Two weeks ago, someone pen-named Ulolodes, which I now know is a genus of owl fly, requested more spider pictures. I do not have a whole lot, but here is a snapshot I took this summer of a spider, which I think is Steatoda triangulosa – triangular cobweb spider – dining on Reduvius personatus – assassin bug.
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The following is a review of The Lie, by Ken Ham (Master Book, 2024), and a comparison of the 1987, 2012, and 2024 editions. A longer article appeared here in 3 Quarks Daily.
Let me first remind you of the scale of Ken Ham’s political significance. He has among his friends Mike Johnson, Speaker of the US House of Representatives, whose law firm has represented AiG pro bono. And among the contributors to its magazine is Calvin Beisner, director of the Cornwall Alliance, whose entire purpose is to deny the importance of human-caused climate change. Cornwall in turn has direct links to the Heartland Institute and to the Heritage Foundation, authors of Project 2025.
Readers here will be familiar with the destructive and anti-scientific approach of the modern creationist movement in the US. But that’s only half the story. It is not only about the beginning of the world, but about its ending. Genesis is pivotal, but so is Revelation. So are the many hints of the end of the world that are explicit in the New Testament, and can be discovered with sufficient ingenuity in the Old.
Such thinking underlines the apocalyptic tone, repeatedly echoed in AiG’s material, that underlies current US right-wing politics. If the Earth does not have a deep past, we cannot expect it to have a prolonged future. We should not be concerning ourselves with conservation, but with righteousness. This perspective has political implications, and comparing the 1987 and 2024 versions of The Lie shows the political aspect becoming increasingly explicit. Otherwise, there is not much difference between the two editions, though The third edition is more repetitious and, where direct comparison is possible, less vigorous in its use of language, and more hectoring, than the original.
I found this spider trapped in a porcelain sink from which it could not climb out, so I naturally snapped a few pictures. The people at Bugguide classified it as a member of the family Gnaphosidae. They warned me that Google Lens is not good at spiders, but, just for fun, I asked. Among the first hits was my very own picture of this very spider here.
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I found this spider inside the house the other day and managed to get a picture showing the 8 eyes. In case you were wondering what it is like to be a bat, think about what it must be like to be a spider.
Spiders have simple eyes, as opposed to compound eyes like those of a dragonfly. Because the eyes are so small, they cannot have good resolution: Even if the eyes were diffraction-limited, their sensors would have to be roughly the same size as the cones in human eyes, for example, and there would be many fewer of them. (In photographic terms, all diffraction-limited F/4 lenses have the same resolution limit, but a longer focal-length lens affords more detail. This paper by Haldane notes that an eye is not very good until it reaches a certain size, but a colleague of mine has just pointed out that context matters and the spider does not need a better eye.)
According to the Wikipedia entry on spider vision , the two central eyes in the lower bank are the principal eyes, and they do their best to form an image, but the pixels (if you will) are nowhere near the focal point. The spider is thus dreadfully nearsighted, though he must get some imaging due to the depth of field. The other, secondary eyes are used for light and motion detection, and, for example, polarization detection.
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I am a little late out of the starting blocks, but last Sunday Francis Collins published an opinion article titled Take It From a Scientist. Facts Matter, and They Don’t Care How You Feel in the opinion section of The New York Times. In case there are any readers who do not know it, Francis Collins is the former director of the Human Genome Project and more recently director of the National Institutes of Health. He presided over NIH in the early part of the pandemic and during the development of vaccines for Covid.
In the article, he outlines the development of the vaccines and rightly bemoans the number of Americans who refused to get vaccinated, even when vaccination was free. He notes that white evangelical Christians, of whom he is one, were the most highly resistant to getting vaccinated. He says,
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