Here’s an article from the Environmental News Service (ENS) on September 20, 2005: Cyprus Tries Education to Halt Illegal Songbird Slaughter.

NICOSIA, Cyprus, September 20, 2005 (ENS) - In an attempt to stop the illegal trapping and sale of migratory songbirds for food, the Cyprus government and BirdLife Cyprus announced Monday the launch of an anti-bird trapping publicity campaign. To get the word out, they will distribute a leaflet prepared jointly by BirdLife Cyprus, the government’s Game Fund, and police.

Trapping songbirds has been illegal in Cyprus for more than 30 years, but fines are low compared with money to be made supplying the songbirds to local restaurants, where birds can sell for two pounds (US$3.60) or more each. They are served to customers as an expensive delicacy known as ambelopoulia.

Image: Migratory songbirds served up at a local restaurant as ambelopoulia, a lucrative and popular dish, from RSPB.

Expelled Exposed
“Flunked, not expelled: What Ben Stein isn’t telling you about Intelligent Design,”
via the National Center for Science Education

One of the foundations of my high school education was watching and discussing Jacob Bronowski’s 13-part series titled The Ascent of Man. It crystallized my thinking about Western thought, science, and the trends that humanity perpetrates. It inspired Carl Sagan to produce his series Cosmos, and resonated with many young minds of my generation. It represents what I think of when I hear the term “Humanism” in the context of open learning.

Below the fold is a clip from the end of chapter 11 of his series, where he says:

It’s said that science will dehumanize people and turn them into numbers. That’s false - tragically false. Look for yourself. This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance. It was done by dogma. It was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods.

Inspiring. I don’t know if I would describe science quite that way (e.g., we can have absolute knowledge that the Earth is round, orbits the sun, life evolves, and a few other things that we consider facts), but this is exactly the problem when we discuss science vs. faith: the absence of certainty, but a “tribute to what we can know although we are fallible.”

Habitat Destruction May Wipe Out Monarch Butterfly Migration:

Intense deforestation in Mexico could ruin one of North America’s most celebrated natural wonders — the mysterious 3,000-mile migration of the monarch butterfly. According to a University of Kansas researcher, the astonishing migration may collapse rapidly without urgent action to end devastation of the butterfly’s vital sources of food and shelter.

I’m a bit late in posting this, but do you remember a few months ago, when two men here in Cyprus were tracked down after slaughtering 52 Red-footed Falcons (Falco vespertinus), for target practice? The incident occurred on British Sovereign Base Area (SBA) land, and the case went to the SBA courts.

Last month, the British SBA court issued a ruling: the two men were fined a ‘derisory’ €1,250 each. That’s it.

Under the relevant bird protection law, the British SBA court could have imposed a fine of up to €17,000 or up to three years imprisonment, or both. The shocking massacre of the migrating falcons – the worst incident of bird of prey killing ever reported in Cyprus – made headlines across Europe after BirdLife Cyprus released shocking pictures of the gunned down birds. The shot falcons – a species of global conservation concern – appear to have been hit for target practice, with 46 corpses and 6 injured birds left lying in a citrus grove a stone’s throw from a main road. The injured birds did not survive.

The defense argument:

I know, I just had a quote posting, but here’s another hot off the presses. In response to ‘framing’ as laid out by Nisbet/Mooney, PZ has the money quote on why Mooney’s grand scheme for duping the public into greater acceptance of science is bullshit:

[Framing implies] a demeaning opinion of the public, and it assumes that the only way to approach people is to “pare down” the ideas. I think this is false. I can agree with the general idea of framing as a tool to get people to pay attention, but I think [Mooney/Nisbet are] going in the wrong direction.

Science educators need to get people to accept new ideas, and they have the goal of having people learn more. [Chris Mooney] and [Matt Nisbet] are too mired in the politics, where the idea is to get people to shift more laterally, to get them to back something without necessarily expecting them to actually acquire new information. Feed their frame, don’t expect them to actually change substantively, but get them to adopt a policy in a way that doesn’t require them to actually change attitudes or beliefs. That’s fine if you’re trying to get them to vote on a bill, but I’m not interested in that.

We want to challenge people, we want to annoy them and shake them up, we want to make them rethink, we want to make them absorb new information and come out of the process smarter. “Framing”, as [Mooney] and Nisbet have presented it, makes all that undesirable. [Framing is] actually a process for preserving the status quo, and if you dislike the status quo, it’s going to be the opposite of what we want to do.

Exactly. The last thing we want is for the public to treat science like a list of facts to memorize. As I said recently on Bitesize Bio, what we want above all is to be promoting inquiry and discussion of descriptive expertise by kinesthetic instruction of the scientific method where we can. And where that’s not feasible, by engaging the public in thoughtful discussion as though they were adults. We must trust that understanding of the scientific method itself will unlock doors to greater rationality in the layperson’s mind, which he or she will then choose to walk through on their own accord.

Not framing.

“My practice as a scientist is atheistic. That is to say, when I set up an experiment I assume that no god, angel, or devil is going to interfere with its course; and this assumption has been justified by such success as I have achieved in my professional career. I should therefore be intellectually dishonest if I were not also atheistic in the affairs of the world. And I should be a coward if I did not state my theoretical views in public.”

- JBS Haldane, quoted in Evolution-the Fossils Say Yes!

Breaking news on a BBC documentary - click on image for video. (hattip: Loranablog)

Migrating Sandhill Cranes over the Platte River, Nebraska.
(Image: Dave Rintoul, KSU.)

I would be seriously remiss not to pass this one along. Hat tip: Hedwig the Owl

I’ve commented on various aspects of the origin of religion or religion as a natural phenomenon, including its psychological, cultural, and anthropological basis. But I’ve never put it all together in one place. Today, Razib of Gene Expression has such an article, that’s a very detailed and comprehensive summary of the subject (emphasis in original):

The plausibility of theism doesn’t need to be something we note only in terms of macrosocial metrics in regards to religious affiliation cross-culturally. As I imply above, theism is at root a psychological phenomena, and the bundle of biases and presuppositions which our biology confers upon us stack the deck in terms of weighting the plausibility of god concepts. This applies to atheists as well. We might not believe in god on the conscious level, but that does not mean that we are immune to the priming affect of agents, and likely supernatural agents as well. The folk wisdom about there being no atheists in foxholes is a reflection of this assumption. Now I’m not going to tell anyone who says they don’t believe in god that deep down they really do believe in god; rather, I simply believe that many of the psychological characteristics which prime one for finding god plausible are present in those who consciously assert that they don’t believe in gods. For example many atheists may feel unnerved in cemeteries despite a materialist world-view; the psychological response may be a result of social conditioning, but it is also possibly a cognitive reflex at an intersection of environmental inputs (think snake aversion as something similar).

Check it out:
Religion: biology ↔ psychology ↔ sociology ↔ history