash—an interesting choice)

The Mind of a Mnemonist, Rodrigo Quian Quiroga

Galileo’s Dream, Candis Callison

Two on a Tower, Jennifer Rohn (another interesting choice; the book is a novel by Thomas Hardy)

Tigers in Red Weather, Pat Shipman

The Lion and the Mouse, Jessica Hellmann

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Abdallah Daar

Ils ont Fait Paris, Vaclav Smil (warning: the book is in French)

I have a huge stack of unread books already piled on my nightstand, but I may look in on Merchants of Doubt, Elegance in Science, and Tigers in Red Weather. If you’ve read any of these, do weigh in here.

The “free will” experiment

Well, I hope we’ve had some fun discussing free will, but before we move on I want to talk about the Soon et al. paper to which I alluded yesterday. It’s two years old, but it’s worth describing because the results are so startling and counterintutive. (It’s also very short and should be comprehensible to the non-scientist.) I’m not claiming that this work proves the absence of free will, but it should certainly give us pause when reflecting about how we make choices.

Soon et al. built on earlier work by Benjamin Libet, who showed in 1985 that subjects asked to press a button at a time of their choosing showed brain activity in the supplementary motor area (SMA) about 400 milliseconds (0.4 seconds) before they were aware of having made a decision to press the button.  Soon et al. note, however, that the SMA may not be a place where the decision to press the button actually originated, and also that Libet’s experiment, while showing that a decision could be predicted, didn’t show that there was “a free decision between more than one behavioral option.” (That is, it wasn’t a choice between two different outcomes; it was simply a choice to act.)

Here’s what Soon et al. did.  First, they hooked up subjects to a functional MRI machine that recorded activity in various parts of the brain.  Then the subjects were presented with a computer screen on which a letter of the alphabet was flashed; these images changed every half second.  They also had two buttons, one under the index finger of each hand.

The subjects were asked to press a button with either hand, and also to remember the letter that was on the screen at the moment when they decided which button to press.  (They indicated this letter by pressing another button.)  Button presses took place about every 22 seconds, and left and right buttons were pressed with equal frequency. At the same time, the MRI showed the location of brain activity, which could be correlated with which button was subsequently pressed.

Here’s the surprising result: the brain activity that predicted which button would be pressed began a full seven seconds before the subject was conscious of his decision to press the left or right button. The authors note, too, that there is a delay of three seconds before the MRI records neural activity since the machine detects blood oxygenation.  Taking this into account, neuronal activity predicting which button would be pressed began about ten seconds before a conscious decision was made.

The earliest brain activity occurred in the frontopolar cortex (FPC) and subsequently moved into the parietal cortex, areas different from the SMA where Libet detected activity. Curiously, the brain activity determining when the button would be pushed was detectable—5 seconds beforehand—in the SMA, but the activity reflecting which button would be pushed occurred in the FPC. As the authors note, “there appears to be a double dissociation in the very early stages between brain regions shaping the specific outcome of the motor decision and brain regions determining the timing of a motor decision.”

The authors conclude:

Taken together, the two specific regions in the frontal and parietal cortex of the human brain had considerable information that predicted the outcome of a motor decision the subject had not yet consciously made.  . . Thus, a network of high-level control areas can begin to shape an upcoming decision long before it enters awareness.

This is dry scientific prose, but what it implies is that our decisions—certainly in the case of which button to push—appear to be made long before we’re conscious of making them.  This is a really interesting result with wide-ranging implications, and I’m surprised it didn’t get published in Nature or Science rather than Nature Neuroscience.  And I think it has to be considered when we talk about things like free will.  What is making the decision, if not our own conscious selves?  Could we find the same result if we hooked up somebody to an MRI and sent him to Baskin-Robbins to choose one of 31 (now 26) flavors? Could we get this predictive brain activity for even more complicated decisions?  There’s a lot of exciting research to be done.

What does the study, then, say about free will? This is discussed at Wired:

Caveats remain, holding open the door for free will. For instance, the experiment may not reflect the mental dynamics of other, more complicated decisions.

“Real-life decisions — am I going to buy this house or that one, take this job or that — aren’t decisions that we can implement very well in our brain scanners,” said Haynes. [John-Dylan Haynes, an author of the study.]

Also, the predictions were not completely accurate. Maybe free will enters at the last moment, allowing a person to override an unpalatable subconscious decision.

“We can’t rule out that there’s a free will that kicks in at this late point,” said Haynes, who intends to study this phenomenon next. “But I don’t think it’s plausible.”

___________

Soon, C. S., M. Brass, H.-J. Heinze, and J.-D. Haynes. 2008.  Unconscious determinants of free decisions in the human brain. Nature Neuroscience 11:543-545.

Libet, Benjamin.  1985.  Unconscious cerebral initiative and the role of conscious will in voluntary action.  Behavior. Brain Science 8:529-566.

Frogmouths!

The “Dracula morph” of the famous morphing owl might represent the bird’s attempt to hide by resembling part of a tree.  This is the strategy adopted by two other groups of birds, the New World potoos and the Old World frogmouths.

An alert reader, Geoff Beikoff, spotted and photographed two tawny frogmouths (Podargus strigoides) resting in a gray box eucalyptus tree (Eucalyptus microcarpa) in North Queensland, Australia (click to enlarge).  Are these cryptic or what?

Tawny frogmouths live in Australia, New Guinea, and Tasmania. Their resemblance to owls is an evolutionary convergence, since they’re only distantly related. But, like owls, they’re nocturnal hunters (eating insects and small rodents) and sit immobile in trees during the day. According to Geoff, “They remain perfectly still and slit their eyes so that the eyes are not readily discernible.” (Note that the morphing owl also slits its eyes during the Dracula display.)

Here, courtesy of the London Zoo website, is a tawny frogmouth and her chick. You can see how the birds got their name:

Here’s a group of captive frogmouths awaiting repatriation to the wild:

Finally, just to show you another weird nocturnal and cryptic bird, here’s a common potoo (Nyctibius griseus) from South America:

Here’s my prediction as an evolutionary biologist who knows little about frogmouth biology:  there exists—or did exist in the recent past—a diurnal, visually hunting predator that kills frogmouths.

h/t: Geoff Beikoff