Happy Birthday, Daffy!
Daffy Duck made his first appearance April 17, 1937 in the short "Porky’s Duck Hunt" and was an instant success.
Audiences couldn’t stop talking about the screwball duck and he quickly supplanted Porky Pig in popularity.
Porky gracefully recovered, eventually accepting the role of straightman for the daffy duck.
As a prima donna, though, Daffy never recovered when he himself was supplanted by Bugs Bunny and has become obsessed with reclaiming the spotlight he lost to Bugs.
That’s no reason not to pay tribute to a true comic genius, though.
What's Going On In That Little Dogbrain?
Dogs have been dumbed down by being domesticated. Wolves are much smarter. Right?
Not!
It turns out that by rubbing shoulders with brainy humans for so long (and being bred by brainy humans) dogs may have had some human smarts rub off on them.
That’s what some scientists are concluding.
Dogs even compare favorably in some tests with critters with a much higher brain rep, like chimpanzees.
EXCERPT:
Chimpanzees, our closest relatives, have been shown to follow a human’s gaze, but they do very poorly in a classic experiment that requires them to extract clues by watching a person. In that test, a researcher hides food in one of several containers out of sight of the animal. Then the chimp is allowed to choose one container after the experimenter indicates the correct choice by various methods, such as staring, nodding, pointing, tapping, or placing a marker. Only with considerable training do chimps and other primates manage to score above chance.
Dogs, however, performed marvelously, and even outdoor dogs with no particular master could solve the problem immediately. (The researchers controlled for the scent of the food.) By 2001 a raft of experiments by Mr. Csányi’s team and another led by Michael Tomasello of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in Leipzig, Germany, showed that dogs were far more skilled then either chimps or wolves at using human social cues to find food. Those results left researchers with this question: If dogs can pick up on human cues, do they turn the tables and put out cues for humans to understand?
What’s Going On In That Little Dogbrain?
Dogs have been dumbed down by being domesticated. Wolves are much smarter. Right?
Not!
It turns out that by rubbing shoulders with brainy humans for so long (and being bred by brainy humans) dogs may have had some human smarts rub off on them.
That’s what some scientists are concluding.
Dogs even compare favorably in some tests with critters with a much higher brain rep, like chimpanzees.
EXCERPT:
Chimpanzees, our closest relatives, have been shown to follow a human’s gaze, but they do very poorly in a classic experiment that requires them to extract clues by watching a person. In that test, a researcher hides food in one of several containers out of sight of the animal. Then the chimp is allowed to choose one container after the experimenter indicates the correct choice by various methods, such as staring, nodding, pointing, tapping, or placing a marker. Only with considerable training do chimps and other primates manage to score above chance.
Dogs, however, performed marvelously, and even outdoor dogs with no particular master could solve the problem immediately. (The researchers controlled for the scent of the food.) By 2001 a raft of experiments by Mr. Csányi’s team and another led by Michael Tomasello of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in Leipzig, Germany, showed that dogs were far more skilled then either chimps or wolves at using human social cues to find food. Those results left researchers with this question: If dogs can pick up on human cues, do they turn the tables and put out cues for humans to understand?
Neuhaus On New Pope
Fr. Richard John Neuhaus is over yonder in Rome right now reporting on Romish goings on and doing a blog while he’s at it.
HIS LATEST POST CONTAINS SIGNIFICANT SPECULATION ON WHO THE NEW POPE MIGHT BE.
So do his prior entries, so read them, too.
(Cowboy aht tip: Southern Appeal.)
Meanwhile back at the ranch, the rats at the New York Times write
More Divine "Coincidence"?
Many folks have commented on the interesting coincidences that surrounded the death of John Paul II (e.g., in connection with Divine Mercy Sunday). My Benedictine priest friend has noticed a possible coincidence with the electino of the new pope. He writes:
We have what seems to be a striking arrangement of God’s provident care this very year.
Saturday, April 16, is the final day of official ceremonial mourning for Pope John Paul II (the Vatican began the nine days with April 8, the day of burial itself).
The day after is the fourth Sunday of Easter, the papally-designated annual "World Day of Prayer for Vocations". The fourth Sunday of Easter always has a section from the Gospel of the Good Shepherd, John 10, no matter which year of the "triennium" we may be in. However, this particular year of 2005, year A of the triennium, has as the first reading on this Sunday Acts 2 in which Pope Saint Peter calls 3,000 to repentance and baptizes them.
The responsorial psalm is "The Lord is my shepherd." The second reading is from the first letter of Pope Saint Peter saying, "For you had gone astray like sheep, but you have now returned to the shepherd and guardian of your souls."
Monday, April 18, is the beginning of the election to discern who has the vocation to serve as the next pope. John 10 continues to be proclaimed at Mass on this Monday and and also on Tuesday.
Next Sunday, given that recent conclaves have lasted less than a week, we may already have a new pope. If so, it is possible the new pope might choose that Sunday for the inauguration Mass of his pontificate.
In the first reading for next Sunday (Acts 6), Pope Saint Peter and the other apostles will ordain the first deacons. In the second reading, the first letter of Pope Saint Peter, the first pope exhorts the Church to come to Christ, to be built up as a spiritual house, a holy priesthood, for we are "’a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people of his own, so that you may announce the praises’ of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light." In the Gospel, Christ the Divine Cornerstone speaks to us of his "Father’s House" that has "many dwelling places."
God is building up the Church indeed!
More Divine “Coincidence”?
Many folks have commented on the interesting coincidences that surrounded the death of John Paul II (e.g., in connection with Divine Mercy Sunday). My Benedictine priest friend has noticed a possible coincidence with the electino of the new pope. He writes:
We have what seems to be a striking arrangement of God’s provident care this very year.
Saturday, April 16, is the final day of official ceremonial mourning for Pope John Paul II (the Vatican began the nine days with April 8, the day of burial itself).
The day after is the fourth Sunday of Easter, the papally-designated annual "World Day of Prayer for Vocations". The fourth Sunday of Easter always has a section from the Gospel of the Good Shepherd, John 10, no matter which year of the "triennium" we may be in. However, this particular year of 2005, year A of the triennium, has as the first reading on this Sunday Acts 2 in which Pope Saint Peter calls 3,000 to repentance and baptizes them.
The responsorial psalm is "The Lord is my shepherd." The second reading is from the first letter of Pope Saint Peter saying, "For you had gone astray like sheep, but you have now returned to the shepherd and guardian of your souls."
Monday, April 18, is the beginning of the election to discern who has the vocation to serve as the next pope. John 10 continues to be proclaimed at Mass on this Monday and and also on Tuesday.
Next Sunday, given that recent conclaves have lasted less than a week, we may already have a new pope. If so, it is possible the new pope might choose that Sunday for the inauguration Mass of his pontificate.
In the first reading for next Sunday (Acts 6), Pope Saint Peter and the other apostles will ordain the first deacons. In the second reading, the first letter of Pope Saint Peter, the first pope exhorts the Church to come to Christ, to be built up as a spiritual house, a holy priesthood, for we are "’a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people of his own, so that you may announce the praises’ of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light." In the Gospel, Christ the Divine Cornerstone speaks to us of his "Father’s House" that has "many dwelling places."
God is building up the Church indeed!
Historical Birthrates
Y’know the good ol’ days when everyone had ten kids?
Those days never existed.
Or, to be more precise: The never existed for more than a few people in particular areas in particular historical circumstances.
The family my cattle-ranching grandmother was born into, f’risntance, had 12 kids, 10 of whom survived to adulthood.
But that’s always been the lucky exception. Not the rule.
How can we know that?
We can do the math.
Suppose Adam and Eve had four kids (Scripture says they had more, but suppose it was only four).
Suppose that their kids paired off and each pair had four kids, just like Adam and Eve.
That’d be eight kids in the next generation.
Now suppose this patten of four kids per couple kept up each generation.
Y’know how many generations it would take to arrive at the 4 billion folks who were alive c. 1980? 32 generations.
Remembering, though, that more than one generation is alive at a time, let’s suppose that two generations were alive at any one time (that would be some grandparents, all parents, and some of the children who would be born; we’ll ignore great-grandparents and great-grandchildren for statistical purposes since so few of these have been alive at the same time before the advent of modern medicine).
Y’know how many generations it would take to get to the six billion people currently alive at present? Again: 32.
Now suppose that on average historically parents had their children four children between the ages of 15 and 45, so the parents were an average of 30 years old when they were between their second and third of their four children.
Y’know how long ago Adam and Eve would have lived? That would be 960 years (32 generations x 30 years at middle of breeding life).
Hm. Doesn’t sound right, does it?
But wait! Maybe there are some factors we haven’t accounted for! Let’s try an easy one: Not everbody gets married. Some people go through life single–or they’re in an infertile union and can’t have kids. Let’s suppose that happens to half of all the children that have been born historically: They either stayed single or couldn’t have kids.
In this case, each generation of parents could have eight kids, with only four of them going on to have a brood of eight kids, four of whom would then reproduce, etc. If only half the kids end up breeding due to singleness or infertility, y’know how many generations that would push back Adam and Eve from the present generation?
One.
In that case, the human race would be 33 generations and 990 years old.
But maybe there are other factors–like disease and war. Those have claimed a lot of people’s lives and kept them from breeding. Suppose that these two factors cut each historical generation in half. In that case, each previous batch of parents would have had 16 kids–half of which were prevented from breeding because of illness or war. Of the eight surviving kids, four didn’t breed because of singleness or infertility, leaving four to find spouses and breed a new batch of 16 kids, only 4 of which would then go on to breed, etc.
How far back would that push Adam and Eve?
One generation.
In that case the human race would be 34 generations and 1020 years old.
Okay, so maybe there’s another factor.
How about the obvious one, biblically: The hugelarge lifespans that the early chapters of Genesis record?
Assuming those are literal, they do create some extra room between us and Adam and Eve. But not as much as you’d think. While Adam may have lived to be 930 years old according to Genesis 5:5, he had his third son–Seth–when he was only 130 years old according to Gen. 5:3. That’s not unusual in the Genesis 5 genealogy. The patriarchs tend to have their kids (relatively) young compared to their hugelarge lifespan (I am so envious of that lifespan, lemme tell you), and it’s the kid-bearing age that counts for making Adam and Eve more remote from us, not the overall time the partiarchs lived.
Those (relatively) high kid-bearing ages also only apply to the first few generations of the human race. Things drop off pretty quickly after the time of Noah.
But there’s a bigger problem.
Even if we give full allowance for pushing Adam and Eve back in time based on the long lifespans recorded in Genesis, that doesn’t change the number of generations between them and us. And therein lies the problem.
If y’all will take a gander at the genealogy of Jesus Christ offered in Luke 3, y’all’ll see that there are 76 generations between Adam and Jesus–and that was 2000 years ago. Allowing for the 30 years per breeding generation over the last 2000 years, that would mean that there have been 67 geneations between Jesus’ day and today, meaning that there have been 143 generations between Adam and us.
Now that’s a problem if you want to say that folks in the past had large numbers of kids on average.
Y’know how many people would be alive today after 143 generations in which each pair of parents had an average of only four kids who went on to breed? (Leaving aside those who were single, infertile, or killed by disease or war.)
There would be 16,725,558,898,898,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 or almost 17 tredecillion people.
The only conclusions available would be (a) there are this many people alive now, despite appearances, (b) the human race is much less than 143 generations old, despite the Bible and science, or (c) the average number of children folks have had who went on to breed is less than 4–way less. Still above 2 or we’d never make any progress at all, but way less than 4.
My money’s on the last of the three options: The average number of breeding kids folks historically have had was much closer to 2 than 4.
If I’ve done my math right, it would take an average of 2.33 breeding children per generation to arrive at the present global population after 143 generations.
If there were some missing generations in the biblical genealogies (as is likely) then the number would be less than 2.33 but still higher than 2. For simplicitly, let’s assume that it’s 2.33, though.
How we account for this number is an open question. Certainly they had more kids than became breeders. Some stayed single. Some were infertile. Some died from disease. Some died from violence.
But I doubt that most parents had 8 kids and only 2.33 ended up becoming parents. I suspect that the historical number was much closer to 4 kids, of which 2.33 became parents.
Yet that number isn’t realistic for parents who aren’t otherwise touched by infertility, disease, or war, which we have already accounted for (on average). If you have two folks get married at 15 and they start having a typical conjugal life then–barring infertility, death by disease, and death by war–they’re going to have a lot more than 4 kids before they hit 45.
This suggests one thing: Folks in the past have been far better at birth regulation than we in the modern world have given them credit for.
Much of the time, no doubt, due to pagan influence and lack of doctrinal clarity, they have used things like abortion and contraception to regulate birth in a morally illicit manner, but even in properly-morally-educated Catholic countries they have been exercising a lot more regulation of births than we’ve been imagining.
After all, if we started with just two good Catholics 1000 years ago in Europe and they had and average of four breeding kids per generation then there would be six billion such European Catholics today.
And there’s not. Nowhere close.
Now, don’t get me wrong: I love big families. I’d love to get married and have one. I’d love to see folks all over the place having them for the indefinite future, including starting colonies offworld to get elbow room for all the new humans. (Take a look in the chart above around generation 36 is you don’t see the need for new elbow room for them.)
But I also believe in looking at the past realistically, and at human nature realistically, and human nature is such that the idea that the regulation of births has only come into view in the last generation or two just doesn’t hold water.
Right or wrong, by good means or bad, the regulation of births has been with us much, much longer.
I Don't Think I Agree With This
HEREZA STORY ABOUT AN EVANGELICAL RADIO HOST LOSING HIS JOB.
The reason he lost his job?
When a caller asked, he entertained the question of whether Pope John Paul II is in heaven and said it is not certain but is a matter between him as "an individual and the Creator."
Now, I always hesitate to comment on such matters when I haven’t heard the original because there can be many nuances that have been dropped out (like an ultra-snotty attitude being displayed at a sensitive moment), but assuming matters are as the press report indicates, should this guy have lost his job?
Of course he overlaid the discussion with the common Evangelical notion that one must be "born again" in an event distinct from baptism and then said that whether John Paul II was born again was a matter between him and God, but stripping the erroneous theological overlay away, it amounts to this: John Paul II’s salvation is not a cetainty and depends on the state of his soul at death, which is something nobody on earth today can say with infallible certainty.
Y’know who else says that?
The Catholic Church.
Until such time as John Paul II becomes a canonized saint, that’s exactly what the Catholic Church would propose to the faithful regarding his soul (minus the born-again-apart-from-baptism stuff). Individual chuchmen, including individual members of the Magisterium, might propose something different, but that’s what Church teaching would say.
So if those were the grounds on which he was fired, I’m just kinda cool towards firing the gent.
There might be other grounds on which to fire him (e.g., he’s teaching all kinds of false doctrine or he talked about John Paul II in an ultra-snotty way at a sensitive moment), but merely questioning the salvation of an individual (who the Church has not yet proclaimed to be in heaven)–that just don’t do it for me.
I thus appreciate the ecumenical sentiment of the station’s general manager, who said:
"WORD-FM needs to function in this city in support of the entire church — that means everybody — and not focus on denominational issues."
But however much reason there may be to confidently hope for the salvation of John Paul II (and there’s a whole boatload of reasons to do so; in fact I wouldn’t oppose the next pope proclaiming him a saint on the spot), I don’t see firing somebody because he simply said that it’s not 100% guaranteed that John Paul II is in heaven.
As of this moment, that’s the position of the Catholic Church.
Now, if you want to fire somebody because they’re saying that one must be born again in an event apart from baptism and that’s pushing a denominational issue on the Christian community as a whole, feel free.
I Don’t Think I Agree With This
HEREZA STORY ABOUT AN EVANGELICAL RADIO HOST LOSING HIS JOB.
The reason he lost his job?
When a caller asked, he entertained the question of whether Pope John Paul II is in heaven and said it is not certain but is a matter between him as "an individual and the Creator."
Now, I always hesitate to comment on such matters when I haven’t heard the original because there can be many nuances that have been dropped out (like an ultra-snotty attitude being displayed at a sensitive moment), but assuming matters are as the press report indicates, should this guy have lost his job?
Of course he overlaid the discussion with the common Evangelical notion that one must be "born again" in an event distinct from baptism and then said that whether John Paul II was born again was a matter between him and God, but stripping the erroneous theological overlay away, it amounts to this: John Paul II’s salvation is not a cetainty and depends on the state of his soul at death, which is something nobody on earth today can say with infallible certainty.
Y’know who else says that?
The Catholic Church.
Until such time as John Paul II becomes a canonized saint, that’s exactly what the Catholic Church would propose to the faithful regarding his soul (minus the born-again-apart-from-baptism stuff). Individual chuchmen, including individual members of the Magisterium, might propose something different, but that’s what Church teaching would say.
So if those were the grounds on which he was fired, I’m just kinda cool towards firing the gent.
There might be other grounds on which to fire him (e.g., he’s teaching all kinds of false doctrine or he talked about John Paul II in an ultra-snotty way at a sensitive moment), but merely questioning the salvation of an individual (who the Church has not yet proclaimed to be in heaven)–that just don’t do it for me.
I thus appreciate the ecumenical sentiment of the station’s general manager, who said:
"WORD-FM needs to function in this city in support of the entire church — that means everybody — and not focus on denominational issues."
But however much reason there may be to confidently hope for the salvation of John Paul II (and there’s a whole boatload of reasons to do so; in fact I wouldn’t oppose the next pope proclaiming him a saint on the spot), I don’t see firing somebody because he simply said that it’s not 100% guaranteed that John Paul II is in heaven.
As of this moment, that’s the position of the Catholic Church.
Now, if you want to fire somebody because they’re saying that one must be born again in an event apart from baptism and that’s pushing a denominational issue on the Christian community as a whole, feel free.